The Division to be made available for pre-load on Steam, come March 1

We know that a good deal of you are excited for Tom Clancy’s The Division, and for good reason.

Even if Ubisoft’s recent history with new IPs has been spotty, to say the least, The Division’s got an interesting mix of elements from RPGs, cooperative shooters, dystopic survival games and more going for it.

Its proprietary Snowdrop engine renders massive, stark environments in glorious detail, and the potential for a mix of cooperation and betrayal is certainly interesting. And it’s not all that far off from release either.

Scheduled to release on March 8^th for PC, PS4 and Xbox One, we’ve now heard news that the game will be made available for pre-loading on March 1^st.

The info comes from Steam Database (Steam DB), who’ve listed its pre-release date as March 1^st.

Knowing that Steam regularly puts placeholders in place, this may well be one, but it’s close enough to the game’s release for us to believe it, so we’ll wait for PSN and Xbox Live to follow suit.

Unfortunately, this info doesn’t clarify when we’ll get a whack at The Division through its announced beta.

Beta is something we’re really hoping to get a crack at, if only because we want to give Ubisoft Massive the best possible chance of correctly honing the game to perfection.

There’s a lot to The Division, like large 8-man raids; cooperative as well as PvP gameplay; abilities and levelling up; a large array of equipment and unlockables; and a bunch that has yet to be revealed to us – that’s a lot to potentially go wrong.

For those who’d like a fairly detailed breakdown of a lot of what the community at large knows about The Division, check out Arekkz Gaming’s coverage below: