A Secret Boss Was Hidden In The Division 2 For Months, Until The Developers Teased It

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Game developer Trick Dempsey recently started Googling to see if anyone had found a secret boss encounter in The Division 2, the giant Ubisoft game he helps make. “I was just like: I don’t [see] a video guide for finding this dude,” he said on today’s State of the Game developer stream. “There’s just nothing.”

Dempsey knew the boss was in the game. He had just triggered its appearance earlier today, before the stream. He was on the weekly stream to talk about some other stuff, but just had to mention this seemingly undiscovered secret. At around 11:30 a.m., he dropped some hints about it.

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And what happens when you offer the players of your game even just a hint of where a secret might be? At about 1:05 p.m., a Reddit user posted that they’d found the boss. On Twitter, someone posted a video of its discovery at 1:32 p.m.

The boss was hidden in the Manning National Zoo mission that was added to Division 2 in late July. In the stream, Dempsey and host Hamish Bode noted that it was not an obvious secret to find. There are no prompts in the game for it, no mysterious objects that have an interaction icon next to them.

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“It’s there,” Dempsey added. “I tested it. I played it today just to make certain.” He did make the activation process sound tricky. “Man, it takes a while to find him, but it’s something.”

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“The only other tip I will give,” Dempsey said, “is if you find yourself in one of our levels and you have about a football field’s length in which you are doing nothing, you should probably look around.

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Sure enough, within a couple of hours, dedicated players made the most of those clues.

The video shows that the boss is called The Agony and is activated after the player shoots several beehives in the zoo level and then interacts with an exhibit of bees and butterflies. The Agony looks like one of the game’s heavily armored enemies from the Outcast faction. He wears a hazmat suit and swings a hammer.

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On Reddit, user ArcLight079 posted the discovery and noted the boss carries a stinger hive, an item that can send small drones at players. Arclight broke down the steps to activate the boss:

so after crocodile pit, in exhibit area before you proceed to monorail, huge open area. shoot 5 bee hives- one straight from entrance , one near ocelot exhibit, one on high ground at wolf exhibit, one near butterfly exhibit, one in mainteance area behind monorail entrance, to left of it, hidden behind cars. after shooting them , go to butterfly exhibit, panel now can be interacted with. secret is done.

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One user speculated that the bee references and the Agony name could be an homage to the bee-wielding Metal Gear Solid enemy The Pain.

The approximate two hours it took for the discovery is about the same amount of time it took for a player to pick up on a tease from The Division 2’s creative director in August and spot the one police car in the game that includes an intentional misspelling on its doors.