Ubisoft has announced that servers for The Division, the open-world multiplayer game coming next week, won’t be live until midnight Australian time on March 8. What that means for you (and us) is that reviews won’t begin until the game is available to the public.

The publisher says that it isn’t letting press in early because it can’t populate the servers as they will be when the public has access. “Since it’s impossible for us to populate the servers in a way that would adequately replicate playing The Division on launch day, reviewers will start playing the game along with everyone else when it’s released on March 8 – after the servers go live officially at 00:01AM Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT),” the publisher writes.

We’ll have our own impressions and a full review once we can put the game through its paces. For our thoughts on the beta, check out our previous coverage.

[Source: Ubisoft]

Our Take

While we wouldn’t be able to get a complete feel for the Dark Zone area (where player-versus-player encounters happen), there’s a hefty amount of cooperative story content that we could get under our belts before the public gets in. If you are the kind of gamer that likes to know what you’re getting into before you lay down $60, you might want to wait until later in the week when the reviews start trickling in.