There are I am sure videos on YouTube if you are so inclined, but as far as I recall, the plot is something like this: On Black Friday (in some year, whenever) a dude with a grudge against modern capitalist society and a very Social Darwinist bug in his ear releases a virus he engineered, spread by physical contact, by infecting a butt-load of paper money that got circulated on the busiest shopping day of the year (talk about a reason for online shopping!). The plague rapidly spread world-wide, killing people en masse, and turning most cities into mass graveyards where for whatever Clancy-esque right wing paranoid reasons hordes of undesirables poured out of the woodwork and set up shop in epic Hollywood gang war fashion.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there was some sort of political infighting in DC which saw the murder of the President and the ascension of a new leader, a dude you get to rescue in The Division 2. There’s also rumors of a broad-spectrum antibiotic or something that is supposed to cure the plague, but of course it’s lost or stolen or eaten by snake or whatever. The crux of the thing though is The Division, a super-sekret combination off special forces black ops people, undercover police operatives, and general might-makes-right thugs who somehow maintain amazing levels of training and skill while living as sleeper agents with no one the wiser. The President (I think the one who became president when the other one was killed?) activates The Division with some Love Potion #9 or something, and voila, you, the player, are there to save the day. That starts the first game.
The first game has you in NYC, ground zero for the outbreak I think, where you revel in massacring a horde of low-lifes depicted as barely disguised versions of young non-white men doing the sorts of things that terrify middle-class whites who only go into the city to see performances of the Lion King or to get sushi. Eventually you IIRC find the perpetrator, but a rogue Division agent (there is always a rogue agent) makes off with…something? someone? both? that can replicate the plague so there is room for a sequel.
In 2, you start off in NYC being sent to DC to handle a crisis there, though with the WONY DLC you will be heading back to the rotten apple eventually. In this second game you essentially do exactly what you did in the first, only with bad guys who are now slightly less egregious stereotyped. Oh, and there’s the uber-baddies, a bunch of PMC mercenary types who are working for some shadowy group that finds the plague warm and fuzzy (they might have shown up in the first game too, it’s been a while). These guys are your end-game sort of foes.
tl;dr, the only solution for the terrible world we live in is for hard-nosed authoritarians in military-issue jackboots to machine-gun everyone and everyone who would oppose truth, justice, and the American way, as defined by Reagan-era conservatives and people who thought Niedermeyer in Animal House was the second coming of Napoleon.
