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of the most
catastrophic
pandemics in history.
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FEATURE
GAMES
GAMES
But for most of us, playing and communicating with others
will be intrinsic to
The Division
experience. Massive Ubisoft
have plenty of experience in ensuring that the communication
mechanic works well.
“We were in the fortunate position to have developed
games facing this challenge before, like
World in Conflict
,"
explains Hultberg.
"We could fall back on the things we learned then. Given
that, it became more of a technical effort than anything else;
making sure grouping up works, team chat, proximity voice-
over-IP, emotes, signs and feedback from the game systems
all operated well.”
The studio pooled the writing talent across the entire
Ubisoft network to build
The Division
's compelling narrative.
This, Hultberg admits, was an exigent task – coordinating
the story with not only an open world New York for players
to contend with, but also the unpredictability of the online
component of the game.
“Scripting
The Division
presented the same challenges
as any cooperative open-world game," Hultberg notes. "We
worked a lot with what is called 'environmental storytelling';
letting the world tell stories through how we design and prop
it. We used something we call ECHOs, which are snapshots
in time accessed from local recording devices by the agents’
technology.
“We have some cutscenes, of course. Characters that talk
to you. Plenty of missions and items you can find in the world
that convey our narrative in different ways. Basically as much
of the narrative as possible has to be accessible in any order
the player chooses – and that is the biggest challenge.”
Judging by the appetite for the closed and open betas,
The Division
is one of the most anticipated games of 2016.
It has been built by the experienced core members of Red
Storm Entertainment, the original studio that Tom Clancy
himself set up to channel his unique brand of storytelling into
video games back in 1987. Despite a series of lengthy delays,
the enthusiasm for
Tom Clancy’s The Division
has remained
undiminished.
The Antonine Plague
Modern opinion is that The Antonine Plague was actually smallpox and was first
described by the Greek physician Galen in 165AD. Thought to have been spread by
Roman soldiers returning from Mesopotamia, it was named after Marcus Aurelius
Antonius, one of two Roman emperors to die as a result from exposure to the virus.
The death count over 15 years was 15 million.
The Plague of Justinian
Around AD 540, a plague carried by rats from Egypt reached the Byzantine
capital Constantinople, and then flowed through Emperor Justinian’s empire like a
bushfire. Incredibly, it lasted five decades, claiming the lives of 100 million people –
half of the population of Europe at the time.
The Black Death
This nasty little bacterial infection, carried by fleas and rats on merchant
shipping and spread pneumonically, devastated Europe between 1347 and 1351,
killing an incredible 20 million – almost one third of the continent's population.
The Spanish Flu
As if four years of war wasn’t enough for the world’s population, in 1918 there
was an outbreak of what became know as Spanish Flu. Quickly spread through the
migration of returning servicemen from the First World War, it lasted for just a year,
and an estimated 50 to 100 million people died from the virus.
4