STACK #137 Mar 2016

GAMES FEATURE

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Panic on the Streets of New York Start spreading the news. NewYork has been hit with a virus and the Big Apple needs you. We speak with IP director on Tom Clancy's The Division , Martin Hultberg. I t is of course tradition for Ubisoft to save a thunderbolt for the conclusion of its E3 media briefing in Los Angeles, and the

five-minute gameplay demo for The Division back in 2013 became the game that everyone at the show was talking about. A tentative launch date of 2014 was pinned to retail schedules, but as details of The Division ’s depth and ambition surfaced, it soon transpired that Massive Ubisoft, the studio behind the game, had little hope of finishing it in time. 2014 became 2015, and deadlines were set and broken. "With The Division , we had to do a lot of 'firsts'," IP Director at Swedish-based Massive Ubisoft, Martin Hultberg, tells STACK . “We needed a new next-gen game engine (Snowdrop), which we developed ourselves. Then we needed to create a new niche within the Tom Clancy franchise. “On top of that we needed to marry several genres into one cohesive gameplay experience, and at the same time we had to do what all games always do; create stories, build a universe, design missions, etc. It was, simply put, a highly complex project that needed this amount of time to reach its full potential.” Traditionally, Tom Clancy-endorsed games could be classified as the thinking person’s military shooters, where strategy is requisite, and espionage, Cold War and covert operations all recurrent themes. The RPG genre is, as Hultberg clearly identifies, totally new territory for the franchise, and coupled with this new direction, the studio also decided to make The Division online only. “The original mandate was for us to create a Clancy online RPG,” says Hultberg. “The online part is key because we want a vibrant world

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with. Player skill is naturally still important, but understanding the different attributes and how they relate to skills, gear, and other mechanics is crucial." New York City is faithfully recreated as a backdrop to game, where an outbreak of a deadly virus on Black Friday sends the world’s most iconic city spiraling into a tumultuous terrain of dog-eat-dog on the eve of Christmas. Playing as an agent of Strategic Homeland Security (The Division) thrown into the epicenter of chaos in the hope of restoring some sense of order, communication between team members is key, but not always essential. “Of course, if players decide not to talk to each other, they don’t have to communicate at all. But a team of people communicating will always be more efficient than one that doesn’t,” says Hultberg.

that brings people together in different social experiences. With easy transitions between playing alone or with others, we hope to give everyone a chance to experience the full potential of our world. “I think one of the main things you have to do [to attract campaign players] is create an inviting and interesting universe for people to play in. Once you have that, you need to look at ways of making sure the experience is smooth and immersive. That is why we developed seamless transition between single-player, co-op and player- versus-player, for example." Hultberg describes The Division as "a proper loot and statistics-based RPG”. “The loot mechanics are at the core of the game," he continues. "What that means is that the gear you use is a strong indicator of how effective you will be in the various tasks you engage

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