STACK #137 Mar 2016

FEATURE GAMES

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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.

of the most catastrophic pandemics in history.

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.

GAMES

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