The Division isn't just Ubisoft's next game, it's the company's future
Imagine a game that combines the open world chops of Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed with the near-future aesthetics and clever online components of Watch Dogs with the best of The Crew’s take on peopling a virtual world with players and non-players. Now give that concept to a team that has been quietly helping on some of those games, always striving — even before its days at Ubisoft — to make online play better. The result is Tom Clancy’s The Division and, Ubisoft hopes, a glimmer of what the future of the company and games in general has in store for all of us.
Snowdrop is designed from the ground up to empower the sorts of worlds and experiences that Ubisoft has increasingly made its core design philosophy.
“I think there will be more online presence in [all] games but it will take many new forms,” he said. “I think that developers have some ideas about what these new forms could be, but we can’t just draw the line from point A to point B and expect to get there. It’s going to take [the] community of players and fans to help guide what each step along that path looks like. Online and especially persistence is a form of social experiment so it could take a myriad of different forms depending on how each game community evolves.
Interesting read on how Ubisoft dares to experiment with new mechanics and try to learn from those experiments and continually evolve their gaming experiences by iterating on successful concepts and building technological backbones to enable continued experimentation. While Ubisoft games hasn’t really been a favorite of mine in general, I’m pretty intrigued by The Division, not only because it’s the biggest game ever to be produced here in Malmö, but also because it seems to involve an interesting combination of mechanics packaged up in a very well polished world.