When the four-day public beta test for online game The Division closed down in late January, plenty of questions remained unanswered. Ubisoft first announced its latest Tom Clancy spin off at E3 in 2013, promising an ambitious combination of role-playing adventure and third-person shooter, set in a New York devastated by a manmade small pox epidemic. Players would get into groups of four and enter the city, clearing the streets of violence. It sounded like a gritty real-world take on Activision’s epic space opera, Destiny. And in many ways, that’s how it played.
But the beta experience drew a mixed reaction. Players enjoyed the near-seamless matchmaking, as well as the combination of a mission-based campaign mode with a competitive multiplayer area – known as the Dark Zone – where co-op groups could fight each other for loot. But the non-player characters roaming the streets of Manhattan all looked very similar, the weapons felt underpowered and the loot seemed slightly mundane. Ubisoft seemed to have stumbled on an unspoken fact of the role-playing genre – that the dynamics only work in a fantasy or science fiction environment. There, players can more easily suspend their disbelief and the roster of enemies and weapons can be boosted by the inclusion of fantastical monsters, weird planets and improbable laser canons.
Could there be such a thing as a gritty real-world RPG?
Well, whatever the answer, it turns out that a gritty real-world RPG was always the aim with this title. “Not many people know this, but when Ubisoft purchased [Swedish studio] Massive Entertainment, their first mandate was, can you create an RPG from Tom Clancy?” says Julian Gerighty, associate creative director on The Division. “Mechanically, they wanted a role-playing game but thematically, it had to fit into the Tom Clancy universe. I know that [IP director] Martin Hultberg worked for a long time on the concept development and it was only when they put their finger on Dark Winter and the fragility of society that it really took root. But the actual RPG mechanics were fixed from very early on.”
So, it seems, was the game’s New York setting. Most of the action, as far as we currently know, takes place in a chunk of Manhattan from Central Park down to Union Square. When asked if we’ll see anything else – Ellis Island? The Bronx? – Gerighty demures: “This is what we wanted to focus on - there may be some surprises.”
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The Division makes use of iconic Grand Central architecture like Grand Centra Station. Apparently the team considered having environments that evolved, either to show improvements or increasing deterioration, but this proved too complex in an open multiplayer environment Photograph: Ubisoft
As it stands, the game takes in all the iconic architecture – the Empire State building, the Chrysler Building, the Flatiron – as well as famed areas like the Meat Packing District. All are shown devastated and abandoned, with burnt out cars littering the streets and avenues, and apocalyptic graffiti covering the walls. “If you want to show a huge-scale catastrophe, then you look at New York,” says Gerighty. “It’s a city that’s moving all the time, it’s so dynamic. So when you show a screenshot or a photo with these iconic streets completely empty, that’s striking - you immediately know something’s wrong.”
Now the end game has crept into the conversation there’s the obvious subject of multi-party raids. Players are easily able to get into small co-op groups of four people – you can matchmake in safe houses in the Dark Zone as well as call in friends when starting missions. But how about larger quests which will require several groups working together – the likes of Destiny’s Vault of Glass or King’s Fall. “I’d love that to happen,” is all Gerighty will say.
Given the huge amount of stuff still to be revealed, and the differing reactions to the beta, what did the four-day test actually show? “It was genuinely back-end testing of the stability of the servers, that was the number one goal,” says Gerighty. “Obviously there are different goals from the publisher side, from marketing, but for [the development team], we managed three times the amount of concurrency than we were aiming for. It looked good, it was stable, there was very little queuing. There were issues we picked up on; another purpose of a beta is, okay, what are people going to find and exploit? All of those things were part of the experience. It’s been really useful for us. You never know how something experimental like the Dark Zone is going to work.”
Throughout the interview Gerighty keeps pressing home the point that there’s so much yet to find out – both for players and for the development team. Although the beta taught us a lot, this is only the beginning of the process. “The game director has been balancing the game for the past four months,” he says. “We’re making sure at the highest level – level 30 - a team of four players, if they do the events, if they’re specced out like this, how’s it going to play, how will it feel? I think the building blocks are fundamentally sound, but I don’t think we’ll stop balancing it – even post-launch. It’s something we’re going to have to keep an eye on and make sure that it makes sense and it’s fun at every single level and scaling point.”
Surely this is something the team must have learned from looking across at Destiny? “I’ve played a fair amount of Destiny - I like it very much,” says Gerighty. “The thing I thought was brave was not being attached to how the game launched, and being able to evolve. It’s not a lesson we’ve necessarily taken on, but it’s very modern, it’s the way the industry is going. The last game I worked on, the Crew, that’s changed massively since its launch.
“I’m so excited by this brave new world - but daunted as well. You used to launch a game then go on holiday for a few weeks, now it never stops.”
