Ubisoft Massive is getting some help from Reflections

Feb 8, 2014 00:26 GMT  ·  By

Ubisoft Reflections, the developer behind the recent Driver: San Francisco racing title, is helping out Ubisoft Massive with the upcoming The Division MMORPG.

The Division surprised and delighted quite a lot of gamers last year when it was revealed by Ubisoft as a project from its Scandinavian Massive team.

Now, according to a new statement from Ubisoft Reflections via Develop, it's also helping out the Swedish team with The Division.

According to Reflections' Pauline Jacquey, 40% of her team is helping Massive in certain aspects like art, technology, and design.

"We're working on all of the game's systems: main characters, enemies, RPG pillars, building Manhattan, online components, and so on," she said. "It gives us a very broad and wide input on the game, but it's not as limited as the naval battles on Assassin's Creed III."

"We've brought a very good design and technological strength to The Division," she added. "Massive's team is bigger, but ours is still significant, and its competency in art, technology and design is really showing. There's so much love for this game at Reflections. Our guys are absolutely crazy about it. So for some of them it's a life achievement being able to participate in the development of the game."

According to recent reports, The Division's Snowdrop Engine was completed rather recently and only now is the Massive team working on content for the actual game.

However, Jacquei emphasized that it was a basic collaboration effort, especially during the later stages of a game's development.

"That's absolutely not the case," she said. "This is part of a global model that Ubisoft has been deploying in the past seven or eight years. It's also classic team size management. You don't want your team to be too big when you're in the initial phase of conception, when you need a lot of agility. But when you're in full production – and given that the game's scope is gigantic – it needs a big team behind it."

The Division is still set to appear in late 2014.