14 DAY TRIAL // Ubisoft has revealed a few more details about the special Snowdrop engine that powers The Division, the upcoming online action game from its internal studio Massive Entertainment, confirming the key goals pursued by the developer while making the new tech.
The Division surprised a lot of gamers this summer at E3 2013 when it was revealed to the world as a next-gen massively multiplayer online game.
Over the weekend, during the VGX 2013 awards, the Snowdrop engine that powers The Division received a comprehensive video that showed lots of actual footage from inside the game.
Now, over on the UbiBlog, developer Massive Entertainment has talked about the goals it had when creating the Snowdrop engine, from making life easier for its actual staff, to allowing the studio to easily and constantly update the game without any convoluted steps.
Check out the full list below.
- Empowerment. Thanks to Snowdrop, everyone involved with the development can more readily realize their goals. When using Snowdrop, the artists, the designer and the animators have the power to achieve their ideas and vision, simply by accessing the game directly within the engine. Snowdrop is a dynamic, interconnected and united system.
- Real time. Each thing the creators develop need to be instant and in-game, so that they know exactly if it will work, with no baking time. That means lightning-quick iterations, with the team testing and evaluating new game features in an extremely short amount of time. The result is the ability to develop game features faster than ever. We built Snowdrop in a way so that the game is always playable during development. We conduct frequent playtests at Massive to ensure it’s constantly tested at every stage of production. Not only does this allow us to obtain the best quality possible, this enables us to achieve a high level of coherence within the game.
- Fun. Hey, games are fun, right? And yes, development is hard work, but it should also be fun. If the tool is not fun, you kill individual creativity. We get all kinds of crazy, fun and unexpected results from an intuitive and powerful tool like Snowdrop. That’s exactly what an innovative gameplay experience is about.
The Division is set to debut next year for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.