The multiplayer shooter is coming out sometime next year

Oct 3, 2014 07:57 GMT  ·  By

Ubisoft is currently working on Tom Clancy's The Division, a shared-world third-person shooter that seamlessly blends single players, cooperative and competitive multiplayer experiences, just like Bungie's Destiny does.

The Division Game Director Ryan Barnard shared some additional details regarding how exactly the post-apocalyptic shooter will play out, and more specifically how the multiplayer structure of the game world is laid out.

The Division is inspired by Operation Dark Winer and Directive 51, real-world protocols that direct how various calamities should be approached.

The game follows the crumbling of the United States as a disease spreads like wildfire, and puts players in the shoes of field operatives from the Strategic Homeland Division, trying to keep social order as best they can.

Shared hub, separate gameplay areas

Just like Activision's Destiny, The Division will present a social area that players can return to after completing each mission, where they will bump into other players as they visit vendors and turn in quests and look for new ones.

The Division's social hub space is separate from areas where combat occurs, and is the only place where gamers will get to encounter others, who are not currently in their cooperative party.

Just like Destiny separates its Player versus Player content to a special area called The Crucible, with the function of a traditional multiplayer menu, so too does The Division, walling off PvP content into separate areas, titled the Dark Zones.

"The only time you'll see a player that's not in your group is inside a Dark Zone or in a social space. You could be in a group in the Dark Zone, you'd be very aware when you're in the Dark Zone, and that single player, you could come across them also in the Dark Zone and decide to engage if you want. But you won't randomly run into them when you're doing missions or when you're in the base of operations," Barnard explains.

Loot and end-game progression

The main reason for playing Destiny beyond the campaign is getting sweet loot, and Ubisoft wants to use a similar item progression system to reward players for their effort and to keep them interested and engaged with The Division.

"End-game is big part of what we want from The Division. We want to have content for players to play endlessly, that would be the ideal goal for the game. So you need to supply that with new items, new weapons that cause them to get more powerful," Barnard tells GameSpot.

The Division, however, won't have the same obvious video-gamey rarity tiers that Destiny or Borderlands have, but instead will use a much more organic system.

"As to the specifics of tiering, we don't actually do that in the game, but they actually do get better. So we have statistics that are affected with an item is a better quality; there's reload time, recoil, lot of those kind of things get better with up to 'legendary' or 'epic', if you want, items," he concludes.

The Division is currently in development, heading to the PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 platforms sometime in 2015.