14 DAY TRIAL // The Snowdrop engine developed by Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment studio for the upcoming The Division online role-playing shooter was imagined not just with the next-gen consoles in mind but also with a small team, like Massive itself, to easily allow developers to craft great experiences.
Video game development nowadays, especially in the triple-A sector, requires big teams of around 100 or more people working on different aspects of a game using a proprietary engine or a licensed one like Unreal Tournament, CryEngine, or other such things.
For The Division, Ubisoft's Massive Entertainment studio wanted to undermine the trend with something that can put into focus its small team.
As such, the developer started working on its own proprietary in-house engine called Snowdrop, which allows any person involved with it to make changes and automatically see the result inside the game, without waiting for help from other colleagues or for pre-rendering.
According to Massive's Rodrigo Cortes, the game's brand art director, Snowdrop entered development a long time ago and was catered to the studio's small team.
"We started to work on this engine very early on, like around five years ago, thinking of what would be coming in the next generation – what where the challenges – and also looking at the constraints we have," Cortes told GamerHub, via CVG.
"We're in Sweden, we have a way of working where we don't have much people for the type of games we want to make. So we wanted to make a triple-A game that would compete with the biggest in the industry while having a reasonably-sized studio like Massive [Entertainment]."
In order to cater to the Massive team and make sure that the engine was able to withstand anything the next-gen console threw at it, Snowdrop entered development and The Division project was quickly added on top.
"So the whole development [of Snowdrop Engine] very early on was based on those constraints - 'how are we going to tackle next-gen, how are we going to tackle triple-A production?', and the solution was to make a new engine. And it was coupled to The Division very early on," he said.
Unfortunately, Ubisoft and the Massive team are still reluctant to share an actual release schedule for The Division. Recent rumors stated that work on the game started rather recently, as Massive still needed time to finish developing the Snowdrop engine.
As such, expect to see more of it at upcoming industry events like E3 2014 this June.