With The Division now live, players are taking to the streets of a meticulously detailed New York in a desperate effort to save what's left of the city and restore order in the wake of a smallpox outbreak. Mixing open world RPG elements with the loot-obsessed shooter mechanics exemplified by the likes of Borderlands and Destiny, it's been one of Ubisoft's biggest day one success stories ever.
We speak with Magnus Jansen, creative director at developer Massive Entertainment, on abandoned features, finding hope for humanity in the game's beta phases, and the terrifying contingency plans governments have in the event of real world quarantines.
WIRED: Early on in The Division's development, you were planning second-screen features for the PVP areas, with a tablet player controlling a drone. Why was that cut?
Magnus Jansen: There were a couple of reasons but the biggest one by far was that we ran into a sort of 'fairness wall'. By that I mean that as the Dark Zone started becoming a bigger and bigger part of the game, because we started having more fun and realising how awesome it was, we started having these problems with balance. How do we balance groups where one person has a tablet and those that don't?
We realised we could probably balance it so that, if one team has five people and one has a tablet, and another is four with no tablet, we can do some dynamic power tweaking. But even if we could do it technically, people would still feel like they were at a disadvantage if 'they' had a team and you didn't. We also didn't want it to become 'pay to win', where you had to literally buy a tablet to be successful, so we dropped it. It was a mad experiment, it was really cool, but ultimately it wasn't fair to the gamers.
Did dropping that have any other knock-ons impacting the game?
Not really. It was ultimately mostly research, a crazy attempt at something. We were using the same assets [as the main game] but vastly reduced, so it wasn't a terrible impact to development to drop it.
How did the earlier beta trials affect the final game players are in now?
Many ways - we've had many hundreds of bug fixes, balance tweaks, and so on. But it's also feature tweaks. That's why we have the beta. Playing for real-real, at home, with friends, is different from playing it at the office. It's always going to be. One of the things we started noticing -- and people streaming on Twitch helped with this -- is that in a real environment, you have a lot of friends that are up to different things at different times, and they're going to be sending you group invites. That didn't happen a lot when we were testing internally, because everyone's sort of playing at the same level.
[What we noticed was] because you accepted a game invite by clicking the right thumbstick but that was also mapped to a melee attack when there was no invite, people would be accepting invites that they didn't want to. We probably wouldn't have noticed that without the beta.
Also, in the Dark Zone [the game's PVP, anything goes area], people have vastly different experiences, depending on the kinds of people you run into. We thought it would be more violent, more predatory than it was, but we saw a lot of friendly interaction, a lot of neutral interaction. We expected shoot first, but statistically speaking it's not as bad as we thought -- there's hope for human nature!
Were you looking at other persistent online worlds in how you modelled the Dark Zone?
We think the Dark Zone is completely unique on consoles, though there are some PC games that have these lawless areas, that touch on what we're doing. We've been looking at those more for confirmation that those ideas can work in our game. We've toned it down quite a bit -- the whole world isn't a Dark Zone, it's voluntary. If you don't like that stuff, you don't even have to enter that area. It's a huge, full game with a deep story and content even if you never set foot in the Dark Zone. But in terms of that lawlessness, there are no rules for how you decide to engage, if you want to kill other players or not. We definitely took inspiration.
How did you approach making The Division a 'Tom Clancy' game? It's nothing like Splinter Cell or other titles with that umbrella.
I think that it's the combination of the plausible, and the scary "what if?" You go through Clancy's books, and he scarily predicted people flying into skyscrapers -- which has happened -- to people setting off nukes in cities. All these terrifying scenarios. He has this eerie ability to come up with stuff that could cause a lot grief. That's what The Division is, our general theme.
If you look at the games with the Clancy brand, the narrative there and the subject matter all deal with that combination. And like that, The Division has that plausibility. It's not realism, strictly; especially not as a game. It's not a simulator, everything isn't absolutely military simulator perfect -- we still take liberties, some things are a little bit higher tech -- but it's plausible. I think that's something we've hit.
As an open world game, how do you see The Division developing in the long term?
We definitely have a lot of endgame -- and not just what we ship with, but what we have planned. That's the big focus. We're starting off with content that's free for everyone, and then down the line we'll add DLC. We basically started doing the DLC just now -- we've been working on the core game until right now.
It's an important thing to point out that even though the beta was Dark Zone heavy, that was because it was basically all it was. When you reached max level, that was all. In the full game, it's not like that -- we have PVE endgame, things to do that are not just fighting other players. The ecosystem of your endgame experience is one of weaving in and out of solo and team, New York and Dark Zone.
What was the most disturbing thing you uncovered while researching the real world 'Continuance of Government' protocols that influence The Division?
I think when we started working on a Tom Clancy game, this realistic setting, we started reading up on all these exercises, all the science, all that material -- that phrase "stranger than fiction" keeps coming back. There's some absolutely absurd stuff. As an example, one of the things that blew my mind was learning that in the planning for a quarantine event of Manhattan, the actual government contingency plans calls for snipers to be placed to take out the many people that would try to escape on inflatable mattresses.
Because of the housing situation in New York, there's a tremendous amount of inflatable mattresses that can double as flotation devices. Someone has actually thought about how to stop people trying to escape Manhattan island on them. That's so creepy and scary. But with a quarantine, if somebody gets out, that could be millions of deaths, so they would kill them. But it's still absolutely mindblowing.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK