Ubisoft Massive brand art director Rodrigo Cortes has told GamerHubTV that The Division's Snowdrop Engine has been in development for five years at the studio.
Cortes commented:
"We started to work on [Snowdrop] very early on, like, around five years ago, thinking of what would be coming in the next-generation and what were the challenges, and also looking at the constraints we have. We're in Sweden, we have a way of working where we don't have the amount of people or the types of games we want to make. So we wanted to make a AAA game that would compete with the biggest in the industry while having a reasonably-sized studio like Massive."
Cortes adds that the entire concept for The Division tems from these constraints and the developers at Massive wondered, "How are we going to tackle next-gen? How are we going to tackle AAA production? The solution was to make a new engine, and it was coupled to The Division very early on."
He says that using Snowdrop allows Ubisoft to improve "the fidelity of things", highlighting "the animation on the cloth, the lighting [and] the particles" and concludes that putting all of these aspects together is about "improving immersion."
Ubisoft has developed numerous engines internally for its titles aside from Snowdrop. Assassin's Creed uses Anvil, Far Cry has Dunia, and Watch_Dogs runs on Disrupt. You can check out the interview with Cortes below.
The Division is expected to launch later this year for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. You can check out a trailer of the Snowdrop Engine in action here.
