Speaking in an interview with PlayStation Universe (PSU), Ubisoft Massive discusses its upcoming open-world RPG, Tom Clancy’s The Division, and reveals a few titbits of information that previously haven’t been revealed.
First up, we now know that the developer is going to test out The Division’s “revolutionary” companion app to see whether it’s viable to launch it on PlayStation Vita.
The app, which will allow players to control an aerial drone to help out teammates in-game, has previously only be announced for Android and iOS, but Executive Producer Fredrik Rundqvist told PSU that it’s hoping to bring the feature to Vita.
“We don’t want to talk about the Vita yet, but obviously we’re going to test that,” said Rundqvist.
The app allows players to join teammates at any time, acting as a second screen and allowing players to view the action from above. Players will be able to highlight enemies, boost attack damage, trigger armour buffs and even launch special attacks, such as missile strikes.
Rundqvist also spoke to us about the gameplay, reiterating freedom of a choice with PvE, PvP content and the ability to team up with other players or play solo.
“We’re building an open-ended game. There is a main story that you can follow but we want the player to decide how to tackle the game itself,” he said. “You can do all the activities around you and there is freedom of choice to do what mission you want to. You can play the game yourself but it’s mostly an online experience, so you will see other players, you can group with friends. We have a set number of people in a group, four players, plus a companion player.
What we’ve tried to do is mix a very immersive shooter type of experience with very heavy RPG elements, so we have skills, we have levelling, and we have loot. We’re not just adding RPG elements onto a shooter we’re delivering a proper RPG experience.“
And just like a fully-fledged role-playing game, Ubisoft Massive is hoping to keep players entertained with content for many months after release.
“We want to have players enjoying the game for months and years,” said Rundqvist. “ There’s going to be different activities to do with players who like to do PvE and PvP. We’re going to support the game for a long time. We’re not willing to talk about what type of content but there’s going to be content coming on a regular basis.
The plot for The Division is inspired by real-world events Operation Dark Winter and Directive 51 as players join a group called The Division, who are tasked with combating the threat caused by virus outbreak.
“We based the whole scenario based on a real-life event,” said Rundqvist. “We wanted to create a game with real-life settings and realistic scenarios. So we started to look at something that actually happened [Operation Dark Winter] which was the virus released in the US and how the government would cope with it. We built our whole lore on [Directive 51] with the creation of The Division, who are tasked with coping with this type of crisis.”
A recent presentation of Tom Clancy’s The Division at EGX showcased the power of the snowdrop engine, while a 20 minute video gives players a deeper look at the gameplay and features that we can expect when the game launches on PS4 and Xbox One in 2015.