Despite the fact that The Division’s visuals have been downgraded, the engine powering Massive Entertainment’s title is phenomenal. Truth be told, some of its features have been toned down, however the Snowdrop seems like a solid engine. And Ubisoft has revealed that other titles may borrow Massive’s engine in the near future.
As Martin Hultberg, head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, told Finder:
“It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”
This sounds great, especially since Snowdrop scales well on both multi-core CPUs and multiple GPUs. A new Assassin’s Creed game powered by the Snowdrop engine, with the same quality of the Global Illumination lighting system that was used in Unity (and not the one in Syndicate as it was clearly scaled back)? And with a better LOD system thanks to Snowdrop? Now that would be awesome.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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