The Division – Snowdrop Described As The Most Efficient Engine, Fans Will Affect Game’s Development


During Ubisoft’s E3 2014 Q&A event for Tom Clancy’s The Division, David Polfeldt revealed some interesting new information about Massive Entertainment’s development plans and the engine that is powering it, the Snowdrop Engine. According to David, fans will be invited to Massive Entertainment where they will be able to affect and influence the game’s development.

As David Polfeldt said:

“We are very happy with the dialogue we are engaging, the conversations we are having with our fans, and we plan to continue that. But we also plan to take it one step further, and you know when we meet you guys, you often have a lot of good ideas and you see things that we don’t see or opportunities that we missed, so what we’re going to do is we are going to give a couple of you – a few of you – the chance to be part of the development team. We will have you over to Sweden, you’ll spend time with the dev team, with the core creative director, you’ll be in the meeting rooms, you’ll have the pen, you’ll be on the white board. We’re gonna make you part of what we do.”

More details about Massive’s plans will be unveiled via The Division’s FB page, so make sure to follow it if you are interested in helping the development team.

Later on, David explained why Massive Entertainment decided to use a new game engine for The Division instead of licensing one.

“In fact you can argue that the race of homo sapiens doesn’t need more game engines. But, when you make a game engine  you have to put one thing as your number one priority. So, one can be stability, one can be multiplatform, you can have many things as your number one spot, but that colors everything in the engine. What we put on number one is efficiency. Power to the developers. So it’s an incredibly powerful and free engine. It gives a lot of autonomy and power to each developer which allows them to be very creative. And they can have an idea in the morning, come to work, have it done before launch, have it in the game and share it with everybody. So that’s extremely sexy if you have incredible developers, and it’s a bit more troublesome if you have junior developers because we give them the power to create fantastic bugs, very powerful bugs, so that’s maybe the drawback. But we’ve gone for efficiency, autonomy and power to the developers. So that’s what Snowdrop is about.”

Tom Clancy’s The Division is currently planned for a 2015 release on PC, Xbox One and PS4!