We saw no lack of games representing the FPS genre at E3 this year, but among them, The Division was a definite stand out. Now, we get additional behind the scenes details from the game’s director.
In a recent interview, David Polfeldt (who is managing director at Ubisoft Massive) began by addressing why the game was initially delayed until next year. “One thing that I would really like for this industry to be able to talk about is the difficulty of predicting release dates. Because we often talk about dates, but the reality is…that if you have a project with say 400 people on it…It’s super difficult to manage a team that big…The real answer, and every developer knows this, is that we don’t know when the game will be ready. Every date that has ever been set in this industry is arbitrary at one point, and I wish we could say that more often that it’s impossible to know.” He reveals.
While the game looks to have a nice layer of next-gen shine in the E3 footage we’ve seen, previous-gen users have expressed disappointment that a port for the 360 or PS3 is not currently in the works. Polfeldt reveals that accommodating this would equate to pulling double duty (if they were to release multiple iterations of the game). “The specific reason is that we built the Snowdrop engine from scratch. And it’s enormously tailored to the current generation of consoles. On the previous generation, the hardware is quite different…So in our case, it would be like having to develop the engine for two more platforms.”
The Division will hit the PS4, Xbox One and PC sometime in 2015.