The Division Almost Had Police NPCs To Control Player Behavior in DarkZones

The Division is a prescient, progressive online action game, that relies on player cooperation for any progress to be made. That is, unless you are in the DarkZone- in the DarkZone, you are allowed to take out other human players indiscriminately, without much in the way of rules stopping you. But it wasn’t always like this- Ubisoft originally had police NPCs in DarkZones, whose sole point would have been to police player behavior, and take out those players who were playing dirty.

“There are always going to be people who are destructors. There are always going to be people who are the hunter killers of this world. We tried to figure out: how much do we want to deal with that? The relative lack of rules in the DarkZone is super important to us, so we toyed with the idea of having Police NPCs that would police the world of the DarkZone and take out people who are too nasty,” The Division Creative Director Magnus Jansén told Examiner.com.

“However, we wanted the DarkZone to be for the player, so what will happen is if you kill a lot of other players and if you’re a really, really bad person, the longer that [Rogue Status] timer [will] get and you will have a bounty on yourself,” Jansén said.

This, then, becomes a self policing system- other players learn a player has a bounty on them, and they all team together to take that player out, if necessary.

“Other players in the area will be notified of ‘hey here’s a bounty, go put down this bad person.’ This makes [the DarkZone] self-policing and self-balancing. I’m sure some people will try to take it upon themselves to be as bad as possible and to avoid capture and that bounty being cashed in, but you’re not going to survive forever,” Jansén said.

The Division is due out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in March.