As reported by GamingBolt earlier, The Division, in true Ubisoft manner, is being worked upon by a whole collaboration of a multitude of Ubisoft studios. Now, Massive Entertainment, the primary studio that is developing the game in conjunction with Ubisoft, talks about how it is working with a machine with so many moving parts.
“For instance, technology sharing in the group is for free. That means I can never sell my engine to another studio or try to make any money from anybody else. Any studio in Ubisoft could call me today and say, ‘hey David can you send me Snowdrop, I want to try it out,’ and I’ll do it within 24 hours,” Massive Entertainment’s Managing Director David Polfeldt said.
“That creates a sense of being in a brotherhood or being on a team. It’s quite powerful. There’s also a question of resources that some of these big projects demand for a limited time a huge boost in resources. Often, it’s easier to borrow that from a studio or pickup some partnership somewhere, rather than for me to hire 17 new guys on Sweden.
“[That] would take over a year [to do], but within Ubisoft I can pickup the phone and say, ‘hey Toronto or Singapore, whoever, are you guys available? Are you guys between projects? Would you like to help me out with this?’ Really that’s how both Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 3 happened; there was a window there that they weren’t able to fill. They just made a couple phone calls and [it happened],” Polfeldt said.
It sounds like this does expedite the development process; unfortunately, it also creates games that can often lack cohesion, such as Assassin’s Creed III. Hopefully,The Division turns out to be more Far Cry 3 than Assassin’s Creed III. We’ll see.
