After revealing its Snowdrop Engine at the Spike VGX Awards, Ubisoft has published a blog for developer Massive Entertainment’s The Division and how the engine provides for better next-gen development.
The blog states that Massive “is a more intimate studio than its name might suggest, so they needed to build a next-gen engine that would allow the team unprecedented efficiency and flexibility.”
“We re-evaluated the entire development workflow to refocus on a smarter, rather than bigger, way of doing things.”
Massive went about creating the engine with three base concepts in mind – empowerment, real-time and fun. “Each thing the creators develop need to be instant and in-game, so that they know exactly if it will work, with no baking time. We built Snowdrop in a way so that the game is always playable during development. We conduct frequent playtests at Massive to ensure it’s constantly tested at every stage of production. Not only does this allow us to obtain the best quality possible, this enables us to achieve a high level of coherence within the game.”
The destruction witnessed in the showcase trailer is very much real-time, according to the studio. “We developed a very visceral and accurate destruction experience using procedural techniques. The destruction effect is not pre-baked in the game; it reacts differently depending on the physical forces at play.
“Tom Clancy’s The Division has been designed specifically for and on next-gen, using our 100% next-gen Snowdrop engine. This new generation of consoles has opened many new opportunities to create more immersive and dynamic worlds, and enabled us to create the universe we had envisioned for The Division.”