The Division 2 promises to make up for all of the perceived mistakes from its predecessor and Ubisoft has done a phenomenal job so far showing us just that. From raids, to an overhaul to how the game itself actually plays, the sequel is looking to do what the first one couldn’t. Now Ubisoft’s EVP Lionel Raynaud is shedding some light on the sequel and how their inclusiveness with the players will affect the story.
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When asked how building a game around player feedback and the open-world formula in mind affects the game’s overall narrative, Raynaud had a pretty interesting answer regarding the heat maps. “So we have data, and what we call heat maps, [which offer] strong knowledge of what is played and replayed, so we can have a good insight on what is interesting for them,” he mentioned in a blog post before explaining how the creation itself actually worked.
“The other way to see it is, especially when we create a world with the possibility of many different stories, is to have very different tastes of stories, depending on the characters. If we have 500 characters in the game we create, we can decide which sections of characters will appeal to a certain audience. There were questions about romance [during the corporate event], and it’s very obvious that there is an audience that is waiting for this. And some of our games are really ready to offer not only gunplay and fights, but romance, or friendship, or a ton of other things that would be super-interesting – and make the characters become more interesting and lovable because they don’t speak only about fights, but also about things that players live in their own lives.”
The next step for the franchise is a fresh start, a clean slate. Earlier last month we learned exactly why the team decided to start fresh rather than continue to try to improve the first game, “”It wasn’t an easy decision,” said Financial Officer Alain Martinez, “but there are so many stories and so many experiences that we want to explore within the world of The Division that we really felt a sequel was the best way to investigate these things.”
Game Director Mathias Karlson mentioned in addition, “Also, I mean, the process of making something is such an important part of learning and improving what to do next, what to do in the future. And these are all the same people, all the same teams and studios that made the first game. It’s an incredible opportunity for us to take all that learning, all that experience from what The Division is today and put that into a new game.”
The Division 2 releases on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on March 15th of next year.
