The Division was one of Ubisoft’s more grand IP creations in recent years. Set in a quarantined Manhattan with players playing agents trying to maintain control while things started to go very wrong. But, the game had some serious flaws, including story, the game’s ending, content, and more. So, for The Division 2, Ubisoft is upping the ante is several important ways, not the least of which is getting feedback from players to influence how the story goes. But how will that work?
Well, Executive Vice President of Creative for Ubisoft’s Canadian studios, Lionel Raynaud wrote a blog post on the Ubisoft website and gave some insight into how this will work:
“So we haWeve 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 went even deeper into how players affect the story in The Division 2 by saying:
“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.”
We’ll have to see how in-depth it goes when the game releases next year.
