Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 Gamescom 2018 Trailer, Interview

Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment’s co-operative loot-based shooter Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 has received a new trailer that shows off a bit of world building and sets up the tone of the upcoming game. Check it out:

The pre-orders for the game are now also open, and you can read all about the different editions and their respective bonuses right here.

You may also want to check out this GamesIndustry.biz interview with David Polfeldt, Massive Entertainment’s managing director, where he talks about the studio’s plans to create an engaging endgame, improve upon the previous entry in the series, and entice people to make the switch to the new game. An excerpt:

“It’s like a second marriage,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz. “The first time you marry, you’re probably happy enough just to fall in love and see what happens. If you’re in your second marriage, you probably know a little bit more about what’s going to follow after the infatuation. You pay more attention to how it’s going to develop over a longer period of time.

“That’s really the difference – we now know there’s a huge expectation on the game, not just as it is on launch day, but in year one, year two and even year three, which we’re in now with a bigger playerbase than we’ve had in a while. We’re… I wouldn’t say less naïve, but we’re much more aware about the fact that it’s a long relationship.

“It’s easier to project yourself into the future and go, ‘yeah, this feels fine in the beginning but what about after one year, two years? How’s this going to work?’ That’s where we started when making our design choices, from the perspective of how’s this going to work in the long term? What are people going to enjoy after two years of playing the game? From there, you can work backwards towards the ‘falling in love’ part, which is actually what the campaign is – it’s just a long love story. In our case, I think it’s going to be longer than the first one.”

This must put a significant strain on the studio. Not only are they trying to make their second marriage work, but their ex-wife is still very much present and has her own demands – i.e. there’s still an active audience for the original Division that needs to be kept engaged.

“You’re right, that doesn’t work, does it?” Polfeldt laughs. “It’s true, though. The Division is still a pretty big project in and of itself, The Division 2 is enormous – and then we’re building [James Cameron’s] Avatar in the studio as well, plus Snowdrop, which is being used by quite a few Ubisoft games now. It really is a lot.

“But we often remind ourselves this is the spotlight we wanted to be in. If you’re a football player and you want to play in the Champions League, you’re not going to complain when you realise there’s a lot of pressure there. In one way, I’m actually looking forward to it more because the spotlight is so big now and the expectations are so high, but this is what we’ve dreamt about. I’ve been in the games industry for 20 years and it’s been something we always fought for.”