“Ray Tracing is commonly used for indirect lighting,” Kasparas Eidukonis, Senior Audio Programmer, says. “Like when you shine a light into a room – maybe it bleeds out through the door and highlights the areas outside, maybe it bounces on walls and creates different colors of light based on the materials it hits.”

“For audio, it’s essentially the same. Light can be described as a wave, just like sound, it just behaves differently when it hits a surface. We shoot out rays that bounce around and propagate sound. And the more rays we shoot out, the clearer an idea of what it should sound like we get.”

Light can be described as a wave, just like sound, it just behaves differently when it hits a surface.

Let’s imagine you sit opposite another person at a table. If you talk, you can clearly hear each other. The sound waves don’t have an obstacle that separates the two of you. Place a lamp on the table, the sound changes slightly. Flip the table over and suddenly you have something between you and the person on the other side, muffling sounds. Is there a door? Is it open? You can keep building on the scenario, and everything you add will bounce waves – or rays, in the case of Ray Tracing – back to your ears, all in different ways. That’s sound propagation.

Now teleport yourself to the middle of the Kinglor Forest. Consider all the trees, plants, rocks, animals, flowing water, birds, enemy bases, and machinery. Imagine what they do to the thousands of rays the game sends out every frame and what it means for the audio experience.

“It’s super important for immersion to get the sound propagation right,” Simon Stevnhoved, Senior Sound Designer, says. “We are evolutionarily trained to be aware of our surroundings, and our ears can pick up on the slightest changes in our environment. When sound propagation works well, you might not pick up on it consciously, but when something is off, it quickly becomes noticeable. You know instinctively that if you make a loud sound – like firing a gun next to a canyon – the sound will reflect a certain way.

We are evolutionarily trained to be aware of our surroundings.

The team started out by using propagation tech adapted from Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, such as the Slapback, Bubblespace, and Obstruction systems. But, as work on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora progressed, they realized that they needed to both improve what they already had and build completely new tech for the game. While looking for ways to improve sound obstruction, GPU Ray Tracing was integrated into Snowdrop, and the audio team saw their opportunity to jump on board.

“The Division 2’s solution wasn’t built for a jungle environment,” Kasparas says. “It was designed for a city environment, with blocky buildings and props. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the geometry is much more varied, with trees and leaves and bushes.”

So, the team got to work on building a small prototype for raytraced sound obstruction, which worked well for walking around the Kinglor Forest, hiding behind trees and tree trunks, and listening to water sounds. They were happy with what they had but knew there were a lot of improvements that could be made. Some environments worked better than others, for example. The team ended up with a hybrid system, mainly relying on the Ray Tracing solution, but still utilizing hand placed data which was already available, such as volumes for inside spaces and doors.

“In the old system, we would have a custom-built solution for each type of environment, for each type of plant, rock, cliff, terrain,” Kasparas says. “The advantage we were seeing with the Ray Tracing solution is that we could do much more with the rays. We wouldn’t need to build those custom systems, instead it would see all those things naturally. We didn’t need to edit a rock and say, ‘this rock is solid’ or ‘this bush is semitransparent’ every time – naturally the bush will have gaps and the rays can pass through it better than the rock.”

Another bonus of utilizing Snowdrop’s Ray Tracing system as a basis was that the team could move the process from the processor (CPU) to the graphics card (GPU), allowing them to create and sample a lot more rays, faster. Moving parts of the process to a separate piece of hardware also frees up the CPU to do other things. And being released exclusively on the current generation of consoles – and PC – helped, as there’s suddenly a lot more memory and power to take advantage of.

For an early prototype of the system, the audio team tried a very realistic approach to sound propagation – trying to mimic how sound propagation works in the real world as closely as possible. While it created an impressive soundscape, it also became too overbearing to be useable in a game.

You still need to tell a story; you still need to understand gameplay. It needs to be approachable.

“You would end up with sensory overload,” Alex Riviere, Audio Director, says. “It’s a lot of sounds: from insects to birds, foliage rustling with the wind, cues for gameplay and navigation, to name a few. It became too much to take in and understand.  It sounded great, but any new player would be overwhelmed in that situation. So, we had to take a step back and iterate on the sound mix to make it less overbearing. You still need to tell a story; you still need to understand gameplay. It needs to be approachable.”

There’s still a lot of exploration left in the audio field. But now, we have the opportunity to enter the various vast (and virtual) environments and landscapes of Pandora and immerse ourselves in the diverse sounds of the flora and fauna you can only find there.

More from Snowdrop

• Shining a Light on Pandora, Snowdrop’s Ray Tracing
• Crafting Pandora’s Breathtaking Landscape, Snowdrop’s scattering system

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora © 2023 20th Century Studios. Game Software excluding 20th Century Studios elements: © 2023 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the 20th Century Studios logo are trademarks of 20th Century Studios. Licensed to Ubisoft Entertainment by 20th Century Studios. Ubisoft and the Ubisoft logo are registered or unregistered trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries.

One of the first things that Oleksandr Koshlo, Rendering Architect and Quentin Kuenlin, Senior Rendering Programmer on Snowdrop, mention when we sit down to talk lighting and Ray Tracing in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, is the scale of the project compared to other projects that Snowdrop has been used for previously. And it’s not just about the map of the game, but also how far away the horizon is for the players.

“It’s a huge world, which means that you can see far, especially from high vertical positions. This means that we need to support very distant rendering and we need to give it a lot of care,” explains Quentin.

Compared to The Division 2, which was also built on Snowdrop but before current gen enabled Ray Tracing, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora saw a lot of work going into supporting different lighting effects from a high distance, which presents light sources that allows distance processing volumetric lighting.

We have been able to drastically improve some of the techniques that we had to forgo in previous productions.

“With Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora being a current gen title, we have been able to drastically improve some of the techniques that we had to forgo in previous productions. Now, we could implement Ray Tracing for both lighting and reflections, and that’s a huge change.”

According to both Oleksandr and Quentin, the change in lighting quality is drastic compared to previous titles built on the Snowdrop engine, making things in the world much better connected, and as different materials and objects have different reactions to lighting, they look more realistic than before.

With the previous probe-based global illumination, small objects and details didn’t have any effect on the global illumination. However, thanks to the new system which works on a per pixel basis, all the objects in the world and every small detail can have an influence on the lighting.

Quentin points at a controller on the table we are sitting at.

“For example, if you take the controller here as an example, when we had probe-based illumination, you wouldn’t be able to cast those small, detailed shadows. But now, we can catch these small indirect shadows on their surroundings – the controller casting a shadow on the table, with the TV screen shining a light on the scene for example. It’s much more precise, and much more realistic – and more physically accurate as well since it reflects rays of light in real life.”

It’s much more precise, and much more realistic.

This also connects to the weather system on Pandora. For example, when it’s foggy, some light will be obscured, and the fog itself uses Ray Tracing to indirect light, creating a systemic interaction.

“The systems kind of feedback on themselves. If the sky is completely clouded, you get less direct light from the sun, making the environment darker. It’s all connected,” says Oleksandr, and adds that one of the challenges they have faced in the past is light shining into interiors, which has been a difficult problem to solve.

“We have worked a lot on this and been pushing the boundaries of the tech to make it work – which it now does,” he says with a smile. “And what’s even nicer is that since we don’t rely on baked data, we can actually support opening doors into dark interiors which will become bright due to the light shining in from the outside. It sounds like a basic thing, but it’s something we’ve worked on quite a while, and it’s nice to finally achieve it.”

Speaking of bake times, Ray Tracing has been pivotal in shorten iteration time for the artists working on the game, as it eliminates long bake times and gives artists instant feedback and removes some of the problems with baking. For example, to get the impression that you would get in the full game, the team had to bake things on a build machine, which would take a lot of time.

“With Ray Tracing, if an artist moves an object, it will instantly update the lighting. This means that artists can create windows and objects and instantly see what it will look like in-game for the players,” explains Quentin.

By working closely with the artists on the project, the Snowdrop team has been able to make the tech better and better with direct feedback, considering how artists work with Ray Tracing.

“It’s really a collaborative effort,” says Oleksandr. “When we started the processes in the development of the tech, it showed promise quickly. But once we committed to it and started using it to produce Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, we had to tackle a lot of challenges, and that’s where our collaboration with the artists really started.”

We had to tackle a lot of challenges, and that’s where our collaboration with the artists really started.

By working together, the artists worked to understand how to implement Ray Tracing in their work, and the Snowdrop developers figured out the best ways to optimize the tech. The collaboration has yielded great results, and the instant feedback from artists to the Snowdrop team has proven invaluable.

“When we work on the tech side, we work with simple scenes with a red cube that you can see the light bounce off from,” explains Oleksandr. “However, once you go to a real level, you can see a lot more, and realize that the artists see issues that we don’t necessarily see since it’s so much more complex.”

Quentin adds:

“The feedback has been great. For us in the Snowdrop team, what we do is physically based, and sometimes you try to be as realistic as possible, but it can actually be too realistic for artists, since it hampers the player’s experience,” says Quentin.

As an example, Quentin brings up light during nighttime in the game. During the night, it will (quite obviously) not be much light in the environment, but for the player, it’s too dark and takes away from the gameplay.

“If the player can’t see anything, it will take away from the experience, so sometimes it might be that they need to boost light in a certain area to make the player experience as good as possible. It might not be the most realistic lighting, but it’s necessary to make the game fun.”

Moving forward, both Oleksandr and Quentin see many opportunities with Ray Tracing and how it can be further evolved.

“What we are doing right now is basically tracing rays from the surface of objects into random directions. If we hit something, we hit something. But in that sense, it’s limited since the light won’t bounce indefinitely. What I think will be our next technological step for our future titles is “Path Tracing”: shooting rays which bounce and bounce and bounce. At the moment we are still working on solving some challenges, but it looks promising and it’s definitely something that we want to keep pushing,” says Quentin.

Right now, we are at the tip of the iceberg.

The Snowdrop team’s goal is to make all new technologies developed on Snowdrop available for any team at Ubisoft that is using the engine to develop their games. Ray Tracing is no different and is now available for anyone to leverage.

“There are things we are working on to get better precision and quality,” says Oleksandr. “Right now, we are at the tip of the iceberg, and there are a lot of exciting and interesting things that we want – and hope – to do in the future when it comes to Ray Tracing and lighting in games.”

More from Snowdrop

• An Evolving Pandora, Snowdrop’s dynamic world
• Crafting Pandora’s Breathtaking Landscape, Snowdrop’s scattering system

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora © 2023 20th Century Studios. Game Software excluding 20th Century Studios elements: © 2023 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the 20th Century Studios logo are trademarks of 20th Century Studios. Licensed to Ubisoft Entertainment by 20th Century Studios. Ubisoft and the Ubisoft logo are registered or unregistered trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries.

“In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the player can directly do things that affect the state of Pandora,” Kunal Luthra, Lead Technical Artist, says. “You defeat a big facility belonging to the RDA, the main bad guys of the game, that’s polluting the world around it, it will become abandoned and overgrown – nature will be reclaiming the area. The forest will recover from the pollution, animals will return. And as you push back the RDA across Pandora, you will see it directly reflected in the world around you.”

“The player can tell straight away when they are approaching a Resources Development Administration – the RDA – facility,” Kunal says. “The plants are dying around you; the wildlife is dying around you. Harvest materials are destroyed, and suddenly you can’t harvest anything. The pollution takes away gameplay opportunities, and the only way to get them back is to destroy the facility. And as soon as you’ve done that, you can see the pollution start to disappear in front of your eyes.”

The system was originally built for Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, where civilian settlements get upgrades as the player helps them recover. It has then been expanded and built upon for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

We can change almost anything. We can change the geometry of the level area, we can load and unload entities we no longer want.”

“We can change almost anything. We can change the geometry of the level area, we can load and unload entities we no longer want,” Daniel Edenbrandt, Senior Gameplay Programmer, says. “We can have new geometry for the animals and NPCs to traverse. It also affects the shaders, that decide how objects and environment look, so even when we don’t change anything gameplay-wise or geometry-wise in a wider area, we can change how we render the plants and environment using what’s called vertex shaders and pixel shaders.”

The system is also built this way to empower the game’s level designers, as it gives them the opportunity to create bases with engaging gameplay together with detailed environment.

“We have scripts in the Snowdrop editor to help the designers generate a variety of foliage depending on what area of the map you end up placing your base,” Kunal says. “You can design it once, and then the system spawns the correct plants automatically based on that. This means that we can create the most immersive world for our players, where the lush and vibrant vegetation populates the entirety of the vast landscapes of the Western Frontiers of Pandora.

We show and hide whatever is appropriate, with bespoke geometry. It’s like layers in Photoshop, essentially.”

“When you design a facility, you place the props and everything that should always exist, then you place the props that should only exist when it’s operational and then props for when it’s abandoned,” Daniel says. “Then we show and hide whatever is appropriate, with bespoke geometry. It’s like layers in Photoshop, essentially.”

Pollution is a whole system in itself, that directly interacts with the dynamic world system.

“The way it’s set up, any gameplay system can access the pollution, and it is also available to graphics shaders running on the graphics card using a pollution texture,” Daniel says. “We can have any range of pollution and if we wanted to, we could define the amount of deterioration on any material or gameplay object – like a harvestable, for example – using these shaders, instead of having multiple versions of the same object just to showcase the amount of pollution.”

The goal of the dynamic world system was to tie everything together and to make every landmark unique. It’s meant to give the player an incentive to go back to previous areas to reexplore places they’ve already visited and to create a sense of the passage of time. But it’s also a part of the game’s message.

“The basic purpose of the dynamic world is to show how bad human actions can be for the environment, but that we can take it back and help it recover,” Kunal says. “The facilities will still be there, but as you progress, they will be taken back by nature.”

More from Snowdrop

• Shining a Light on Pandora, Snowdrop’s Ray Tracing
• Crafting Pandora’s Breathtaking Landscape, Snowdrop’s scattering system

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora © 2023 20th Century Studios. Game Software excluding 20th Century Studios elements: © 2023 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the 20th Century Studios logo are trademarks of 20th Century Studios. Licensed to Ubisoft Entertainment by 20th Century Studios. Ubisoft and the Ubisoft logo are registered or unregistered trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Kunal Luthra, Lead Technical Artist, David Österlind, Lead Environment Artist, and Carl Leonardsson, Senior Programmer, are three of the people that have worked on the scattering tool to help the Avatar team build an immersive Pandora.

“Simply put, the scattering system is a procedural placement tool,” David says. “It uses a node system that connects objects together in a parent-child relationship based on the radius around the objects. Maybe a tree has certain plants that grow around it, or a river has a certain type of pebbles and rocks on its banks, which in turns have certain flowers that grow around them. Once we have set up the logic we can populate the world in an instant, allowing for quick and easy iteration. It’s advanced, but the core idea is very simplistic, in the sense that everyone can grasp it.”

“We consider scattering to be the first pass,” Kunal adds. “But it’s a good first pass! When we’ve locked the scatter, we can go in and massage the content, add, remove, and move objects – adding that artist flair. And if you have an area that is extra important, where you know something important will happen in the game, artists can go in and handcraft those specific areas without using the scattering system first.”

Procedural world building tools are not new, games like Far Cry 5 have used them for a long time, but the scattering system in the Snowdrop engine was built from the ground up based on the specific needs of the project which brought a range of new innovations. After all, each procedural generation tool does things differently, based on the desired outcome. But with this level of fidelity and detail, it’s easy for the tools to bloat and become hard to use.

For artists, this tool is invaluable.”

“The scattering interface in Snowdrop is meant to be as art friendly as possible,” Kunal says when asked what improvements the team has made compared to other similar tools. “The system is not just driven by a code recipe to generate some procedural, arbitrary result. An artist can, from scratch, fill out a map based on rules, with specific assets, the child-parent relationship between objects, hierarchies, and build a nice, believable world in a user-friendly way. For artists, this tool is invaluable.”

Originally, the scatter system might have been built for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but by now it has become a general Snowdrop feature that other games can benefit from.

“We did cater it for this project,” Kunal says, “to create the Pandora we wanted, but we always keep in mind how to keep it scalable and streamlined for other Snowdrop projects in the future. The more projects use it, the better and more comprehensive and advanced and easier to use it becomes.”

“It is definitely integrated into Snowdrop overall now,” Carl says. “That’s also something that we want to work more on, to make it better and easier for other projects to apply.”

Once an area has been automatically populated, it’s easy – and fast – for an artist to go in and tweak and fix things to their specifications.

“And we can scatter in layers,” Carl says. “We can place objects in layers. You might have your aquatic systems – you can have scattering at the bottom of a river, at the surface, on the cliffs next to the river, perhaps on the floating island just above it.”

It’s also important for the team behind the scattering system to be in contact with other teams, like game design, to make sure that the areas it produces fit the rest of the game.

“It might be artist driven, but it needs to go hand in hand with level design and game design, for example,” David says. “For example, interactive plants might need to have a certain distribution, or crafting materials can only be found on a certain tree with a certain type of bark. That needs to be considered as well.”

We can scatter on other assets, on props, anything really that we think should have it. That’s very powerful.”

The system is also built to be fast.

“You can have your graphs that describe the rules on one side, and the game on the other,” Kunal says. “We make an adjustment and in seconds we see the results. That’s another of its key strengths, that the iteration times are so fast – you can iterate, and iterate, and iterate quickly, and not have to wait for ages until your changes are reflected in the game.”

“When we started, we were only placing things procedurally on terrain,” Kunal says. “But now we can scatter on other assets, on props, anything really that we think should have it. That’s very powerful.”

“At the end of the day, it’s about keeping the player immersed, consistently, through the whole game. And if there are some pockets, anomalies, that we can tweak, then we do that.”

More from Snowdrop

• An Evolving Pandora, Snowdrops dynamic world
• Shining a Light on Pandora, Snowdrop’s Ray Tracing

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora © 2023 20th Century Studios. Game Software excluding 20th Century Studios elements: © 2023 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the 20th Century Studios logo are trademarks of 20th Century Studios. Licensed to Ubisoft Entertainment by 20th Century Studios. Ubisoft and the Ubisoft logo are registered or unregistered trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries.

To celebrate, we caught up with some current and former team members to find out what makes the game so special.

THE WORLD OF THE DIVISION 2

One of the things in The Division 2 that stands out to a lot of people is the game’s world, the city of Washington D.C. – recreated to a 1:1 scale, using Massive’s own Snowdrop engine – itself. “There’s such a sense of scale and attention to detail,” Lead Game Designer Fredrik Thylander says. “And not just the visual fidelity, but how much there is to find and see and experience in that city.”

“The hidden hunters, the underground faction that only come out at night, the events and living world of enemies and friendlies roaming around,” he says. “There’s lots of systemic looter shooters out there, but none with an immersive, detailed, alive world like The Division 2.”

Product Director Morten Ryberg agrees. “The game has a lot of things that are different from most other games,” he says. “But most notably is the attention to detail in the world. We treat it as a character both in terms of story and emotion.”

Daria Ilyina, Community Developer, also points to the world as one of the things that really makes the game stand out. “It completely wraps up the players in the virtual experience in front of them – from story and sound to random encounters and graffiti on the streets of D.C.,” she says.

SHOOTING AND LOOTING

Another thing that our developers think makes the game special is the variety of gameplay styles it supports. “It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve played – there’s something for everyone,” Daria says. “That’s what truly makes the game so enjoyable for many different people.”

It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve played – there’s something for everyone.

“It’s not easy to make a game where loot feels rewarding and at the same time give players the choice in terms of their playstyle,” Morten adds. “I believe this is achieved in The Division 2.”

The gameplay is one of the things that stands out to Fredrik from his time working on The Division 2. “I think I’m most proud of the gunplay and shooting,” he says. “At the end of the day, even without all the RPG systems, great locations, and gadgets, it’s still a solid shooter at its core. One with far, far too many unique guns and attachments, that all feel fun to mess about with, and with unique sounds, reloads and handling.”

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

One of the first things that will catch your eye when you enter Massive’s studio in Malmö is a giant statue of Agent Heather Ward, one of the characters from The Division 2. The statue was originally constructed for E3 2018 and stood right at the entrance to one of the Los Angeles Convention Center’s wings, as the game was revealed to the public during the conference.

“That’s one of my best memories from The Division 2,” Cristian Pana, Senior Producer for the project and now Managing Director for Ubisoft Bucharest, remembers fondly. “Arriving at the LACC and seeing that beautiful statue, and the two robotic arms carving the names of community members and beta testers into the plinth.”

“The Division 2 community is one of the most diverse fanbases I’ve ever worked with,” Daria says. “They are an incredible bunch of players, artists, cosplayers, storytellers, streamers and content makers from across the globe united by a common passion – they embody the true essence of our Division Agents.”

In 2023, The Division 2 is still growing, and the team is planning for the game’s fifth year. “There are so many details and ambitious additions that we will bring to millions of players,” Morten says with a smile. “We are looking forward to sharing those plans with our players and even more to see it all be realized over the next 12 months.”

“A lot of hard work lays in front of us, but it will all be worth it!”

More from Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

• The Division 2 launch week – A Massive road to launch
• The Unique Sound of The Division 2, Audio Director Simon’s story

In a bout of nostalgia, several of the developers booted up the game and spent their lunch shooting at each other in a game mode they themselves had developed all those years ago.

But what was it like for Massive, who had just joined Ubisoft, to develop multiplayer for such a blockbuster title? With Far Cry 3 turning 10 years old this year, we sat down with some of the developers that worked on it to find out more.

A WHOLE NEW GENRE

“We were already playing a lot of first-person shooters at the office when we got the mission to create the multiplayer for Far Cry 3,” Senior Quest Producer Johan Oldbring, who worked as Associate Producer – and later Live Producer – on the game, says. “We were playing games like Battlefield and Call of Duty together on our lunch breaks, so we already knew a lot about the genre, even if we had never developed an FPS before.”

When Ubisoft acquired Massive from Vivendi in 2008, the studio mostly had experience with real-time strategy games, having developed classics like World in Conflict and the two Ground Control games. Now the developers had to not only work in a brand-new genre, but they also had to move from PC-only to consoles. It was a whole new world in many ways.

“Once we went to the local game store and bought 70 copies of Battlefield: Bad Company and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare,” Johan says. “We did a lot of research, looked at the competition, tried to understand the genre to find out what we liked and did not like. When we started development on the Far Cry 3 multiplayer, we already had a lot of thoughts and ideas on what we wanted to do and what we wanted to improve.”

Having a Player versus Player multiplayer was not new to Massive – World in Conflict had a PvP mode already. While World in Conflict belonged to a completely different genre, the team still looked to their previous creation to find inspiration. They wanted the same quick matches that World in Conflict had.

“We often thought of World in Conflict more like a first-person shooter PvP game than a real time strategy game,” Johan says. “We wanted to keep the quick matches, perfect for those lunch breaks.”

It was not just gameplay that the team mulled over. As they played other games, they asked themselves questions like “what is a multiplayer match?”, “how long are they, what is the infrastructure like, what systems are important?”. And what happens in-between matches?

What is a multiplayer match?”, “how long are they, what is the infrastructure like, what systems are important?

The answer to that question would have a significant impact on the Far Cry 3 multiplayer experience – once a match was over, the team that won could choose between “killing” or “sparing” the best performing player of the opposing team in a rather gruesome post-match scene. They also added the ability to chat via text and voice while waiting for games to start, a feature that World in Conflict had pioneered and was groundbreaking for multiplayer games at the time.

A UBISOFT CRASH COURSE

“Far Cry 3 was intended to be our Ubisoft ‘university’,” Massive’s former Managing Director, David Polfeldt, wrote in his book The Dream Architects. “The plan at Ubisoft HQ was that [Ubisoft] Montreal would create an awesome single-player experience, and Massive would add the online components. So far so good.” But as David points out in the book, it would turn out to be a major challenge.

“Making the multiplayer was hard,” Game Director Ditte Deenfeldt, who worked as Associate Lead Game Designer on the co-operative part of the Far Cry 3 multiplayer, says. She had joined Massive on the same day that Activision Blizzard put the studio up for sale in 2008. “The co-op team was small. The lead studio and the single-player game had their own problems, so communication was not always the best and we did not always get the attention we might have needed.”

The engine Far Cry 3 was built in was not made for online multiplayer, and the editor used to put everything together was not made for it either. It could take 24 hours for changes a developer made to be integrated, so there was no fast way to test to see if what they had done worked or not. Massive had a lot of online experience but had to learn a whole new online infrastructure to make the modes work.

“At one point there was a bug in the editor where it would crash every seven minutes,” Ditte remembers. “It took five minutes to start up again. So, I would have to make my changes within seven minutes, then the editor would crash, and I would have to wait for five more minutes for it to boot up. I worked like that for two weeks before it was fixed. It was frustrating at the time, but we can laugh about it now!”

“We had to be creative. We did not give up and we focused on doing the best we could with the tools we had.”

FINDING THE TONE

As described in The Dream Architects, Far Cry 3 had a troubled development, before it turned into the classic it is seen as today. “You have to remember that before Far Cry 3, the series was completely different,” Ditte says. “All of that humor, the pop culture references, the tone, all of what we think Far Cry is today, was established in Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. We did not know the direction the game would go in while we worked on the multiplayer.”

The shift in tone between Far Cry 2 and the third game in the series would end up being a boon for the team at Massive. Through their analysis of what multiplayer meant, they had already established that a co-op match needs more humor to be fun to play. Not everyone understood their reasoning.

“You can’t tell long and complicated stories through this kind of co-op,” Ditte says. “You cannot add long cutscenes. It just needs to flow, and it needs to be replayable. You just want to joke and laugh with your friends while playing; you even laugh at sad things! We added a sense of humor to the co-op without knowing the direction the main game would take, and sometimes it was hard to explain to others why we had to do it that way.”

We added a sense of humor to the co-op without knowing the direction the main game would take

Far Cry 3 was released on November 29, 2012, to great acclaim and sales figures. It was an instant hit, and the tone and feel of the series would forever be changed. The single-player campaign, featuring a strong narrative and the iconic antagonist Vaas, would in a sense overshadow the multiplayer modes – something that did not make the experience of creating them any less valuable for the teams moving forward.

LESSONS LEARNED

Today, Massive Entertainment is the lead studio on several AAA projects – The Division 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the Star Wars Project – and the developers – both at Massive and at Ubisoft – learned a lot about co-development through their experiences with Far Cry 3.

“You learn a lot after having been a co-dev yourself,” Ditte says. “You become a better lead studio if you have been a co-dev and know exactly what a co-dev studio need. You learn just how important constant communication is. That is something we brought with us, and that is how we work with our partners today.”

“I still have close friends in Montreal from the Far Cry 3 days! Those are the kinds of connections you want to create.”

RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

10 years is a long time.

“Far Cry 3 feels like a lifetime ago,” Johan says. “Up to that point, we had made pretty niche games, in a way. We are of course proud of World in Conflict and Ground Control, but it was an amazing experience when people you talked to knew about the brand. ‘Wow, you work with Ubisoft, on Far Cry!’ That was new for us. We had suddenly gone global.”

Coming back to the game a decade later gave the developers a unique opportunity to reflect on their past work and think about where those first steps on their journey with Ubisoft would take the studio. After all, Massive’s very own Tom Clancy’s The Division would be revealed at E3 2013, less than a year after Far Cry 3 released.

“I am really glad we got to play Far Cry 3 multiplayer again before it shut down,” Ditte says. “I was skeptical at first – are we really going to put ourselves through this? But when I saw it again, I could see everything it taught us, how valuable it was for us. I could look at the multiplayer modes with new eyes and new perspectives.”

The gang from Massive was not alone when they logged in over lunch. An old-time player was online and joined the fun, unaware of who he was playing with, helpfully warning the developers that the servers were closing. “He totally owned us,” Ditte says, laughing.

“It is a game from another era,” she says. “It is so violent! It can be quite cringe at times. That said, the flow is great. The multiplayer might not be perfect, but now, 10 years later, I am proud of what we accomplished with the tools that we had. I was surprised that it wasn’t as bad as I somehow remembered it being! We can pat ourselves on the back.”

Ubisoft “university” indeed.

“Good job after all, Ditte, from 10 years ago,” Ditte says, with a smile. “Good job.”

Useful links

• World in Conflict 13 years later.

Please note that this article contains spoilers for The Division 2 and Warlords of New York. You have been warned.

In Season 4, released in 2020, the players were forced to kill Faye Lau, a character that had been a part of the story since the very beginning of the franchise. As they stood over her still body – the once leader of the Division’s efforts who had betrayed all her friends and allies – many players asked the question – why?

And though Faye was gone, her story was not over. And in Title Update 15, the reasons behind Faye’s actions finally started to become clear. While two years have passed for us in the real world, only minutes have gone by in the game world. And for the writing team, it has hardly been any time at all.

“Faye has been with me all this time,” Lauren Stone, Narrative Director for The Division 2, says. “Since I was working with the whole Tom Clancy brand for the last two years, I was always looking at her story within the wider context of all our transmedia properties.”

When Lauren started on The Division back in 2016, Faye was the first character she wrote for. She loved writing for her, and Lauren instantly had a ton of ideas for directions Faye could go in.

“I actually proposed this whole love story between Faye and Nathan, Doctor Kandel’s assistant, in 2016. I wrote up a bunch of collectibles that would show the evolution of their relationship, like The English Patient, with him taking care of her after she lost her eye.”

“Sadly, we couldn’t do it because Melissa O’Neil, who voices Faye, was doing a show and was unavailable to record that particular story.”

FINDING FAYE’S VOICE

The actress Melissa O’Neil was instrumental in turning Faye into the iconic character she became, and when the team started to work on the Warlords of New York expansion for The Division 2, they knew they needed her back.

“We didn’t want to get a soundalike,” Lauren says. “Melissa was irreplaceable. If she was not available, we had to think of something else. Thankfully, she wanted to support us and The Rookie, the show she is working on, helped us so she could come back and voice Faye again in Warlords of New York.”

After working with Melissa in the recording booth, and seeing the impact she had on the character, Lauren felt it was necessary to give Faye the send-off she deserved. “The story of her and Nathan’s love did not fit within the plot of Warlords of New York and so, like many ideas and potential story threads, it was abandoned for a better idea that better served the story we were trying to tell in 2019.”

“We are so happy and honored that we got to work with Melissa for such a long time, and that she helped us bring a character that is so important for the Division franchise and story to life.”

LIVING ON THE SAME STREET

For Lauren, writing characters comes with a variety of emotions and connections. As a writer, you sometimes must write characters that are very different from yourself – which according to Lauren can be fun. “I think Aaron Keener and I are probably the most different, other than President Ellis,” she says. “Ellis is a [REDACTED], he is fun to write but we are very different people.”

But with Faye, something was different. There was a connection there. “There are characters that live on the same street as you” as she calls it. “Faye and I are very similar women,” she says. “We are both justice monsters, who will sacrifice ourselves to serve our community, we are both disabled – she lost an eye, I have three autoimmune diseases – and we are both Asian American women who are elder-millennials and grew up within that cultural context.”

“I am white passing, Japanese, Latina and indigenous woman from California and Faye is a Chinese American woman from New York. We are not the same, but we have a lot of common touchstones.”

We are both justice monsters, who will sacrifice ourselves to serve our community.

Lauren sees Faye as the kind of person that would do the right thing, regardless of how wrong it might seem. Faye looks at the bigger picture and is not afraid to adapt as she gains new information. “She gets fixated on solving a problem,” Lauren says of Faye, “but she does not get obsessive about the results. She follows where the evidence leads her, and adapts, instead of trying to only find evidence that supports her original hypothesis. Denying new information, and the inability to change our minds, is dangerous. Faye is willing to admit when she is wrong and change her course of action.”

CRAFTING A LIVING STORY

According to Lauren, when crafting a new story in the Division universe – be it in the games, for an audio drama or a novel – you must make sure to honor the stories that have already been told and build upon them. Lauren and the team work hard to make sure to create a foundation and pockets in the world where others can have the freedom to tell their stories, while still having everything grounded and tied together.

“My goal is for everything to be additive and stand on its own merit,” she says. “You do not have to read the book to understand the audio drama or play the game, but if you want to see how more people interact with this world you can do so by engaging in other mediums.”

“The Division is a deep and meaningful exploration of the best and worst of what humanity has to offer in a time of crisis. I want to create a catharsis – not a trauma generator. At the core of any Division property is community and teamwork.”

At the core of any Division property is community and teamwork.

Of course, The Division 2 is an online game in continuous development. The game changes and evolves over time, which is a challenge when telling a story, since it becomes a marathon, not a sprint. “You have to pace yourself and keep looking ahead,” Lauren says. “You have to move forward with intention and make better choices each time”.

“If we learn from our mistakes we can grow and build something meaningful together. That does not mean we ignore the mistakes or pretend they do not exist, but we cannot hold onto a minor failure or a battle we lost if we want to win the next one tomorrow.”

That sounds like something Faye might say.

It all starts with a concept. “I try to find something in the new content that we can tie an Apparel Event to, so when we do an update, it all feels coherent,” Art Producer Palle Hoffstein says. Sometimes it can be tricky and take a while to find that tie-in, but in the case of Title Update 15 and the Fairview Crew Apparel Event, it was clear from the start.

TELLING A STORY

“Fairview Crew came together very quickly because the new content is set in an atomic power plant, a very specific environment that we haven’t had in the game before,” Palle tells us. To him, the best events tell a story through their gear, answering the question “why would somebody be dressed that way?”. And in a power plant, there were a lot of stories to tell about the people dressing up in the clothes offered in the new event.

“Who is keeping the plant running, six months after society collapsed? Who is there? Do they live there now?” Palle asked himself and his team. “They would have gear that was part of their old job, but by now their stuff is going to be taped up, the visors are going to be cracked, they might be mixing and matching stuff that’s probably not even keeping them safe anymore!”

“And while some people still know how to run the power plant, others have completely fallen apart. But for all of them, the gear is their connection to a world that is gone – that is why they are holding on to these pieces of clothing.”

FINDING THE COOL

After the concept has been finalized, Palle shares it with the Creative Director and the Narrative Director. If they like it, he then goes to the Concept Artists so everyone can get an idea of what the gear will look like visually.

“I will take that high level idea and start turning it into something concrete,” Senior Concept Artist Topi Pajunen, who worked on the Fairview Crew Apparel Event, says. “I do research, mood boards and sketches before handing it to Palle to discuss what they look like, what kind of feel does this gear convey?”

“But also, how would it work in-game? Does it function with our characters? Does it look cool?”

This coolness factor means that, despite the research, a piece of clothing does not need to be completely realistic and practical. It just needs to be iconic for the theme, archetypes of something you would straight away connect with the subject matter.

And while creating the final concept art, the artists keep building on the connection to the world of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 – in the case of Fairview Crew, it was branding. “Pentco is a fictional company that our players have already seen in the Division games,” Palle says, “so we decided that this power plant would be a part of this established corporation that has a logo, that has brand colors. In real work clothing, you would see logos everywhere, so we used that to ground the gear into the ‘reality’ of the game world.”

FROM 2D TO 3D

Once the concepts are signed off on, it is time to get the gear into the game. Some of the 3D assets are created in-house at Massive, but much of it is handled primarily at Ubisoft Shanghai, following the regular 3D process pipeline before ending up inside Tom Clancy’s The Division 2.

“There’s a high polygon version, we review it, it goes to low poly, we review it, it goes to skinning and rigging, we review it, it goes into the game, we look at it,” Palle tells us. “All through that process we stop and iterate as needed, because something that works great as a concept does not always come to life in the way you would like when you see it in 3D.”

The way Tom Clancy’s The Division 2’s character work, with five pieces of clothing and six pieces of gear that all need to be shown on the character, there is a lot of complexity involved and tweaks must be continuously made before Palle and his team are happy with the result.

And, as Topi points out to us, the team must be aware that players, in the end, want to mix and match gear to get the look they want for their character. During an event, the new pieces are meant to fit together as coherent outfits, but if you want to wear a Hawaii shirt from the Heat Wave Apparel Event that ran in 2019 with a new gasmask from the Fairview Crew Apparel Event in 2022, you should be able to.

“We have so many pieces in the game, not everything works with everything,” Palle elaborates. “If you are going to wear something we made two years ago with something we made now, we cannot guarantee that they look amazing together. That is not our priority when putting together new outfits. And we build them quite differently now than we did in the past.”

THE SHIFTING TECHNOLOGY OF VANITY

“It was more rigid when we started,” Palle says. “The biggest thing we added in Year 1 was probably the ability to have hoodies up, which everyone was asking for, which I was asking for, that we just could not do originally. We needed gameplay support and I had to nag people for a long time.”

“The other big thing was the ability to hide the chest piece.”

That might not sound like a big thing on paper, but a lot of thought and work went into hiding that piece. When Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 launched, the real focus was on the game’s regular gear that was designed to have a visible progression as you moved from level 1 to level 30. The equipment would get bigger and more technologically complex, and in the end, you would be decked out in heavy, impressive and elaborate gear.

“The problem was the players did not like that,” Palle says. “They liked being powerful, they did not like the look of being encumbered with a lot of gear. So, we started producing things that looked more streamlined, and then we started hiding the chest piece on some shirt pieces.”

Together with hats and jackets, a shirt has some of the most interesting real estate where people communicate through clothing, both overtly and subtly. It is a good place for logos and slogans, and helps players define who their character is. It gave the team a lot more places to play and tell stories.

In the Fairview Crew Apparel Event, the team is adding a new type of item that has not been in the game before – purely cosmetic backpacks meant to fit in with the rest of the outfits in the event. They have no gameplay advantages, but because the players can choose to change the look of their regular gear while keeping their stats using Appearance Slots – colloquially called a “transmog” system in games – these new backpacks open a lot of options for both players and developers.

“What’s cool is that The Division 2 is a third person game, you see your character over the shoulder, so the backpack takes up a big amount of screen space,” Palle says. “It is very front and center. The new functionality takes the canvas of the screen and opens up a big area that was not available to us before to do some storytelling and play around a little bit. “

“Before they needed to be fully plausible, they had to look like real gear. But with the new cosmetic gear, we have more room to play with colors and materials. This is going to be fun!”

It sounds like a simple process but opening up this space did take some gameplay programming and design to work. To Topi it was worth that extra effort. “We can now work in full 360 degrees around a character,” he says with a smile. “It is very exciting to me. The visual area of games is where I live. I love it. There are so many things you can imagine what characters can put in a backpack, so many different materials they can be made out of.”

THE FUTURE OF AGENT FASHION

Moving forward, the team wants to do two Apparel Events per season and for them to counterbalance each other. If one has a more militaristic theme, they want the second one to not have that. “We might have underestimated the importance of self-expression in the community when we launched,” Palle says, “but that is something we can address now. And it is fun to work on!”

The next one is meant to tap into contemporary clothing, but still with the same “six months later” vibe that Fairview Crew has.

“It is something we tackled a little bit in the past, but I do not think we really pulled it off,” Palle says. “We are better positioned to do that now. We have people here that are more into clothing and fashion. I am really looking forward to that event and to see what the community does with it.”

The team of course has more ideas and plans for what they are going to do for future Apparel Events, hoping to do even more with the vanity system they started with the backpacks and using it for more pieces.

“We want to give players more options,” Palle summarizes their philosophy. “And we always want to give them even more opportunities to communicate who they are in our game world.”

“Before I decided to pursue a career in gaming, I was working for insurance and oil and gas companies,” she tells us. “Long story short, after 2014 I realized it was not me for me anymore, and since I had a passion for community and gaming, I applied for my first Community Management job.”

Her previous experience in IT analytics and customer & partner relationship helped Daria to quickly adjust to a brand-new working environment and gave her new ways to use her skills and expertise. “Despite the popular belief that the community discipline is just a way of breaking into the gaming industry,” she says, “I knew that this is what I was truly passionate about.”

Which titles did you work on before?
Lost Ark, Warface, Conqueror’s Blade, Prison Architect, a bunch of FTP mobile games and some other titles that are yet to be announced.

What excited you about The Division 2?
The continuation of the story and The Division 2 endgame trailer that featured the Black Tusk and their robot dogs!

What are your first impressions of the Division community?
Three words come to mind: passionate, demanding, and artistic. Even though it can be tough sometimes, there are always those who continue to inspire us with their ideas, creations, critique, and constructive feedback. It’s the community who I work hard for every day.

I have been a part of The Division community myself since the first game came out, and till this day it never ceases to amaze me how creative the community is.

What is it like to work in a Community team?
Amazing and inspiring! The Community Management discipline attracts creative individuals from all kinds of backgrounds – from content creators and copywriting specialists to Social Media Managers and live streaming gurus. It is a perfect opportunity to share the experience and learn from each other.

But primarily, it is a collaborative process. ‘Teamwork makes the dream work’, as the saying goes. Of course, we are working together to achieve a common goal, but it is also very important not to forget about helping each other to attain our full potential.

Also, the memes.

What will be your first steps as Community Developer?
Too late for the first steps, I’m afraid. With the ongoing PTS and TU15 release preparations I feel like I have already run a marathon!

Jokes aside, my primary goals as a Community Developer are not only limited to facilitating the communication between players and developers and ensuring that KPIs are met timely, but also creating safe spaces for the most vulnerable community members and building meaningful relationships with gamers through friendliness, transparency, and information awareness.

What is your first impression of Massive?
They are exceptional people here! I am glad to have joined the company at such an exciting time.

The Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 Public Test Server for Title Update 15 just closed and the update will be officially released for all platforms soon. For more information and news, follow The Division 2 on Twitter.

More from Tom Clancy’s The Division 2

• How we Crafted an Authentic Washington D.C. for The Division 2
• The Unique Sound of The Division 2, Audio Director Simon’s story

For example, he’s the teacher on NGON’s video project Code{}School, that we’ve written about on the blog before. But he also does talks outside of Massive and Ubisoft, including this talk for Game Engine Design students at his old school, the University of Reykjavik. The talk covered both programming tips and a look at how Ubisoft Connect works.

https://youtu.be/SukHhnU_PtM

“Outside of the regular topics like who I am and what I do on a day to day basis, I also wanted to go over topics the students most likely had covered but to cover them from a different angle,” Olafur tells us. “In this talk I discuss design patterns and why studying them in the classical manner might not be very effective, and then I go over a problem in performance and code efficiency they might not have thought about.”

When teaching, Olafur’s aim is to create “Aha!” moments. Instead of focusing on specific features, he wants to focus on problems that might arise and how to solve them using the tools the students have already learned. “Then we can reveal the feature or element we are teaching”, he says. “Now the students have a connection to why a certain feature exists. When you teach someone something, starting with the ‘why’ is important.”

If you want to learn more from Olafur, make sure to follow him on Twitter. As a bonus, you will also get a lot of programming jokes from him.