'Tom Clancy's The Division' Release Date Next Year: Ubisoft Discusses Delay

Ubisoft recently discussed the delay of “Tom Clancy’s The Division,” which was originally slated for a release date sometime during the third or fourth quarter this year.

Earlier this month, the French developer announced “Tom Clancy’s The Division” wouldn’t launch until 2015. “The Division,” which is currently being developed by three studios – Ubisoft Red Storm, Ubisoft Reflections and Massive Entertainment -- will be available for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.

“Working on ‘The Division’ is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all of us at Massive, Reflections and Red Storm Entertainment,” the development team said on Ubisoft’s blog in early June. “We are creating something we are really proud of and we don't want to compromise on quality. We are going to release the game when it's ready.”

Gamespot recently spoke to Ubisoft Massive managing director David Polfeldt about the delay.

"One thing that I would really like for this industry to be able to talk about is the difficulty of predicting [release dates]. Because we often talk about dates, but the reality -- and this is really coming from the trenches -- is that if you have a project with say 400 people on it, you're working on a fairly new piece of hardware like the current-gen, and you're trying to be the best game ever, and you want to do 90+ [rating on Metacritic], the reality is it's very hard to do that,” Polfeldt said. “It's like if I were to ask you to become a professional athlete. Yeah, you could become an athlete, but when will you be ready? It's a really hard question."

Polfeldt also discussed the difficulties of developing one game with three studios.

“It's super difficult to manage a team that big. Any software project that is on that scale, it's incredibly hard for a producer to manage and to accurately predict what's going to happen. And then you add on top of that the discussion about the narrative, about the IP, about the main character, about the features. The real answer, and every developer knows this, is that we don't know when the game will be ready,” he explained. “Every date that has ever been set in this industry is arbitrary at one point, and I wish we could say that more often that it's impossible to know. The closer we get, the more accurate we will be. And I think for us, we were too optimistic when we said 2014.”

“Tom Clancy’s The Division” won’t be available on the Xbox 360 or PS3, mostly due to the game’s Snowdrop engine, a dynamic, interconnected and united system that will power the game. The engine will run in real time and will have an innovative new destruction system, which means that each time an action takes place – a car explodes or a glass window shatters -- it will look different, and will actually be a separate experience every time.

“It's enormously tailored to the current generation of consoles. On the previous generation, the hardware is quite different,” Polfeldt explained. “And they're also different from each other [PS3 vs. Xbox 360]. So in our case, it would be like having to develop the engine for two more platforms. And it's just a huge job that we could do, but were excited not to."

Polfeldt added that there are "a lot of interesting things in the game that were not shown this year at E3. So there's a lot to come." We're looking forward to it.

What do you want to see in "Tom Clancy's The Division?" Leave a comment or tweet me.