Despite being the capital of the United States of America, Washington DC isn’t the most recognisable US city and certainly is not the most glamorous. Many will think of Los Angeles or New York when asked about American cities, often leaving off the home of the White House. But for the team at Massive Entertainment, Washington DC was an obvious choice for the sequel to their New York-based shooter The Division 2, because of how different and unique the city is.
The team considered going to Seattle or New Orleans for The Division 2, but Washington offered them so much more. There are the countless iconic landmarks, a massive variety in terms of how different each area of the city is, and crucially a lot of possibilities to create environments that are more natural, with lots of foliage and open areas.
Why Washington?
If you go back to The Division you will notice that almost all of the city is built up high, with concrete all over the place, as you would expect from an urban hub such as New York. But that resulted in a city that didn’t have much variety. Especially when it came to its colour palette, because no matter how well designed each area is, from the outside a lot of skyscrapers look very similar.
But in Washington things are very different. The suburbs and residential areas feature smaller individual houses with gardens, wider streets that have since filled with garbage, because who picks up rubbish when the world is on its knees? It’s generally a very different setting to downtown Manhattan. Even the more central areas of DC are different, with more open spaces, and buildings you can actually see the roofs of from the ground.
However, level design director Manny Diaz says that the real difference comes from the more natural areas of DC. Despite being a major urban city, the surrounding area is filled with wildlife, wide open spaces, and lots of green areas. Or at least more than you’d ever see in New York.
How The Division 2 Gameplay Changes
This changes a lot of things, and not just in terms of visuals. With more natural areas comes more open space, and that means limited cover at best. In central New York there was always something to hide behind within a few feet of wherever you were, so provided you weren’t getting flanked you always knew you could chill behind a wall and be pretty safe. But now, having to cross a fairly open field means you really have to plan your movement, spotting cover before you even consider darting out.
When playing in co-op this also creates a much more tactical style of play, where you will have to communicate with your team to remain safe. If you want to sprint over to a tree 25 meters away, but know multiple enemies will see you, then you’re going to have to warn your team, and ask for some cover fire as you sprint for your life.
Then you will have to do the same as they move forward, or you will be picked off one by one. Of course in the more built up areas of the city you can still bounce from cover to cover in classic The Division style, but this new geography offers more variety, which is never really a bad thing.
Diaz also reveals that many of the missions in The Division 2 will take you from built up urban areas, past the iconic landmarks and into some woodland, or to the suburbs. This is designed to really make you think you have been on a journey, something you could never really do in New York. Starting off in the business hub of the city and ending up on the banks of a small stream is much more memorable than running 10 blocks across Manhattan.
How Washington Was Recreated
Building this digital version of Washington is no easy task though, especially when the team wants anyone who has ever been to the city in real life to feel like they recognise even simple street corners. One of the ways they have done this was starting off with a ton of data about road size, building locations, and even where larger trees are. They then imported all this into the improved Snowdrop engine and were left with completely untextured areas of the city that were exactly the same as the real thing.
From there the team chose areas they wanted to include, stitched them together to create an interesting map to play in, and made a few changes here and there. But still a lot of the locations, even if it’s just a side street in the middle of the area that closely resembles George Town, have the same dimensions and layout as the real world. It should feel instantly familiar to anyone who has been there before.
Very early in in development, just after this tech was added to the engine, Diaz recalls a time where he was just walking around full size areas of DC that were completely untextured. Just the layout of the roads and the building locations were in place, but even then he managed to recognise a street he had been on before, thinking there was supposed to be a cafe just around a corner. And as soon as he walked around that corner in the digital world, the cafe was staring him right in the face.
Whether or not all this extra work to create areas of Washington that are almost entirely realistic, and the focus on variety was worth it, remains to be seen. Probably only a small percentage of players will have actually been to Washington DC, so most will be unable to recognise anything outside of the major landmarks.
But what we do know is that this will make The Division 2 feel very different to the first game. Sure, New York had a ton of recognisable places, key landmarks, and did feel like New York, but this time with actual city data creating some areas that are 1:1 recreations of the real thing, you should feel like you are in a real city — not a digital playground created by level designers.
