E3 2013: Tom Clancy’s The Division, An “Online, Open-World RPG”

E3 2013: Tom Clancy’s The Division, An “Online, Open-World RPG”

Ubisoft ended their conference with the announcement of Tom Clancy’s The Division, a new “open-world online RPG,” based around a global pandemic collapsing society.

The first trailer explained the background of the game, that modern society is a complex and fragile house of cards that could all be brought down by one link of the chain breaking. In The Division, that link is a virus spread on bank notes during Black Friday leading to filled hospitals, quarantine zones, international trade collapsing, eventually, “everyone will be a potential threat.” That trailer ends asking, “what will it take to save what remains?”

After that trailer, Ubisoft’s representative switched to a live gameplay demo with three other players. Despite the repeated tagline of it being an “online RPG,” the demo showcased third-person cover-based shooting almost exclusively.

The video above doesn’t include it, but during the conference stream the representative was shown holding a PS4 controller. The banter between the team is also not from the characters in the game, but between the real people controlling the demo.

The demo ends with the squad encountering another group of player-controlled characters, part of what the rep then described as “a whole new online, open-world, RPG experience, coming out for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.”