The Division

I joined Tom Clancy’s The Division in 2014 as an Associate Lead Animator at Ubisoft Annecy. It was a brand new licence for Ubisoft, and the first collaboration between our studio and Massive Entertainment in Malmö, one that proved hugely constructive, on the project side as much as the cultural one.

A city emptied by a virus

The game launched in March 2016: an open world bordering on an MMORPG, with a scenario that felt very topical. A virus sweeps the planet and devastates Western civilisation as we know it.

Our mandate in Annecy was urban life: how do you bring a city to life, here New York in the dead of winter, when its population has been all but wiped out?

Survival, day after day

With the animation team, it all started with observing people and imagining what they would actually do in survival mode. The buildings had to be furnished with the few inhabitants still living in them, and their behaviours changed between day and night, with far fewer people out in the streets after dark.

The city also had to change as the game progressed. The sanctuaries where survivors took refuge went through stages: in the early days of the pandemic they were full of sick people, and by the end of the game, people had managed to grow their own crops.

We brainstormed each of these evolutions, shot them in mocap at the studio, motion edited the captures, then worked with the environment teams to set every animation in place according to the stage of the game. Survivors digging through bins in the freezing cold were typical of the moments we built this way.

The Division was the first project I worked on where I had to think about human behaviour. Before that, I had been animating games where none of this mattered.

This is where I realised everything this job was going to bring me.