The Division 2

I first worked on Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 in the second half of 2018, on the main game, with the Ubisoft Annecy team. I then left on maternity leave, and came back in November 2019.

The game, developed by Massive Entertainment in Malmö together with Annecy and several other Ubisoft studios, had shipped in March 2019, and production was in full swing on Warlords of New York, the expansion that would take players back to New York in March 2020 and on which I stepped up to Senior 3D Animator. The Annecy mandate was clear: bring the streets of the game to life, starting with its civilians.

Seven months after Black Friday

The first game had shown players a New York frozen solid, collapsing days after a pandemic broke out on Black Friday. The Division 2 is the opposite: Washington in summer, seven to eight months later, crushing heat, supplies dwindling for months. Survivors garden in protected sanctuaries where they used to scavenge bins, and the villains have had time to organise into structured groups.

Warlords of New York then brought everyone back to the streets of New York, with the civilians and the villains roaming them. Even though the teams had already worked together on the first game, a lot of thinking went into bringing these cities to life all over again.

From the mocap stage to the street

My work was motion editing from end to end. It starts with brainstorming what civilians can believably do in this world, then shooting those behaviours in mocap, then editing the captures into animations the game can use. The last step is a close collaboration with the environment teams, to place each animation exactly where it belongs in the world.

Players wandering through the city come across the result as little vignettes along the way, some funny, some grim. They genuinely add life to this post-apocalyptic world, and polishing every one of those little stories is the kind of work that lands, hours later, in players’ living rooms.

I had already worked on these same subjects for the main game, before my leave, and they carried on into the expansion, along with the raid set in a foundry and its different bosses.

Thinking like a survivor

What I loved most on this project was slipping into the skin of someone surviving a post-apocalyptic world. I had just had my first child, and my perspective on things had shifted.

Diving into research on survivalism, on how human beings behave when everything falls apart, was exhilarating. Observing all of that adds so many strings to an animator’s bow.

The Division 2 will remain the project that brought me back to production, and the one that taught me how much an animator grows by watching people. An open world does not come to life through set pieces: it lives through the hundreds of small, truthful behaviours that players may only ever glimpse once.