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You start with nothing

“When we start the game, the play’s character only has his go-bag with him, right?” explains design director Axel Rydby. “When it becomes activated, that’s the only thing he can really bring with him. In that go-bag he roughly has 72 hours of supplies, he’s got his weapons and his gear, and that’s what he starts with.”

Food and water are valuable

“Food and water is a very important part of our game, but players will not need to eat and drink to stay alive”, explains Rydby. “Our game is a lot about the fall of society. Clean water and food suddenly become scarce.” Because of this scarcity, while you don’t need to eat to live, food and water become something players need to prioritise as they “become very valuable and rare resources that can be used to trade.”

It’s a classless RPG

What you do is up to you, with your character developing through doing rather than picking abilities or skills. “It’s a classless structure, you don’t pick one class upfront” explains lead game designer Mathias Karlson. “It’s something you grow into as you make decisions throughout the game. As you see what is available to you, you make some tough but fun choices.”

The engine’s so detailed, it models melting snow

Whatever, Battlefield. Crumbling skyscrapers are so passé. Next-gen damage models need to get the little things right in addition to all the macro-destruction, and that’s exactly what Ubisoft Massive promises from its own engine. “When glass shatters or wood splinters, it will mimic reality like you’ve never seen before”, claims a post on the dev blog. What’s more, “thanks to Snowdrop’s shaders system, the environmental surfaces will change as the weather changes during gameplay. As you see, snow eventually melts.”

There’s actual fun to be had in its second screen play

We’re still not totally sold on second-screen gaming on the whole, but of all the candidates vying to sway the collective gamer mind on board with swipey tablet tinkering The Division’s companion app looks the strongest. Using a tablet you can control a drone and eliminate enemies from the air, or give PS4 players buffs and healing when they need it. There’s more functionality still promised when the game’s released.

Clan sizes have no upper limit

“Right now we have no plans to cap the number of players who can be affiliated to any particular clan,” says the Ubisoft Massive hive mind. ”We are also looking to have a very extensive web-based clan support system for all players in The Division. But we should have more to come around all this soon.” If the studio sticks to its guns, we could be looking at Eve Online-sized collectives stomping the snowy hinterland.

PvP plays a big part

“Player vs. Player combat will play a very big role in The Division,” says senior community developer Antoine Emond. “The choices you make as a Division agent can either spur a recovery or plunge the city further into chaos. The people you meet in certain areas of the game can either be your best friends or your worst enemies. So you’ll constantly be making decisions that will impact the world around you.”

It’s only possible on next-gen

Sick of seeing games hamstrung by cross-generational releases? Game director Ryan Barnard’s thoughts on the matter will be music to your ears. “This setting could only be achieved on next-gen hardware, since we wanted to explore a very real and frightening threat to our current social collective, and showcase it as a plausible and realistic scenario. Beyond graphics, next-gen consoles are incredibly powerful when it comes to player immersion, realism and offering huge, open worlds to explore.”

The apocalypse scenario is informed by reality

“The whole foundation of this game is based on realism,” says game director Ryan Barnard. “That’s what makes our story so scary and engaging – it could actually happen. We spent months researching the subject, and the more we learned, the more frightened we became. Our objective is to create a setting that is as plausible as can be, which is why we consulted with experts and even had some of our team attend ‘mid-crisis’ survival training. All of this showed us how quickly everything can spiral out of control, how unprepared we are, and how vulnerable our society is.”