Speaking to GameSpot for EB Expo 2014, The Division game director Ryan Barnard shared more details about how Ubisoft’s post apocalyptic multiplayer shooter structures its game world. The Division presents a shared world experience akin to that of Destiny, in that singleplayer, co-operative and competitive multiplayer modes are blended into a more seamless experience.

THE SOCIAL HUB

In Destiny, you can return to a social area called The Tower after completing each mission. In this area, you can bump into other players as you visit vendors and hand in quests. The camera also defaults to a third-person view, so you can see your new weapons and pieces of armour. The Division contains its own social hub space that is separate to areas in which combat occurs, and it’s the only place that you’ll encounter players who aren’t in your current co-operative party.

PLAYER VS PLAYER AREAS

Destiny separates its PVP content to an area on its map called The Crucible. This functions like a traditional multiplayer menu option, as it allows you to drop into competitive matches against other players. Similarly, The Division separates its own PVP content into separate areas called Dark Zones.

“The only time you’ll see a player that’s not in your group is inside a Dark Zone or in a social space,” Barnard explains. “You could be in a group in the Dark Zone, you’d be very aware when you’re in the Dark Zone, and that single player, you could come across them also in the Dark Zone and decide to engage if you want. But you won’t randomly run into them when you’re doing missions or when you’re in the base of operations.”

ITEM REWARDS

Though The Division won’t have loot drops that are obviously tiered by rarity as in Destiny, the game still wants to use item progression as a way to reward players.

“End-game is big part of what we want from The Division,” Barnard elaborates. “We want to have content for players to play endlessly, that would be the ideal goal for the game. So you need to supply that with new items, new weapons that cause them to get more powerful. But as to the specifics of tiering, we don’t actually do that in the game, but they actually do get better. So we have statistics that are affected with an item is a better quality; there’s reload time, recoil, lot of those kind of things get better with up to ‘legendary’ or ‘epic’, if you want, items.”

Barnard also spoke about the game’s approach to recreating classes common to the RPG genre. The Division is in development for the PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 and will be released in 2015.