Ubisoft: Player actions will shape New York in The Division, will let you explore areas other than Manhattan

Ubisoft recently posted an interview with The Division game director Ryan Barnard, and while Barnard didn’t exactly divulge everything about the upcoming game, there were some interesting tidbits.

In the E3 demo, we only saw a section of Manhattan being played on. Barnard revealed that, while Manhattan is where the majority of the game will take place, there will be times where players can go to other areas outside of New York City:

Absolutely. Exploration is key to the game. The majority does take place in Manhattan – but, yes, you will be able to explore other areas in the game.

Seeing as how Ubisoft is labeling The Division as an open-world RPG, the question rose of whether players’ actions will make any sort of impact. According to Barnard, the actions that players take will affect the world around them:

To answer it simply: Yes, your actions as a player are very important; the game world will change depending on your actions or inactions. I’ll try to give you a little more than I did at E3. We’re fixing New York, the whole quest or overarching objective of The Division is to get the “grid” back online and functioning; by grid, we mean water, power, sewerage, sanitation, etc. Your actions will change the face of your New York.

Finally, while you are more than welcome to play The Division by yourself, it is an open-world game, which means you’ll more than likely be teaming up with either your friends or people you meet. As such, having content that will require people to be in a group of more than four players could be in the works, something that Barnard admitted is the case:

For retention and the end game, “group-plus” content will be really important. I can tell you that there will be multi-group content. I can’t get into it too much, but I can say there will be at least eight-player content.

The Division will launch sometime in 2014 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC.

Source: Ubisoft