At this point, it is easy to call The Division one of Ubisoft’s most profitable franchises, but there was a time when Massive Entertainment imagined a very different future for it. The studio was not originally building a cover-based looter-shooter at all. Instead, it was chasing something much closer to an MMO heavily inspired by World of Warcraft. That idea was eventually thrown out in favor of the action game players actually got, but now two veteran developers have finally shown what The Division looked like back when it was still being shaped as a massively multiplayer RPG.

Creative director Drew Rechner and game director Fredrik Thylander discussed the first The Division in one of Massive Entertainment’s anniversary videos, where they revisited and commented on the game’s early design ideas. The nearly twenty-minute feature mostly focuses on how the shooter’s combat and enemy systems came together, but the most revealing moment arrives near the beginning, when the conversation turns to the period when the project was still much closer to a traditional MMO than to the final game.

The Shadow of World of Warcraft Hung Over the Project for a Long Time

In the video, Rechner explained that The Division eventually built its combat around an internal loop called OPE, short for Observe, Plan, Execute. The idea was that the player would assess the situation, think through the next move, and then carry it out. But the team did not arrive at that structure right away. According to Rechner, it took a while because the project originally started out as an MMO, and one that was very clearly being shaped in the image of World of Warcraft.

Thylander and Rechner said that this early version did not yet have the kind of skill-based precision that later defined the finished game, nor did it really include the traditional shooter feel players now associate with the franchise. Because of that, the team spent a long time trying to balance the game’s shooter side with its ability-driven systems. The short footage they showed makes that early vision look genuinely bizarre in hindsight: it featured a classic hotbar interface, a greener and more natural-looking environment, and even a dog companion following the player around. In other words, this version of The Division was far removed from the devastated New York players finally stepped into in 2016.

Ubisoft Pivoted at Exactly the Right Time

Massive Entertainment ultimately made the right call by abandoning that MMO-heavy direction, and most of those early systems did not survive the pivot. Looking back, it is hard to argue with the result. The Division went on to sell more than 10 million copies, became a major hit for Ubisoft, and spawned a sequel that also turned into a strong success while continuing to receive new content for years. In other words, the studio let go of its World of Warcraft ambitions at precisely the moment it needed to.

Even so, it is fascinating to see the strange alternate version of the project that almost existed. In another timeline, The Division might have arrived as a hotbar-driven MMO with skill rotations and a dog companion instead of the tactical looter-shooter fans know today. Whether that version would have survived is another question entirely. But at least now there is a small glimpse of what it looked like when Ubisoft nearly built its own World of Warcraft, only to abandon that plan and make something much more durable instead.

Source: 3DJuegos