'Tom Clancy's The Division' Will Be So Realistic That New Yorkers Might Have an Advantage

The Division is going for a stunning level of realism in their interpretation of a post-epidemic New York City, but just how realistic will the city in the game be?

Well, very realistic, apparently. In an ongoing set of interviews from Examiner's Game On blog with the men behind The Division, Ubisoft Massive's brand director Rodrigo Cortes spoke about just how real New York City will be in The Division. And apparently it'll be real enough that real-life New Yorkers will feel right at home.

"Actually I think so," Cortes told Game On when asked about New Yorkers being able to find their way around better than others. "They'll recognize themselves and will be able to navigate pretty well, but we're still doing a lot of gameplay enhancements to be able to navigate easily just by scanning the environment, you can always find the landmarks as they are [around] the City."

But what about the poor folks that don't live in the Big Apple?

"Through the UI [we have] this map where you can access the map at all times and you can see the 3D recreation of New York and you can easily find where you need to go," Cortes said.

So, that's a relief. Personally I'm from New Jersey and frequent New York, but I certainly don't know it like the back of my hand. So an intuitive map system will be very helpful.

The studio also feels that it owes it to itself to put out the most realistic game possible, since this is a Tom Clancy title.

"If you look at the [Tom Clancy] books, it's very often based on real people, so we went to the root of Tom Clancy and found our heroes are agents since they're embedded into society," Cortes said. "They're real people, normal people that are being placed in this extraordinary circumstance where they need to be able to act, so that's one part.

"The second part is the authenticity and realism. You have military shooters, but not many are as realistic or plausible as the Tom Clancy games. Everything we do is based on research including the story, Directive 51 and technology, it's all based on real things that exist right now that we extrapolate our fantasy on top of it."

All very cool. For non-New Yorkers, maybe start studying Google Maps or something to get ready for The Division, because it sounds like it's going to be ultra realistic.