The Division's dynamic world brings "a whole new realistic level"

We caught up with executive producer Fredrik Rundqvist to learn more about the structure of The Division, about New York City, dogs, rats, tunnel people and much more in this interview.

Speaking of the wild-life, there will be rats of course, but stray dogs will also play a big role.

"In this kind of mid-crisis almost apocalyptic scenario, obviously there is going to be a lot of dogs that have gone stray, that have gone wild."

"When we did our research you can imagine if you have to choose between feeding yourself, your children or your dog I guess the dog will come last and also the disease is primarily hitting humans. In our research we discovered there's around half a million dogs, domestic dogs in New York City today and of course, many of them wouldn't survive and they would die but there still would probably be at least a couple of hundred thousand dogs that will turn wild pretty fast when they don't get food the regular way anymore."

The wild-life is one component in a greater dynamic, living world in The Division that players will explore.

"We don't want the game to necessarily be your traditional linear story-driven game, but rather a full open world that you can explore as you want. And for that to be exciting you really need the world to be dynamic. Things are going on even if you're not around. So it's not like a scene starts to play when you turn the corner. You actually have different factions in the city. You have wild-life. You have weather. You have time of day. Everything is interacting the whole time and you're kind of just inserting yourself into that living world. We think that brings the game to a whole new realistic level and I don't think you can really fake that it really has to be dynamic systems that plays out as real as possible."

The conversation moved on to cover the structure of the experience how it's divided into PvE and PvP, and so on. Then New York came up, and the verticality that the city offers. And that wound up taking us underground.

"People would know Times Square or Empire State Building or Madison Square Garden, but they don't necessarily know what the underground looks like. And we're not just talking subways, we're talking service tunnels, utility layers of the city that you need all those functions for the city to work. But nobody usually goes there, but you'll be able to go there and that's pretty cool."

So... will there then be tunnel people?

"I wouldn't necessarily label them as tunnel people, but there obviously will be a lot of different factions in the city and there will definitely be people that will take advantage of the more protective areas of the underground. Imagine the game takes place around Christmas, New Year, New York is freezing at that time. Obviously people will move down towards the tunnels. So it's ironic isn't that the penthouse is worth nothing in this, the $50 million Westside apartment is worthless and the homeless people in the underground that's the prime real estate in this scenario. So that's like flipping reality a little bit."

The Division is scheduled for release next year on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.