The Division's Snowdrop Engine has been in development at Ubisoft Massive for around five years, brand art director Rodrigo Cortes has revealed.

"We started to work on [Snowdrop] very early on, like, around five years ago, thinking of what would be coming in the next-generation and what were the challenges, and also looking at the constraints we have," Cortes told GamerHubTV. "We're in Sweden, we have a way of working where we don't have the amount of people or the types of games we want to make. So we wanted to make a AAA game that would compete with the biggest in the industry while having a reasonably-sized studio like Massive.

"The whole development very early on was based on those constraints," he continued. "How are we going to tackle next-gen? How are we going to tackle AAA production? The solution was to make a new engine, and it was coupled to The Division very early on."

Cortes explains that using Snowdrop allows massive to improve "the fidelity of things", highlighting "the animation on the cloth, the lighting [and] the particles". "All the things put together is improving immersion," he says.

Unlike EA, which has made moves to build most of its internally-developed titles on a single engine, Ubisoft appears to have multiple engines on the go simultaneously, including Snowdrop, Assassin's Creed's AnvilNext, Far Cry 3's Dunia and Watch Dogs' Disrupt.

The Division is due to release exclusively on next-gen platforms and PC later this year. To learn more about what Snowdrop can do, take a look at last month's tech trailer.

Source: youtube.com/gamerhubtv, shacknews.com