What to expect from Ubisoft at E3 2015: Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, Rainbow Six: Siege, and more

“Marketing has become a lot about listening. They tell us what they want to know and we answer them,” Ubisoft’s Tony Key said. “People who are engaged every other year, maybe they’re hit game buyers, that’s a different communication for those people.

“We’ve gotten very good about tailoring our communications, developing tools and strategies that target specific groups like that. And then there’s the lapsed gamer that bought the first two and then stopped; maybe she had a family. If they’re still active in gaming we want them back. We need a special message for those people, too.”

Rainbow Six: Siege launches for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on Oct. 13.

The Division

Don’t be fooled by Tom Clancy’s name on the game: The Division is a new intellectual property for Ubisoft, an open-world RPG shooter from Ubisoft Massive in Sweden. The hugely ambitious title has been delayed more than once, and it’s now scheduled for first quarter 2016.

We caught up with David Polfeldt, the managing director at Massive, earlier this year when he visited South by Southwest in Austin. Activision Blizzard (then Vivendi Universal) sold Massive Entertainment to Ubisoft in 2009.

The Division starts you off as a sleeper cell, an almost-ordinary Joe that is called up when a pandemic strikes New York City and puts the island under quarantine. You’ll obtain and upgrade items and weapons, hone your skills, meet people who can help or hinder you, and generally go from figuring out what’s going on to reinstating law and order.

“You start with almost nothing,” Polfeldt said. “But your enemies are also becoming more proficient.”

Deciding how to set up the game originally meant figuring out where there was room to do something new in the Tom Clancy universe, he said.

“There are already a host of Clancy games – why make another one? We knew we didn’t want to have soldiers in a SWAT team.”

They were inspired by Operation Dark Winter, a 2001 bio-terrorist attack simulation designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies. It mimicked what would happen if a smallpox attack got out of control and the social breakdown that would follow.

“When things stop working, society spirals out of control in three days,” Polfeldt said. This conflict would become the basis of their new game. “You’re one of the sleeper agents. It could be anybody; it could be you. Because it’s not about being an elite soldier. You’re not there to shoot people. Suddenly, everybody with a gun is a threat. You just have to do what you can.”

Even then, Polfeldt ruefully acknowledged the delays it has seen, talking about the decisions the team’s had to make about how much realism is enough (they’ve made a host of site visits and gone through survival training) and how many features are reasonable to include.

“I think that’s one of the advantages of new intellectual property,” he said. “We don’t feel too pressured by the development calendar. It’s more, get it right. If things go well and we do our job, the adventure begins when we ship. It’s like launching a missile.”

Other Ubisoft original games

Key said Ubisoft sometimes doesn’t get enough credit for the brand-new original games they put out, either because they carry a familiar name like Clancy’s or because their launches are highly polished productions.

“Ubisoft does this better and more frequently than any other publisher,” he said, pointing to games such as Watch Dogs, The Crew, Valiant Hearts, Child of Light, and other new launches. “Yes, we do a lot of Just Dance and we do Assassin’s Creed every year. But we also bring a lot of new stuff. I think that’s not fully appreciated all the time.

“Things are so big and so mainstream and so big that people forget they are new IPs by the time they launch. So maybe that’s part of it. Maybe it’s a marketing problem with Ubisoft. We are very proud of our heritage of bringing new brands to the market, and our goal is to do that more than anybody else.”