I was extremely fortunate to design the single player introduction to The Division 2 with both the Prologue, and the White House Intro. This was not an easy task as it required a lot of heavy scripting with a short turnaround. The layout, cover placement, combat, sequence scripting, and intro credits/bink videos were all aspects of the Prologue that I was specifically responsible for. I worked closely with Narrative Direction, Art Direction, and our Creative Director Julian Gerighty to nail down the tone and pacing of this intro mission.

Environment Art | Sonja Christoph and Oskar Johansson Möller
Additional Technical Scripting | Lukas Joley and Andreas Springare

Following the games Prologue, players find themselves in the decaying streets of Washington D.C.

Designing this small mission was my favorite contribution to the project. The end battle on the White House lawn was a big focus for me and I worked on it from the early concepts through to launch. The biggest design challenge for me was to imitate a large scale battle while avoiding a steep learning curve for new players. There were also some tech limitations that I can’t go into extreme detail about...but the end battle required some smoke and mirrors and a bit of ‘rogue scripting’ on my end to pull it off. It was a Level Designers dream to create a mission that takes place on the lawn of one of the most iconic buildings in the world.

Environment Art | Sonja Christoph
National Xmas Tree Design | Robin Petersson
Additional Technical Scripting | Lukas Joley

Prison Liberation was the first mission I built when I started at Massive. It was used as the featured Side Mission in our First Playable milestone for Ubisoft. Designing around a 1 to 1 environment match while comfortably fitting 4 players into a space was something that I never had to worry about when working on CoD. It was certainly a steeper learning curve than I originally thought but an interesting challenge to overcome in order to build a proper Division level.

My initial plan was to have dozens of prisoners in these stacked containers reaching out and screaming in pain to create some urgency in the narrative and a dominating read as you enter the first combat area. My first blockout had a lot of paths and flanks that ran behind and above the stacked containers. Due to tech limitations and a lack of animation resources for Side Missions, I could not get the drone prisoner NPCs in every container and I eventually had to remove as many containers as possible since the location is too tight for 4 players. In order to supplement the level of urgency I was going for with a tight deadline, the environment artist decided to double down on the visuals. The art style is extremely dark and matched well with the tone I was trying to sell. I don’t think Designers would normally feel okay with saying the environment did more for their mission than the gameplay…but I feel totally okay with that here. When the game released we had a lot of people mentioning how creepy the mannequin hallway and prison yard areas were when they played.

Environment Art + Lighting | Christopher Durso

The original LD on this mission was Fredrik Levau. The original narrative and general mission flow was all his work. The mission needed a little help to reach the Alpha milestone. During that time I reworked the cover layout and redid the player path to make things a bit more readable and added a few different options depending on your playstyle (reworked balcony to overlook pool area better and added upper catwalk and containers for some height variation) As far as the script goes, I reworked the mission objectives and streamlined the gameplay with the contaminated supplies in each area. In the final objective, instead of having 1 stack of contaminated supplies to destroy while enemies attack you, I set up 3 that players could tackle in any order while also defending a timed comms uplink that players interact with when first arriving in the space. It was interesting to push and pull on the initial intentions without completely reworking every aspect of the mission. It was really fun to work on such an iconic location and Fredrik laid the groundwork for a very memorable Side Mission

Original Level Design | Fredrik Levau
Environment Art | Oskar Johansson Möller