If you remember the worldwide gameplay reveal by Ubisoft's on Tom Clancy's The Division, third person tactical shooter video game, during the E3 last June, you won't forget how the game environment flows with some concepts used in the game that makes existing shooter video games so passé in game story designs. Some of these are already seen in some movies and TV shows that it's just but natural that these will flow into game designs.

If you haven't seen the gameplay reveal, which already racked up almost 2.5 million views, here you go…

Now as a game developer and game story teller, you might welcome the Snowdrop engine used by the developers at Ubisoft to design the latest tactical shooter game under the name of the late Tom Clancy, and following in the footsteps of Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell. In the game, you get to be part of the "Strategic Homeland Division (SHD)" or "The Division" as the USA collapsed under the weight if a pandemic that spreadout during the Black Friday Shopping Spree where millions of Americans all over the country go to shopping  in a mad rush to get the huge discounts from retailers nationwide.

The Division was tasked to protect the survivors and help in countering the threat. With the collapse of government due to the pandemic, they have turned into 21st Century Western Lawmen, imposing order and eliminating those who use violence against survivors of the pandemic.

The scenes in The Division are breathtaking taking into account lighting and time of the day which makes gameplay even more exciting and you have to be able to use light to gain tactical advantage over the enemies. The Snowdrop Engine (not related to the Frostbite Engine used by Battlefield 4) makes this possible and this engine, Ubisoft claims, helps game engine development easier and much more fun:

For starters, Massive is a more intimate studio than its name might suggest, so they needed to build a next-gen engine that would allow the team unprecedented efficiency and flexibility. “We re-evaluated the entire development workflow to refocus on a smarter, rather than bigger, way of doing things,” they told us. That resulted in three pillars for the engine:

Empowerment. Thanks to Snowdrop, everyone involved with the development can more readily realize their goals. “When using Snowdrop, the artists, the designer and the animators have the power to achieve their ideas and vision, simply by accessing the game directly within the engine,” Massive said. ”Snowdrop is a dynamic, interconnected and united system.”

Real time. “Each thing the creators develop need to be instant and in-game, so that they know exactly if it will work, with no baking time,” Massive says. That means lightning-quick iterations, with the team testing and evaluating new game features in an extremely short amount of time. The result is the ability to develop game features faster than ever. “We built Snowdrop in a way so that the game is always playable during development,” Massive shared. “We conduct frequent playtests at Massive to ensure it is constantly tested at every stage of production. Not only does this allow us to obtain the best quality possible, this enables us to achieve a high level of coherence within the game.”

Fun. Hey, games are fun, right? And yes, development is hard work, but it should also be fun. “If the tool is not fun, you kill individual creativity,” Massive says. “We get all kinds of crazy, fun and unexpected results from an intuitive and powerful tool like Snowdrop. That’s exactly what an innovative gameplay experience is about.

To really understand it further is to watch the actual video presentation of the Snowdrop Game Engine:

Now itching to grab a copy of Tom Clancy's The Division. You will have to wait almost  a year yet as release date is expected to be in the 4th Quarter 2014.