Hotbars and a Dog? The Division's Wild MMO Past

Ten years. That's how long it's been since Tom Clancy's The Division launched as a cover-based looter shooter set in a pandemic-ravaged New York City. But according to two of the developers who built it, the game originally looked nothing like that. It was a World of Warcraft-style MMO, complete with hotbars, grassy open fields, and a dog companion trotting alongside your character.

In a "Devs Playing" video posted on Massive Entertainment's official YouTube channel, creative director Drew Rechner and game director Fredrik Thylander played through the Broadway Emporium mission while reflecting on the game's development. Rechner explained that The Division's combat was built around an internal framework they called OPE: observe, plan, execute. But reaching that loop took time. "When we had started working on The Division, it was still an MMO with World of Warcraft-style gameplay," Rechner said. "That skill component wasn't there. There weren't those traditional shooter aspects."

Around the two-minute mark, the video cuts to a few seconds of what appears to be a never-before-seen early prototype. The contrast is staggering. Instead of the snow-covered Manhattan streets and tactical cover mechanics, you're looking at cartoonish visuals, a wide grassy environment, and a classic MMO-style hotbar lining the bottom of the screen. Thylander pointed out the hotbar specifically, and there's a dog companion following the player character around. I cannot think of a bigger tonal gap between a prototype and a finished product in a major franchise.

From WoW Clone to Cover Shooter

Rechner described the challenge of finding the right balance between skill-based MMO mechanics and traditional shooter gameplay. "We were constantly trying to balance how much shooter is there, how much skill is there," he said. The team eventually landed on the cover-based loop that defined both The Division and its sequel, but it's clear from the footage that the journey there was far stranger than anyone outside Massive knew.

You can still see traces of that MMO DNA in the final product. The loot tiers, the instanced missions, the stat-driven gear systems; strip away the third-person shooting and the bones of an RPG are right there. But watching that prototype footage, it's obvious the game could have gone in a radically different direction. An alternate-universe Division that played like WoW would have landed in a completely different market, and I suspect it would have struggled to find an audience in 2016 when the MMO genre was already contracting. The pivot to a tactical shooter was almost certainly the right call. The dog, though? Bring the dog back for The Division 3. That's a hill I'll stand on with every other person who's seen this footage.