Ubisoft Massive art director Rodrigo Cortes told GamerHubTV that the Snowdrop Engine which powers The Division has been in development for 5 years.
The quote:
"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.
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. 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."