Ubisoft has announced Tom Clancy’s The Division: Heartland, a new free-to-play entry in the series that will be coming to Xbox, PlayStation and PC in 2021-22.
The Division: Heartland is in development by Red Storm Entertainment, a studio that has worked on multiple Tom Clancy licenses, and has been charged with plenty of the development of The Division and The Division 2. They are credited with having done a lot of the work to turn the original game around after a tricky launch.
Beyond this, Ubisoft are looking to expand this branch of the Tom Clancy universe, with plans to take The Division to mobile and bring the game to a wider audience, and The Divsiion 2 will be receiving new content in late 2021, with Ubisoft Massive and Ubisoft Bucharest adding a new game mode and new ways to level up agents.
Alain Corre, Executive Director of Ubisoft EMEA said, “In the past 5 years, The Division has grown from a very ambitious project at Ubisoft, to a world-renowned franchise reaching 40 million unique players. We are very proud of what our teams have accomplished with this franchise and the amazing universe they have created. The potential and depth of this enables us to explore new and exciting content that will please loyal long-term fans of The Division and new ones alike.”
Precisely what form The Division: Heartland will take isn’t quite clear, but the fact that it’s free to play and that it’s coming from Red Strom suggests that it will be sticking in the looter shooter genre of The Division 2, but hoping to get a clean slate without the weight of that game’s content for new players. We’ll have to wait and see, of course… it could be a hyper competitive arena shooter or a psychadelic platformer for all I know!
Source: press release