A new listing earlier today outed a new game in Tom Clancy’s The Division franchise. Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland appeared on the Ubisoft store itself earlier today before it went offline.
The listing also indicates that the game will be free to play and available as a PC download. The main visual shows a group of armed agents wearing gas masks.
Tom Clancy’s The Division, an online only multiplayer third-person shooter, launched in 2016 for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, and was an industry wide commercial and critical success. It broke the record for first week launch for a new franchise, as well as multiple company sales records. In its first 24 hours it sold more copies than any other game in the publisher’s history, and already earned as much as $ 330 million within its first five days.
However, Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 would not be as much of a success as the original. Launching in 2019 for Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and also Stadia, Ubisoft disclosed that both titles sold more than10 million units in total but did not provide total sales figures.
Ubisoft revealed that the title did perform below expectations, and below what the original game had sold. The company cited increased competition from other similar games at the time, which would have included Destiny 2, Apex Legends, and Overwatch, among others.
Both games were developed by Swedish studio Massive Entertainment, this first original project with Ubisoft after being acquired from Vivendi in 2008. Because of the disappointing performance of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Ubisoft did not announce any new games for the franchise in the immediate future. Instead Massive started work on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, announced in last year’s E3 and scheduled for release this year. They were also announced to have started work on a still unnamed Star Wars open world game.
While it would seem that Ubisoft lost interest in Tom Clancy’s The Division franchise, the gap between Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 and Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland is roughly the same three years. It’s likely development for this new game simply proceeded in secret, though we have yet to learn how long it had started production and if this is the same size and scale as its predecessors.
The shift to a free-to-play game is also significant, as it may not longer be the same kind of game that the first two Tom Clancy’s The Division games were. There have also been many changes in both free-to-play and full retail multiplayer online shooters since the release of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, so Massive may not have simply been able to release the same kind of game that they have in the past.
Source: Reddit, The Ubisoft Store
