We now have a new rumor on the status of The Division: Heartland.
Tom Henderson shared this update from his sources on Twitter:
“I’ve seen a lot of people wondering if The Division Heartland has been canned or not – it hasn’t, but it has gone through some significant changes since we last heard about it. Will report more after I pindown more details.”
The Division: Heartland was announced all the way back in 2021, and the last official, major update we had on the title was an overview video from April 2023. We were shown a PvEvP shooter, moving away from the urban setting of the original The Division games to a rural setting in Silver Creek.
In this preview, the Division is tasked with managing the contamination zones that have been appearing in Silver Creek, adding survival elements. Aside from managing resources to avoid contamination itself, you also have to manage hydration and deal with a day/night system.
Unlike the original The Division games, The Division: Heartland is also being produced as a live service game. Ubisoft had hopes that this would be the title that would be giving them a steady stream of revenue, to help them in producing even more games.
Informally, we reported that The Division: Heartland received a rating in Taiwan last November. That is usually seen as a sign that a game was getting close to release, but of course, we are now talking about this six months later.
We have reported on behind-the-scenes turmoil behind Ubisoft, but there hadn’t been any news or rumors on how that affected production of this game in particular. It isn’t necessarily a bad sign that Ubisoft had not talked about the game. If The Division: Heartland is still a work in progress, everything we had described above may no longer be true about the game, and what they have in the works now may also not reflect what the final title will actually look like.
The worst thing that could have happened to the game now would be if it has become another The Last Of Us Online. Red Storm Entertainment is well known to be a competent game studio. This is the original licensee of the Tom Clancy video game franchise, and they are best known for the Rainbow Six franchise.
However, like Naughty Dog, they are a veteran studio that hasn’t dabbled in live service games yet. If it turns out that Red Storm just isn’t up to the task of shifting to a live service game studio, then this may title may have been struggling this whole time. Hopefully there is better news in the horizon.
