We have a quick new update on Tom Clancy’s The Division 3.
Tom Henderson of Insider Gaming casually dropped this tidbit when he was asked about it on Twitter. Tom said this:
“The Division 3 is probably 4 or so years away, I’d imagine.”
Now, this seems to be a conservative guess on how the title is going on, but it’s a bigger deal if you look at the bigger picture at Ubisoft.
Now, we have been reporting on the growing crisis at Ubisoft for the past few months. In the shadow of allegations of misconduct, and a toxic workplace, that’s built over several years, the company has been missing financial targets for too long, to a bigger extent than they can recover from.
Fans may imagine the narrative that “Ubisoft was always bad” or that Ubisoft has been bad for a decade or longer. But Ubisoft has managed to keep fans buying their games, even when those games face poor reviews or technical issues. It is typical of the average AAA game company to simultaneously have bad reputations, and still be financially successful. Now, things are so bad that we are looking at a potential hostile takeover of the shareholders, with telltale signs of a power struggle between them and the Guillemots.
In this context, we can notice that Ubisoft denied that they were even making a Tom Clancy’s The Division 3 in February 2023, only to officially announce it in September of that same year. It may be possible that Ubisoft was always planning to make this sequel, but there’s other things we can talk about here.
The official announcement came with news that Julian Gerighty would be returning to the franchise. Julian was creative director on Tom Clancy’s The Division and Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, so he arguably pushed a consistent creative vision on these titles.
This May, Ubisoft cancelled the free-to-play spinoff Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland, a few days before the launch of XDefiant. Indeed, it was popular speculation at the time that Ubisoft simply chose to focus their resources on the new title, as Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland was rumored to have faced internal setbacks.
But Julian Gerighty also happens to be the creative director for Star Wars Outlaws. Here and now, the big creative mind behind The Division is not looking all that great inside Ubisoft.
So Tom’s comment seems to suggest that Julian’s next big project is still going forward for now. We do expect a AAA title that was announced last year to take at least four more years to finish development. It seems that Ubisoft is just going to move forward with their well laid plans for the future, regardless of how the company’s volatility will turn out in the next few months.
Gerighty may still be making and finishing Tom Clancy’s The Division 3. But by the time the game comes out, he may no longer be answering to the Guillemots.
