The Division has been a pretty successful franchise for Ubisoft. The Division 2 is currently sitting at 40 million players total, according to the French publisher’s most recent numbers, so it makes sense for them to want to expand that universe beyond their current offering of just two games.
Ubisoft has just announced that they’re making a brand new Division game. The Division Heartland, as the name suggests, will be set in the same universe but “will provide an all-new perspective” along with “a new setting” that will almost certainly turn out to be the American Midwest. A giant water tower surrounded by trees just screams small-town Wisconsin or Illinois.
In The Division, a highly virulent strain of smallpox called Green Poison gets released as part of a terrorist plot and causes a global pandemic that wipes out much of the world’s population. The threat of total societal collapse causes the US government to activate “The Division,” including a number of domestic sleeper agents bent on ensuring government continuity.
Much of The Division 2 is spent fighting local factions in Washington DC and trying to get the President back–which doesn’t entirely go well. Panning out far away from the action would provide an interesting take on just how strong The Division’s reach is in sparsely populated areas that are away from the big power plays of the previous games.
Division Heartland is set to arrive in 2021-2022 for PC, console, and cloud gaming platforms. Early testing is set to begin soon, and you can sign up to participate on Ubisoft’s website.
We don’t have many other details other than it’ll be a free-to-play game, so expect monetization in the form of microtransactions and probably a season pass of some kind.
In the same announcement, Ubisoft also confirmed the existence of a Division mobile game that will be revealed soon, and also that more content is coming to The Division 2, although they were again light on the details.
Also, The Division movie is still coming to Netflix and recently got a director in the form of Rawson Marshall Thurber.
