Earlier today, Ubisoft confirmed the cancellation of The Division: Heartland. This free-to-play shooter with extraction elements was in development for a few years before it was sadly shut down by Ubisoft. This news comes amid a slight restructuring at the company that seeks to reassign team members to ‘more important’ projects, such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six. It has been more than five years since The Division 2 was released, and now fans are starting to feel that another game from the series won’t hit the market.
Over time, publishers and developers are becoming more stringent with their projects. There seems to be much less money in the industry for development costs, and in the last year and a half, investments have wavered. That means that, unfortunately, some projects have to be shut down – with some being closed off after they’ve gone live. The Division: Heartland isn’t the first game to be wiped off the slate in recent weeks, but it’s certainly a sizeable disappointment for fans.
The Division: Heartland was in development for a while, but according to recent feedback on tests, it wasn’t resonating well with players. It had gone so far as to be rated by certain regulatory boards, and various details were revealed about the game such as the core mechanics and the expected gameplay loop.
In The Division: Heartland, players would have travelled to Silver Creek to investigate a brutal conflict featuring rouge Division agents and a settlement of survivors. It would have seen players explore a vast world as a day-night cycle unfolded. Heartland would have featured survival elements and increasingly difficult enemies as time went on. As this was an extraction shooter by nature, players would be required to successfully extract from Silver Creek with their loot to keep it.
It was destined to be a crossplay and cross-progression title, eradicating borders between gamers and aligning everyone. There was a unique virus-based mechanic written into the game that would see a poison move dynamically across the map, stretching unpredictably around the open-world environment. It sounded brilliant, and it would have been released on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
Here’s what Ubisoft had to say about shutting down the project:
‘After careful consideration, we have made the tough call to halt development on Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland, effective immediately. Our priority now is to support the talented team members at our Red Storm Entertainment studio, who will be transitioning to new projects within our company, including XDefiant and Rainbow Six.’
This is one of a few games cancelled by Ubisoft in recent years – will it be the last? In other Ubisoft news, XDefiant is being released next week.
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