What you need to know
- Ubisoft has very quietly cancelled The Division Heartland.
- The free-to-play spinoff from the main series was supposed to expand the game's universe to a new location and introduce a different type of gameplay to that of the current titles.
- Ubisoft buried the news in an earnings report on the same day it revealed the next Assassin's Creed game.
I love The Division 2, I love the franchise and, like many players, have been waiting what feels like forever to play The Division Heartland. Now, that'll never happen.
Games get cancelled all the time, but there's been such a long promise of this one actually ever becoming a thing, I'm extremely unhappy with how this has been handled. Buried in an earnings report, Ubisoft details the bad news.
As part of Ubisoft’s efforts to streamline its operations and adapt to evolving market trends, there have been further reorganizations within the Global Publishing teams, both at the APAC region, that is now organized into three engagement hubs, and at the central level. Additionally, in line with the increased selectivity of its investments, Ubisoft has decided to stop development on The Division® Heartland and has redeployed resources to bigger opportunities such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six.
Ubisoft
So, fans of The Division franchise will no longer get Heartland to play, but it's OK, those resources are being pumped into XDefiant, yet another competitive FPS that almost certainly won't be as popular as Call of Duty.
Just last year, I sat through a briefing before Division Day that still very much hyped up Heartland. It's not as if it wasn't progressing, either. There have been a number of closed playtests. There were rumors it was cancelled, but also rumors that it was undergoing major changes.
I guess we have the answer now.
The Division Heartland was billed as a PvPvE survival action shooter. On the surface, what we've seen of it, things looked familiar, but the gameplay was definitely a departure from that which we've been used to in The Division and The Division 2.
Besides the disappointment, I think Ubisoft has done a massive disservice to its community handling things this way. The length of time alone we've been waiting for this game to launch deserves a proper message to prospective players. Burying it inside an earnings report is weak sauce, Ubisoft. And you know it.
