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The Division Heartland

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Division_update_header.jpg

 

An Update on the Tom Clancy’s The Division Universe

 

Ubisoft

 

Hello everyone,

 

When we launched Tom Clancy’s The Division in 2016, the team at Ubisoft Massive and all of our studios around the world had high ambitions for what was then the first completely original IP under the Tom Clancy’s umbrella since 2009 – not to mention it was also an ambitious game unlike anything Ubisoft had produced before. Thanks to you, our fans, the reception to The Division exceeded our expectations, breaking multiple Ubisoft records.

 

You continued showing phenomenal support in the years since, playing with and against each other across major post-launch content for the original game. You also came along with us for the highly anticipated launch of The Division 2, making it one of the most successful games of 2019, and its 2020 expansion, The Division 2: Warlords of New York, the most active in the game’s history. Through all of this, you have created an incredible community of over 40 million players, setting the franchise on an expanding trajectory that now includes more games and more transmedia content set within The Division universe that we’re unveiling today.

 

While work continues on The Division 2, other Ubisoft teams have been exploring additional ways to introduce The Division to even more players. Today, we’re pleased to share that Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland, a free-to-play game set in The Division universe, is in development at our Red Storm studio. Having worked on Tom Clancy games since 1997, its extensive experience across numerous genres and games, most recently The Division and The Division 2, makes Red Storm a perfect fit for this project. Heartland is a standalone game that doesn’t require previous experience with the series but will provide an all new perspective on the universe in a new setting. The game will be made available in 2021-22 on PC, consoles, and cloud. Those interested in participating in its early test phases can sign up here.

 

Heartland isn’t the only new game in development. The Division will also be coming to mobile platforms for the very first time, bringing the universe to an even wider audience. We’ll have more details on this exciting project at a later date.

 

As previously announced, brand new content will be coming to The Division 2, with development led by Ubisoft Massive and support from Ubisoft Bucharest. While it’s still too early to discuss any specific details, this update will include an entirely new game mode for The Division franchise and new methods for levelling your agents with an emphasis on increasing build variety and viability. We look forward to revealing more later this year ahead of this content’s late 2021 release.

 

And if that’s not enough, we also have The Division film in development with Netflix thanks to Ubisoft Film & Television. Inspired by the events of the original game, the film will star Jessica Chastain and Jake Gyllenhaal, and we recently announced that Rawson Marshall Thurber is at the helm as director.

 

This film also marks the first big step in a broader plan to expand The Division universe’s transmedia offerings. With that in mind, we’re revealing an original novel coming from our publishing partners at Aconyte. This new story is set after the events of The Division 2 and explores how the Outbreak affects different regions of the United States as agents fight to secure supply routes.

 

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It’s an exciting time to be a fan. We can’t thank you enough for your continued support of The Division and we also want to thank all of our teams that continue to improve, grow, and expand upon its universe. We know many of you are eagerly awaiting more details on all these projects, and we will be sure to share them with you as soon we’re ready, so stay tuned.

 

That’s all for now!

 

Signing off,

 

Alain Corre, executive director of Ubisoft EMEA

 

https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/2MaVWnNfnfQ128qCKaUE3w/an-update-on-the-tom-clancys-the-division-universe

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Broker

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This is actually really interesting. I know Division 2 is chugging along and is popular enough to still be going, though I never see anyone talking about it or streaming it. A free version of that makes total sense, and even the novel does as it’s based on Tom Clancy stuff.

 

I’m quite shocked by the Netflix movie starring Donnie Darko and Jessica Chastain though. It makes me wonder if they’re looking to expand their audience in a very different direction, or if their data says there’s a big crossover between D2 players and The Day After Tomorrow fans or what. I guess maybe they just have an existing relationship with him due to the PoP movie?

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Hitcher

Hitcher

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18 minutes ago, Harsin said:

Imagine sitting down to read a Division novel.

New York Collapse: A Survival Guide to Urban Disaster was brilliant and didn't this Tom Clancy bloke write a few novels?

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Mr. Gerbik

Mr. Gerbik

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9 hours ago, Harsin said:

Imagine sitting down to read a Division novel.

Imagine paying attention to the story in a Clancy game. I love me some Splinter Cell but the story and dialogue is always blah blah blah political military tensions weapons and my brain immediately checks out. It always feels like an AI-generated story based on specific Tom Clancy words and concepts.

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Opinionated Ham Scarecrow

Opinionated Ham Scarecrow

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The Division is probably the most tonally odd game going. Society has collapsed, factions have formed. No discussion, just go and kill the fuck out of everything.

 

I do love the setting and mechanics though, I just fear what will be lost by taking the series FTP. I signed up for the beta thing though so I guess I'll check it out. 

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moosegrinder

moosegrinder

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6 minutes ago, Opinionated Ham Scarecrow said:

The Division is probably the most tonally odd game going. Society has collapsed, factions have formed. no discussion, just go and kill the fuck out of everything.

 

While wearing ridiculous outfits. The dissonance in these games is phenomenal. 

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Harsin

Harsin

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35 minutes ago, Opinionated Ham Scarecrow said:

The Division is probably the most tonally odd game going. Society has collapsed, factions have formed. No discussion, just go and kill the fuck out of everything.

 

I do love the setting and mechanics though, I just fear what will be lost by taking the series FTP. I signed up for the beta thing though so I guess I'll check it out. 


It's actually even worse than that. I’m going to quote myself from the thread about the film.

 

Quote

I don't think most people who played The Division realised just how gross the story was because (like most Ubisoft products) it's presented as one dimensional wooden characters spouting a wafer-thin bag of cliches wrapped in a billion menus and tutorial pop-ups.

 

But basically, the U.S. government has secretly seeded the entire population with undercover sleeper agents that they can activate for black ops missions to go shoot people the government decides they don't like in the face. In the game, rather than this being treated as an absolutely horrifying scenario, there's a given assumption this was a great idea and they're treated as the heroes and thank god they did it because they are now the only thing that stands between us and the evil terrorists. USA! USA!
 

The second game is worse if anything as it starts with a voiceover that might as well be an advert for the NRA.

 

DID YOU OWN A GUN?

DID YOUR NEIGHBOUR?

SOME SURVIVED!


 

Quote

Another faction is that all the low wage manual workers in the city have formed a club to go around burning people alive and other assorted war crimes and now their betters need to teach them a lesson with the business end of an assault rifle. Here's their description from the game.
 

The Cleaners are New York City sanitation workers-garbageman, public facility janitors, park custodians, street cleaners, water treatment plant operators, etc. - whose jobs in better times were devoted to keeping neighborhoods and infrastructure clean. Many commuted to work from outside the city but got trapped in the urban quarantine zones during the early days of the plague. Others were inner-city dwellers who lost loved ones during the outbreak. 
 

They are one of the major enemy factions in Tom Clancy's The Division and an enemy faction in Tom Clancy's The Division 2.

Responding to what they perceived as the shameful failure of local and federal authorities to protect their health and families, a number of these blue-collar city workers banded together to take matters into their own hands. Organized and armed by Manhattan's sanitation supervisor. Joe Ferro.

 

The Cleaners aimed to eradicate the mutant smallpox virus. Their chosen method of killing is donning flamethrowers fueled by napalm. The Cleaners incinerated anything and anyone suspected of carrying the disease. This often included perfectly healthy survivors exposed to the virus.

 

Reminder: Before it got cancelled the premise of Ubisoft's next Rainbow 6 single-player game was that Occupy Wall Street was actually a front for EEK! TERRORISTS!

 

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K

K

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The Division is quite an odd game. The setup and background are fairly realistic (or at least have a kind of realistic sheen, with lots of military jargon deployed in the right places), but the actual game has you fighting against gangs that feel like they belong in the Warriors or Arkham City. Like, on the one hand, you've got mission briefings along the lines of "We have a kinetic dropzone downtown, and need a tier one asset to hold and neutralise. Deploy from the TOC with select operators", and then the actual mission involves you killing loads of the Posties gang, who drive around in tanks painted in the UPS colours which fire Amazon packages full of nitroglycerine, and whose boss quotes Charles Bukowski over a loudspeaker while you're shooting the three weakpoints on his exoskeleton.

 

There's also the slightly queasy way that your job in the pandemic is to shoot people. It's not a bad game, but the politics are even more dubious than your average Call of Duty game, which at least has you fighting against people who want to take over the world, rather than people who want food and medicine.

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Vimster

Vimster

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The Division games are all military industrial cobblers with a dubious notion of restoring safety to the streets. If you're being very generous you could say it's a comment on American imperialism, where the player is one of The Good Guys even though what they're doing is just as bad as everyone else, it just so happens they're doing it for All The Right Reasons. However this is Ubisoft inspired by Tom Clancy, so it is simplistic good-vs-evil with a right-wing perspective, wrapped up in authentic-sounding military gobbledygook and a twist of mild near-future SF.

 

Once I'd got past the initial staff and was into just roaming about finding missions (played 1 and 2 solo) all that fades into the background and it's the military-industrial equivalent of hack/slash/loot. I didn't give a toss about the briefings beyond who do I have to take down. The actual mechanics and gameplay are addictive and compelling, even if the politics behind it make me feel uneasy if I put my mind to it. 

 

I dread to think what an RP server on this would be like, with all these armchair warriors pretending to be elite crews on the mic. 

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Garibaldi

Garibaldi

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15 hours ago, K said:

 

There's also the slightly queasy way that your job in the pandemic is to shoot people. It's not a bad game, but the politics are even more dubious than your average Call of Duty game, which at least has you fighting against people who want to take over the world, rather than people who want food and medicine.


Largely correct up until the very last part. Nowhere in the games does it have you assaulting people/factions who are just trying to secure basic supplies or medicine. The factions have either gone off the deep-end and are burning people alive to stop the infection, terrorising civilians, exploiting settlements, or attempting to consolidate their power in a myriad of dangerous ways. 
 

As I said in the other thread, it’s also underlined that Division agents do at least as much harm as good. An alarming percentage of them end up going rogue and turning their training against the innocent, so there’s obviously something very flawed in the whole, well, division. 
 

There are enough issues with the jingoistic concepts of the game without needing to invent any. 

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