Developer Red Storm Entertainment and Ubisoft are working on a new installment in The Division series called The Division Heartland, but the contents of that new game have already been spoiled by a significant leak. Around 20 minutes of gameplay have appeared online that come from The Division Heartland in what was apparently a closed test of the game. The gameplay showed a similar enough experience to other Division games players will already be familiar with, but Ubisoft’s stressed in the past that you don’t need prior knowledge to play this free-to-play game when it launches sometime this year or next.
The Twitter user who’s aptly named SkyLeaks shared a snippet of the gameplay on Twitter that showed the “highly confidential” closed test of Heartland. It opened with lead game designer Taylor Epperly giving an overview of the game where she talked about the game’s new Silver Creek setting and the PvE Expedition mode as well as the PvEvP Storm mode.
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yeah yeah nda and stuff blah blah who cares pic.twitter.com/rStfrRo6fD
โ SkyLeaks (@SkyLeax) May 15, 2021
“Both modes will have you scavenging, exploring, looting, fighting, and surviving all while avoiding the most aggressive and unpredictable virus contamination The Division has ever seen.”
Epperly ended the video by asking people not to leak the footage and spoil the surprise for others, but it seems that request wasn’t honored. She added that the team will be scouring the Internet looking for leaks following the closed test.
If that’s the case, they’ve most certainly already seen the approximately 20 minutes of gameplay that were uploaded to Vimeo. That footage comes from a one “Hook_Em Gaming” apparently and shows off some of the in-game experiences Epperly described in the video above.
Ubisoft described the game only briefly in its announcement about the future of its Division series and hyped up Red Storm as the perfect fit for the experience Heartland hopes to be.
“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,” Ubisoft said previously. “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 Division Heartland is planned for PC, consoles, and cloud platforms sometime in 2021 or 2022.