'The Division' Comes To Middle America: Ubisoft Discusses The Next Iteration Of The Popular MMO Shooter
Tom Clancy’s The Division has been out for seven years now, and despite the rather quick release of the sequel in 2019, it has become a widely popular MMO. Now, in 2023, it looks like the next iteration of the game, The Division: Heartland is set to release on the near horizon. On Thursday, Ubisoft released a preview of the upcoming game, its new features, and how it’ll handle its trademark PvP zone.
The first two games were set in New York City and Washington D.C., with some DLC and updates featuring missions and raids set in other nearby locales. Heartland ditches the big city for Middle America in a town called Silver Creek. Players will help McKenzie Reid track down her rogue agent commander and unravel more of the situation surrounding the plague that upended civilization.
The town of Silver Creek serves as a sort of hub, which is more and more common in online looter-shooters like The Division and Destiny. Before you go on your assignments, you’ll prepare a go bag with supplies and water to sustain you while you’re out on the mission. Exhaustion and sickness will actually matter. In previous games, there were regions of the map where the virus was active, requiring players to don a rebreather to go into those zones. Now, in Heartland, rebreathers will actually degrade, and the active virus zones will constantly move, adding a new dynamic and survival element to consider for play.
RELATED:
The series’ distinct PvP component consisted of “Dark Zones” which were portrayed as quarantined sections of the city that were entirely abandoned and closed off to the rest of the city. Ubisoft mentioned that this time around, those “Dark Zones” will have something to do with a day and night cycle, with the night part of the cycle becoming something like the previous “Dark Zones.”
No release date has been given at this time, and the game will be free-to-play. A closed beta is set to run sometime this summer.
READ NEXT:
Source(s): Polygon