A quick peek at the Xbox Store indicates support for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Since PS5 isn’t listed on the PlayStation Store, this likely refers to previous-gen console versions being backwards compatible. While Xbox Series X/S had 60 FPS support for a while, PS5 players only recently received the update last December.

And aside from including all three paid expansions – Last Stand, Underground, and Survival – alongside two cosmetic packs (Let It Snow and Parade) and six outfit packs, that’s pretty much it. No improved visuals or new gameplay content. It replaces the Gold Edition, which is no longer available on either storefront. However, you can still pick it up on Steam.

As disappointing as all this is, at least Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 has a lot more coming up. In March, a new Realism Mode will become available for a limited time, offering realistic bullet damage, minimal HUD and all leveling elements removed. It’s also getting another year of content, including a few “surprises.”

The banner refers to Tom Clancy’s The Division Definitive Edition—a title that Ubisoft has made no mention of in the past. While there is plenty of speculation about what this could be, with some wondering if it is part of some plans to re-release both of the older The Division titles on current-gen platforms, others have posited that it might be part of Ubisoft’s plans to bring more of its games to the Nintendo Switch 2.

The Division was released all the way back in March 2016, so an impending announcement also sounds more likely as it would coincide with the title’s tenth anniversary.

The banner for The Division Definitive Edition features highly-stylized art depicting an agent of the eponymous Division standing in the foreground, with the skyline of New York City in the background. This skyline also has a darker reflection on the lower half of the banner, showcasing how the city is crumbling away due to the major catastrophe that kickstarts the story of The Division.

Looking to the future, series producer Julian Gerighty had spoken earlier this month about how development on The Division 3 was going since the title’s 2023 announcement. While he didn’t reveal too many details, he did note that “it’s shaping up to be a monster.”

In the meantime, The Division 2‘s developers have also been working on The Division 2: Survivors, which will serve as the return of the fan-favourite Survivors mode from the original The Division. The project was unveiled back in August, and had been described at the time being an “updated take on the survival extraction experience.” The new take on the Survivors mode is being led by The Division‘s creative director Magnus Jansén, and was said to be in “early stages” of development at the time.

2025 also saw the release of the second major expansion for The Division 2, dubbed Battle for Brooklyn. Much like 2023’s Warlords of New York, Battle for Brooklyn once more took players to New York City, this time in the eponymous borough. The story is kicked off with players taking on the Cleaners as part of efforts to rescue Dr. Jessica Kandel, before eventually escalating to a major plot that threatens the entire world.

For more details about The Division 2: Battle for Brooklyn, check out our review, where we gave it a score of 7 out of 10 thanks to its solid mission design, new gear sets, and good blend of nostalgia and value for money. We also criticised extensive technical problems with the PC, as well as the lack of new objective types.

“So, The Division 3 is in production, right? This is not a secret. It’s been announced. It’s shaping up to be a monster. I can’t really say anything more than that.” Announced in 2023, there haven’t been any reveals or updates, other than Gerighty shifting focus from Star Wars Outlaws to work on it in 2024. While we’ll have to wait longer for new details, at least it’s making progress.

As for The Division 2: Survivors, the goal is to transform the entire Washington D.C. map with a snowstorm, resulting in a different experience from the base game (where the weather didn’t really impact the gameplay). Gerighty teased that the title hints at what the mode is about, but wouldn’t venture any further.

The team is keen on leaning into the comfort aspects, like the controls and map knowledge, and subverting them to engage veterans. Development is led by creative director Magnus Jansén, the main man behind The Division 1’s Survival, which Survivors is based on, but there’s still no word on a release date.

As for The Division Resurgence, one interesting little tidbit: Players can actually meet and squad up in the mobile title’s open world, a first for the franchise. It’s scheduled to launch by March 31st, 2026, according to Ubisoft’s last fiscal report.

The DLC kicks things off on a rather mellow note. Anufi wants to reunite the clans and sends you off into a relatively unexplored area of Pandora, which can only be accessed through flight. On getting to the new zone, you once again get to experience the beauty of moon, but from a new angle; just about everything in the new zone is downright gorgeous, with wide-open canyons and towering mountains that were definitely designed with the idea of players flying through at high speeds.

Aside from flight being the key mechanic for the DLC, there unfortunately isn’t really much new here. Sure, mounted combat gets a big focus, and you also have access to new abilities that make flying around an absolute joy, but you’re still ultimately going to spend most of your time fighting either local wildlife for their crafting materials, or RDA soldiers for the sake of the story. Much like the areas from the base game, the new DLC zone ends up feeling more like it was designed to be a sandbox than with any real design intent other than “flying is cool”.

"Visually the new zone introduced in Secrets of the Spires is just as gorgeous as the base game and Sky Breaker."

This also becomes quite obvious once you make content with the local tribe of the new zone, earn their trust, get some new flying abilities, and kick off the story in earnest. Ultimately, it always just seems to fall back to fighting off RDA forces. On the bright side, while the story itself is more or less just an excuse to get you to do things, the gameplay itself can be a lot of fun.

To call flying the core mechanic of Secrets of the Spires isn’t really an exaggeration. The DLC introduces brand new mechanics that let you pull off impressive stunts like flinging yourself to grapple off some vines under Pandora’s many floating islands, for example. However, the player is expected to be quite familiar with the game’s core mechanics and doesn’t really hold your hand outside of the first few minutes while you find the new tribe.

In fact, the DLC fully expects you to come here after you’ve wrapped most of the core game up, since there’s a gear requirement of level 20, and keeping with Ubisoft game traditions, you’re even given a story skip in case you want to avoid grinding and get to the fun parts. While this does bring up more curious points, like why even have levels of grinding that can be made superfluous at the press of a button to begin with, but that has been a core design issue with Ubisoft’s games for quite a few years now.

"To call flying the core mechanic of Secrets of the Spires isn’t really an exaggeration."

Visually the new zone introduced in Secrets of the Spires is just as gorgeous as the base game and Sky Breaker. The world from James Cameron’s movie series has once again been brought to life in a convincing manner, and depending on your system’s hardware, the game even gets incredibly close to looking just as good, and if you get the right angles, sometimes even better than the movies.

While the DLC doesn’t bring anything new to the table aside from an expanded set of moves for flying, what it does end up doing quite well is bringing in more of the incredibly immersive world that we praised the core game for. The story itself tends to largely stay out of your way once you’ve started unlocking your new abilities, and a lot of the same gameplay loop is present here, tasking you with upgrading your gear, and even buff-providing food by letting you lose in a beautifully rendered new zone.

After having spent some time away from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, returning to it only with the release of its latest DLC, it is worth noting that some aspects of the core gameplay have started feeling a bit clunky. This is especially true for the new DLC zone, which relies a lot more on verticality, and brings with it a whole host of new ways to travel around including bouncing plants. The presence of these new features makes the general movement of the game feel unnecessarily heavy, and jumping especially feels quite off when compared to even some of Ubisoft’s other shooters.

"Ultimately, it always just seems to fall back to fighting off RDA forces."

Combat, on the other hand, remains largely unchanged, aside from some of your new flight-based abilities. The core gunplay is still solid, and while it isn’t going to give you the same level of gory entertainment as something like Doom, it’s fairly competent, and mowing down RDA troops still has its charms. There’s also something special about being able to dive bomb into a group of enemies and quickly taking them out with your arsenal, which now also includes a crossbow designed to be specially used while flying. Unfortunately, this alone doesn’t really do much to shake up the gameplay.

Ultimately, Secrets of the Spires doesn’t really do much too revitalize Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and unless you liked the base game so much that you just want any excuse to spend more time with the title, the DLC is unlikely to offer much in the way of new enticing features to bring you back. Sure, some of the new flying abilities can be fun, but they tend to stop feeling novel relatively quickly, and since the DLC’s main story is more or less just an excuse to have you fighting against RDA yet again, there just doesn’t feel like there’s enough new here in terms of core gameplay to be worth returning to.

On the other hand, fans of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will undoubtedly love the fact that there’s an entirely new zone to explore, as well as a few new abilities that make flying around a more active endeavour than just holding forward on your analogue stick. Secrets of the Spires unfortunately feels like something of a whimper to end the main game’s series of DLCs rather than a bang, with its new features feeling just novel enough to maybe keep a player entertained for an hour or two but ultimately feeling anemic enough to entice most to just move on to other releases.

This game was reviewed on PC.

During Q4 and full fiscal year financials, it touted the success of franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Rainbow Six Siege while promising updates for Shadows, Star Wars Outlaws, XDefiant and other titles at Ubisoft Forward on June 10th. Speaking of the free-to-play and totally-not-facing-troubled-development shooter, it’s out on May 21st. Life is seemingly looking up for the company, especially after so many underwhelming releases and controversies.

However, one announcement almost went under the radar amid all the hype for the next Assassin’s Creed. Ubisoft confirmed that development on The Division Heartland had stopped to “redeploy resources to bigger opportunities such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six.” Your response is probably: The Division What? If you know about the game, then it’s more likely, “It was still in development?” and you would be justified for asking.

The Division Heartland was first announced in 2021 for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5 and PC. It was touted as a free-to-play PvEvP-focused “survival-action shooter”, but instead of Washington D.C. or Manhattan, taking place in a more rural location called Silver Creek. The story concerned some “new breed of poison”, Rogue Division Agents and hostile survivors.

Players could collect materials and supplies, fighting off other players and AI enemies while completing objectives. The hook is that night could fall and add new enemies. Like an extraction shooter, it was paramount to extract or lose all of your gear upon death. Another challenge is the virus dynamically moving around the map, which necessitated filters for players to survive. Still, it could provide some nice loot if you ventured inside.

While multiple classes are nothing new for the franchise, Heartland sported six playable characters. Presumably, they would play a role in the “expanding” story, which never came to be, but alas. As you complete operations, new missions and areas on the map become available while your Base of Operations improves. Two types of Operations were available – Storm Operations, which saw 45 players competing in a PvEvP environment and Excursion Operations, which were PvE only.

It all seems simple enough, as does the reason for Ubisoft ultimately canning the project. After all, it cancelled the team-based title Project Q, the battle royale-focused Ghost Recon Frontline, Splinter Cell VR (and an alleged Splinter Cell battle royale title), and other such projects. Clearly, the tide was turning on the extraction shooter trend, and Ubisoft decided to cut its losses.

The call would likely have been easy since Heartland suffered multiple delays and developer Red Storm Entertainment was better off supporting XDefiant (cue the “Is it though?” reaction). The studio isn’t closing down like some other publishers, so all’s well that ends well, sort of?

It would seem so on the surface, but it’s still bizarre that Heartland would still be cancelled after all this time. Lest we forget, Ubisoft is the same publisher that kept Skull and Bones alive for years and years, through multiple reboots and departures at its Singapore studio, to release it to a middling critical and commercial response. Would The Division Heartland not have found more appeal, especially considering the popularity of IP?

According to those who participated in its playtests over the years, the answer is “No.”

Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson reported after the game’s cancellation that it “changed pretty significantly the last couple of years and had constant ongoing playtests, but it still didn’t resonate with players.” While more details will be forthcoming, streamer ConnorEatsPants offered his thoughts on a playtest from last year, which boiled down “what the fridge is this.” He then posted an in-game image of signs on a telephone poll stating, “All Way,” “One Way”, “No Cycling” and “Yield to Pedestrians” (on bicycles no less).

Other impressions from alleged playtesters on Reddit indicate multiple other problems, from PvP only being available at night time (which meant waiting for nearly an hour for the night to arrive) to mind-numbing tasks that involved collecting materials on a loop. You couldn’t access higher-level zones without doing these missions, and based on impressions, it seems that some of the best content, like Vulture Raids with multiple players teaming together.

One also criticized how the best elements of The Division were either dumbed down or outright absent (aside from the shooting).  I’ve always believed that the roots of The Division Heartland lay in the first game’s Survival expansion, available in November 2016. Alone in the Dark Zone and freezing, collecting weapons and clothing to survive while battling against enemies and up to 23 other players – it felt genuinely nerve-wracking to play, especially when Hunters are on the loose.

The main goal is to gather antivirals and extract them, but looting medicine to manage your own infection was also necessary. Considering Escape from Tarkov’s closed beta launched in June 2017, The Division’s Survival may have been the first proper extraction shooter.

Maybe the goal was to capitalize on this but expand it into something more, not unlike Outbreak from Rainbow Six Siege, which spun off into Rainbow Six Extraction. Perhaps Red Storm’s vision for the game was just at odds with what people liked about The Division and couldn’t fit into the extraction shooter model despite literally having a template in Survival. Maybe it couldn’t use the same premise as Survival and had to fit this whole “evolving story” into a brand new location. Perhaps it was greenlit to tide series fans over while Ubisoft Massive worked on projects like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws.

Whatever the case, it wasn’t working, and instead of dropping millions more into a project that was too big to fail, like Skull and Bones, Ubisoft opted to cancel it while the cancelling was good. It’s unlikely to be missed since Massive announced The Division 3, with Julian Gerighty, co-director of the first two games, becoming an executive producer for the brand after Outlaws launches. The fact that Heartland was cancelled before he took the position seems to indicate that it’s more of an executive decision. Otherwise, those resources may have gone into the franchise’s future, especially given Red Storm’s experience with past titles.

For now, The Division Heartland can be considered another victim of Ubisoft attempting to chase trends, greenlighting too many projects and ultimately cutting back after several failures to focus on its top franchises. The series will continue to thrive, while Heartland is likely forgotten by everyone but the developers who worked on it. It’s a shame in many ways – there’s no comfort in having a years-long project cancelled out of the blue – but the sooner Red Storm can move on to bigger and better things (preferably after XDefiant), the better.

EA Sports FC 24 continues to reign on top. Super Mario Bros. Wonder came in second place, followed by Hogwarts Legacy in third and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in fourth place. Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition was the other new entry this week, ranking in 15th place, while the base game’s sales rose by three percent, placing it in 11th place.

The remaining charts are as expected, with LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga going from 12th to re-entering the top ten. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Nintendo Switch Sports and Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch ranked sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively.

Check out the top ten best-selling physical titles in the UK for the week ending December 9th below.

Gerighty is “setting his sights” on The Division 3 and building a team for the same, with Ubisoft Massive leading development. He’s also overseeing projects like Tom Clancy’s The Division Resurgence on mobile and Tom Clancy’s The Division Heartland from Red Storm Entertainment. Of course, The Division 2 will remain well supported.

“We may have over 40 million players, but The Division is still in its early years as a franchise. There are so many incredible stories to tell, places to explore and people to protect,” says Gerighty. For now, refining and pushing the quality higher is a key goal for the franchise.

“I think that we delivered that with Tom Clancy’s The Division’s cutting-edge visuals, incredible gameplay, and promise to the player that they can’t get this experience anywhere else, and then again with Tom Clancy’s The Division 2. It’s about refinement, it’s about pushing the quality bar consistently forward.”

In a message to fans about the franchise’s future, he said, “There are a huge number of talented developers currently working on the brand, and I think that having more consistency can only make everybody’s work sing.”

The Division 3 and Star Wars Outlaws aren’t the only titles that Ubisoft Massive is working on. It also has Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which launches on December 7th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC. Check out the latest gameplay trailer here.

“Too big is a game that people don’t manage to play, enjoy, and finish,” said Gerighty.

“Our objective is to really get people into a very dense, rich adventure, open world adventure that they can explore at their own rhythm,” he continued. Gerighty goes on to talk about how Star Wars Outlaws will be a more focused title that will be “very manageable”.

“So it is absolutely not a 200 or 300 hour epic unfinishable RPG,” said Gerighty. “This is a very focused action-adventure RPG that will take people on a ride and is very manageable.”

Khavari spoke about how the studio wants players to experience the journey of protagonist Kay Vess in the game. This means that the length of the game will have to be more manageable so that more players will get to finish it.

“We’ve talked about this a lot on the team is that yes, we’re building open worlds, we’re building bustling cities and cantinas and wide open plains, but we always try to approach it from a place of character, from a place of story and realizing that this might be Kay Vess’ first entry into a planet like Toshara that we’ve crafted for this,” said Khavari. “So that’s always in top of mind, is fusing that narrative element with the game.”

This doesn’t mean that Star Wars Outlaws will be a small game, however. Developer Massive Entertainment revealed earlier this month that the game feature a number of planets, with each being as large as 2 to 3 zones from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

Star Wars Outlaws looks like it will allow players to fulfill quite a few Star Wars-related fantasies. Gerighty revealed earlier this month that players will be able to visit the planet of Tatooine, and even work for, and betray Jabba the Hutt.

Star Wars Outlaws is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release some time in 2024.

Sources familiar with Ubisoft’s plans spoke to Kotaku’s Ethan Gach and said this game is Ubisoft Massive’s unnamed Star Wars title. Internally known as Project Helix and led by creative director Julian Gerighty of The Division series fame, it reportedly has space travel between planets. Unfortunately, two sources said the project hasn’t been making good progress.

There are reportedly high hopes, with some hoping it could be the first blockbuster for Ubisoft outside Assassin’s Creed. However, releasing it this fiscal year may prove too ambitious, and it could slip into the fiscal year 2025, which starts on April 1st, 2024, and ends on March 31st, 2025. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time a 2025 release date was rumored.

In response, a Ubisoft spokesperson simply said, “We don’t comment on rumors or speculation.” With Ubisoft Forward on June 12th, perhaps we’ll find out if it’s coming this fiscal year and learn the official name. Stay tuned in the meantime.

A new listing for Monetization Specialists at Massive Entertainment in Malmö, Sweden, has been discovered. Their role will be to “contribute to the financial success of our games, shaping strategies that boost profitability while respecting our players and the essence of each game.” A Fast-Track program sees Specialists hired but not assigned to a specific project immediately.

Instead, they’ll work with the Live Revenues strategies department (console and PC games). They must learn about “generating additional revenues in the fairest, value-added way possible through secondary store items, monetization systems, live events – and more – as you participate in multiple projects.” They’ll also “Monitor the monetization strategies and acquisition, engagement, and monetization KPIs of 3 Ubisoft projects.”

Once the program ends, they’ll join Massive Entertainment, working with the monetization director to develop strategies “aligned with player expectations and the creative & game directions.” They’ll also “Work closely with game economy designers to come up with justified pricing for items, events, and services.”

One must also “Plan and oversee the content, promotions, and offers of the primary and secondary stores with the digital sales teams” while collaborating with UI, UX and programming teams to “implement your monetization systems and features.” Of course, adapting features based on player feedback is also required.

Ubisoft Massive is no stranger to post-launch monetization, as seen with The Division 2. However, if these monetization strategies apply to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora or Star Wars, it could be in the same vein as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Whether DLC or expansions are planned remains to be seen.

The untitled Star Wars project doesn’t have a release date, while Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora could release sometime between April 1st, 2023, and March 31st, 2024, for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Stay tuned for updates in the coming months.