Ubisoft casually announces The Division 3
The creative director of Star Wars Outlaws will take The Division reins next year.
Star Wars Outlaws creative director Julian Gerighty will take a new role at Ubisoft once that game is done: executive producer of everything Tom Clancy's The Division. That includes oversight of all the Division-branded games: The Division 2, The Division Heartland, mobile game The Division Resurgence, and, what's this? The Division 3, which Ubisoft casually announced in the press release about Gerighty's new job.
Star Wars Outlaws and The Division 2 studio Massive Entertainment is "actively building a team" for The Division 3 right now, the press release says. As for Gerighty's current project, open world Star Wars game Outlaws, Ubisoft says he "remains fully committed" to it and that he'll "remain on the project through launch" before starting his new role.
The Division 3 is very early in development then, which helps explain the lowkey announcement—there's no trailer or even artwork to share. We've seen similarly concise, early game announcements from other big developers in recent years. Blizzard, for instance, announced last year that it's working on a survival game without giving it a name, a move we interpreted as an effort to recruit talent.
Gerighty's previous credits at Ubisoft include the other main Division games, as well as games from the Splinter Cell and Ghost Recon series of Tom Clancy-branded games, The Crew, and Watch Dogs. He's been with the company for 25 years, spending the past 10 at Massive Entertainment.
The Division and The Division 2 were Ubisoft's take on Destiny 2-style shared world shooters, except near-future military-themed and set in New York and Washington DC rather than space. We liked The Division 2, which released in 2019, although it has never come close to matching the popularity of Bungie's sci-fi FPS, which went free-to-play the same year The Division 2 came out. Third time's the charm?
It'll probably be a while before we hear anything significant about The Division 3, since Massive is only now recruiting the team for it, and Gerighty won't change focus until after Star Wars Outlaws releases. That's supposed to happen sometime next year.