Ubisoft recently announced Tom Clancy's The Division Heartland, an upcoming free-to-play installment in the looter shooter series. The game is being developed by Red Storm Entertainment, a studio under the Ubisoft umbrella that has worked on both previous The Division games. Details at the moment are scarce, with no information on an exact release date or even what kind of game The Division Heartland is.
The most likely scenario is Heartland will be some form of battle royale game. Rumors of a The Division battle royale surfaced a few years ago, but it never came to fruition. Ever since the genre exploded with PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite, it seems every major game developer is trying to get in on the trend, and most are free-to-play games - just like The Division Heartland. Some established franchises have been successful in adopting the game mode, like Call of Duty's Warzone, but others, such as Battlefield, failed to capture a long-term player base.
Ubisoft did promise The Division Heartland "will provide an all new perspective on the universe in a new setting," so would make sense if the game is something other than another looter shooter. Ubisoft is also already allowing interested players to sign up for early access to Heartland, so it may not be too much longer until some concrete gameplay details are revealed.
The Division Has Already Approached the Battle Royale Genre
When the first Tom Clancy's The Division received its second round of post-launch paid content, it got a new game mode called Survival. Beginning from a helicopter crash in Manhattan's Dark Zone, the game's most dangerous area, players had to survive both PvP and PvE elements during an extreme blizzard. While not a traditional battle royale, The Division's Survival had strong similarities to games like Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown, where players have to collect gear, complete an objective, and then safely extract from the combat zone.
Given the series' setting, it's likely The Division Heartland will end up in the same vein as Survival mode. Both Tarkov and Hunt have permadeath mechanics, where players lose the character and gear they brought into the game upon getting killed. A similar system might fit into a The Division battle royale fairly well, with players having to recruit Division agents or operatives of another faction for each game. Most battle royale games have some form of overarching narrative, after all, so if The Division Heartland is part of the genre, gameplay mechanics like these could be woven into the series' lore - presumably having something to do with a viral outbreak and taking place somewhere in the Midwestern United States.