Gameplay footage of The Division Heartland leaks online

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

20 minutes of Ubisoft's upcoming free-to-play The Division Heartland has leaked online.

Tom Clancy's The Division: Heartland is a standalone spinoff title that you'll be able to play for free when it launches on PC, consoles, and cloud platforms sometime in "2021-22". The footage – which has now been taken down from YouTube and Vimeo – showed off a good snippet of the gameplay that takes place in a small American town called Silver Creek.

Still online is an introduction from lead game designer Taylor Epperly, imploring players to give their "unfiltered feedback" whilst asking the "very limited group of players" included in the closed test to "avoid sharing any information, including what you see in this tech test".

"Please don't be the one who ruins the surprise for the larger Division community," she said.

Not much else is known about Heartland, but it's being developed by Red Storm Entertainment, whose work on the Tom Clancy saga dates back to 1997's Tom Clancy's Politika. The studio has also co-developed several Rainbow Six games and worked on the Far Cry series and both Division games.

Ubisoft clarified its plans for the looter-shooter after announcing a surprise extension for the game's update schedule at the beginning of the year. The update is "still in its early stages and will take several months to complete," so it's currently planned for "late 2021 at the earliest".

While the timeline is still coming together, Ubisoft did offer some clear goals for the big update. "We are looking to bring a game mode that is entirely new to the franchise," the dev team says.

Here are all the new games coming in 2021 we can't wait to play.