Tom Clancy's Elite Squad is shutting down, bringing the franchise-crossing mobile strategy game to an early end.
The official site for Tom Clancy's Elite Squad broke the news, revealing that the new update which rolled out on Android and iOS today will also be its last. Elite Squad will keep working until Ubisoft shuts its servers on October 4; since the game officially launched on August 27, 2020, that means the game will have been available for just over 13 months when it goes offline.
Tom Clancy's Elite Squad was first announced back at E3 2019 with a stylish trailer that sold the "everybody get in here" concept: Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell, Caveira from Rainbow Six: Siege, and many more characters from across Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's meta-franchise team up and face off in real-time 5v5 battles. The largest update for the game will stand as the launch of Elite Squad Season 2, which made some substantial revisions to the core grid-based combat system and tweaks to individual character abilities in March.
The news post from Ubisoft explains that the game was "no longer sustainable" despite the development teams exploring several avenues to keep it going. The timing is probably just a coincidence, but Ubisoft did just announce another Tom Clancy's project that crosses over elements of the military fiction series: XDefiant is a free-to-play FPS that draws inspiration for its player factions from Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and The Division. XDefiant's first closed playtests are set to begin on August 4, so these two crossovers will cross over for a bit, at least chronologically speaking.
Elsewhere at Ubisoft, the company has confirmed that Beyond Good & Evil 2 is still in the works despite extended periods of external silence, and its long-in-development pirate game Skull and Bones has crossed out of the alpha stage of development. Its upcoming titles Riders Republic and Rainbow Six Extraction were recently hit with delays, though Far Cry 6 is still on track to arrive in October as planned.
See what else is on the way this year with our guide to new games 2021.
