Rumor: Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy games mash up in a new F2P shooter

The Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, and The Division franchises will cross over in a single multiplayer game made by Ubisoft, according to a social media leak this weekend first reported by VGC.

The project, code-named “BattleCat,” surfaced in several since-deleted images posted Sunday by a Twitter user called Zer0Bytes0. The four images were since removed by Twitter on a copyright claim from Ubisoft. Zer0Bytes0 said the game “began testing around January.”

VGC, without identifying any sources, called the images authentic and said Ubisoft will not be showing it at Saturday’s Ubisoft Forward livestream, which kicks off the week of E3 2021. Polygon has reached out to a Ubisoft representative for additional insight on this leak and when fans may hear more.

In early May, Ubisoft announced Tom Clancy’s The Division: Heartland, a free-to-play adaptation of that IP for PC and consoles, launching sometime in late 2021 or 2022. One week later, a Ubisoft executive told investors that the publisher is now prioritizing the kind of persistent, free-to-play video games that have been so successful for Electronic Arts (Apex Legends), Activision (Call of Duty: Warzone) and Epic Games (Fortnite and Rocket League).

This weekend’s rumor suggests that “BattleCat” will draw its combatants from the factions in Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, the Wolves enemies of the near-future Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, and Splinter Cell’s Echelon network of operatives. The game will be a class-based shooter, where each character class has a unique ability, and the playlists described mimic escort and collection-type games found in current, popular shooters.

Ubisoft already has a free-to-play Tom Clancy crossover game available on mobile platforms, Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, which pits cartoonish versions of characters from Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, The Division, Splinter Cell, and other Clancyverse games against each other in a fast-paced military RPG.

Earlier Monday, Ubisoft also announced a re-titling of the next Rainbow Six game, now called Rainbow Six Extraction, which appears to be a survival-based PvE multiplayer game. In Extraction, players are working together to survive against and defeat horrifying creatures spawned from a laboratory experiment gone wrong.

Ubisoft Forward begins at 2 p.m. EDT on Saturday, June 12.