The circle has closed on Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Frontline, a planned battle royale-inspired take on the Ghost Recon franchise that was announced last fall. Ubisoft said during an investor call Thursday that the project has been canceled. The publisher also canceled a planned Splinter Cell VR game.
Ghost Recon Frontline was unveiled last October as a free-to-play game that would send more than 100 players onto a massive battlefield where they’d fight, secure intel, and attempt to survive until they were extracted. Developer Ubisoft Bucharest promised an advanced class system, “unbound tactical freedom,” and strategic gameplay “with multiple ways to outsmart enemy teams and win every fight.”
The developer said at the time that Frontline was being “built on core Ghost Recon values,” but response from Ghost Recon fans was widely negative. Backlash to the game’s reveal and premise was swift and intense, and Ubisoft postponed on a planned technical test for Frontline just one week after the game was announced.
Ghost Recon Frontline was being developed for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, and streaming platforms Amazon Luna and Google Stadia. The game was part of a larger push toward free-to-play games at Ubisoft, which included F2P spinoffs in the Tom Clancyverse, The Division Heartland and Tom Clancy’s XDefiant. The latter of those two games has since dropped the Tom Clancy brand, and is now known simply as XDefiant.