Sony continues to invest heavily in the Horizon franchise. While the Netflix TV series has seemingly been stopped by the scandal involving showrunner Steve Blackman (The Umbrella Academy), last week’s State of Play unveiled the rumored Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered. It launches on October 31 for PlayStation 5 and PC with improved character models, shaders, and textures, new conversation mocap, enhanced cameras for dialogues, and more.
A couple of weeks later, Guerrilla Games and Studio Gobo will launch LEGO Horizon Adventures, a family-friendly spin-off that retells the story of the first installment in a way that’s more palatable to a younger audience.
However, both of these are minor projects. The bulk of Guerrilla Games is working on the Horizon Online co-op game and the third single-player installment, with the latter quietly confirmed alongside the studio’s restructuring in April 2023. Speaking on the latest Spawn Wave podcast, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier revealed which one will be released first.
Guerrilla Games is in an interesting place because they’re working on this Horizon Online game that I’m not sure how many people want that, and so they’ve got this remaster coming and then the LEGO game coming. Part of me feels like, I wonder what happens if neither of those hit, and it turns out there isn’t a ton of interest in Horizon anymore. Are they still gonna be doing the online game? I don’t know. There are a lot of questions around their strategy and around that online game that I certainly have.
Horizon Online is their next project, not whatever the third single player game looks like, so that one might be a ways off. Sony’s PlayStation’s live service initiative was no joke. Everybody was like, it’s live service games all around, and Horizon is one of the few that hasn’t been canceled or hasn’t come out and flopped the way Concord did. So yeah, a lot of questions there, but a lot of people are working on that online project.
Indeed, as Schreier pointed out, following the cancellations of games like The Last of Us Online and the urban fantasy game that the now-defunct London studio was working on, not to mention Concord’s complete debacle, Horizon Online is one of a few PlayStation live service projects still running. As such, it’s not surprising that Sony is fast-tracking it compared to the third installment in the single-player series.
However, it will indeed be a departure from the mainline entries, and not only because of the cooperative multiplayer. Guerrilla Games has already confirmed it will feature a new cast of characters and a ‘stylized look’ that didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence in some early leaks.
Is Sony making the wrong move by prioritizing this project? Let us know your opinion below.
