Sony’s ambitious but frustrated live-streaming service strategy is suffering its next serious setback. As can be seen from a recent report by Jason Schreier, a well-known industry reporter at Bloomberg, Horizon Hunters Gathering, the multiplayer game project being developed by Guerrilla Games, is being fundamentally redesigned. Of course, the reason for the sweeping change was the continued negative feedback from the spring closed playtest. Rather than building the game into a permanent live-service game, developer Guerrilla Games has completely stripped away the GaaS mechanics and reshaped the project into a smaller, traditional co-op experience with a story mode.
According to people familiar with the matter, the renovation work on the project has begun in June. Originally planned as a long-lasting co-op game with an extensive multiplayer hub, ever-changing events, and a constant infusion of content, the game’s scope is shrinking dramatically due to the retcon.
Although the game has not yet been discontinued, the pressure on the development team is enormous: During an internal work meeting, employees were told that Guerrilla Games must convince PlayStation management by December to allow the project to reach new milestones.
Due to the reduced scope, a large portion of the developers will be exiting Horizon Hunters Gathering and redeployed to another project within the studio that will also be tested at the end of the year.
For fans of the single-player series centered around protagonist Aloy, these revelations bring mixed news. While nearly the entire studio has reportedly been working on offshoots of co-op games in recent years, the actual follow-up, Horizon 3, is being developed by a very small skeleton team and is still several years away from completion.
Guerrilla Games’ development dovetails perfectly with Sony’s ongoing difficulties in implementing its live services plans. Following the discontinuation of The Last of Us multiplayer and the complete failure of Concord, Horizon Hunters Gathering’s move shows that the company is learning from past failures and rigorously correcting the project before release. It remains to be seen whether the revised concept can convince management in December.
