While one Horizon multiplayer game felt almost inevitable, Guerrilla Games finally made the news official on Friday through a new job posting. The Sony studio behind the open world RPG series wants to bring the post-apocalyptic robot battle online with an upcoming project featuring new characters and a different art style.
“A new internal team is developing a separate Online Project set Horizon‘s universe’, Guerrilla Games wrote on Twitter. “With a new cast of characters and a uniquely stylized look, Friends can explore the majestic wilderness of Horizon together.” So don’t expect to work with ALoy and her other friends this time.
Job openings for the new game include character, quest, and combat designers, as well as “stylized” world artists and character animators. From the descriptions it sounds like what you would expect from the makers of Horizon zero dawn and Forbidden West, but with a multiplayer twist. The references to a new art direction, meanwhile, could indicate a different set of visual compromises than a studio that has traditionally been at the forefront of visual fidelity, to accommodate the new cooperative gameplay.
Guerrilla also makes it clear that it’s still working on a new single-player installment in the Horizon series, in addition to the PSVR2 spin-off, Horizon Call of the Mountainand Forbidden West DLC, Burning banksthe latter two will both be released in early 2023. There are also vacancies for an external project, but it is not clear what exactly that is.
Rumors about one Horizon multiplayer project has been swirling around for a while, including one report of a Horizon MMO is licensed to Guild Wars publisher NCsoft. The multiplayer push comes as other major Sony first-party franchises have made the leap to online, including Ghost of Tsushimas co-op raid updateand a forthcoming one multiplayer only The last of us spinoff.
After the acquisition of Bungie, whose successful MMO shooter Lot 2 has become one of the gold standards in live-service gaming, Sony revealed plans to add more than one dozen more live service games by 2025. If recent years have been any indication, not all of them will succeed, and few if any will reach the level of Apex Legends, Genshin effect, and other recent breakout hits. With a growing majority of all game companies’ revenues coming from microtransactions and other “recurring player expenses”, it’s easy to see why Sony would try.
