Sony is overhauling Horizon Hunters Gathering after private gameplay tests produced disappointing feedback from players. The upcoming multiplayer project from Guerrilla Games is dropping its live service structure in favor of a smaller cooperative story experience. According to reporting from Bloomberg, the development team has until December to convince studio executives that the project deserves to move forward.
Guerrilla Games began reworking the project earlier this year when early test impressions raised internal concerns. The original vision called for an ongoing online ecosystem with continuous content updates. That plan is gone. Developers are now attempting to reshape the project into a traditional cooperative action game with a dedicated narrative mode and a much tighter scope. Studio leaders held an internal meeting to inform staff that the game must hit a critical quality benchmark before the end of the year. Developers who are no longer needed on the project are being shifted to another internal effort that faces a similar review in December. A PlayStation representative declined to comment on the internal changes.
This sudden change in direction points to a larger problem inside Sony interactive division. During the previous hardware generation, the company found enormous success by producing cinematic single player blockbusters, helping the PlayStation 4 reach over 117 million unit sales. Turning those same single player worlds into persistent online cash cows has proved difficult. Internal teams have already scrapped online projects set in the worlds of God of War, Spider Man, and The Last of Us, burning through hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Even the $3.6 billion purchase of Bungie has run into trouble, marked by soft sales for Marathon and layoffs across the studio.
The troubles surrounding Hunters Gathering also create uncertainty for the core Horizon storyline. Guerrilla generated massive acclaim with Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017 and Horizon Forbidden West in 2022, which ended on an unresolved cliffhanger. Most of the studio staff moved directly to this multiplayer experiment, which features a completely different visual presentation from the mainline entries. Only a small group is currently outlining the next single player chapter, meaning a true narrative sequel is still several years away from release.
