Horizon 3 is reportedly still years away as a small team continues to plan the single-player sequel
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Earlier today, a new report claimed that PlayStation is planning a substantial rework of Horizon Hunters Gathering, responding to poor playtest feedback for the multiplayer spin-off by stripping the live-service elements in order to make it more of a traditional co-op game. That report also has some bad news for fans of the traditional Horizon games: Horizon 3 is apparently still years away.
The "majority" of developers at Guerrilla Games are still working on Horizon Hunters Gathering, according to Jason Schreier at Bloomberg. That leaves a very small team planning the next single-player Horizon game, which is apparently still years away from being finished.
That's pretty much the same story that's been reported since February, when Horizon Hunters Gathering was first announced. Even then, Schreier was reporting that the majority of Guerrilla was working on the multiplayer spin-off, leaving Horizon 3 on the backburner. It seems that hasn't changed, even as the studio finds itself forced to pivot from the initial plans for Hunters Gathering.
Five years separated the launches of Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017 and Horizon Forbidden West in 2022, and it's looking like there might be an even longer wait before Horizon 3 rolls around. I'd even hazard a guess that we won't be buying Horizon 3 on a physical disc.
PlayStation has made a big push into live-service games over the past few years, and during that span we saw the launch and immediate shutdown of Concord, a middling response for Bungie's Marathon, and the death of Destiny 2. The publisher's biggest recent multiplayer hit is certainly Helldivers 2, which wasn't even developed internally. It's tough to put that context out of mind when another multiplayer experiment is dragging resources away from one PlayStation's biggest single-player franchises.