Horizon 3 Is “Years Away” Due To Live-Service Reboot

Only a small team at Guerrilla Games is working on Horizon 3, while the rest of the studio remains focused on the recently announced Horizon live-service game.

Horizon Hunters Gathering Is Going Through A Reboot

Sony’s PlayStation division is overhauling Horizon Hunters Gathering, the online action game Guerrilla Games announced earlier this year to a tepid reception, according to Bloomberg. People familiar with the plans told Bloomberg that Guerrilla has been reworking the game since June following poor feedback in private testing.

The plan now is to strip out the live-service structure entirely and turn it into a more traditional cooperative multiplayer game, complete with a story mode and a considerably smaller scope than originally planned. 

The game isn’t cancelled, but it isn’t safe either. Guerrilla told staff in a meeting this past Wednesday that the studio has until December to impress executives with its next milestone. Many developers currently on Hunters Gathering will be reassigned to a different project that will also face its own evaluation at the end of the year.

Sony’s Live-Service Push Keeps Stumbling

PlayStation has poured resources into live-service games over the past several years, chasing the long-tail monetization that titles like Fortnite and Destiny have shown is possible, but the initiative has mostly produced cancellations and shuttered studios instead.

Sony has already scrapped live-service projects tied to God of War, Spider-Man, and The Last of Us, burning through hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development time in the process. The company’s $3.6 billion acquisition of Destiny developer Bungie in 2022 hasn’t fixed the pattern either, pointing to the underwhelming launch of Marathon.

Guerrilla’s own trajectory makes the shift especially notable. The studio built its reputation on the strength of two acclaimed single-player games, Horizon Zero Dawn in 2017 and Horizon Forbidden West in 2022, the latter ending on a cliffhanger that left fans waiting for a follow-up.

Instead, the majority of Guerrilla’s staff moved on to Hunters Gathering, a sharp departure in both gameplay and art style, initially leaked under that name via the 2023 Insomniac Games hack years before its official reveal.

Only a small team has been working on Horizon 3 in the meantime, and Bloomberg’s sources say it remains years away from completion.

For fans hoping Horizon Forbidden West’s cliffhanger gets resolved soon, this reshuffling doesn’t help. The people actually equipped to build that next chapter are still tied up on a spinoff that, as of this week, doesn’t even have a settled identity of its own.