Horizon 3 remains years away from release, with a “tiny team” said to be working on planning it out at developer Guerrilla Games.
A new report into the fate of multiplayer spinoff Horizon Hunters Gathering from Bloomberg also contains a brief update on the next single-player Horizon game, which is set to continue Aloy’s story from 2017’s Zero Dawn and 2022’s Forbidden West.
"A tiny team has been plotting out the next single-player Horizon game but it remains years away from completion, according to the people familiar with the studio’s plans,” Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reported.
Rather than jump straight into Horizon 3 after Forbidden West, Guerrilla Games focused on Horizon Hunters Gathering, which is now being rebooted. The wait for Horizon 3, then, could be many years away. If true, perhaps it’s targeting the PlayStation 6. If that’s true, it would mean the Horizon series skips the PlayStation 5 generation in terms of mainline games designed exclusively for the console (Forbidden West was a cross-gen game that launched on PS4 and PS5).
A full-blown sequel to Horizon: Forbidden West was confirmed to be in the works when Guerrilla mentioned "Aloy's next adventure" in April 2023. In October last year, Sony was said to be targeting 2026 for filming of its live-action Horizon Zero Dawn movie, with a release at some point in 2027.
There also appears to be a third game in development at Guerrilla. Bloomberg said some staff who were working on Horizon Hunters Gathering have now been moved to a mystery project that is set for evaluation at the end of this year.
Horizon Hunters Gathering isn't the only multiplayer game set in the Horizon universe. Bizarrely, NCSoft and Sony are working on Horizon Steel Frontiers, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game designed for mobile devices, but also playable on PC. NCSoft is said to be working closely with Guerrilla to craft the world, but this is very much an NCSoft-developed game.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
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