Sony Interactive Entertainment has been putting out consistently high quality first-party titles for its PlayStation consoles over the last few generations. In recent years, the platform holder has begun to see the value in expanding its franchises by any means possible. In some cases, that means porting its greatest hits to PC or working to develop movies like Uncharted. Now, it appears that Sony may want to expand its Horizon franchise by branching out into an MMORPG.
The news comes from a website called MTN, which claims that Sony has entered an agreement with developer NCSoft to create a massively multiplayer online RPG set in the world of Horizon. NCSoft is the studio behind games such as the Guild Wars series, so it has plenty of experience in this genre. If it turns out to be true, then this move is not entirely surprising. Sony also recently acquired the developer Bungie and cited that this move was to use the studio’s expertise in live service games to help Sony develop the future of its live service game strategies.
Multiplayer titles are becoming a far larger part of Sony’s overall strategy going forward. Naughty Dog is hard at work on The Last of Us multiplayer spin-off based on the factions mode from the original game, and it has even been previously reported that Guerrilla Games, the developer behind the Horizon series, wished to include cooperative elements in Horizon Zero Dawn.
More recent reports suggest that Guerrilla is already working on a multiplayer-focused Horizon game, but there has been no official confirmation of this just yet. It is also claimed that a remake of Horizon Zero Dawn for PlayStation 5 is in the works. Given that The Last of Us: Part 1 was recently released as a remake of the original 2013 game, it would not be surprising to see Sony continue this strategy with some of its other successful exclusive titles. When it comes to the multiplayer side of things, Ghost of Tsushima players will remember the Legends expansion that added cooperative multiplayer to the game. Therefore, a Horizon multiplayer experience would not be the first time a Sony first-party game has experimented with cooperative multiplayer.
Horizon Forbidden West is currently available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles. The VR title, Horizon Call of the Mountain, will be released on PlayStation VR 2 in February next year. Finally, there is a Netflix adaptation of the franchise in development.