Video game companies are notoriously cagey about sharing their plans. In a market saturated with sequels and spin-offs, developers nevertheless treat every new project with extreme secrecy. They’ll rarely even be up-front about what they aren’t working on, but today the PlayStation studio behind Ghost of Tsushima did just that.
As it approaches its 25th anniversary, Sucker Punch took the unusual step of letting fans know what not to expect from its next game, killing rumors of a potential sequel to superhero sandbox series Infamous, or stealth platformer Sly Cooper, happening anytime soon.
Sucker Punch wrote:
As our games continue to grow in scale and complexity, they require the full attention of our studio. With our focus on our current project, we have no plans to revisit inFAMOUS or Sly Cooper right now, and no other studio is currently working on projects related to those franchises either. These characters are very special and near and dear to our hearts, so while we’d never say never to re-opening those doors down the road, for now there are no inFAMOUS or Sly Cooper games in development.
Previously, some PlayStation fans were eager to believe the opposite. On the heels of rumor mongering by self-proclaimed insider Twitter accounts and mysterious updates to various web pages, it seemed like the fan-favorites might resurface. But rather than let false hope spring eternal, like some game studios have been known to, Sucker Punch came clean with fans.
In the meantime, the studio said that following some upcoming maintenance it will keep Infamous 2‘s level editor servers alive for a little bit longer and it plans to make the Infamous Second Son DLC Cole’s Legacy purchasable separately from the Collector’s Edition. The Sly games, on the other hand, remain completely inaccessible on modern platforms. While previously available as part of PS Now, none of them are currently included in the revamped PS Plus library.
Founded in 1997, Sucker Punch’s first game was the underappreciated, physics-based platformer Rocket: Robot on Wheels for Nintendo 64. It later entered into a publishing agreement with Sony and released the first Sly Cooper on PS2 in 2002, and the first Infamous on PS3 in 2009. Sony bought the studio outright a couple years later, and in 2020 it delivered Ghost of Tsushima, which catapulted it into the top tier of PlayStation studios.
While Sucker Punch didn’t come out and say it’s working on a sequel to Tsushima, it seems like a good bet considering the first one has sold over eight million copies and several LinkedIn pages and job postings have referenced an upcoming project with similar attributes. The bigger question is whether it will remain focused on a single-player narrative, or branch out even more deeply into multiplayer combat.
Ghost of Tsushima’s online mode called Legends added co-op quests, horde survival, and end-game raids. It was a cautious but successful initial foray into a new way to play the game, and something Sucker Punch might pivot to in the future. Earlier this year, following the announcement it was acquiring Destiny 2 maker Bungie, PlayStation laid out big plans for a raft of 10 new live-service games by 2026. A new online-only The Last of Us spin-off will be one of those. Time will tell if Ghost of Tsushima 2 ends up being another.
Clarification: 7/1/22, 4:36 p.m. ET: The online content being preserved in Infamous 2 is its community level editor, not a full multiplayer mode.
