Horizon: Zero Dawn developer's next game may be Horizon Online as a third single-player game looks "a ways off"

Horizon Online is reportedly the next game in PlayStation's open-world robot-dinosaur series, not a single-player threequel.

After Horizon: Zero Dawn, sequel Horizon: Forbidden West, and now, just seven years later, Horizon: Zero Dawn Remastered, many people expected series developer Guerrilla Games to close out the trilogy it began with a third mainline game. Rumors have long circulated that multiplayer projects were bubbling in the background, but it now seems they might be coming sooner than expected.

That's according to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, who recently dished on the unannounced project with the Spawncast podcast. "Horizon Online is their next product, not the third single-player game, looks like," Schreier says. "So, that one may be a ways off."

For clarity, Horizon Online is seemingly the co-op multiplayer romp that Guerrilla Games is developing itself, and the company's director Jan-Bart van Beek previously said it was "a massive shift for the studio." That shouldn't be confused with the Horizon MMO that Sony is apparently making in collaboration with NCSoft.

"Sony-PlayStation's live service initiative was no joke," Schreier continues, "everybody was like, 'it's live service games all around.' Horizon is one of the few ones that hasn't been canceled or hasn't come out and flopped the way Concord did. A lot of people are working on that."

While Helldivers 2 soared and Concord crashed, Sony scaled back its ambitious plans and scrapped several live service games. The publisher previously had a dozen in development, but has since publicly canned The Last of Us Online and reportedly binned a Twisted Metal reboot. Here's hoping things go smoother for Horizon.

Netflix’s Horizon Zero Dawn series was also reportedly scrapped after allegations against Umbrella Academy’s showrunner.