PlayStation Reportedly Reboots Horizon Hunters Gathering After Negative Playtest Feedback

Sony's live-service ambitions have taken another hit with news that Horizon Hunters Gathering, the cartoony cooperative multiplayer spinoff from Guerrilla, has been rebooted following disappointing playtest results. Bloomberg reports that the publisher ordered the reset in June 2024 after closed playtests earlier this year surfaced fundamental problems with the game's direction. The development team has since been stripping out live-service systems to refashion the project as a traditional cooperative multiplayer game with a story mode and significantly reduced scope. For players who were skeptical of the Monster Hunter comparisons when the game was announced in February, this pivot feels like an admission that the original vision wasn't connecting — and a last-ditch effort to salvage years of work before a make-or-break December milestone.

The stakes are unusually transparent for a project still in development. Sources indicate Guerrilla staff were told this week that the studio has until December to impress PlayStation leadership with the rebooted version's next milestone. Failure to deliver could mean cancellation, a fate that has already claimed several of Sony's live-service bets. Some Horizon Hunters Gathering developers are reportedly being reassigned to another Guerrilla project with its own year-end milestone, while a "tiny team" continues early work on the next mainline Horizon single-player entry — still years from release. This resource shuffling suggests Sony is hedging its bets across the franchise rather than doubling down on the multiplayer experiment.

Horizon Hunters Gathering's Secret Redesign

According to Bloomberg's reporting, the reboot order came in June 2024 after closed playtests produced negative feedback. The original version of Horizon Hunters Gathering featured a social hub called Hunters Gathering where players could customize characters, visit vendors, upgrade gear, and team up for adventures — standard live-service infrastructure. It is unclear how much of this, if any, remains in the rebooted version. The game was built around three-player co-op with distinct Hunter classes offering melee and ranged playstyles, a roguelite perk system for build crafting, and two core modes: Machine Incursion, a high-intensity wave-based mission culminating in a boss fight, and Cauldron Descent, a longer multi-stage trial with procedurally varying rooms and hidden rewards. A narrative campaign was also planned to introduce new mysteries and characters while remaining fully canon to the Horizon universe.

It remains unclear how much of this original design survives the reboot. The reported mandate to create "a traditional cooperative multiplayer game with a story mode and a far smaller scope" suggests the persistent social hub, seasonal content pipeline, and long-term engagement mechanics may be cut. Machine Incursion and Cauldron Descent may remain as core gameplay loops, but their progression systems and replayability hooks would likely need fundamental redesign without live-service scaffolding. The roguelite perk system could fit a traditional co-op structure, but its integration with a finite narrative campaign rather than an endless seasonal model raises questions about endgame retention — a problem the original design may have solved with live-service tools the reboot explicitly rejects.

Horizon Hunters Gathering's Reboot

If accurate, this reboot represents a significant philosophical shift for a project that was part of Sony's live-service portfolio. Game director Arjan Bak described the original combat as "tactical, reactive, and deeply skill-based, building on the tactical precision of the Horizon games while embracing the dynamics of team play. The foundation of Horizon Hunters Gathering centers around challenging and replayable hunts." That language — "replayable," "foundation," "hunts" — signals a game designed for hundreds of hours of repeated engagement, the exact model the reboot now abandons. Stripping live-service elements to focus on a narrative campaign with a defined endpoint suggests Sony is prioritizing a polished, complete co-op experience over an ongoing platform, potentially aligning Horizon Hunters Gathering more closely with games like Remnant 2 or Deep Rock Galactic than Destiny 2 or Helldivers 2.

"They overspent basically. They were overzealous,"

Vinit Agarwal, director of the canceled Last of Us multiplayer

The December milestone deadline creates intense pressure to demonstrate that this smaller-scope vision can still deliver the "tactical precision" and "dynamics of team play" Bak emphasized. Three-player co-op with distinct classes and a roguelite perk system could work well in a campaign-structured game — players complete the story, experiment with builds across multiple runs, and move on — but the original Machine Incursion and Cauldron Descent modes were described as endlessly replayable systems. Redesigning them for a finite experience without making them feel like truncated versions of their former selves is a substantial design challenge on a six-month timeline. The comparison to Monster Hunter that dogged the announcement may actually become more apt if the reboot embraces a hunt-campaign-hunt loop with crafted encounters rather than procedural live-service grind.

From Zero Dawn to Bad Feedback

Horizon Hunters Gathering's troubles reflect a broader retreat from Sony's aggressive live-service strategy. In February 2022, the company announced plans for more than 10 live-service games by March 2026, backing the push with acquisitions including Bungie, Haven Studios, and Firewalk Studios. By 2023, president Hiroki Totoki had scaled that commitment to six titles by the end of fiscal year 2025, acknowledging that "for the gamers quality should be the most important." Since then, the track record has been bleak: Naughty Dog's The Last of Us multiplayer was canceled at 80% completion, Concord launched and was pulled offline within weeks, and unannounced projects at Bluepoint and Bend were reportedly axed. Helldivers 2 stands as the lone breakout success, selling 12 million copies in 12 weeks to become the fastest-selling PlayStation Studios game ever.

Vinit Agarwal, director of the canceled Last of Us multiplayer, provided candid context for the industry-wide pivot in April. He described how COVID-era growth flooded money into online games in 2020, only for the market to contract as people returned to offices and discretionary spending fell.

The reboot of Horizon Hunters Gathering will either become a case study in course-correcting a live-service project before launch or another entry in Sony's growing list of multiplayer misfires. The December milestone gives us a concrete timeframe to watch for — if the game resurfaces at a PlayStation showcase or State of Play before year-end, the reboot is on track. If it goes quiet, the writing may already be on the wall. For now, the Horizon franchise's multiplayer future rests on a team racing a deadline with a fundamentally changed brief.