The PS5 has been all about big exclusive titles since it first launched. The only issue is that these exclusives are overwhelmingly single-player adventures, from Demon’s Souls to Spider-Man: Miles Morales to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. That’s all well and good, but when will the PS5 have a multiplayer extravaganza to call its own? (Destruction All-Stars didn’t quite cut it.)
While we don’t have an answer just yet, we do know that the team at Firewalk Studios are hard at work on such a project — and that they’ve got former Destiny, Call of Duty and BioShock developers backing them up.
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Information comes from the official PlayStation Blog, in a post written by Tony Hsu, head of Firewalk Studios. In the piece, Hsu waxes poetic about how multiplayer gaming can forge friendships and create memorable moments in ways that single-player experiences simply can’t. Firewalk Studios — part of the ProbablyMonsters family of developers — and Sony recently forged a partnership for an “original multiplayer game,” which will presumably debut on the PS5 whenever it’s done.
Hsu stresses, among other things, the Firewalk team’s deep experience creating multiplayer games, shooters, and multiplayer shooters in particular:
“Our collective leadership team is no stranger to building memorable multiplayer experiences,” he writes. “Ryan Ellis, our Game Director, was a Creative Director on Destiny. Elena Siegman, our Executive Producer, was a producer on Guitar Hero II, Bioshock Infinite, and multiple Destiny releases.”
Other members of the team have worked on Mass Effect and Apex Legends, while Hsu himself worked on both Call of Duty and Destiny.
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We know definitively that Firewalk Studios is working on a multiplayer game in conjunction with Sony. We can make an educated guess that the game incorporates shooter elements, and that it will come out on the PS5. It also seems reasonable to think that the game will be exclusive to Sony systems, but it’s important to note that the blog does not make any promises one way or another.
Unfortunately, the game’s title, release date and general premise are also a mystery. Hsu explained that the team is “already hard at work on development,” and has been toying around with a playable build for the last year. Like many other studios, Firewalk had to adjust to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, which almost certainly slowed down the development process.
“We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on when the time is right,” says Hsu. That seems to be the closest thing we have to a timetable at the moment.
Sony has dabbled with multiplayer shooters in the past, from Killzone to Resistance, with mixed results. Some games were well-received while others weren’t. None of them made the same splash as Microsoft's Halo, or multiplatform series Destiny. But with the right talent, anything’s possible, and Firewalk seems to have plenty of that on its side.
