Where’s the heck sequel?

Launching ten years ago today, Sleeping Dogs is an open-world action game that has proven to be a hit with gamers and critics alike. So how did we manage to go a decade without a sequel?

united front sleeping dogs Launched in August 2012 as a spiritual successor to the True Crime series, the game actually began as a new title for True Crime before being canceled by Activision, then picked up and rebranded by Square Enix. Despite selling several million copies in just a few months, a Square Enix report in 2013 called Sleeping Dogs—along with Tomb rider reboot and Hitman: Forgiveness – as failures, noting that the three games “failed to reach their goals, and resulted in financially unsatisfactory consequences.” The game got an upgrade for the then-new Xbox One in 2014, with Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition Offering a better version of an already excellent game, but criminally speaking, this is where Wei Shen’s story ends.

Will Sleeping Dogs 2 ever happen?

It wasn’t meant to be. United Front quickly began working on pre-production on a sequel, but Sleeping Dogs 2 was canceled in 2013 before full production could begin. Patrick Klepek did an excellent deep dive into the sequel we’ll never get over it vice Back in 2016, including insight from the original team and design documentation – it’s worth a read and discusses plenty of planned features, including co-op gameplay, and procedurally generated side quests like la Skyrim, a companion app that lets the second player run the police force (Watch Dogs later did a similar job) and more. Soon, the team’s attention turned to the free casual Sleeping Dogs game called Triad Wars, but that was also ruled out before it left beta. The United Front spent the next few years running odd jobs (such as helping to develop Halo: The Master Chief Collection) before closing for good in 2016. The question is, where does that leave any hope for today’s sequel?

This question, as it turns out, is very difficult to answer, because it is not entirely clear where the rights to IP Sleeping Dogs currently lie. Square Enix is ​​believed to have retained the rights, so shutting down the developer shouldn’t cause any problems, although recent developments are muddiing more waters. Back in May, Square Enix She sold a bunch of her western studios and IPs to Embracer for just $300 million — a deal that apparently included “50+ back-catalog games” as well as big games whose names have already been verified, such as Tomb Raider and Deus Ex (and Legacy of Kain, still the heart of spring). Embracer was specifically asked about Sleeping Dogs, but not confirmed Whether it’s among the Square IP addresses included in the bulk deal. If the IP stays with Square, it’s safe to say it’s as good as dead. But if it’s Embracer, there’s a very real chance that there will be a sequel on the cards one day, although you’ll have to imagine that those larger IPs will be at the top of Embracer’s priority list now, and the deal is still small.

Another question arises, though… With the united front closed for so long, who would develop a potential follow-up? Open-world games with great melee combat are few and far between – one of the main reasons Sleeping Dogs stands out as it did at launch – so finding a team capable of doing justice will be difficult. Insomniac would have been a great fit, but the California team Become a PlayStation studio Back in 2019, he will probably be off the table. Rocksteady would probably crash, but it’s owned by Warner Bros. , which leads to additional complications. It’s certainly not impossible for a new or unexpected developer to come out and install it with a project so we can’t rule that out, but this will definitely prove the most challenging part of bringing Sleeping Dogs back in a loyal way. there he is Although there is a gap in the market. what Yakuza series It has shifted away from its kinetic combat roots and into turn-based RPG battles, only keeping action-based melee alive in the episodic series, RuleWhile the biggest games in the genre like GTA and Saints Row tend to focus on gunplay and usually don’t do very well, giving something like Sleeping Dogs a USP edge to stand apart from the major players in the field.

Even attempts to break into other forms of media make it feel like sleeping dogs are cursed. A film adaptation was announced in 2017 with Donnie Yen in the lead role, although it looks as if he struggled to get off the ground. Yen was still talking about the project Late like last year -Obviously he owns the link rights himself, so he’ll probably just need a studio to buy the mod and splash some cash, but a movie based on a video game done in 2012 would likely be tough today, even if I was going to watch the hell out of this . If it is a sequel to the game Do It’s coming out someday, that’s probably the boost that the splicing movie needs, but we’ll have to wait and see both. Just thinking about how good the new Sleeping Dogs will look on current devices makes me sad that it may never happen, so hopefully Embracer has some good news to share once she starts playing with her new toys.

Regardless, the happy 10th anniversary of one of the best games of its kind, Sleeping Dogs – we’ll pick up a cake or two to celebrate. Would you like to see a sequel? What developers do you think will be up to the task? Do you hope to see Donnie Yen someday kick some triple ass like Wei Shen? Sound out below!