A sequel to Journey to the Savage Planet was in the works before reportedly being cancelled by Google. The Journey to the Savage Planet sequel was in development for Stadia by Typhoon Studios before being shut down by the tech giant.
In the original game, players set out to the planet ARY-26 for exploration and combat. By researching various flora and defeating dangerous creatures, fans could unlock gear to traverse deeper into the alien world. To go along with the survival aspects, those enjoying the game could team up with a friend for cooperative play, and support for the first game led to Typhoon Studios working on a sequel for Google Stadia.
Google went through with buying the developer last year to work on its sequel. Typhoon Studios gave up that name when joining Google to be part of the Stadia Games and Entertainment team. As a first-party production, Journey to the Savage Planet 2 was in full swing, according to Video Games Chronicle (VGC), before it was recently cancelled. According to the report, the new game was focused on using the same co-op adventure format of the original.
The new game would have been much grander in scale, though it is unclear if that means a bigger and more complex world, or a variety of different planets. Unlike the positively reviewed Journey to the Savage Planet, the sequel was going to include fully animated cutscenes. The development team behind the new title did not find out about production cancellation until the public announcement this month, according to VGC.
For fans of the original game, this news will be disappointing. It sounds like the developers had high hopes for the title, and wanted to build upon what made the first one successful. This studio joined up with Google with a plan to support Stadia, and now it seems to have lost its working relationship without private notice. This is not particularly shocking, however, given Google's recent issues with other game developers like the studio behind Terraria.
There seems to be some turbulence behind the scenes with Google and Stadia. Despite trying to reach a wide audience with the platform, it does not look like it got off the ground. Google is scaling back on Stadia not even two years after its initial launch while closing down developers and initially leaving the original Journey to the Savage Planet broken. For now, players may want to consider whether diving into Stadia is going forward.
Journey to the Savage Planet is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, Switch, and Xbox One.
Source: VGC
