The Resistance franchise seems to have reached the end of the road as Sony suggests it has no clear plans of keeping the sci-fi horror series of first-person and third-person shooter alive.
During an interview with Official PlayStation Magazine UK, the online producer of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) Daniel Brooke came out and bluntly stated that while it had been a pleasure to work on Resistance: Burning Skies, the most recent title in the franchise, his firm does not seem interested in thinking about the future of the series.
“The Resistance franchise has been exciting to work on, but as for the future we have no definitive plans,” he conceded.
The franchise has been on a somewhat rocky ground ever since the release of its very first title Resistance: Fall of Man for the PlayStation 3. While there was no denying the impressive job that Insomniac Games had done with the development of the game, the over-all experience still left plenty to be desired.
Sony and Insomniac took another shot at the alien-fighting shooter in 2008 while hoping to deliver what the fans had been asking for, but the response did not turn out to be anything close to what they had hoped for.
Going for a different approach by moving the series into a different direction, Sony released Resistance: Retribution, a spin-off of the first title in the series, for its portable device PlayStation Portable (PSP) in 2009. Once again, the response was nothing to boast about.
The franchise returned to PlayStation 3 for the third instalment. It was clearly obvious that a lot of thought had been put into the development of the story and character design. The overall game looked excellent, but once again it failed to bring impressive results.
The CEO of Insomniac Games Ted Price was blunt about the company’s decision to abandon the franchise during an interview at the start of this year.
“We won’t be making any more Resistances,” stated Price.
The studio is currently busy with the development of a four-player cooperative action game Overstrike that was revealed at the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). It is also working on another game, Outernauts, for the social networking website Facebook.
With Insomniac Games separating itself from the Resistance franchise, Sony kept the series alive by bringing Nihilistic Software on-board to release Resistance: Burning Skies for PlayStation Vita. The decent marketing campaign led to above-average sales, but the game failed to thoroughly impress the critics.
The response to Resistance: Burning Skies seemed to have finally conveyed the message loud and clear to Sony. Despite its persistent efforts, the firm failed to make the franchise into something special. It now appears that Sony has decided to call it a day and shift their focus to seemingly more promising projects.
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