When I talked about the five gaming IPs I feel Sony should look into bringing back on the PS4, Resistance was one of the franchises I named. While the series was, for most of its life, a bit confused about exactly what it wanted to be, by the time Resistance 3 came out, it had settled into the comfortable niche of providing engaging and high quality first person shooter campaigns.
But by then it was too late, and we haven’t received any Resistance game since, unless we count the disastrous Vita spin-off Resistance: Burning Skies. Insomniac themselves have gone on to do bigger and better things, such as Sunset Overdrive on Xbox One, Ratchet and Clank on PS4, and the upcoming Spider-Man game for the PS4.
So, are they ever going to return to Resistance at this point? Speaking to Finder, James Stevenson of Insomniac said that while it’s unwise to ever say “never”, it feels like a long shot that the studio would return to that series.
“It feels like it’s a long shot to me,” he said. “But I have learned over the years to never say never. I think there are a lot of people out there that have fond memories of a Resistance game from the PS3 era, but yeah, never say never, it’s just that we have no plans to make another Resistance game in the future.”
Okay, so if Insomniac is not returning to the franchise for the foreseeable future, what are their thoughts on some other studio tackling it? Stevenson rightly pointed out that Insomniac doesn’t actually get a say in that, since it’s Sony who owns the IP.
“Obviously other developers made the portable versions for the PSP and Vita back in the day. It’s actually Sony that owns the IP and owns that universe. So I guess if they were really passionate about making Resistance 4 and we couldn’t or didn’t want to do it, Sony could totally engage another developer. But that would be up to Sony, not us.”
So, that’s that- basically, at this point, if you want to see a new Resistance game, the ball is totally in Sony’s court, not Insomniac’s. I guess we should hope Sony will want a quality shooter in its pantheon, then. Resistance would certainly fit the bill.