While a rumoured reboot of the Twisted Metal franchise is believed to have been cancelled for over a year at this point, a new report indicates that it would have been a massive departure in gameplay from its predecessors. According to Mp1st, a UI programmer on the cancelled project described the game he worked on as Project Copper.
Among the details revealed through the description of the title is the fact that it was “a classic PlayStation IP”, which would indicate that it was indeed a Twisted Metal game. Interestingly, it would feature third-person combat alongside traditional vehicle-based combat. The title was also seemingly developed using Unreal Engine 5.
The programmer also showed off a few blurry screenshots of the pre-release version of the game with a prominent “Under NDA” watermark on top, which revealed that there would indeed be on-foot action as well. The description for the title said that the primary objective was “to be the last one standing,” which would indicate that it would have been a battle royale game.
Reports of the game being cancelled surfaced back in February 2024 alongside layoffs that affected around 900 employees throughout Sony’s studios. The same layoffs also affected major studios like Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog and Guerrilla Games alongside Firesprite.
While the Twisted Metal reboot was believed to have been originally under development by Lucid Games – the studio behind Destruction AllStars – a job listing discovered back in February 2023 indicated that Firespirte was handling development of the title.
Twisted Metal‘s reboot was believed to have been a live-service game, likely under PlayStation’s push to release more live-service titles a few years ago. Since then, however, it’s backed off the idea.
Last year saw the release of Concord, which failed hard enough that servers shut down within less than a month of its launch. Its failure has been a pretty big deal at PlayStation’s studios, and reportedly prompted the cancellation of projects at Bluepoint Games and Bend Studio.
Among the list of cancelled live-service projects at PlayStation’s studios include The Last of Us Online, and even a multiplayer component for Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida also spoke about this push for live-service games, saying that he would have pushed back against this focus at PlayStation. He spoke about how Sony should have continued to focus on its single-player story-centric games that have been critically and commercially successful.
“I was managing this annual budget and was responsible for allocating resources to what kind of games to make,” said Yoshida in an interview back in January after leaving Sony. “If the company is considering that way, it probably wouldn’t have made sense to stop making another God of War or whatever, like a great single-player game, and put all the money into these service games.”
Currently, the only live-service success story at Sony has been Helldivers 2, which is available on PC and PS5.
