Lightspeed LA has laid off 80 people after publisher Tencent decided not to move forward with Last Sentinel, the studio's cyberpunk open-world game, PC Gamer reported, citing Bloomberg. The game has not been cancelled: the studio is continuing work on it without Tencent's backing and plans to "shift the creative and development direction" of the project to meet player expectations.
Last Sentinel was announced at The Game Awards in 2023 and has been in development for six years. Doubts about its state began circulating after a run of promotional videos published last year showed no footage of the game itself, according to PC Gamer's account.
What the game was meant to be
The project was built as an open world set in a vertical city in a cyberpunk Japan, with destructible environments alongside the driving and shooting mix that drew comparisons to Rockstar's open worlds. Bloomberg's reporting, as relayed by PC Gamer, says the team assembled to build it was much smaller than the ones Rockstar has used on its recent games of that scale.
How the project got here
Anonymous sources at Lightspeed described an unclear vision for the game and what they called a "polarizing" approach to management by former Rockstar San Diego studio director Steve Martin, according to the report. The project went through multiple delays and at least one partial reboot over its development.
A poor playtest and an unimpressive demonstration to Tencent executives earlier this year preceded the publisher's decision, the report said. Lightspeed scrambled to assemble an improved version of the game afterwards, but Tencent did not continue with the project.
That leaves Lightspeed LA working on Last Sentinel alone. Neither the size of the remaining team nor a revised release window has been announced, and the studio has not said what the shift in creative direction will involve for a game whose audience was told to expect an open-world rival to Grand Theft Auto.
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