Team Ninja will be increasing development on a few unannounced titles this year. In an interview with Video Games Chronicle, Producer Fumihiko Yasuda confirmed Ninja Gaiden is not one of them. He also clarified that there are currently no plans for a sequel in the Nioh franchise.
Yasuda has always wanted to make a new instalment in the Ninja Gaiden series, but at the moment he hasn’t gotten the green light to make the game. However, protagonist Ryu Hayabusa might be making an appearance elsewhere in the meantime. In an interview with TheGamer, Yasuda confirmed he’d “definitely like to have him make an appearance again in a game coming soon” with more details on this to be announced as soon as possible.
At the end of last year, Yasuda confirmed to that the Nioh series had already reached a resting point, although we weren’t sure what that meant. Next month, The Nioh Collection will be released on PlayStation 5 and he confirmed this will be the last we’ll see in the franchise for quite a while. The story that was told between the two games is now complete with all of the loose ends tidied up. At the moment, there are no plans for a sequel but this doesn’t mean it’s something the team won’t ever consider for the future.
If the team was to consider a sequel, it wouldn’t be set in the Sengoku period. Team Ninja feels like they’ve done as much as they can with this period; this also rules out a potential spin-off with other game characters like Yasuke the Black Samurai. Even the DLC for Nioh 2 stretched into the Heian period. Any potential Nioh sequel would be set in a different time period, or even in a completely different setting altogether.
Elsewhere, the PlayStation 5’s SSD drive has decreased loading times to the point where open world games have become more accessible to developers. An open world title is something Team Ninja would like to tackle but, again, not right now. The team would want to put their own spin on the genre, creating a title with “a lot of intensity” that is “really action-packed from beginning to end”. It’s another potential idea for the future.
In the meantime, The Nioh Collection will be available on February 5. In celebration of Nioh 2 Remastered – The Complete Edition being part of that collection, all Nioh 2 players can grab two new armor sets for free between February 5 and February 26.
[Source: Video Games Chronicle, TheGamer]
