Hitman studio IO Interactive is going out of its comfort zone with an online fantasy game

gamepur.com:

IO Interactive, the development studio most well known for its work on the Hitman franchise, is starting to tease one of their incoming projects in a post looking for more people to join their team. While unnamed and with very few details at this point, we know that the game is a new IP set in an online fantasy RPG world.

Just speaking speculatively on the art shown in the tweet above, Project Fantasy, as it is referred to in the developer’s Twitter bio, looks to allow at least three people to party up and go on an adventure. As you would expect, this is a big departure for the studio, with their blog post noting the new game “expands our creativity, our capabilities, and in some sense our identity.” Seemingly, the game is built up to be a live service game, with them referencing that they plan to add to it as time goes on. Unfortunately, like their upcoming Project 007, there is no real time frame for when you can expect to see this game in action, but it is likely still in the early stages of development.

While this is the first time we have seen IOI talk publically about this upcoming game, it has been mentioned in passing before. Windows Central’s Jez Corden has spoken in the past about the team working on an Xbox-exclusive game with dragons in it. While we should note that Xbox was never mentioned in the blog post above, this would almost certainly be that game in development.

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While Project Fantasy definitely is a new direction for IO Interactive, they have proven their ability to make a successful live service game already with Hitman World of Assassination. The big question for us is how they can handle making a strictly multiplayer game. In the