Moon Studios Next Game (Moving on from Ori)
Moon Studios Next Game (Moving on from Ori)
Moon Studios are on the shortlist of game developers that seemingly came out of nowhere and established themselves as one of the best indie studios around. Other studios that I would consider on this list include Team Cherry, Studio MDHR, Mojang, and playdead. These are studios that with their debut title, disrupted the norm and garnered attention from the whole industry.
So what is Moon Studios up to now?
We can take a look at their fairly short development history to search for patterns and then comb through some things that members of the team have said in interviews and on social media to try to predict when we might see the third game from Moon.
Will There Be Another Ori?
On March 11, 2015, Ori and The Blind Forest was released and was easily one of the bright spots of the Xbox One generation, especially early on. Ori and The Blind Forest was a commercial and critical success winning awards, receiving mostly 9’s or above from review outlets and according to the founder of the studio, became profitable within a week of release.
Obviously, Moon Studios partnered up with Microsoft again and exactly five years later on March 11, 2020 released Ori and The Will of the Wisps. Unsurprisingly, the sequel was bigger and better in most ways and went on, once again, to critical and commercial acclaim.
Thomas Mahler, co-founder of Moon Studios has said that while a third game in the series is a likely possibility, it’s not happening at the moment as the team is focused on moving in a new direction.
Third Game in The Third Dimension.
Funny enough, one of the other studios that appear to be moving parallel to Moon is playdead who is also moving to 3D for their third game. This was discovered in a job posting alongside the invitation that states ““if you’re into Zelda, Diablo or Souls…we’ve got something awesome brewing”
Moon Studios hasn’t stopped there when describing their third game ““Ori was our Mario, this is our Zelda”. Now they have listed Zelda, Mario, and Diablo to help describe the game they are working on. They have only developed two Metroidvanias in their short time as a studio, so either they are on to something big or are very oblivious to think that their next game should be named alongside three of the greatest gaming franchises ever.
There has to be something about dominating the 2D gaming environment and wanting to prove to the world that you are capable of more. “Our next project is a make or break moment for Moon. Either we manage to revolutionize the ARPG genre or we’ll slowly fade away into the distance” said Mahler.
When talking about their first two games Thomas Mahler said “ I usually don’t replay games after spending thousands of hours on them. Our ARPG will be our first game that I will happily re-play again and again and that feels awesome to me”
Private Division will be publishing this time around as reports indicated that Microsoft passed due to toxic workplace allegations that arose shortly after the release of Will of the Wisps. However, Microsoft did acquire Activision Blizzard and felt like they would be able to help with those workplace problems, which does lead me to believed that there was other reasons that Microsoft might not have wanted to publish Moon’s third game.
Moon Studios and the Third Game.
The good news is that Moon Studios was founded with one of the core elements of the studio being remote work, which means that the pandemic likely affected them much less than many other studios. The CEO of the studio has said that their office policy is: We don’t have an office.
Looking at their release cadence in their short existence, Moon Studios were able to release their second game, exactly five years after their debut. Releasing their third game on March 11, 2025 doesn’t seem out of the question because even though, they are building this game from scratch, instead of iterating on an existing game like Will of the Wisps, they began prototyping this game back in 2015 and they also have been increasing in size ever since.