The game development studio at Innersloth stumbled upon something big that had quite the delayed reaction in fan-acceptance, mirroring the classic gameplay style of Trouble In Terrorist Town which began as a Counter-Strike mod that was then adopted with stronger implementation of gameplay mechanics in Garry’s Mod.
In essence, players attempt to kill others within the game without being caught by innocent players, which inevitably escalates into hilarious accusations and big-brain plays as everyone argues about who could have possibly killed whom.
Innersloth took this essence of gameplay, and spun it into a serviceable title where players operate as androgynous characters on a space station, where those noted as crewmembers need to complete tasks to win, and imposters need to kill crew members without raising any suspicion (lest they be thrown out of an airlock into the infinite vacuum of space).
The title released on November 16, 2018, and enjoyed a relatively quiet, yet positive, launch. Fast forward by a year and a half, and everyone on Twitch is playing Among Us with parties of ten streamers all attempting to baffle each other while murdering.
From xQc to Fl0m, Myth to BikeMan, Among Us has suddenly turned into one of the most popular titles on Twitch and there are zero signs of it slowing down anytime soon.
Innersloth has noted in the past that they’re looking at creating Among Us 2 to bring about a more serviceable iteration of the title; currently, movement a bit iffy and the artistic design is…serviceable, yet isn’t necessarily turning heads.
Exciting news!https://t.co/W2TyA4O1hC
— Innersloth 🦥 (@InnerslothDevs) September 23, 2020
Among Us 2 was the plan for weeks now, to help the studio offer a cleaner title that doesn’t contain ‘spaghetti code’ and various machinations of developers just eager to make the title work and get it out the door.
‘We’ll fix it live’ seemed to have been the de facto sentiment for Innersloth.
Yesterday evening, however, Innersloth launched interesting news: Among Us 2 has been canceled, and they’re redoubling efforts to bring Among Us into a more stable and satisfactory release in light of it’s exploding popularity.
From servers to an in-game friend system (and even a new stage), Innersloth has pulled back the curtain in their blog post on what will be a massive slew of upgrades and balances as the development studio refocuses on the title that has recently received a wealth of attention. The news has been received with various attitudes; some note that it would likely be better for the studio to simply restart from the ground up if the aforementioned ‘spaghetti code’ is as bad as implied.
Others are static that Innersloth won’t be taking this new-found sense of popularity and churning out another title with microtransactions and new mechanics, as the gaming industry is wont to do when one of their titles is received well.
Innersloth notes that they are beginning work immediately and folding planned features of Among Us 2 into the current title, and they will keep the community abreast of updates as they’re ready to roll out. You can purview the blog post yourself at Innersloth’s home on Itch.io, here: https://innersloth.itch.io/among-us/devlog/181107/the-future-of-among-us