Among Us, the viral online multiplayer game, was released in 2018 — two years ago. But its popularity peaked recently, in 2020. Developer InnerSloth had already announced a sequel, Among Us 2. But because of the substantial growth of Among Us, InnerSloth is canceling Among Us 2 — to work on improving Among Us.
In a blog post published Wednesday, InnerSloth described the code base for Among Us as “outdated,” and said it had been hoping to adjust it in a sequel. But the original game’s popularity has skyrocketed with a massive influx of players recently, and InnerSloth is choosing, instead of creating a sequel, to bring Among Us up to speed. In a post from earlier in the year, InnerSloth said Among Us had amassed 70,000 to 110,000 users per hour — up from 30-50 players per hour when the game was originally released.
“All of the content we had planned for Among Us 2 will instead go into Among Us 1,” InnerSloth said. “This is probably the more difficult choice because it means going deep into the core code of the game and reworking several parts of it.”
InnerSloth outlined a bunch of features coming to the game, but didn’t provide timing.
* Servers. Forte is still working very hard to figure out our server issues. We don’t have an ETA but things should hopefully be getting better and better. This is taking up all development time on his end.
* Colorblind support. It’s something we’ve put off for way too long… We plan on adding other identifiers for players as well as certain color focused tasks (Like wires). This should also open the potential for more colors. In the past we couldn’t add more colors because it became too difficult to tell players apart.
* Friends/Account System. This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time but just haven’t been able to tackle. For the health of the game going forward we’re going to sink our teeth in and figure it out! This one will definitely take some time.
* A new stage! It is still very early and we have only just begun designing the layout. The theme has been settled on though! The next stage in Among Us is going to be a Henry Stickmin themed location!
There’s more under wraps, according to InnerSloth. “We just need to prioritize and organize all our plans,” the studio said.
