Acquiring some design documents pertaining to its development, Waypoint has revealed some information about the planned sequel for Sleeping Dogs, United Front Games’ ambitious sandbox game set in contemporary Hong Kong. Plans for Sleeping Dogs 2 were set in motion in early 2013, with the game following on straight after the events of the original Sleeping Dogs, as undercover agent Wei Shen joins up with a “conflicted and corrupt partner” called Henry Fang.
While Sleeping Dogs 2 may never come to light, here are our top 15 sandbox games which may fill that void.
Players could select between the two officers, with each character offering a different way of tackling a story mission. In an example taken from the design document, Wei’s path through a mission may involve “busting heads” to gain information about a case, while Fang could plant evidence by “breaking into a suspect’s house”. Sleeping Dogs 2 also planned to use a player’s phone as part of the game, with a free Sleeping Dogs 2 app allowing people to summon police patrols to help them out in a mission.
United Front Games titled Sleeping Dogs 2 as a “massively single player experience”, where individual players’ cities would be impacted by decisions made by multiple people. This system had not proceed past the conceptual stage, but it planned to use cloud saves to determine the “global neighborhood crime levels across all games” and then tweak your game’s neighbourhood to reflect the overall trends in crime.
Unfortunately, Square Enix never greenlit the sequel and Sleeping Dogs 2 was cancelled in late 2013. At this point, United Front had not proceeded past making some very early prototypes so the game’s core design was still subject to change. From all the potential presented in these design documents, Sleeping Dogs 2 sounds like a fantastic open world game which was never allowed a chance, due to the middling success of the original Sleeping Dogs. Make sure to read the whole expose over on Waypoint and let’s hope Square Enix looks after this old dog in the future.