Among Us Developers Abandon Sequel Plans and Commit to Updating the Original

Among Us, the Mafia-esque party game that's been dominating the viewer charts on Twitch, has led to a pretty odd summer for its developers Innersloth. Faced with a sudden surge in popularity for a game it had decided to stop updating, the team announced a sequel. Now, a little over a month later, Innersloth has come up with a different plan for Among Us: no more sequel, put all those features and improvements into the original.

Simple in concept, elegant in execution, and wrapped in a mid-aughts Flash game aesthetic, Among Us casts players as astronauts on a spaceship with a pressing problem: there's a murderer (or murderers) in their group. Impostors in the crew are tasked with killing off other crew members, then covering for their actions when group meetings convene to decide whether or not to eject someone from the ship under suspicion of murder. Originally released in 2018 as a mobile, local play-only experience, the PC release and the gameplay's perfect fit for big-personality streamers have helped it explode over the past few months.

That arc prompted the announcement of Among Us 2 in August, with Innersloth citing the server woes that Among Us now routinely experiences ("it really was not created to be this big") as a reason to start anew. After further consideration, Innersloth is sticking with the original and is committed to fixing it up.

"All of the content we had planned for Among Us 2 will instead go into Among Us 1," developer Marcus "PuffballsUnited" Bromander writes. "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. We have lots of things planned and we're excited to bring new content to everyone as you continue to enjoy playing!"

Besides server improvements, Innersloth plans on adding color blindness accessibility features, a friends system, and a new stage.

Hopefully, it won't be long until Among Us is more stable and crews don't have to embrace workarounds like picking different server regions to get games going. Until then, bear with it and keep working on improving your poker face.