Troy Baker’s cyberpunk answer to GTA 6 has been stuck in development hell for six years

A Bloomberg investigation has detailed the troubled six-year development of Last Sentinel, a cyberpunk open-world game from Tencent's Lightspeed LA studio that was internally pitched as a rival to Grand Theft Auto. The project, which involved actor Troy Baker as performance director, has repeatedly stalled despite huge investment, culminating in Lightspeed LA laying off developers in July as it rethinks the game's direction. The saga highlights the difficulty even a well-funded studio can face in matching the scale and ambition of a title like GTA 6.

Revealed in 2023 as an ambitious AAA open-world game, Last Sentinel proved too complex for Lightspeed LA's comparatively small team and was hampered by what Bloomberg described as "polarising" leadership, leading to repeated delays, missed deadlines and costs running into hundreds of millions of dollars. A playtest earlier this year drew mostly negative feedback, and a subsequent revised demo also failed to satisfy Tencent executives, prompting the layoff of around 80 staff on 28 July. Lightspeed LA says the game continues under a new "creative and development direction" likely to abandon the open-world sandbox format, though no release window has been set.