Cancelled plans for Sleeping Dogs 2 were ridiculously ambitious

We'll likely never see a Sleeping Dogs 2 now developer United Front Games has been shut down - but plans were once very much afoot for the open world crime drama to get a sequel.

We've heard of UFG's plans before, but Waypoint's new deep dive into the sequel's design document is by far the most detailed account yet of what Sleeping Dogs 2 might have been.

And wow, it was ambitious.

First off, you'd have a big new open world and the return of Sleeping Dogs' main character Wei Shen, now based in China's Pearl River Megacity.

Wei Shen would also have a corrupt partner, Henry Fang, and action would play out from both points of view to tell stories which would only fully reveal themselves when you had played both sections.

Sleeping Dogs 2 would have also featured co-op play and a companion app where you could influence the main game's overworld by bringing in things like helicopters - which sounds like the original Watch Dogs.

Most ambitious of all? UFG wanted to use "the cloud saves of all players to determine the global neighborhood crime levels across all games, and then mapping that crime to the difficulty level in policing those neighborhoods in the individual's games".

I have no idea how this would work.

It's worth remembering that these ideas are from the game's pre-production design document and may well have been scaled back had the game been officially greenlit.

Sadly, Sleeping Dogs 2 never entered full production.

In happier news - the original Sleeping Dogs' Definitive Edition will be free to download and play on Xbox One via Games with Gold in December.