Guerrillarecently confirmed that itmoved on from Killzone a long time ago. That isn’t surprising. The studio had been continuously working on Killzone games from the early ‘00s through the launch ofKillzone Shadow Fallin 2013.
Guerrilla (or rather, offshoot Guerrilla Cambridge) developed six Killzone games in a decade, which would be enough to make any developer ready to try something new. Especially since the series never lived up to its ‘Halokiller’ hype and largely received middling reviews from critics and relatively apathy from the mainstream audience it tried so hard to capture.
Guerrilla May Be Done With Killzone, But Sony Shouldn’t Be
When Guerrilla decamped toHorizon, it seemed to unlock something artistically for the studio, and was rewarded critically and commercially for its efforts. I understand why Guerrilla wants to continue to focus on Aloy and her post-post-apocalyptic exploits. But it was a bad move onSony’s part to let Killzone lie fallow for 11 years, and it will be a really bad move to continue not investing in the series' future.
I’m not writing this as a Killzone fanboy. In fact, I’ve never played any of those games. I don’t have a dog in this fight, outside of wanting more FPS games with campaigns. But Killzone represents a pretty huge gap in Sony’s exclusive offerings. The PS5 has no games, as the meme goes, but itreallydoesn’t have first-person shooters — in fact, when Sony finally released a multiplayer FPS, it was thennuked from existence two weeks later.
Even setting theConcorddebacle aside, Sony has largely focused on one kind of game: third-person narrative action-adventures. I count 34 games published by Sony (barring games only published by Sony in certain regions), and there is a major trend in the kind of game the company puts out. Of those 34 games, 21 are in third-person (I’m not counting Ratchet, Sackboy, or Astro here; though they have a similar perspective, they’re 3D platformers, which is a meaningful difference). Of those 21, 20 are action-focused.
Until Dawnis the non-action outlier here.
Also among those 21 games, 19 are single-player. On top of that, nine of the games on the list are remakes, remasters, or complete editions. There are three first-person games on the list, but two are in VR (Firewall Ultra, Horizon: Call of the Mountain) and the other one (Concord) has been Thanos-snapped out of existence.
Sony Needs Games To Fill The FPS Niche
Sony has absolutely nothing to fill the Killzone niche. You can play Call of Duty on your PS5, of course, but that isn’t selling any systems. With a PC, you can basically play every FPS that comes out. Sony has cornered the market on third-person action, but if you like other kinds of games (or you played Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us, The Last of Us Part 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Death Stranding, Demon’s Souls, Nioh and Nioh 2 on the consoles they originally released on), the PS5 doesn’t have much to offer.
Resurrecting Killzone would be a chance to change that, to diversify the console’s lineup and bring new and lapsed players on board. The last game launched when Halo was still a juggernaut, just a year after Halo 4, but single-player FPS games don’t need to kill Halo anymore. Microsoft has struggled to get new Halo games out the door, and struggled to support them when it has. The series is no longer the benchmark by which all shooters are judged, and the dearth of new releases would make a new Killzone more exciting than it ever was during Guerrilla’s run with the series. For genre fans, any single-player FPS with a triple-A budget and production values would be water in the desert.
Astro Bot was a reminder that Sony can still make quality games, but it wasalso a reminder of the wide variety of games the company used to make. It showed that it can still put out an incredible 3D platformer, but the other genres it has left languishing still desperately need a revival.
