Killzone Shadow Fall

» see killzone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Every console launch needs the game in the demo kiosk, the one that decides somebody at the counter. On 15 November 2013 the PlayStation 4 went on sale in North America and that game was Killzone Shadow Fall. Guerrilla Games had been making the series since 2004 and this was the entry with the hardest job in it, and it did the job: over 2.1 million copies by 2 March 2014, which for a launch title with no installed base to sell into is a strong number. Europe got the console and the game together on 29 November.

The fiction had moved on thirty years from the earlier games. Helghast survivors and Vekta natives now shared one planet split by a wall, which let the studio build a shooter that looked like a clean bright city instead of the grey war zone the series was known for. The multiplayer that shipped with it had ten maps, and Guerrilla then released every additional competitive map for free rather than behind a pass, which in 2013 was an unusual position for a first-party publisher to take.

Then nothing. There has not been another Killzone. Guerrilla spent the rest of the generation building Horizon Zero Dawn, and by the time anyone thought to ask about the franchise again the studio had a much bigger one.

~ the dossier ~

~ 12 august 2022 ~

Guerrilla announced the shutdown in July 2022 and executed it on 12 August. Three games went at once. Killzone Shadow Fall on PS4 and Killzone Mercenary on the Vita were the two Guerrilla titles, and the third was RIGS: Mechanized Combat League, the PlayStation VR launch game the same studio had put out in 2016. Shadow Fall's Intercept co-op mode went with the competitive side, because it ran through the same servers.

One announcement retired the online half of a console franchise plus two platform launch titles, on the same afternoon. It went out as a tweet.

~ the maps they gave away ~

Worth putting on the record, since there is nobody left to play them. Every competitive map released after launch was free. The Cruiser and The Hangar arrived that way, Canyon and The Statue followed, and the co-op side got maps on the same terms. A studio spent two years shipping unpaid content into a multiplayer mode that nobody can reach now.

~ the ps salonu ~

Console shooters reached me in Turkey mostly through the PlayStation salonu, the rented-by-the-hour console rooms that sat alongside the internet cafés and outlasted them. I was twenty nine when this launched and past the age for either, but the thing those rooms ran was FIFA, then Call of Duty, then more FIFA. Killzone was never on that rotation. It was a game people knew as the reason to buy the machine rather than as a game anyone was playing, and if your relationship with a console is hourly, you never buy the machine.

killzone.com still resolves and drops you on the PlayStation homepage for whatever country you happen to be in. There is no landing page for the series behind it anymore, just the shop.

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