Veteran developer Simon Larouche has returned to Guerrilla Games, which is apparently three years into working on a secret, unrevealed game, leaving many to wonder if a new Killzone could be in the works. The studio is still working to finish Horizon Forbidden West, which is schedule to release on PlayStation 4 and 5 by the end of 2021.
Simon Larouche's credits in the game industry reach back to 1997, when he began as a CG artist in Montreal. By 2000, he had become a designer, working on games like Monsters Inc. and Far Cry: Instinct for Behaviour Interactive and Ubisoft. He first joined Guerrilla Games in 2006, moving to Amsterdam to spend three years working on Killzone 2. Before his current project at the studio, he returned to Montreal to work with Ubisoft on Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Rainbow Six: Siege, and Watch Dogs 2. Interestingly, his resume also reveals he spent a year with Eidos-Montréal on an abandoned multiplayer component for Guardians of the Galaxy.
Back in Amsterdam since February 2018, Larouche is now a director on a "TBA" title, according to his LinkedIn profile as highlighted by Wccftech. "Secret Game is Secret," he writes. One possibility is a new Killzone, since the second one is Larouche's only credit with Guerrilla and one of the most popular entries in the FPS series. It has been dormant since 2013's Killzone: Shadow Fall, even though that was the first PS4 game to sell more than a million copies. Guerrilla then switched focus to Horizon Zero Dawn, and Forbidden West was announced in June 2020 alongside the reveal of the PS5.
An implication of Larouche's work is that Guerrilla has grown large enough to have parallel teams developing games simultaneously. Another is that his project is probably months (or perhaps even weeks) away from being announced, as it's now rare for a title to spend three years in development without some form of teaser being shown publicly. Guerrilla's unnamed game will likely be revealed at a forthcoming PlayStation State of Play event, likely by the end of 2021. That reveal could potentially come alongside a confirmation of the Ghost of Ikishima standalone expansion rumored to be in development at sister studio Sucker Punch Productions.
One potential argument against a new Killzone is that Guerrilla may be tired of the franchise, since it was the only property the studio worked on between 2004 and 2013. A second is that three years of clandestine development would be consistent with trying to start up a new IP altogether. By the same token, though, Killzone is a blockbuster property that might warrant the same amount of work and secrecy. Killzone 2 was famously a showcase for the PS3 and Sony might be aiming to repeat that with a new Killzone for the PS5.
Sources: LinkedIn (via Wccftech)
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