Sony Reportedly Revives Killzone With People Can Fly as Guerrilla Prioritizes Horizon Hunters Gathering Fix First

By CriticalPixel · 2026-09-07

Killzone has been dead in the water for over a decade, and Sony apparently wants to change that. According to a fresh report from IGN, the publisher is in the early stages of bringing its old first person shooter series back from the grave, most likely as a remaster or a remake rather than a brand new sequel. Guerrilla Games built its name on Killzone before pivoting hard into Horizon back in 2017, and the shooter has been sitting untouched since Killzone Shadow Fall launched on PS4 in 2013. Twelve years is a long time to let a franchise gather dust, and the fact that Sony is even poking at it again says something about how thin the PlayStation shooter lineup has gotten.

Killzone Shadow Fall official PlayStation Store cover art

What We Actually Know So Far

The clearest details come from MP1st, which reports the project is being handled with help from an external studio rather than staying purely in house at Guerrilla. The name attached is People Can Fly, the Bulletstorm and Outriders developer that already signed a co-development deal with Sony back in March 2025 on a codenamed project called Delta, built around an existing PlayStation IP. Nobody has confirmed which Killzone game is getting the treatment, but the smart money points at the original 2004 PS2 shooter, the one that got tagged the Halo killer back when that was still a fun marketing angle for Sony to lean into.

Killzone Shadow Fall is still sitting on the PlayStation Store today for twenty bucks, and Killzone Liberation is there too for ten, so the franchise never fully disappeared, it just stopped getting new entries. Shadow Fall actually held onto a decent multiplayer community for years, with servers only shutting down in August 2022, nearly a decade after launch. That kind of staying power is exactly why fans keep asking for this series to come back instead of staying a museum piece on the store front page.

Guerrilla Has a Line to Get Through First

Here is the catch. Guerrilla is not free to just jump on Killzone right now because it is busy cleaning up its own mess. The studio's Horizon multiplayer spinoff, Hunters Gathering, got rebooted after landing to negative feedback, and per IGN's reporting some staff already shifted off that project onto something else with a milestone due by the end of this year. The plan, as MP1st tells it, has Killzone slotted in as Guerrilla's next big focus once Hunters Gathering is stable, which also pushes the still years away Horizon 3 further down the queue behind it.

Killzone Liberation official PlayStation Store cover art

Guerrilla's own art director Roy Postma said back in 2024 that the studio was done with Killzone as a team, describing the shift to Horizon as a deliberate move toward a brighter, more relatable world after a decade in Killzone's grim and violent one. That quote reads very differently now that the series might be getting dragged back out of storage, and it hints at why an outside studio like People Can Fly got the call instead of pulling more Guerrilla staff off Horizon duties.

Fans Are Hyped and Extremely Skeptical at the Same Time

Reaction under the IGN post is a genuine mixed bag. Some replies want a full ground up rebuild in the style of the Oblivion or Resident Evil remakes rather than a simple visual polish job, while others are already rattling off wishlists for Resistance and SOCOM to get the same treatment next. There is real nostalgia in there too, with more than one reply calling Shadow Fall's campaign underrated and pointing out its multiplayer had actual staying power. But plenty of replies are rolling their eyes at Sony specifically, pointing to sluggish movement as Killzone's biggest gameplay flaw compared to Halo, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike, and openly doubting anything will ship for another five years given how early stage this still is. A handful are outright dismissive of Sony's console strategy lately and say nostalgia alone will not get them to buy a PS5. Reaction here is limited to what showed up under one post, so treat it as a temperature check rather than a verdict.

The Critical Pixel Take

Handing a beloved but shelved shooter to an external studio while your own team is stuck firefighting a live service reboot is not a great look, even if People Can Fly has the resume to pull off a competent remaster. The bigger problem is priorities. Sony is choosing to fix a struggling multiplayer spinoff before touching a franchise fans have been begging for since 2013, which tells you exactly where Killzone sits on the internal priority list right now. A remaster of the 2004 original could be a genuinely fun way to reintroduce the series to a PS5 audience that never touched it, but calling this early stage is doing a lot of work. Early stage reports like this one have a habit of turning into years of silence before anything real gets shown, and Sony's own track record on shooters this generation has been rocky at best.

What Happens Next

Nothing here is official. Sony and Guerrilla have not confirmed a Killzone project publicly, and until they do this stays firmly in rumor territory built on sourcing from MP1st and picked up widely by outlets including IGN. The realistic timeline puts any reveal well behind Guerrilla finishing its Hunters Gathering fix, so do not expect a State of Play reveal trailer anytime soon. Still, after years of PlayStation leaning almost entirely on Horizon for shooter adjacent content, even a rumored Killzone remaster is a sign Sony knows its single player shooter bench is looking thin.