Killzone 2 developer Guerrilla Games has shown a strong commitment to regularly updating the high profile PS3 exclusive with improvements, something that managing director Herman Hulst claims is a “strong” part of the Triple A game process.
“Well, we’ve done patches also for Killzone 1, right? Though the systems then were less meant to do these patches, but still, we were able to do that,” explains Hulst. “I was talking to some other guys out of Bungie at GDC on the idea that games don’t ever finish anymore, right? So, you go into this kind of service model, and you keep on improving your game.
“… We’re thinking about continuous improvements to our game. If we find issues, we now have a million-plus people playing the game actively — if you look at the Killzone.com site, [that’s] how many people are playing it. So they’re bound to find issues or cheat. You know, we had an issue with auto-aim being a kind of cheaty solution sometimes, so we fixed that, just to make the experience nice for everybody. I think that will continue for the next half year.
“The Halo guys are working on Halo 3 still two years down the line,” he continues. “I think that’s the kind of model that you’re looking at. The Left 4 Dead guys, I think they did 70 patches or so? And they slip it under the curtain. You don’t see it anymore, with Steam. That’s the way that you need to think about these kinds of things … It’s a strong thing that we listen to our customers and we fix these things when we find them, and just help improve the game continuously.”
It’s certainly great that developers can continue to support their games now, provided we don’t get into a mentality where they feel they can rush out a shoddy product and finish it with patches after the fact. I’m glad that KZ2 continues to get improved, even if updates on the PS3 take ten billion years.
