Killzone: Mercenary may not get all the attention of a big console first-person shooter, but Guerrilla Cambridge’s commitment to the game’s continued post-launch development deserves every PlayStation Vita owner’s support and admiration.
Mercenary has already been updated twice since its launch in September. Between now and the first few months of 2014, Guerrilla Cambridge is aiming to post another four patches to add new content, address specific technical concerns, and further hone the balance of the game’s robust multiplayer mode. Basically, every complaint mentioned in our recent discussion review will be fixed.
For Vita owners desperate to save as much precious memory card space as possible (like me!), Update 3 should prove to be the most important update of them all. Update 3, scheduled to release sometime in the next few weeks, will replace the two previous updates and drastically reduce the game’s massive digital footprint. It’s expected to shave the file size down by around 800MB. That’s huge!
Update 4 will follow up the file size reduction in January. It’s aim will be to improve matchmaking, reduce ongoing connectivity problems, and–finally!–introduce an auto team-rebalancing feature.
Once some of the lingering technical issues are corrected, Guerrilla Cambridge will set its sights on giving gamers new gameplay content to enjoy. To that end, Update 5 will expand multiplayer with two new maps (seen in the screenshots on this page) and introduce a Botzone option for playing Mercenary and Guerrilla Warfare multiplayer modes offline against AI bots.
Last but not least, Update 6 will be used for any leftover clean up and refinement work that needs to be done, and to implement support for Vita TV. So wait, is that confirmation that Vita TV is coming west? Possibly, but nothing concrete has been announced. Killzone: Mercenary is available in Japan so the Vita TV update could just apply to that region. I’m sure Vita TV will eventually make it stateside, but don’t read too much into this and get too excited just yet, folks.
New Killzone: Mercenary Updates Coming, Free Multiplayer Maps [Killzone.com]