Sony-owned studio Guerrilla Games has confirmed it has begun work on a new IP now that some staff are finished with PlayStation 4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall.
In an interview with Eurogamer at EGX 2013, lead designer Eric Boltjes said the Shadow Fall team were keen to branch out into other types of games, and work on doing so has started.
"I can be true about it, yes. That's definitely what's happening right now. I can't tell you what we're thinking of but yes," he said.
"As a studio we do want to branch out, and we have started work on a new IP, something completely different to Killzone. I don't want to say anything about it right now, but as a studio we do want to keep it fresh."
Starting work on a new game before the current game is released is a development cycle that mimics Guerrilla's strategy of moving on to Killzone: Shadow Fall on PlayStation 4 before Killzone 3 was released on PlayStation 3.
A few months before Killzone 3 launched in February 2011 its designers began working on the follow-up - what would eventually become Shadow Fall.
And now, with Shadow Fall's November release nearing, designers have once again started work on a new game, but this time it's not a game in the Killzone series, rather a new intellectual property.
"Usually what happens is at the end of a game people start to roll off," Boltjes explained.
"The artists and the coders work the longest, and then QA. But the designers, at some point their work is done. They're not allowed to touch the game because that changes everything for all other departments.
"So about three to four months before you ship, the designers sit down and think, what can we do for the next one.
"That happened then [with Killzone 3 to Shadow Fall] as well. So, about three years ago we went into that phase. The really tricky part about that phase is not trying to do too much. You have a room full of people and they all have a different idea of what they want to change about the game. They can't do everything, especially if you only have two-and-a-half years to build it.
"So it's streamlining that process of what we want to do to this is what we're actually going to do. That's the tricky part."
Predictably, Boltjes declined to go into detail on what Guerrilla has up its sleeve, but as a part of Sony's Worldwide Studios network, we can be sure it'll lead on PlayStation platforms.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-09-30-killzone-dev-guerrilla-confirms-work-on-new-ip-has-begun
