Killzone: Mercenary Update Plans Outlined, Include Maps And Botzone

It's been a big year for the Killzone series with Mercenary launching in the early fall on the PlayStation Vita and Shadow Fall hitting the PlayStation 4 as a launch title. Now it looks like that trend will be continuing into 2014 as Guerrilla Cambridge announces plans for upcoming DLC to be added to their portable outing.

Earlier this year, the folks at Guerrilla Games announced that all level-based DLC for Shadow Fall would come with a skimpy price tag of zero dollars. Rather than segment the audience in a shooter that, let's face it, isn't pulling down Call of Duty numbers, the team announced that any new maps added to the multiplayer portion of their FPS would be provided free of charge.

Now it looks like Guerrilla Cambridge is taking a page from the same book, as a recent announcement highlights update plans for Mercenary over the next several months, including two free DLC maps for the portable shooter.

If you missed out on the review from a few months back, I was pretty dang impressed with Killzone: Mercenary on the Vita. The story was enough to carry the game through while the shooting was a lot of fun. The multiplayer mode succeeded in its own right, though, offering up a unique spin on the Killzone competitive formula spread across three modes and six maps. Not a heck of a lot of content by console shooter standards, but it got the job done on the go.

The community has thinned out a bit over the past several months, though you can still find a match without much muss or fuss. The simple fact of the matter is that, while solid, there simply wasn't enough depth to the multiplayer options to keep a gammer hooked for months on end. Also, with the launch of three major console FPS' recently, it's likely many of Mercenary's followers have since moved on to the latest flavor of the week.

Guerrilla Cambridge is hoping to entice everyone back, however, as Senior Producer Mark Green outlines upcoming patches and additions to the game that should make any shooting fan happy.

While Mercenary and its past couple of updates eat up quite a bit of memory card space on the Vita, the first upcoming update aims to reduce those file sizes by about 800MB. Great news, for those of us who want to keep more than a couple of games on our miniscule Vita cards.

Update four is set for January and is planned to improve matchmaking and connectivity online, as well as throwing in a team-rebalancing feature for good measure.

Following that, update five will offer up a pair of brand new multiplayer maps for free, as well as the highly requested offline Botzone. That means you'll be able to get more mileage out of your game when you're away from internet access and keep the fight alive years from now when online matches are even harder to come by.

The sixth and final mentioned update is set for early 2014 and will further refine the game, as well as add in additional support for Vita TV for those regions with access to the device.