Silly rumor smash: Naughty Dog not working on Killzone 3

You might have heard that Uncharted developer Naughty Dog was working on the engine for Guerilla Games’s Killzone 3. Well, you heard wrong.

“It’s not true,” Game Director Herman Hulst told me in an interview at a recent Killzone 3 event.

When asked where that rumor (which was published as fact by a number of outlets) had come from, Hulst seemed shocked, telling me “I have no idea. I talked to [Naughty Dog co-president] Evan Wells yesterday about it; he had no idea either.”

“We talk to Naughty Dog a lot about the general development process,” he explains, “mostly about concepts and ideas for technology. And each team has their own technology groups; each team develops their own engine… there are some tools that we share. That’s a two way thing. But stating that one team is developing the engine for another is way too big of a story; it’s more of a conceptual thing, back and forth.”

Not that the game needed much help in the visual department — Killzone 3, even in its early state (the game ships in 2011) looks stellar. Hulst says the scope of the game is just larger all around, with the demo area I got my hands on being 10-times bigger than any one area from Killzone 2. Check out my hands-on details and impressions of the game, which I played in both 2D and 3D.