Killzone 2: Exclusive Guerilla Interview

Another meaty Killzone 2 feature - we talk to Guerilla's Eric Boltjes and Angie Smets to get every last drop of detail...

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Kikizo: How flexible is this feature? Can you set a game up so that, say, only fellow team members could hear you?

Boltjes: The way it works is that besides the squad channels we've talked about you also have a proximity channel, and that's based on distance and how loud you speak. So what happens is that if you're talking to your team and an enemy's nearby, he can hear you as well. It's a gameplay element in that sense. We realise that some people can be quite annoying with headsets - yelling and stuff - so you can mute any player you want at any time.

Kikizo: Clan support is still quite a rarity for a console FPS. There's hardly any in Halo 3, for instance...

Boltjes: Yeah, that's quite unique for us - we offer the "Valor" points system, tournaments and so forth.

Kikizo: I'm sure veteran shooter fans who like to excel will enjoy putting together a clan, topping the Valor listings, but let's say you're a member of an average clan in the middle of a thousand others - what's going to make the experience fun for you?

Boltjes: I think what the Valor system does in general is that it segregates the market, that's the thing - if you only have ten points and you're quite a noob, you're only going to play small matches, and you'll slowly build up more points. But what the Valor system also does is you can almost do "all or nothing" games. Tonight we're going to bet all our points, if we lose, tough, but if we win, we're going to go up like a thousand ranks. So for the lowly clans I think it's getting up the ladder, I think that's really going to be interesting... As well as that, playing clan, having a team base, is always fun anyway. Playing as a team, team tactics - the hardcore players like doing that, even though they're not playing for a leaderboard position, they're just playing for fun.

Kikizo: The maps we've been playing in the beta are really impressive - we're struck by how you've managed to accommodate five entirely different game types per area without anything feeling forced. How much polishing did it take to achieve that?

Smets: We do a lot of play-testing internally. We have a "Friday Fragfest" where every Friday afternoon at five we play the game... It's a really good way of testing all the mechanics, you know, you just gradually add all your features onto it, but also to play-test your maps. What we did when the guys finished the campaign level that we showed at E3 2007 was that we took the environment and we made some small changes, and then we play-tested it for about six weeks, making sure we got the layout right and that there were enough routes, and to take care of all the spawn-camping that is usually one of the things in multiplayer you really need to think about.

Kikizo: When Killzone 2 comes out I suspect it's going to be rather popular online. Do you think Sony's servers have the capacity?

Smets: We do lots of load testing on the servers, and of course we have this whole beta programme where we not only get feedback on the game but also do load testing and performance testing. We hope we've done that well enough that when we go live the servers will be OK, and we scale up correctly for the amount of users. You can never predict.

Kikizo: I suppose problems are inevitable with an online game of this magnitude. Providing it's ironed out quickly, no big deal.

Smets: The thing is with developers and publishers is that you really need to work closely together to decide how many servers you need - if we didn't do our load testing correctly then they wouldn't know how many servers we need, and if they don't give us their load testing information we can't make changes to the code. But we're lucky, we have some really nice guys at Sony working with us.

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