Killzone 2: Exclusive Guerrilla Interview

Kikizo gets a rare opportunity to sit down with the top staff at Guerrilla, for a detailed interview on the most talked about game of this gen: Killzone 2 for the PS3.

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Kikizo: In other words, how much progress has it made since then, let's phrase it that way.

Heide: It's made quite a lot of progress. Obviously we've released Killzone Liberation in the meantime, and when Liberation was finished we combined the entire team, and moved them onto this project. So I would say that especially in the last half a year, it's come a very, very long way. In the run up to E3, we saw a massive upscaling in terms of the quality and variety in the game.

Kikizo: I think it's clearly the best looking game on PS3 right now...

Heide: Thank you...

Kikizo: ...but to achieve it, you must have had a lot of special help and kind of special favours from Sony's hardware people, could you describe what advantages you've been given in order to get to this position?

Heide: Well, I think first and foremost I have to compliment our own tech team, because this is our proprietary engine, something that we've built on our own from scratch. And of course we're working with Sony's tech guys as well. We've got their Advanced Technology Group in London, and they're developing something called the Edge Toolset, which is providing some base level techniques that we need. So we're using Edge animation and Edge geometry for instance, those are two particular suites that we're using, to help accomplish some of these things; our animation system is driven by Edge and our geometry processing is partly handled by Edge as well. So those are the two big things that as part of the Sony family is very helpful.

Kikizo: In terms of that technical formula together, Edge with the stuff you have built in house from scratch, with it being this formidable, do you think that overall engine results could be used for titles elsewhere in the Sony group?

Heide: Absolutely. I mean the technology we're developing, as well as the technology that all the other first party developers are creating, we're sharing that. Obviously, each game has its own specific requirements; you can't compare the requirements of a first person shooter with that of a racing game, it's entirely different - if you go and see what the Gran Turismo team is doing it's completely different. But it's a different game so they have different requirements. So we're sharing all this information with the other teams, and they with us; there's these sessions throughout the year where some of the coders or some of the artists meet up, and we actually use the resources of other studios as well, for certain specific things, so there's a lot of sharing going on.

Kikizo: I have to say that for thirty frames per second this somehow moves more smoothly than expected. But would you like to have reached 1080p or sixty frames per second?

Heide: It's always a balancing act. We're running at 720p, thirty frames per second, and of course one of the issues with the original Killzone was framerate. We wanted to make sure that we always maintain our framerate this time and that is a balancing act, how much can you throw on screen. We've got a very, very powerful machine, with its SPUs it's taking care of physics, some of the AI processing, a lot of the rendering, so basically we can do a lot more than we could originally.

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