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: The detail is sort of relentless - even when we detach the camera and fly right into the distance and examine places that you only see in the background of the trailer cut scene. What is the technical strain here?

Heide: This particular level is about two gigabytes of data that we're chewing through, so we're very happy to be able to have Blu ray to have levels of this kind of detail - not just the environment and the level of detail in them, but also the characters are all very detailed. We can speed up or slow down the cut scene progress [in debug mode] in real time, which is quite useful for us as developers to see if animations are working correctly or collisions are working the way they should be, so we know that it's looking good.

We've got some Hollywood-grade special effects going on, a wind shimmer here and there, and full screen anti-aliasing so that it's a very smooth and crisp image. But some of the more special tricks that we're doing are with post processing. If I turn it off, you will see an entirely different image. This is one of the things that we're quite extensively working on is post processing filters, to really tie the overall image together. There's a lot of things going on - some very sophisticated lighting with sunlight for example that's nice and warm, but when we add the post processing back on we really add depth to that feeling that we want to create, and it allows us to create that mood and setting that we're looking for.

It also allows us to add things like depth grading, so that with distance we can add more contrast, we can create a distance and basically have the whole image very cinematic, and that is specifically the way we want it to be. And it's all dynamic, we can change it over time. Changes in weather, depending on the mood of the level, we can just fiddle with these variables and adjust that over the course of the game. Another thing we can also do with our engine is a thing called Deferred Rendering, which allows us to draw lots and lots of shadow-casting lights, and that again adds to the immersion and makes everything feel like part of the world because everything's casting shadow and behaving the way it should behave. Maybe in the light you can see some little moths flying around or whatever - it all adds to the world feeling alive and believable.

Kikizo: So are you aiming for realism or fantasy as a means of immersing the player? After all, this is a science fiction setting.

Heide: What we're going for is very much 'Hollywood realism', so it's very much exaggerated; bigger explosions, more dramatic deaths and things like that - a little bit over the top here and there, but it still has to feel believable and somewhat realistic.

Another thing is that we've gotten rid of most of the HUD elements. So things like the health bar, objectives, anything that you see in a lot of other games, we've got rid of most of that information. That's because again we want the player to be like, 'wow', and have a very cinematic experience, and really feel immersion with just the gun and the environment, basically. We do however give the player some visual clues as to, is he being hit, how is his health doing, and that's where post processing comes in, we can desaturate the image, add some contrast or add some blur, so the player knows he's being hit and has to get out of that place and find cover.

Kikizo: How would you describe the theme or trend of this story versus the story we got in Killzone 1?

Jonge: It's the same sort of style, but I think this time the big difference is that we don't have as many playable characters, we have one playable character, and we follow his story really. And the story is also going to follow on from Killzone Liberation, which was the sequel to Killzone 1, but this is now the sequel to Liberation, so some of the elements from Liberation will continue and be brought into this story, but it's a big universe, so there's a big story.

Heide: We're also now taking the fight to Helghan, the Helghast home world. So where the original Killzone and Killzone Liberation took place on Vekta, this is now an even more hostile environment in Helghan. It's one of the reasons that the Helghast have adapted themselves with these goggles and breathing masks, they're basically part of this large-scale invasion of their home world.

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