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: If it's such a hostile environment that the Helghast have to wear masks on their OWN PLANET, why aren't the human forces required to wear a mask?!

Heide: That's something that will be revealed when we step more into the story.

Kikizo: What's the deal with the main character and how does he work with Rico in terms of the AI?

Heide: The new player character is called Sev, he's part of the The Legion, which is a Special Forces group. The Navy is leading most of the invasion but get stuck and they call in The Legion to help them out which is exactly what you see at the start of this level. The ships you've seen flying are the cruisers and you've also seen other ships that are intruders in landing craft. There are some familiar faces as well; Rico is the leader of this small group of special forces, and right now in this third mission, there's a convoy headed to Viscari's palace, to capture him, and that's being stalled because ground forces and incoming aircraft are being taken out with cannons and a lighting weapon that the Helghast have developed. The Helghast have managed to convert the planet's powers into weapons and they'll be using those against you.

With Rico, if Rico gets shot, we have a revive system, much like in Killzone Liberation, you run up to your buddy, press the X button and help him back up - there's a time limit in which you have to do that, if you're not quick enough and he dies, you fail the mission. We already applied a lot more tactics and awareness of the environment in Killzone Liberation, but with Killzone 2 we had to take a couple of steps further, because the environment is destructible and cover is destructible, so the enemy has to know whether you're behind cover, whether they can fire through it, whether their cover is destructible, all these physical objects, so they have to navigate a very complex world, and that required that we really worked at the AI so that things behave appropriately to the environment. All in all, the AI has had a major overhaul from the original Killzone.

Kikizo: The animation looks particularly good, how is that achieved?

Heide: It's particularly important for us to have animations that are believable, something in particular that we picked up from the original Killzone and realised that this is what we could do with next-gen. It's never going to feel the same again! And most important to this game is the cinematic style, before we 'aimed' for a very cinematic style and a lot of intensity, but with PS3 we can bring our ambition to life. Animation is key to the experience; when you're making a shooter, shooting has to be fun, and it has to be rewarding. And what we're doing there is we're making sure that as you fire, every bullet has an impact, that you actually feel what you're doing influences the world. So not only that your environment is destructible, but also the bullets that you put into an enemy will make them react in a realistic manner.

We've developed a hit response system which allows us to have lots of different responses on an enemy, and depending on where you hit him, we can blend motion captured animations with real physics data. So we'll have a flinging right arm motion captured, if you hit him in the right arm - but based on the weapon that you hit him with, the strength, the angle, it will create a slightly different animation to make sure that it's correct from a physics perspective. That's one of the things that we found is very important, to make sure that this behaves exactly the way it should, and with motion capture this is very realistic but now it's very dramatic and it adds a lot to the satisfaction of downing a Helghast.

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