Killzone: Shadow Fall (PS4)

Guerrilla was at the PlayStation Meeting earlier tonight to take the wraps off a brand new Killzone title for the PlayStation 4! To mark this exciting milestone, Game Director Steven ter Heide has prepared a few words.
Today we are happy we can finally show you what we have been working on.

It has been an amazing journey for us so far, being offered the opportunity to be a launch title for the new PlayStation, and the subsequent mild panic to figure out how to best handle all of that.

But being able to now share it with you is both a scary and proud moment. We are hoping you will like what we have created, and are happy to present you with the first glimpse of Killzone Shadow Fall.

The piece of live gameplay we presented at the PlayStation Meeting shows you a new world, a new situation and a new hero.

The game is set in a near future, thirty years after the events of Killzone 3. The world is a very different place; two rival factions known as the Helghast and the Vektans live side by side in a futuristic city, divided by a vast wall.

Tensions are high, and the cold war they are embroiled in is about to go hot. In the midst of this all stands a Shadow Marshal, you. The most special of the special forces, tasked with maintaining the delicate balance.

From responding to bold attacks, to quiet infiltrations or all out combat, you will be required to adapt and think on your feet as you have to face a variety of escalating events that could destroy your home world.

Shadow Fall’s live demo showed a brighter, more colourful Killzone than we've seen before. This partly reflects the greater power at Guerrilla’s disposal and a subtle shift Guerrilla's approach to the series’ environments, says Van Der Leeuw. “One of the things we weren't able to do [before] is on this scale create this vibrant, living city and then in typical Killzone style, of course, we wanted to have it come under attack. We wanted to introduce a few things that are different.”

“One is a new conflict, where in the past we took inspiration from World War I and World War II type conflicts, this very much is a cold war setting, so you saw the city divided by this wall. It looks different, our take on how we wanted to progress the franchise going into PS4 and also the player’s character. You're now playing as a Shadow Marshall, part soldier, part spy. We wanted to really set the player up to now take on the powerful enemy properly.”

Studio director Hermen Hulst describes that setting, Vekta City, as the core of Killzone: Shadow Fall. “We have multiple environments, clearly, but this is a key part of it. We really liked the architecture of it. We certainly picked a setting that allowed us to show off things like what we can do with lighting and reflection and I guess that makes a difference. But most importantly, we just wanted to make something that was truly beautiful that shows off what our designers can do and what our artists can do.”

“When you have that contrast between this kind of beauty it shows you a world that truly is worth fighting for, and then you see that explosion and the nasty Helghast that arrive... I think that contrast is what we were after, to really juxtapose that nastiness with something that's so beautifully designed.”

Guerrilla says it has thought carefully about how Vekta functions, right down to the city's infrastructure. We ask whether the vast cityscape we saw flashing below us in the demo was part of the game, or just background scenery. “Well, you'll visit parts of the city, but it's not like an open-world city that you're flying over,” says Van Der Leeuw. “It is, in that case, made for that view and to give a sense of the world that you're in. But you'll visit parts of the city. I don't think we should go into too much detail on which parts you'll visit, because that might reveal a bit too much of the story. But you'll go there and at the same time, whilst we don't want to claim it's going to be an open-world type game, we should emphasise that the spaces are much larger and you will visit some of them at a later stage. There's a lot of space there.”

So does the game’s greater scope reflect greater ambition and shifting priorities at Guerrilla, or merely technological advancement? Van Der Leeuw says that “the drive and the reach for a larger environment has to do with more choice, more options, how you traverse being able to play a level in a different way, making it less corridor-y.”

Hulst, meanwhile, says it’s now much easier to build large environments than before. “It's not like it was un-doable, it just took such a huge amount of effort to do it at the detail level that we strive for,” he says.

“I think the last time we visited Vekta was in Killzone 1 and you see the difference in how much better an environment like this comes out on the next generation. It's enabling new stuff for us,” says Van Der Leeuw. “Climbing was not something we were able to do before. With the combat there's now more choice, you can climb up and take the battleground in before you go in, so we’re trying to make it more intelligent, so you prepare yourself before you go in. All these things we take into consideration when designing a world.”

Hulst confirms to us that the demo was running at 30fps, before Van Der Leeuw elaborates on how Guerrilla is shifting all of that power inside PS4 around. “I think we were running on all the different cores for all the different systems, including AI and gameplay which we've never done before. We've never utilised the CPU power we’ve had like this. We had about sixty guys running around in the demo which is far over what we've been able to do before – that's about three or four times more.”

“Animation networking quality was much higher, I think it's just basically been proven that the amount of time it takes AI programmers to get their code up and running in parallel is so much easier that it just enables us to do much more. Of course we were optimising towards 30fps, making sure we didn't drop a frame – or that we dropped a few frames but not very many – basically just making sure it ran smooth. And this is a launch title, we've just got new hardware and we weren't using some of the hardware acceleration for stuff like audio at the time we did the demo, which we have now done. So I think there's a lot more left in the system.”

“I think we're stretching and upping in all of these areas and there are still trade-offs, but the trade-offs aren't as constrained as what they were before,” adds Hulst. "That's what I believe really creates a more compelling gameplay experience – you saw some games on current gen that had a lot of people on the screen, but in combination with the animation and the fidelity and the responsiveness, everything together, that will create that vibrant world. It's that believable world that we're after.”

Originally Posted by TyrantII 

It is funny they basically admit that their 10K PS3 models don't look much worse than their 40K PS4 ones in engine. So why go with 40K when you could make due with less and free up resources?

Hopefully that in store for the future. There's plenty of tricks and good use of other tech besides model polycount that will make the GFX shine. Use it.

The volumetric lighting / fog towards the end is super sexy.