[E3 2010] Out of the Frying Pan...
We go into the fire of playing Killzone 3. Lots of it. And it. Is. Glorious. A lengthy play section with the fourth level of Guerrilla Games' shooter yields more than a few wow moments -- many of 'em in actual threeee deeee!
Published: May 27, 2010
With the exception of perhaps the pricing announcement, few moments thus far in the history of the PlayStation 3 have been met with as much controversy and smug condescension as the original Killzone 2 target render. While developer Guerrilla Games has gone on record more recently as saying something entirely pre-rendered on a farm of machines put enormous pressure on the team to actually meet that level of visual splendor, the results spoke for themselves. Killzone 2 was far, far closer to that video than many thought possible when it finally came out that the whole thing was more or less smoke and mirrors, and challenged the team to rise to the occasion.
This time around, though, there are no target renders. No smoke, no mirrors. Despite not shipping until sometime next year (and right now, "2011" is the only release date being given), the reveal of the fourth game in the series is being done right: a full level of the game available to all us booze-sucking chumps lucky enough to get to write about games with nothing in the way of obvious attempts to shield us from the early state of the game.
Killzone 3 -- both in terms of the development process and the game's actual timeline -- began the second Killzone 2 ended. With an engine that was clearly up to the task of rendering the devs' vision for the game, the challenge then was to make the game, as Guerrilla's presentation point man Herman Hulst put it, "a full-blown sequel". Pausing only to deflect rumors that there was some form of collaboration with other SCE Worldwide Studios on said engine (though admitting games like Uncharted 2 and God of War III offered "friendly competition to get [Gurrella] to raise the bar") , Hulst quickly filled in the all-important details on what would greet players at the start of Killzone 3.
If you haven't finished Killzone 2 yet, it would probably be best to skip this next paragraph and go do so now, because we're going to spoil the hell out of it.
Colonel Radec is dead. Scolar Visari, the despot Radec was meant to protect, has fallen to the same fate, but not before resorting to an all-out nuclear strike on his own city in the hopes of stemming the ISA invasion on their home world of Helghan. In the end, his death was merely a portent to something far worse: a power vaccum. In the wake of a single, unifying, militaristic leader, multiple underlings that want nothing more than to take his place have come to the fore, squabbling with themselves as much as with the invading ISA forces.
Were the infighting between the new "leaders" of the Helghast a distraction, that would be one thing, but as the end of Killzone 2 made abundantly clear, this is their planet, and they have no shortage of military might -- more than enough to go around even as jostling for control of the people may be going on. For a battered and very much outnumbered ISA invasion force, that can only mean one thing: retreat. Oh, it's not a full escape, of course, as Sev and returning constant annoyance Rico have their work cut out for them. In fact, the first thing they need to do in the mission we got to play through was rescue Captain Narville.
"In Killzone 3, the enemies will be smarter, the enemies will be scarier and they will bring a lot of new tactics..." It's hard not to chalk up Hulst's opening speech as typical sequel promises. Every successive game in a series is promised to rewrite the AI for enemies or widen the scope or offer more variety to the gameplay and environments. Killzone 3, however, is ably demonstrating that all of those things will likely be very true indeed. The AI, we found, wasn’t overwhelmingly improved; this is still a shooter, after all, and as such many of the enemies serve as fodder for your dot sight as you gun them down by the dozens.
This time around, though, there are no target renders. No smoke, no mirrors. Despite not shipping until sometime next year (and right now, "2011" is the only release date being given), the reveal of the fourth game in the series is being done right: a full level of the game available to all us booze-sucking chumps lucky enough to get to write about games with nothing in the way of obvious attempts to shield us from the early state of the game.
Killzone 3 -- both in terms of the development process and the game's actual timeline -- began the second Killzone 2 ended. With an engine that was clearly up to the task of rendering the devs' vision for the game, the challenge then was to make the game, as Guerrilla's presentation point man Herman Hulst put it, "a full-blown sequel". Pausing only to deflect rumors that there was some form of collaboration with other SCE Worldwide Studios on said engine (though admitting games like Uncharted 2 and God of War III offered "friendly competition to get [Gurrella] to raise the bar") , Hulst quickly filled in the all-important details on what would greet players at the start of Killzone 3.
If you haven't finished Killzone 2 yet, it would probably be best to skip this next paragraph and go do so now, because we're going to spoil the hell out of it.
Colonel Radec is dead. Scolar Visari, the despot Radec was meant to protect, has fallen to the same fate, but not before resorting to an all-out nuclear strike on his own city in the hopes of stemming the ISA invasion on their home world of Helghan. In the end, his death was merely a portent to something far worse: a power vaccum. In the wake of a single, unifying, militaristic leader, multiple underlings that want nothing more than to take his place have come to the fore, squabbling with themselves as much as with the invading ISA forces.
Were the infighting between the new "leaders" of the Helghast a distraction, that would be one thing, but as the end of Killzone 2 made abundantly clear, this is their planet, and they have no shortage of military might -- more than enough to go around even as jostling for control of the people may be going on. For a battered and very much outnumbered ISA invasion force, that can only mean one thing: retreat. Oh, it's not a full escape, of course, as Sev and returning constant annoyance Rico have their work cut out for them. In fact, the first thing they need to do in the mission we got to play through was rescue Captain Narville.
"In Killzone 3, the enemies will be smarter, the enemies will be scarier and they will bring a lot of new tactics..." It's hard not to chalk up Hulst's opening speech as typical sequel promises. Every successive game in a series is promised to rewrite the AI for enemies or widen the scope or offer more variety to the gameplay and environments. Killzone 3, however, is ably demonstrating that all of those things will likely be very true indeed. The AI, we found, wasn’t overwhelmingly improved; this is still a shooter, after all, and as such many of the enemies serve as fodder for your dot sight as you gun them down by the dozens.
