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Killzone Shadow Fall – Guerrilla explain how PS4′s tech changes the series, & the FPS
From the moment the curtain went up on Guerrilla Games’ new shooter during February’s PS4 reveal, Killzone: Shadow Fall wasn’t just going to be exciting in its own right as an eye-wateringly high-fidelity episode in the shooter series: it was also our first look at the future of FPS gaming.
Killzone Shadow Fall
How does all that whirring and buzzing technology beneath PS4’s hood translates to new, strikingly detailed visuals. What it means for environmental effects like fire and smoke, both prominent cast members of the game’s explosive debut. How the extra processing power will change AI behaviour. Most fascinating of all: that snatch of gameplay on Vekta, an appropriately guerrilla attack by disguised Helghast on an uptown neighbourhood, shows us not just what PS4’s capabilities are, but how the first wave of developers are using all those gigawatts, nanohertz and bionic FLOP unicorns of next-gen to create, as executive producer Angie Smets puts it, “a more human drama… something a lot more personal and emotional.”
There are fundamental capabilities of PlayStation 4 that hit you right in the face the second you start that healthy and safety-flouting flight around uptown Vekta City past all those glassy monuments. Things the trusty old workhorse that is PS3 simply can’t hack. “The first thing that people notice is fidelity,” says game director Steven Ter Heide, speaking exclusively to OPM. “It’s running in 1080p, whereas the last game was running in 720p – that immediately makes a difference. The particle resolution had to be very low [on PS3], but because we’ve got loads more memory [now] we can have higher particle resolutions. More HDR lighting gives lots more range in the type of light we have in this level; both the amount of post-processing effects, and the quality of these effects. That’s the kind of thing people notice when looking at the difference between PS3 and PS4. The games look prettier.” Ter Heide is clearly grateful to be working with this expanded toolset, but he also seems uneasy talking about Killzone: Shadow Fall just in terms of number crunching. No one wants their game to be seen as simply a tech demo with extra neck stabbing, after all.
“It’s running in 1080p, that immediately
makes a difference. We can have higher
particle resolutions. More HDR lighting,
[more] post-processing effects”
Smets hammers that point home: “Prettier, but also more vibrant. I think the world is really coming to life much better than our previous games.” She’s right: it’s much easier now than in previous Killzones to imagine the everyman of Vekta living his life, nipping out to buy a Pot Noodle and a lottery ticket from the corner shop, and staying the heck clear of the gigantic, terrifying wall that separates them from the displaced Helghast refugees seething on the other side. And, well, we all know how well that uneasy neighbouring works out.
Vekta’s appearance of being vibrant and bustling with life succeeds because the areas you’re shown before the attack are actually populated with a believable number of Joe Publics. On PS3, few shooters really give us a crowd. More often than not you’re presented with an inexplicably deserted city, dockyard or public building, and asked to use your imagination to fill in the gaps. Bioshock Infinite’s shops on carnival day and Far Cry 3’s villages – we’re looking at you. Something PlayStation 4 can offer beyond high-detail textures and pretty particles, we learn, is a higher headcount. “I think we have about 60 characters on-screen at any one time and that helps with a more vibrant city,” says Ter Heide. “Of course, there’s a lot of clever trickery going on,” he concedes. “Where you’re looking, we make sure that that’s appropriately populated.”
Killzone Shadow Fall hands on. Subscribe for more PS3 & PS4 videos.
Even with this example of how Guerrilla is using PS4’s extra horsepower to build a bigger, better Killzone, you can see how first-person shooter design is changing. There’s always been an element of scene-setting, throwing crowds at the player like The Truman Show did to its star while other areas of the city lay barren. But with more sophisticated hardware, “we can create the illusion of a living world a lot more this time,” explains Ter Heide. “If you have to rely on faking it in the distance and you don’t have the numbers up close to make it feel real, it just kind of falls down.”
Naturally, it also falls down if you’re surrounded by drooling simpletons whose daily routine consists of walking into a waist-high obstacle for 24 hours. Believable AI is a crucial attribute of anyone you aim a gun at, but it’s also just as important a quality in your friendly neighbourhood NPCs. It’s the reason you still haven’t forgotten the guy you met in Zelda II (it’s fine, we forgive you) who said “I AM ERROR” before you backed away in horror out of his Hitchcockian nightmare house. “You can see the characters respond to you as the player,” says Smets. “I think that all adds up to the feel that there are real characters, and the city is really populated. On PS3 there was always a trade-off between the number of NPCs and their behaviour, Ter Heide tells us. But on next-gen, you can have your cake and tell your AI exactly how to eat it. “Rather than saying, ‘Okay, we can’t have 60 characters, but eight with great animation,’ this time around we can have 60 with great animation and do some other stuff as well,” he says.
Again, there’s a game-changer evident in Killzone: Shadow Fall’s attentive ISA grunts and (rightfully) worried-looking Vektan citizens: “Specifically the things that we’ve added from a design perspective [are] making characters more responsive. They know where danger is, or where attractive things are to interact with.” It lightens the load for the cut-scene guys for a start, he points out, as they don’t have to pose each NPC frame by frame – they just trust that each citizen acts naturally enough to enhance the scene rather than pull the rug out from underneath it.
The local townspeople are getting smarter at the same rate they’re getting better looking, then. And in the distance you might not find hundreds of NPCs explaining the Higgs boson particle to each other in real time, but you will see more of the world in Shadow Fall than you’ve seen in Killzones past. “We’re trying to create this more epic scale,” says Ter Heide. “As we’ve always tried to in previous Killzone games. We’re creating a more vibrant and living world around you. We want to give you a place that you want to protect and that you want to see more of [rather] than just being confined to corridors. We want you to have these larger vistas to understand more of the world around you.”
The insane draw distance throughout the game’s flight sequences and long-range battles hasn’t just been chucked in to impress people during development. “It’s definitely not just in the little bit we showed you,” reassures Smets. It’s also definitely not distance for distance’s sake, either. Showing you more of the divided Vektan city gives Guerrilla a chance to tell you more about the universe without having to subject you to a five-minute cut-scene. “Storytelling can be much more subtle in terms of the city environment,” says Smets. “I think the city we showed you in the announcement demo is a really interesting setting that hints at the story, too… every design [decision] you make also has to say something about the world and the story. You feel the futuristic architecture, the size of the city and that it’s obviously very wealthy. [There’s] lots of modern technology, and there are even blossom trees.”
Every design [decision] you make has to say something about the world and the story. You feel the futuristic architecture, the size of the
city and that it’s obviously very wealthy
There’s that PS4 tech helping out again to bring some subtlety to storytelling then – something Quantic Dream’s David Cage touched on passionately when he revealed his, er, old chap (not that kind) to everyone on stage. And it’s just as relevant to shooters as it is to Cage’s brand of interactive cinema.
It’s obviously trickier in the FPS genre, mind. Subtlety and finesse are all well and good until you’re presented with another ‘shoot all the people’ objective, but Guerrilla is determined to better the genre in this regard. “We’d definitely like to introduce a more intelligent storyline that dives deeper into the Killzone universe, which is something people really picked up on,” says Ter Heide. Anyone yearning to learn more about the Helghast than what they look like with bullets in their knees/chest/face or how high they can be propelled by a grenade will have their day with Shadow Fall. “Everyone was always talking about what the Helghast are like, what the world is like – the cultural and social aspects,” he says. This game’s higher fidelity and increased character count is “a good opportunity” to finally explore that in detail.
Smets and Ter Heide agree that PlayStation 4’s next-gen muscle isn’t a free pass to increased emotion and subtlety, but it’s certainly a powerful facilitator for studios that want to push the boundaries a bit. Full performance capture (ful-per-cap?) is another tool in the box for developers with the will – and the budget – to drag their characters out of Uncanny Valley and into the realm of believability for you to form a meaningful bond with. “You get the actor’s range of emotions in his voice, in his looks and the body language to go with it,” explains Ter Heide. “Obviously human faces have always been very, very difficult to capture, in terms of CG even. An increase in fidelity will obviously help in that respect.” Ful-per-cap (yep, we’re sticking with that one now) has caught on in bigger game studios like beards and sailor tatts in Shoreditch, and with the imminent visual step up Ter Heide mentions, it’s likely to become the new standard for animation and audio.
Killzone Shadow Fall gameplay. Subscribe for more PS3 & PS4 videos.
But, as Kanye West never tells himself when he throws on clothes before an awards ceremony, there’s always the danger of going too far. Framerates aside, there’s only so far you can dress up a scene with textures labelled ‘look_at_me.bmp’ and plumes of smoke before the sublime becomes the ridiculous. Did the team push all the environmental effects to breaking point in post-processing, we ask? “We deliberately wanted to play on that confusion,” responds Ter Heide. “The moment right after the blast is maximum confusion. You don’t know who the enemy are, because apparently they have disguises, and everywhere is filled with smoke. When the dust settles on the environment, you can start to make out where your enemies are, where the frontlines are and what your options are.” An exciting indication of how intensity will be amped right up when it comes to next-gen firefights.
Guerrilla Games isn’t just working on the software side of PlayStation 4 – the Dutch studio has been a consultant during the development of both the console itself and the redesigned DualShock 4 controller. “Our developers had so many meetings with [PS4 mastermind] Mark Cerny and the technical directors from all the various studios,” recalls Ter Heide.
The focus from Guerrilla’s standpoint was on balancing the hardware inside PS4 to avoid any bottleneck, “so there’s enough memory bandwidth that you can actually use all of the memory.” What particularly excites the Shadow Fall director is PS4’s potential for evolution. “Not just necessarily on the hardware side, but [also] in terms of services and what people are going to be able to get out of a locked piece of hardware is going to be very exciting,” he states. “It’s nice to be able to do more [polygons]… but I think server side is where we’ll see new things.”
So what have we learned? Well, details on Killzone: Shadow Fall’s storyline are being kept under lock and key in a safe guarded by Helghast riflemen, but we can certainly get an idea of how that story will be told. It won’t just be cut-scenes with higher polygon counts. It’ll be in the sumptuous level of environmental detail. It’ll be in the look on NPCs’ faces, and in the way they cower from the high-fidelity explosions that destroy their once peaceful town. It’ll be told by the writing on the walls, resplendent in 1080p, and also in the view on the horizon of the bits of Vekta you might not ever visit, but are convinced really do exist. Now that’s an approach you can really get behind.
What’s more, having been involved with three generations of PlayStation – five, if you include PSP and PS Vita – the studio’s much wiser about how to present its early footage in gameplay demos than it was with Killzone 2. They bring it up, not us: “[We got] off to a rocky start with a certain trailer that was released to showcase our ambitions,” says Ter Heide. “I think from a technological point of view our studio has matured.” That Killzone: Shadow Fall’s announcement demo was playable “on the actual hardware” speaks volumes for PS4’s developer-focused design, he tells us. It’s also a small miracle there were no disasters in working on an unannounced game, on an unannounced platform that has a Share button. “It did make me rather nervous,” Smits reveals.
As the first next-gen shooter to show its hand, Killzone: Shadow Fall forms the blueprint for the genre on PS4. If you’re wondering what the new hardware means for Call Of Duty, take a look at the smoke, fire and destruction effects in Shadow Fall and imagine what Treyarch and Infinity Ward would do with them. How can Bungie’s open-world shooter Destiny possibly convey the enormousness of an entire solar system? Well, just check out those draw distances. Other studios will push the hardware further in time, and in different directions (we’re still eagerly awaiting that Freeman-flavoured reveal, Valve), but as the first gun to fire on PS4 – expected to land alongside the console this November – Shadow Fall will also be the loudest. And who wouldn’t be excited by a brutal, planet-dividing conflict with that kind of weight on its shoulders?
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From the moment the curtain went up on Guerrilla Games’ new shooter during February’s PS4 reveal, Killzone: Shadow Fall wasn’t just going to be exciting in its own right as an eye-wateringly high-fidelity episode in the shooter series: it was also our first look at the future of FPS gaming.
Killzone Shadow Fall
How does all that whirring and buzzing technology beneath PS4’s hood translates to new, strikingly detailed visuals. What it means for environmental effects like fire and smoke, both prominent cast members of the game’s explosive debut. How the extra processing power will change AI behaviour. Most fascinating of all: that snatch of gameplay on Vekta, an appropriately guerrilla attack by disguised Helghast on an uptown neighbourhood, shows us not just what PS4’s capabilities are, but how the first wave of developers are using all those gigawatts, nanohertz and bionic FLOP unicorns of next-gen to create, as executive producer Angie Smets puts it, “a more human drama… something a lot more personal and emotional.”
There are fundamental capabilities of PlayStation 4 that hit you right in the face the second you start that healthy and safety-flouting flight around uptown Vekta City past all those glassy monuments. Things the trusty old workhorse that is PS3 simply can’t hack. “The first thing that people notice is fidelity,” says game director Steven Ter Heide, speaking exclusively to OPM. “It’s running in 1080p, whereas the last game was running in 720p – that immediately makes a difference. The particle resolution had to be very low [on PS3], but because we’ve got loads more memory [now] we can have higher particle resolutions. More HDR lighting gives lots more range in the type of light we have in this level; both the amount of post-processing effects, and the quality of these effects. That’s the kind of thing people notice when looking at the difference between PS3 and PS4. The games look prettier.” Ter Heide is clearly grateful to be working with this expanded toolset, but he also seems uneasy talking about Killzone: Shadow Fall just in terms of number crunching. No one wants their game to be seen as simply a tech demo with extra neck stabbing, after all.
“It’s running in 1080p, that immediately
makes a difference. We can have higher
particle resolutions. More HDR lighting,
[more] post-processing effects”
Smets hammers that point home: “Prettier, but also more vibrant. I think the world is really coming to life much better than our previous games.” She’s right: it’s much easier now than in previous Killzones to imagine the everyman of Vekta living his life, nipping out to buy a Pot Noodle and a lottery ticket from the corner shop, and staying the heck clear of the gigantic, terrifying wall that separates them from the displaced Helghast refugees seething on the other side. And, well, we all know how well that uneasy neighbouring works out.
Vekta’s appearance of being vibrant and bustling with life succeeds because the areas you’re shown before the attack are actually populated with a believable number of Joe Publics. On PS3, few shooters really give us a crowd. More often than not you’re presented with an inexplicably deserted city, dockyard or public building, and asked to use your imagination to fill in the gaps. Bioshock Infinite’s shops on carnival day and Far Cry 3’s villages – we’re looking at you. Something PlayStation 4 can offer beyond high-detail textures and pretty particles, we learn, is a higher headcount. “I think we have about 60 characters on-screen at any one time and that helps with a more vibrant city,” says Ter Heide. “Of course, there’s a lot of clever trickery going on,” he concedes. “Where you’re looking, we make sure that that’s appropriately populated.”
Killzone Shadow Fall hands on. Subscribe for more PS3 & PS4 videos.
Even with this example of how Guerrilla is using PS4’s extra horsepower to build a bigger, better Killzone, you can see how first-person shooter design is changing. There’s always been an element of scene-setting, throwing crowds at the player like The Truman Show did to its star while other areas of the city lay barren. But with more sophisticated hardware, “we can create the illusion of a living world a lot more this time,” explains Ter Heide. “If you have to rely on faking it in the distance and you don’t have the numbers up close to make it feel real, it just kind of falls down.”
Naturally, it also falls down if you’re surrounded by drooling simpletons whose daily routine consists of walking into a waist-high obstacle for 24 hours. Believable AI is a crucial attribute of anyone you aim a gun at, but it’s also just as important a quality in your friendly neighbourhood NPCs. It’s the reason you still haven’t forgotten the guy you met in Zelda II (it’s fine, we forgive you) who said “I AM ERROR” before you backed away in horror out of his Hitchcockian nightmare house. “You can see the characters respond to you as the player,” says Smets. “I think that all adds up to the feel that there are real characters, and the city is really populated. On PS3 there was always a trade-off between the number of NPCs and their behaviour, Ter Heide tells us. But on next-gen, you can have your cake and tell your AI exactly how to eat it. “Rather than saying, ‘Okay, we can’t have 60 characters, but eight with great animation,’ this time around we can have 60 with great animation and do some other stuff as well,” he says.
Again, there’s a game-changer evident in Killzone: Shadow Fall’s attentive ISA grunts and (rightfully) worried-looking Vektan citizens: “Specifically the things that we’ve added from a design perspective [are] making characters more responsive. They know where danger is, or where attractive things are to interact with.” It lightens the load for the cut-scene guys for a start, he points out, as they don’t have to pose each NPC frame by frame – they just trust that each citizen acts naturally enough to enhance the scene rather than pull the rug out from underneath it.
The local townspeople are getting smarter at the same rate they’re getting better looking, then. And in the distance you might not find hundreds of NPCs explaining the Higgs boson particle to each other in real time, but you will see more of the world in Shadow Fall than you’ve seen in Killzones past. “We’re trying to create this more epic scale,” says Ter Heide. “As we’ve always tried to in previous Killzone games. We’re creating a more vibrant and living world around you. We want to give you a place that you want to protect and that you want to see more of [rather] than just being confined to corridors. We want you to have these larger vistas to understand more of the world around you.”
The insane draw distance throughout the game’s flight sequences and long-range battles hasn’t just been chucked in to impress people during development. “It’s definitely not just in the little bit we showed you,” reassures Smets. It’s also definitely not distance for distance’s sake, either. Showing you more of the divided Vektan city gives Guerrilla a chance to tell you more about the universe without having to subject you to a five-minute cut-scene. “Storytelling can be much more subtle in terms of the city environment,” says Smets. “I think the city we showed you in the announcement demo is a really interesting setting that hints at the story, too… every design [decision] you make also has to say something about the world and the story. You feel the futuristic architecture, the size of the city and that it’s obviously very wealthy. [There’s] lots of modern technology, and there are even blossom trees.”
Every design [decision] you make has to say something about the world and the story. You feel the futuristic architecture, the size of the
city and that it’s obviously very wealthy
There’s that PS4 tech helping out again to bring some subtlety to storytelling then – something Quantic Dream’s David Cage touched on passionately when he revealed his, er, old chap (not that kind) to everyone on stage. And it’s just as relevant to shooters as it is to Cage’s brand of interactive cinema.
It’s obviously trickier in the FPS genre, mind. Subtlety and finesse are all well and good until you’re presented with another ‘shoot all the people’ objective, but Guerrilla is determined to better the genre in this regard. “We’d definitely like to introduce a more intelligent storyline that dives deeper into the Killzone universe, which is something people really picked up on,” says Ter Heide. Anyone yearning to learn more about the Helghast than what they look like with bullets in their knees/chest/face or how high they can be propelled by a grenade will have their day with Shadow Fall. “Everyone was always talking about what the Helghast are like, what the world is like – the cultural and social aspects,” he says. This game’s higher fidelity and increased character count is “a good opportunity” to finally explore that in detail.
Smets and Ter Heide agree that PlayStation 4’s next-gen muscle isn’t a free pass to increased emotion and subtlety, but it’s certainly a powerful facilitator for studios that want to push the boundaries a bit. Full performance capture (ful-per-cap?) is another tool in the box for developers with the will – and the budget – to drag their characters out of Uncanny Valley and into the realm of believability for you to form a meaningful bond with. “You get the actor’s range of emotions in his voice, in his looks and the body language to go with it,” explains Ter Heide. “Obviously human faces have always been very, very difficult to capture, in terms of CG even. An increase in fidelity will obviously help in that respect.” Ful-per-cap (yep, we’re sticking with that one now) has caught on in bigger game studios like beards and sailor tatts in Shoreditch, and with the imminent visual step up Ter Heide mentions, it’s likely to become the new standard for animation and audio.
Killzone Shadow Fall gameplay. Subscribe for more PS3 & PS4 videos.
But, as Kanye West never tells himself when he throws on clothes before an awards ceremony, there’s always the danger of going too far. Framerates aside, there’s only so far you can dress up a scene with textures labelled ‘look_at_me.bmp’ and plumes of smoke before the sublime becomes the ridiculous. Did the team push all the environmental effects to breaking point in post-processing, we ask? “We deliberately wanted to play on that confusion,” responds Ter Heide. “The moment right after the blast is maximum confusion. You don’t know who the enemy are, because apparently they have disguises, and everywhere is filled with smoke. When the dust settles on the environment, you can start to make out where your enemies are, where the frontlines are and what your options are.” An exciting indication of how intensity will be amped right up when it comes to next-gen firefights.
Guerrilla Games isn’t just working on the software side of PlayStation 4 – the Dutch studio has been a consultant during the development of both the console itself and the redesigned DualShock 4 controller. “Our developers had so many meetings with [PS4 mastermind] Mark Cerny and the technical directors from all the various studios,” recalls Ter Heide.
The focus from Guerrilla’s standpoint was on balancing the hardware inside PS4 to avoid any bottleneck, “so there’s enough memory bandwidth that you can actually use all of the memory.” What particularly excites the Shadow Fall director is PS4’s potential for evolution. “Not just necessarily on the hardware side, but [also] in terms of services and what people are going to be able to get out of a locked piece of hardware is going to be very exciting,” he states. “It’s nice to be able to do more [polygons]… but I think server side is where we’ll see new things.”
So what have we learned? Well, details on Killzone: Shadow Fall’s storyline are being kept under lock and key in a safe guarded by Helghast riflemen, but we can certainly get an idea of how that story will be told. It won’t just be cut-scenes with higher polygon counts. It’ll be in the sumptuous level of environmental detail. It’ll be in the look on NPCs’ faces, and in the way they cower from the high-fidelity explosions that destroy their once peaceful town. It’ll be told by the writing on the walls, resplendent in 1080p, and also in the view on the horizon of the bits of Vekta you might not ever visit, but are convinced really do exist. Now that’s an approach you can really get behind.
What’s more, having been involved with three generations of PlayStation – five, if you include PSP and PS Vita – the studio’s much wiser about how to present its early footage in gameplay demos than it was with Killzone 2. They bring it up, not us: “[We got] off to a rocky start with a certain trailer that was released to showcase our ambitions,” says Ter Heide. “I think from a technological point of view our studio has matured.” That Killzone: Shadow Fall’s announcement demo was playable “on the actual hardware” speaks volumes for PS4’s developer-focused design, he tells us. It’s also a small miracle there were no disasters in working on an unannounced game, on an unannounced platform that has a Share button. “It did make me rather nervous,” Smits reveals.
As the first next-gen shooter to show its hand, Killzone: Shadow Fall forms the blueprint for the genre on PS4. If you’re wondering what the new hardware means for Call Of Duty, take a look at the smoke, fire and destruction effects in Shadow Fall and imagine what Treyarch and Infinity Ward would do with them. How can Bungie’s open-world shooter Destiny possibly convey the enormousness of an entire solar system? Well, just check out those draw distances. Other studios will push the hardware further in time, and in different directions (we’re still eagerly awaiting that Freeman-flavoured reveal, Valve), but as the first gun to fire on PS4 – expected to land alongside the console this November – Shadow Fall will also be the loudest. And who wouldn’t be excited by a brutal, planet-dividing conflict with that kind of weight on its shoulders?