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Eurogamer Expo Sessions: Guerrilla Games on Killzone 3

Variety, controller lag, story and Move.

EurogamerSo the idea is it's designed to attract people to Killzone 3 who would otherwise not play it?
Steven Ter Heide

Absolutely. It should be about accessibility and opening up to a new audience. But at the same time if there are a couple of good exclusive Move titles out there, that have a good implementation or it's an interesting game, that get people to experience what Move is like, they might want to start playing that as their default method simply because it's their preference.

As I mentioned in the presentation, it's a skiers versus snowboarders kind of thing. A lot of people say skiers are wimps, I don't like skiing, I'm a snowboarder guy and I'm tough. But there really isn't a good or a bad one. They can both do excellent tricks. It's just a preference. This will go the same route, where people will take to Move and say, I'll ditch the DualShock and I'll stick with Move. Time will tell.

EurogamerYou've said 'who knows?' when asked about campaign co-op. How big a job is it to make Killzone 3's campaign co-op?
Steven Ter Heide

Co-op is a lot of work. It is. If you have two guys running around in the world the AI has to respond to that and the world has to respond to that. That is work. Initially everything is focused on one guy. All of a sudden there are two standing next to each other. Who do you focus on? Where does the fire come from? How does the gameplay change? You have to invent new systems for, what if one player jumps ahead? Or the other one is stuck? Or you can't get to each other? Doors close behind you. Doors open up in front of you. It's simple things initially you don't think about but it's a heck of a lot of work to get that going.

EurogamerBe honest. What are the chances of campaign co-op being in Killzone 3? 50-50? 60-40?
Steven Ter Heide

Honestly, I can't comment on that.

EurogamerYou've confirmed a public beta. What do you hope to learn from it?
Steven Ter Heide

We play the game extensively ourselves, but that's feedback from a hundred very hardcore guys. For multiplayer you need thousands. You need to get a good solid grasp of the player base out there. You need to make sure we get objective feedback.

A lot of times, as soon as the game goes live, you'll see things we haven't encountered before, not even in a public beta, simply because the player numbers are higher and people get more inventive over time. They'll find new camping spots, new ways to break the game, and we'll have to fix that. That's how it goes.

EurogamerWhen will the public beta launch?
Steven Ter Heide

We'll announce details very soon.

EurogamerKillzone 2 was probably the best-looking game ever made when it was released. When people play Killzone 3 will they say it's the best-looking game ever made?
Steven Ter Heide

I certainly hope so. At the time, with Killzone 2, we said we're firing on all cylinders and we're maxing out the PlayStation 3, and this is as good as it's going to get. But then Uncharted 2 comes along, and God of War 3 comes along. It's like, okay, there's a little bit more power in there and we need to find it.

The guys go back and they look at stuff. We find ways of doing things smarter and differently. We talk to the guys at Naughty Dog. We talk to the Santa Monica guys. We learn from each other. We're all different games. I've seen a couple of comments where they said you've used the Naughty Dog snow. It doesn't work like that. We can't get a bucket of snow from Naughty Dog and put it in our game. They're different games. Different technologies.

But of course we look at their tricks and what things they employ and see if that could apply to our stuff. And vice versa. There's a lot of knowledge sharing, but it's very low level and more about what the experience is like rather than code being transferred from one game to another. It simply doesn't work like that unfortunately. I wish it would, but unfortunately it doesn't. We have to write it all ourselves.

Killzone 3 is due out on PlayStation 3 in February 2011.