Killzone 2 Comments by Kristan Reed

Burn the heretic!

"If gears 2 is to be the only game to raise that bar (and arguably it hasnt judging by the screenshots), then where does that leave XBOX 360 games for the next 2 years after that?"
imo, it doesn't work like that. Quality doesn't have a metric scale, or is it supposed to be measured by counting pixels ?

Stick comment threads on a DVD/Bluray, make it into a game, give them cross platform play, instant million seller!

"your PSN network is making this comment thread game the rubbish"
"you lie! it is your RROD!"
"you are only playing this because you have no other games"
"at least I'm not paying 0.03p per day to argue with you"

I hope Killzone2 wil be delayed to 2010, because I love those killzone preview comments threads. Everybody from both "sides" knows this will be a generic, 6 to 8/10 FPS, and yet we keep on talking about it with a passion, even everyone knows that resistance 2 will be 10 times better.

"and arguably it hasnt judging by the screenshots"

Yes, it has. On those comparison screens they showed here a while back you could see Gears 2 was much nicer looking.

killzone is a cooler name than halo! and yes that is my contribution!!

I think Killzone 2 is the most impressive game I've seen so far, the game's look is the most stunning thing about it, great animation, shaders, textures, i mean, everything is outstanding and very, i mean veryyyy close to the 2005 CGI... (It's as impressive as Crysis from both a technical and artistic point of view, and yes i have Crysis, played it from the begging to the end with everything Max, excepy antialising at 1900x1200 resolution) now with all the features and multiplayer set up, these can pretty much be one of the best, if not the best shooter of these generation.

Oh and by the way, Gears dont have convincing physics, everything, from the grass to the trees are static in the screen, nothing moves, if you fire at a crate, it will blow the same way every time, you canīt jump, swim etc... the animation is fluid but pretty much the same every time, your player falls the same way, take cover the same way etc... despised of the sutuation.
You dont see any kind of loosing balance present "for example" in Uncharted animations, where he can slip, bump etc... if they dont improve these, the game will be more of the same with a different color pallet.

And yes mate, physics and graphics are 2 of the most important things in modern games, that's what make them modern in the first place (as well as the gameplay scheme but we all know that already).

"If gears 2 is to be the only game to raise that bar (and arguably it hasnt judging by the screenshots)"

Gears 2 is very obviously a step up from Gears 1, unless you have defective eyesight? Screenshots are not a tool to judge what a game looks like, as when in motion it's a different prospect. The vidoes of Gears 2 show clear improvement.


"then where does that leave XBOX 360 games for the next 2 years after that?"

It leaves 360 gaming where it's always been, a step up from PS3 gaming.

Also, you are equating art direction with technical prowess, a schoolboy error. There are better games out there technically, but visually I think gears is still leading the pack.

farticusmaximus

man, your blindness towards the Xbox is ridiculouss... i'm speachless, Gears 2 is very pretty, yes, i really like that game too, i have the first for the PC and Xbox360 "i even play that game in my Pc with everything max, 16x antialising at 1080P and love it", but in my opinion even Uncharted looks better, not to mention Killzone 2.

you can prefer the art direction and gameplay, but please, stop deniyng the fact that the Ps3 can boost very impressive visuals, even better then Gears.

Oh and by the way, Gears dont have convincing physics, everything, from the grass to the trees are static in the screen, nothing moves, if you fire at a crate, it will blow the same way every time, you canīt jump, swim etc... the animation is fluid but pretty much the same every time, your player falls the same way, take cover the same way etc... despised of the sutuation.
You dont see any kind of loosing balance present "for example" in Uncharted animations, where he can slip, bump etc... if they dont improve these, the game will be more of the same with a different color pallet.

And yes mate, physics and graphics are 2 of the most important things in modern games, that's what make them modern in the first place (as well as the gameplay scheme but we all know that already).

Apologie, as always you equal visuals with overall quality of the game. A very shallow view. Only when KZ2 proves it's shrugged off it's predecessors apalling gameplay can it be considered a good game.

The game you should be comparing killzone 2 to is COD4, gears is a terrible game to compare it too. I don't see people comparing burnout paradise to GTA4 so why are you comparing gears to killzone 2.

farticusmaximus continues to be the same arrogant prick he always was. Is your life so sad that you need to let out some steam in the PS3 threads?

Apologie accusing someone else of being blind towards a console right before spewing a bunch of pro-PS3 nonsense. lol

Claiming the PS3 can output better visualls than the 360 is so outdated at this point. Where have you been for the last year? It's been proven time and time and time and time and time again that it's simply not the case.

I've seen plenty of Uncharted and I don't think it looks any better than Gears or any of the other top-looking games. C'mon already!!! Nobody's buying your bullshit!!

If that's your opinion, that's fine, but to present it as fact is a bit presumptuous...especially considering that many who aren't partial to either console would disagree.

ronuds

. but you do agree that the animation and physics engine in Uncharted is better right??? i mean, you played tha game from the beginning to the end, right??? (graphics apart, i'm not even discussing them now)

@ Apologie

No, I did not play the game from beginning to end. It's been a while since I've seen Uncharted in action, but I'll take your word for it on this one! ;)

@ Apologie

I've not finished Uncharted either, I'll tell you why.

1) Screen tearing is awful.
2) Buggy - I've died because he's fallen 2 feet but landed where he shouldn't so hovers for a while then dies.
3) I can't stand it when the camera zooms out for 'better perspective' and you can't see fuck all or where you want to go.
4) The fights are simply, "Spawn 5 men, let them die, spawn 5 more from the other end, repeat"
5) The puzzles are so shit they barley rate as puzzles.
6) The trophy patch renders your current save unusable.
7) Texture pop-in (but not too bad)

I did have more but I've forgotten them now.

And whoop-de-fucking-do he does some shitty scripted slip and stumble animations, so do Lara, the prince guy from PoP and Altair in Assassins Creed. If you're gonna moan that Gears doesn't do somthing that some other game does, at least choose a better example than a stumble animation.

You can't cut people up with a chainsaw in Uncharted, but you can in Gears. Who's better now?

And I don't remember any amazing physics in Uncharted, examples? Grass moving doesn't count though, it's just animation.

Graphics in Uncharted were probably better than Gears granted, but I finished Gears at least 3 times and can't even be arsed to carry on with Uncharted anymore. I'd rather go back to my 4th playthrough of Mass Effect, or my 2nd of MGS than carry on with the Uncharted tedium.

Jesus Christ...

Same old shit from the same retards everytime a Ps3 thread comes up. Time to grow up.

Bots, fantastic :)
Splitscreen?

Farticus, your such a fanboy. Your rubbishing a game that has a bland look and art direction whilst citing Gears of War as an iconic looking game. A game which doesnt share any qualities whatsoever with the first Killzone. No ultra fascist government types or dreary brown/greys in that game, at all. Hmmm...Oh wait!

Is it just me or does this article list a load of features that are standard for multipplayer FPS games these days? Pick which weapons and which gametypes are on a map, scoreboard at the end etc etc.

You're all completely out of your trees.

Carry on.

To be fair, both Killzone 2 and Gears 2 look good. I'm going to check Gears 1 on m'laptop based on the video posted of #2 here. Its nice effectively having a mobile xbox!

If only I could have one of these....
http://www.itechnews.net/wp-content/uplo...

Gears seems to be rocking the big monsters setplays/scrips as Resistance 2 is going for. Killzone 2 seems to be a bit more of a 'realistic' troop warfare setting (so again cod4 comparisons valid). Something for all.

yeah I cant wait for Gears 2. I dont care if its no improvement over 1, it was fun to play and im a gamer so I win. Pity other folk on this forum cant just leave it at that.

its win /win for those who own both consoles imo with the quality of the games coming this year and next.

Master Chief is a bit of an unlikey icon, certainly well known now, but is still basically a big green spaceman with a Solid Snake-esque voice.

Drake was quite a cool lead in a climate of marines.

He's been rather heavily marketed though. I'm sure people do know who he is, even if it is "that green computergame man".

"Uhm, no, they dont. They show a SLIGHT improvement that is only noticeable in a direct 1:1 comparison of both games.
2 years and DoF with a bit more colour is all they can squeaze out of the Unreal engine? "

I think you better leave comparisons to the pros m8.

There is more to engine upgrades than what you mentioned. The amount of stuff on screen has seriously been upped in Gears2, as have a lot of effects and physics. The fact that Gears1 looked so good was already an amazing feat at the time that has barely been matched by games that came out a few years later. There is only a limited amount of polygons/textures/geometry these consoles can pull and the focus now should be on new gameplay, more levels, better streaming, more online features and new tricks.

Besides... don't expect exponential upgrades to the HD consoles. Basically these guys are hardware from 4 years ago... you can't expect them to follow the PC curve. Yeah I know some of you (less sharp tools) believe there is incredible untapped power... but sadly that is almost certainly marketing bullshit. The theoretical performance of the HD consoles has been known for quite a while now.

"The average joe isnt going to recognise him aside from he's in a shoot-em up. He's no Lara Croft. "

Yeah the unknown Chief. Strangely I have seen him on BBC News, in numerous cosplay events, as collectible models, on covers of non-gaming magazines, on the side of Coke bottles and as giant statue in shops. Seems very unknown and non-iconic to me.

"Seeing as the player never actually sees Master Cheif except for in cut scenes, he's not even that iconic"

Judge Dredd.. case closed. Nuff said.

looks like a great game :D

farticus : IGNORED

"Yeah I know some of you (less sharp tools) believe there is incredible untapped power... but sadly that is almost certainly marketing bullshit. The theoretical performance of the HD consoles has been known for quite a while now. "

Uhh...I'm not so sure why you're suggesting people are dumb just because they expect a discernible improvement in the quality of graphics over the course of a console's lifespan. To me that sounds quite reasonable considering the evidence from past generations, even if the improvement is achieved through means other than 'untapped power' (not that it makes a blind bit of difference).

Of course each console reaches a plateau eventually, and in the case of the 360 that might well be GOW. I don't know. What I do know is that from looking at the screens and videos available to me, the sequel looks slightly better. But to be honest I think a lot of that is the nice Uncharted-esque sunset they've got in those screenshots there. Looks much more inviting.

OT...KZ2 is looking pretty good. I haven't played the original so I've not got a great frame of reference here, but it does sound an awful lot more tempting than it did a year or two back.

"To me that sounds quite reasonable considering the evidence from past generations, even if the improvement is achieved through means other than 'untapped power' (not that it makes a blind bit of difference). "

Hmmm.. maybe I should have gotten a bit more into this.

I do not think a lot of people who do not design or write software (and/or games) quite understand where this performance boost comes from. A lot of it comes from optimizations of the engine and not of some new hardware tricks (although yes... optimizations can come from new ways of using the hardware). Usually after a software project is complete you have some time to think about it and in 100% of the cases people in your team will find new creative ways of improving some parts. (remember that in the case of Unreal Engine a lot of iterations of this process have happened on PC already, making the engine a lot more resistant against big leaps).

The second performance boost actually comes from "cheating" :) I remember when I wrote my first 3D engine I was confident it would be easy. I had spend years studying math and was very familiar with the (rather easy TBH) math behind 3D visualization. Strangely my engine was VERY slow :) It took a lot of reading and a lot of talking to games programmers to get that engine up to speed. Why? I wrote it "by the book" and games always cheat and rarely use the pure math behind everything. (lookup tables being one of those cheats for example).

The last performance boost is usually clever and better art. What was 4 polygons in the first game often gets replaced by just 1 polygon with a better texture :) Ofc in todays world of shaders and stuff there are plenty of tricks to solve this in different ways.

Anyway... this is getting seriously off topic here. Lemme just end with one last "trick". One of my friends is doing very high level studies on what information in pictures is automatically generated by the brain. Turns out you can actually remove certain things (like some shadows) from a scene without your brain noticing. The trick ofc is do build that into a 3D graphics engine (BTW has not been done in a gaming engine as far as I know... but expect this to happen in the next gen).

For people who think Gears2 is just Gears 1. Here is a gigantic read with all the new stuff. Technical BTW.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/37...

"So, to prove your point, you've done absolutely nothing but describe how a team of programmers squeazed a little bit more out of an engine through "optimisation" without proving that the game actually looks significantly better? "

You don't get it... my reply wasn't even addressed at you any more. Bye.

I'm another freak who believes Killzone 1 was great. Really enjoyed it. As much as I love Halo there was some really crap bland repetitive levels in the middle of the game to bulk it out so to speak. I don't remember Killzone every being as boring as those levels. At the end of the day different people like different things about games. I've always hated Metal Gear Solid games but some people love them. Thats just the way it is. However Killzone 2 is a big game for me as I enjoyed the first one sooo much.

@Dizzy

Fair enough, that was a good explanation. But what you just described would still appear as though it were 'untapped power' to Joe public, as the end result is still an improvement in graphical quality. Kind of like the difference between Burnout and Burnout 3, which is likely the culmination of all those things you mentioned. But to the average gamer, it was the PS2's hidden potential.

Anyway, not much else to discuss here since we're just arguing semantics :P

EDIT: and you can actually see them using some of those techniques in GOW2. If you look closely, it looks as though they've added some extra layers of vegetation to give it that overgrown look, but they've actually just moved some of the stuff that was growing on top of the building and dangled it down the sides to make it more prominent. Throw in some matching textures, a pretty sunset and and hey presto...it's not really pushing the engine any harder, it's just a very smart use of assets IMO. I'm not arguing that they haven't made any improvements to the game, just my take on those screenshots.

I'm with BozoBanana.
Killzone 1 was great. No boring levels like the "Library" levels in Halo 1, 15 hours long (I finished Halo 2, which was released in the same month, in 8), different paths with the different characters. The game just got mowed down by IGN and Gamespot, because it just couldn't be that a Sony game could be as good as Halo 2. But frankly,everyone who followed IGN and the lot those days, was just wrong. Killzone 1 wasn't perfect, but neither was Halo 2 (remember the very sucky final boss).

I had fun with both of them, but to all of you who didn't, or only very briefly played Killzone 1, mob mentality is a silly thing.

Looking forward to Killzone 2... but even more so to Resistance 2, which story is even better.

"@Dizzy

Why link to an article with a senior producer, someone who's business it is to hype his project up to the press, and has no real knowlege of the engine improvements?"

Fanboys clutch at each and every straw...

/goes back to playing games from the era when gameplay was considered more important by people who call themselves gamers than lots of pretty pixels...

nice comments here all over the place.
i donīt own a ps3, i have player KZ1 i dinīt like it. but that doesnīt matter.
itīs good news for ps3 owners to get some good FPS games besides COD.
resistance2 and KZ2 will push gaming further and will be good for FPS to come later. beceause they will need to be better that these games

"resistance2 and KZ2 will push gaming further"

Push gaming further into the U-bend? Dreadfully dull looking sequels to abysmal games do not inspire confidence.

Christ allive. Grow up you pack of bloody kids.


On a tangent, can everyone just ignore farticus. I didn't stick him on my ignore list to have everyone else fill my view with responses to him. I used to avoid ignoring anyone, but I tell you, once you break the seal on that ignore list for a few special cases it just makes the air all clean again. Altogether now...

+1

Come on people, learn to ignore the trolls. Don't take the bait.
No doubt an intelligent conversation on this thread is impossible at this stage.
Just a bunch of kids having temper tantrums, sigh.

I didn't play the first Killzone, but the multi-player on this does look quite exciting. I look forward to seeing it in action. :o)

What the fuck is up with the hate for Uncharted? It's easily one of the best games on the PS3. I'm having loads of fun with the puzzles and the crazy shootouts so I don't see the reason for the bashing. And this has nothing to do with Killzone 2 for that matter.

For the people bashing Killzone 2, just keep in mind that you are underestimating the game. It has potential to be a great shooter and you're just hating on it for the sake of hating. But of course, I should expect it from hateful mongrels who bash the PS3 night and day.

"Killzone 1 was great. No boring levels like the "Library" levels in Halo 1, 15 hours long (I finished Halo 2, which was released in the same month, in 8), different paths with the different characters. The game just got mowed down by IGN and Gamespot, because it just couldn't be that a Sony game could be as good as Halo 2."

Killzone 1 was good, not great. The engine struggled to keep up with the game and that was a serious problem (though somehow it didn't affect the gameplay too much). In stills Killzone 1 looked much better than Halo 2's plasticky shiny world but when things started moving it got into problems.

As for the alledged AI problems, I didn't encounter them on my playthrough. But what really sunk Killzone versus Halo 2 were the multiplayer options: the best loved features of the hardcore gamer = reviewer. The rest of the world doesn't care (except of course for the xbox niche) which makes these features have way too much impact on review scores.

"Looking forward to Killzone 2... but even more so to Resistance 2, which story is even better."

I'm looking forward more to Killzone. I like its Art direction and play style (if that keeps the less arcadey pace of the original) better. But Resistance has a great story, will definitely play that as well. But first I still have to finish around 5 Atlus PS2 RPGs and all of the PS3 games I got last year...

@fartiblah

What kind of stupideous mind would judge a game like KZ2 before release based on the first KZ game. The team has increased in size 10 times as big in personal, same for the the budget of 40 million, and Sony is supplying programmers and tech from their firstparty inhouse devs. The game has been postponed numerous times to polish. Sony needs this to be a AAA game, and they won't release until that's the case.

Guerilla isn't even close to being the same devteam compared to their PS2-era. This is all no guarantee for a KZ2-successtory, but any shit coming from your mouth in this thread so far is stupedeous and beyond cuz it's based on KZ history.

That's like having an opinion on a child's personality without knowing the person, based on the knowing his/her dad. Only dumb people's minds work so generic and primitive.

Cant wait for the class & badge system

over 3 months to go :(