Killzone 2 Preview

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With all this team-play, of course there's a lot of infrastructure to support larger groups like clans. You have to rank up to a certain level to unlock the clan-creation option, but once you have you can give yourself a name and start inviting people to join from your friends list, or by recruiting from leaderboards among other things. There's a 64-player limit, but we doubt that will upset anybody (and if it does, we also doubt it's unchangeable). You can only be in one clan at a time, but of course you can leave, and it's possible to transfer ownership of a clan or nominate clan officers who can take over if you're out of town. Boltjes jokes that there are safeguards to stop you getting drunk and deleting the entire clan, but he's also being serious.

To compel you to join clans and fight each other, Guerrilla has implemented a clan score system called "valor points", which starts you off with a pot of valor (can we call it valour?) and allows you to wager it against other clans in a fight. Guerrilla says it will highlight the biggest valour-point totals changing hands and that it will be a hard road back if you run out, although there will be larger low-level clan tournaments with totals up for grabs if you do run out (think of it as non-league football, perhaps). All the way up the skill scale there's support for tournaments with a capacity of 256 clans if you can organise it.

All of this will, inevitably, feed into and allow you to orchestrate it from Killzone.com, the "Killzone Command Center", which will include a number of tools for coordinating your activities and tracking stats and progress. Your profile page will show you your progression towards ranks, ribbons and medals, and there will be four overall leaderboard types (individual, friends, clans, clan members) populated with weekly and monthly boards in a variety of areas. Over 100 player stats are supposedly tracked, so you can see who has the most headshots and compare your performance against others. Killzone.com will also host developer blogs, developer-run tournaments and other promotions to keep you interested.

Sony's community push is noticeably significant on all its 2008/9 titles, including LBP, Resistance 2 and Killzone 2.

While it's wide-ranging for those who dig into it, though, Guerrilla also wants inexperienced and casual players to be able to make their way into the multiplayer side of the game, offering an "Easy Join" option that simply matches your rank and relative skill-set to other players when you want to head to a server, and there's also the promise of introducing new content gradually, not least by separating it across various ranks, to avoid overwhelming people. That's hardly just a casual feature though (we'd certainly appreciate it), and good-for-one-and-all is a theme across a number of other inclusions. When you respawn, for example, it's possible to check out a video feed of the action at that location so you don't end up walking into a shower of bullets from a cluster of campers.

For all this talk of infrastructure and framework, we're not shown much of the actual game, although what we do see suggests graphical equivalence with the single-player campaign, and a mini-map inserted in the top-left. The videos remind us of Killzone 2's saturated graphics (especially the muzzle flare - a gunpowder rainbow in every barrel), leathery textures, high contrast thresholds and smoky corridors, and observing some of the night-time squad attacks in particular, albeit in brief, we'd estimate that the dynamic will be distinctive.

We still want one of those Helghast hats. We'd wear it to weddings.

There's a lot of work to do, though, before the game's ready in February 2009, and the developer will be polling the public for its feedback with a multiplayer beta test prior to release, and giving the press (and presumably public) hands-on with it at Leipzig's Games Convention to help gauge whether its ideas are working as planned. Boltjes' talk was meant to be all-encompassing, we suspect, and a few follow-up questions suggest the game's feature-complete on the online side: yes we're thinking about co-op for DLC, no there aren't controllable vehicles, etc.

What's clear is that Guerrilla's taking online multiplayer - and managing the needs of the community that supports it - very seriously. The devs' boss Hermen Hulst pipes up from the corner during Boltjes' Q&A to answer that multiplayer and single-player are "exactly equally important" to the Dutch studio.

Overall it's a comprehensive array of features, clearly influenced by the likes of Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3, and if Killzone 2's gameplay inspires the player numbers to fill out the framework, those players sound as though they will be well served. The key is whether once you've built it, they will come - and we should get a better impression of that once we've played it for ourselves in Leipzig next month.