Killzone 2: Top 5 Quick Fixes
The changes that need to be made before release.
by Cam Shea, IGN AU
Australia, December 3, 2008 - We've just spent a number of hours getting stuck into Killzone 2 preview code. Our thoughts? There's a lot to like, but it's just not as compelling as it could be. With that in mind, we've decided to highlight five areas that we think can still be changed in time for release. Here's hoping Guerrilla Games is reading.
Before we move on to those, however, it's worth quickly telling you about the stuff that did impress us. First and foremost are the graphics. This game is drop-dead gorgeous. We've seen urban blight before, but it's never been quite this pretty. Killzone 2 uses a restrained colour palette (of the genus "Grittyus"), but the lighting is beautiful – glare from the sun pokes through the clouds and lightning lights up the night sky, while subtle changes help give the world tone; at times stark, at times rich. The texture work is uniformly excellent, as are the animations, and there are numerous small touches, such as motion blur as you turn, that add yet another layer. The wider environments are quite spectacular. You'll have shoot-outs in shanty towns that have been thrown together from corrugated iron, you'll walk through back alleys and claustrophobic apartment blocks littered with refuse and debris, and your jaw will hit the floor as you stare at a destroyed city street, plumes of smoke sweeping across the night sky, while lightning crackles and power cables strung across the street dance in the wind.
Squalor has never been so appealing.
The physicality of the first person perspective is also really impressive. You really feel like your character has weight, and when you reach out and turn around to climb down a ladder, walk up and grip a gun emplacement, hop over a low barricade, or reload your weapon, the sense of motion and your connectedness to the world is spot on. The cover system is also a good showcase for the first person perspective, allowing you to simply walk up to a wall or low barricade, and hold down L2. This will see you stick to the wall (allowing you to lean out if there's a doorway or window) or automatically crouch down behind the barricade – popping up to shoot, then taking cover again is simple. It works well.
We're also appreciative that - while designed to be linear - Killzone 2 still presents the player with options. Sure, they're mostly 'you can go down this corridor or that corridor, up this set of stairs or that set of stairs' choices, but it still makes the world feel much more believable, and importantly gives you flanking options. Now, onto our five quick fixes...
SO-SO WEAPONS
Look, we're not saying the weapons in Killzone 2 are bad – it's a perfectly fine array. They just don't get us all that excited. What can you expect? Well, the signature weapon of the game is probably the M82 assault rifle – that's the one with the glass window iron sight and green dot aiming reticule, but there are a number of rifles and machine guns to choose from. There's the StA-52 assault rifle, which has a slightly faster rate of fire but a fair bit of recoil (which, of course, can be used to your advantage), the StA-14, which is more of an old school single shot rifle – no auto fire for you, but it has a better range than something like the StA-52. There's also the StA-11 sub-machine gun, a great rapid fire machine gun with next to no recoil.
Spicing things up a little more are the M1 LMG – a mighty powerful chain gun that's (naturally enough) pretty slow to reload, the M13 shotgun, the VC-9 rocket launcher, the StA-74 sniper rifle and the VC1 flamethrower. You're also able to switch to the M4 revolver at any time with the triangle button – it packs a bit of a punch and has unlimited ammo, and you've also got a knife which can be accessed with the D-pad. Oh, and don't forget the frag grenades… although these are next to useless unless you seriously cook them. The light and the blinking sound mean that enemies scatter the second you throw one.
The M82 is satisfying to shoot, but it's utilitarian.
Those are the weapons we've used so far in the game, and while there are probably more (there's definitely another rocket launcher for instance), we still can't help but feel a little letdown. We get that the team is going for a believable weapon loadout, but we could definitely do with a little more 'pop'. Even the shotgun – that staple of the FPS genre – just isn't that compelling. This thing doesn't feel like raw death in your hands. It feels like slapping someone with wet newspaper. Slapping them very very hard with a semi-automatic newspaper, of course, but a slap nonetheless.
And then there's the flamethrower, the current flavour of the month for shooters. As opposed to World at War's flamethrower, which fires a jet of flame twenty feet or so, Killzone 2's flamethrower is a little different – it shoots an arcing stream of molten flame. It's pretty effective, but rather than sending your enemies to a quick and charcoaled death, they tend to dance about for quite a while before succumbing. We want faster stopping power!
How to fix it:
In the case of the shotgun, the fix is simple – beef up the sound effect and make it more of a boom (seriously, it's amazing how big a difference sound design can make to your impression of something), and then make it a little bit more powerful. It doesn't have to do more damage, but if it knocked enemies back a little more, we'd feel more bad-***. The flamethrower also needs a few simple tweaks to give it more oomph. In short, your enemies should die quickly and horribly. Enough with the prancing about on fire already. You're dispensing death, not leading a Stunt Man 101 course.
As for the other weapons, well, we know this game isn't going for a Resistance-like approach, but a little more variety wouldn't hurt, either. Ball's in your court Guerrilla – surprise us!
CONTEXT
Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing? Why should I care? Search me - the Killzone 2 code we have right now doesn't make much of an effort to tell you. Granted, we only have six complete levels, so it's not like we're playing from the beginning and experiencing the game's full narrative, but there's a definite absence of incidental narrative right now. We're hoping that we'll have more motivation in the final game. We want a good reason to hate the Helghast and to want to wipe them out!
Who are you people and why should I care whether you live or die?
How to fix it:
Obviously the final game will have a much greater narrative grounding than the levels we have right now, but it wouldn't hurt to have a little more of the chatter from your squad used to fill in gaps (of course, it has to be subtle - nothing worse than forced exposition), and how about putting some info about the world in those briefcases you collect during levels?
OVERLY CHATTY, OCCASIONALLY STUPID & FREQUENTLY UNAMBITIOUS AI
"No, really, be my guest! Step in front of me through that doorway so you can get shot and block my view of the approaching Helghast soldiers. That's awesome, thanks guy!" This is just one verbatim quote from me during my Killzone 2 play sessions. (Sarcasm may be the lowest form of humour but I don't know what I'd do without it.) The AI in this game, while reasonable, certainly isn't a shining beacon of human-cyborg relations. At least, not right now it isn't.
At this stage in development, the friendly AI – you spend a fair bit of the game alongside at least one other friendly soldier – veers between useful and highly irritating. On the useful side of the fence, your buddy will finish off Helghast for you, will often draw fire for you and will help you move smoothly through the environment... partly by hovering around the entrance to the next section, but partly by opening doors for you, because – as has become distressingly apparent over the years – although most leading men in the shooter genre can chew through hundreds of enemy soldiers, a simple door handle is too much for them. Mind you, most doors in shooters are welded shut, so I guess after a while you'd just stop trying.
Being berated was bad, but the wedgie was really unnecessary.
On the irritating side, there's the aforementioned stepping into your line of fire/obscuring your view moves, but thankfully, that isn't too often. More annoying is your buddy's habit of berating you during sections where you have an objective. In one area you need to set two charges. The first one is out in the open, and there are heaps of Helghast wandering about nearby, not to mention a couple on mounted guns up on a higher level. In short, you've got to clear the area before you try and set the charge. Your squadmate, however, pays this no mind. From the second the section begins he's screaming at you "SET THE CHARGE! SERIOUSLY MAN, HURRY UP AND SET THE FRICKING CHARGE! ARE YOU IGNORING ME OR ARE YOU JUST STUPID? SET THE GODDAMN CHARGE!" Is he helping you clear out the enemies? Not at all. Nope, he's basically hiding in a corner with a megaphone, shouting in your ear about how inadequate you are. "Hey! AI guy! If setting the charge is so easy, why don't you do it yourself? If not, shut the hell up!"
So that's the friendly AI. What about enemy AI? Well, it's not too bad, even though they do seem to either run at you or stay behind cover and move from predefined point to predefined point. There's nothing we haven't see before here, but there really isn't that much variety to their tactics, which ties into a lack of enemy variety (more on that further along). Overall though, enemy AI, while not spectacular, is good enough.
How to fix it:
We've said it before and we'll say it again – it's great when an AI buddy clues you in on the way forward, but it should be the player leading the charge. By and large Killzone 2 follows this rationale, so it should be a simple fix to ensure that this is the case at all times. That way, no more AI getting in the way. Similarly, it's a pretty simple tweak to dial down the prompting you're given by the AI, so we're pretty sure that by the time the game ships, you won't be getting berated to SET THE CHARGE nearly as often.
VANILLA ENEMIES
So, I've got nothing against vanilla ice cream. Quality vanilla ice cream, after all, can be quite delicious. Still, you don't want to eat nothing but vanilla ice cream for hours on end. Inevitably, you start thinking about all those other flavours, and how you could get some mix and match action happening it would be like a flavour explosion in your mouth.
Same deal here. Granted, we haven't played all the way through the game, but from what we have played, the enemies get pretty samey pretty quickly. Sure, there are a few variations on the basic Helghast design (such as the guys that tend to man the machine gun turrets, who seem stronger and faster than the standard issue grunts, the sniper 'ghast, and the big sub-boss dudes that have chain guns and thick armour, so you have to shoot their weak spot), but they're hardly radical departures. It all settles into an unsurprising rhythm very early on, and this is compounded by a lack of truly mindblowing set pieces and scripted encounters... which we'll get to next.
Menacing? You bet. Chock full of personality? Not so much.
How to fix it:
Quick! You've got a month or two of development left – get a bit more variety in there! Give the soldiers robo-attack dogs or something! We need more flavours sitting atop our Killzone 2 cone.
PACING ISSUES / SCRIPTING LETDOWNS
The best heavily-scripted shooters, such as Call of Duty 4, are all about momentum. Lulls in the action only ever serve to build tension, otherwise it's action all the way, with new types of challenges thrown in regularly. Killzone 2 hasn't quite got that balance right yet.
One area has the player and a couple of friendlies charged with surviving a Helghast assault in an open courtyard. The set-up is pretty decent – there are a couple of directions on the ground they can come from, as well as a second level above the player. You have a couple of spots that are pretty defensible too. So why is it so dull to play through? It's because the enemies come in waves – with no real variety within their ranks, and there are big, boring gaps in-between the waves that don't successfully build tension. Perhaps it would be more fun on a higher difficulty level (our code is locked to Trooper difficulty, which is the second lowest of four), but the entire sequence really needs to be tightened up.
And as much as this game has a good sense of scale, you don't really feel that involved in the scale. Take the big open battle early on in the game (video below). Sure, you can pilot a tank, and you can blow Helghast soldiers up and destroy other tanks, but you're artificially constrained to a really small area of movement. That's not really delivering on the promise of the environments.
http://au.ps3.ign.com/articles/935/935405p1.html
