BITMOB: Do you worry that you might be ahead of the curve in terms of 3D?
STH: I don’t worry about it. It’s a great addition to an already great game. First and foremost, the game’s got to be good, because 3D is not going to make a bad game any better. But it is going to make a good game even better. I think once people play it — there’s a lot of skepticism around there, but what we’ve picked up so far in terms of the response, from the press as well, is that once you start playing it you do notice that it has an added benefit. It’s really awesome to be in the middle of that war. The sense of immersion is greatly increased. Something with Killzone that we always want to achieve is to really put you in the middle of that action
BITMOB: Relative to all the time that goes into making a triple-A title, is it all that much work to make a game 3D?
STH: The work for 3D is relatively small. Obviously, you have to render everything twice, so that’s a hit on our tech team, who had to already push the engine to the next level just to create the game that we want to make.
And at the same time there’s a couple of design choices, or design problems, that you need to solve. Most of the game works in 3D initially, out of the box, because the game is made in 3D. The 3D world is there, so rendering that is easy. But the things that don’t belong in a game world, things like the HUD elements, those you have to work on. What layer of depth do they need? What do we want to do with the crosshair, because the crosshair is one game element that you can’t really get rid of? That’s something that involves additional work on top of what we’re already doing for the normal game. But it’s not that much — most of the content, it’s just one-to-one.
[more 3D stuff in the article]
It's both awesome and rather scary.
