Inside the Killzone

By: Giancarlo Varanini, GameSpot - Posted on March 17, 2011

Guerrilla's Killzone franchise has found itself in some contentious positions over the course of its life span. The development of the first game in the series brought about cries of "the Halo killer" from the press. The second game found expectations dramatically raised due to a target render video prominently displayed during a Sony Electronic Entertainment Expo press conference, which prompted questions of whether or not its high visual standards could actually be achieved. Despite all of these things, Guerrilla has seemingly remained steadfast in delivering its own vision for Killzone, and with the fourth game in the franchise completed, we got a chance to speak with Hermen Hulst--cofounder and managing director of Guerrilla Games--to talk more about the design process behind Killzone 3, the franchise as a whole, and the good and bad characteristics of the video game industry.

The Killzone target render that was unexpectedly put on display at E3 2005.

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GameSpot: For the original Killzone, you had to deal with the "Halo killer" moniker. For Killzone 2, you had the target render video from E3. It seems like Killzone 3 was the first time there wasn't any manufactured pressure from the outside. The team was able to focus on its own goals.

Hermen Hulst: Going back to a few things you're saying, the Halo comparisons were a press thing. I met the journalist who came up with that recently, and he apologized. It was a blessing and a curse in a way [that we were being compared] to a well-established game. That was an honor to us in a way, and it really raised the exposure to the franchise. It was also kind of awkward because they're such different games. We never really thought of them as a benchmark or even as a reference--even though, of course, [Halo] is an FPS.

It's a very different story for the second target you bring up. The studio [created that target render] as a benchmark. We created that as a concept trailer to capture the core experience of the game. It wasn't just a graphical benchmark--it was the intensity and the visceral gameplay style. All of that was captured. Then it was exposed to the outside world when we weren't ready. But that had little to do with it, so the pressure was a secondary thing to that trailer.

The pressure for Killzone 3 was self-imposed in that we didn't want our fans to wait for another four to four and a half years. We've suffered from that in the sense that after four and a half years, your game might be forgotten about. There are very few people that still play multiplayer on the servers. Now, I think we can bring a game to a loyal and still very active user base. We still have mindshare with a lot of the people playing Killzone 2. That's been great. That's one thing we wanted to do. For a lot of teams, I guess it's normal to have a two-year cycle, but for us, it was new and that was the big pressure with Killzone 3.

GS: What have you learned in terms of streamlining development while moving from one Killzone to the next? Have you seen any drastic changes in terms of how Guerrilla makes games?

HH: I think the single biggest thing is that we always had an extremely junior team compared to some of the competition that had very veteran teams, usually US-based. This was the first time we were actually able to do a project where the vast majority was veteran game developers, and that makes a big difference. You require fewer people to come up with new things and to develop through with the required level of polish. That was probably the single biggest change for us--to have that team ready. Then, of course, we could start from day one because we had a great base [to work with]. Killzone 2 was such a solid foundation for us that we said, "OK. Let's use that." Initially we actually said, "Let's not even go too deeply into technological improvements. Let's focus on the variety. Let's theme every level nicely and differently." I think one of the biggest gains over Killzone 2 was that it has such different environments, pacing, and gameplay--that's what we wanted to focus on initially. And, just the guys that we have on the team, they started developing, optimizing, and finding new ways to create more variety and more feature-driven gameplay. That was also a different mind-set from the previous game and a very deliberate one too.

GS: How do you respond to feedback? Are you actively looking at what fans want?

HH: It's part of our development philosophy. We listen and we listen rigorously. We browse through every review, forum post--we're very methodical that way. We list what people really, really like, and we take that and we try to push it as far as we can without changing the essence of it. On the other side, we look at the things that weren't as good. We try to take those things and really flip them over. Internally, we call it a funny name. We call it the "top and bottom-up approach." In the original Killzone, AI and multiplayer were examples of some of the worst-reviewed elements. We turned them around into some of the better-reviewed elements in Killzone 2. People thought it was a little monotonous through the first half of Killzone 2, so that's a really good example of something we took and really made sure that every level plays and looks differently. Also, within every single level, there's a lot of diversity and variety.