Guerrilla's stunning PLAYSTATION 3 trailer, showing the future of the Killzone series, is the talk of the town here in LA (as well as the Internet at large). We did some digging...
Jan-Bart Van Beek is the Game Director of the PS3 Killzone at Guerrilla Games, and has spent the last few months working on the trailer that really blew the crowd away at Monday's PLAYSTATION 3 unveiling. After a second showing of the trailer at today's SCEE conference received another rapturous round of applause, we caught up with Jan to find out more.
How do you feel about the reaction to the trailer that was shown yesterday?
Jan-Bart: It's been an amazing reception, the rush you get from seeing your own stuff on the big screen like that, and then the reaction to it, it's a big rush, I'm really happy about it.
How long ago did work start on the sequence?
Jan-Bart: We started working on it in late November, and only finished it three days before the show, at the very, very last moment!
It seemed like Killzone, only more so! Is that what we can expect from the finished game?
Jan-Bart: We want to avoid having just Killzone with more beautiful graphics. We want to add a lot more to it than that. So we're adding a lot more character interaction, with the ways they respond to you and how you can react to them. There's a lot more interactions between characters like you see in the trailer, people dragging each other off out of combat and helping each other, giving each other their weapons - a lot more real human interaction, basically.
[Ben Duncan, the game's Producer] It's like with the Alfred Molina demo, the quality of facial animation we can get with the characters means you'll really feel that emotional sense of being part of a unit and fighting together. Characters working together, comrades pulling each other back from the field of battle; that kind of thing is really going to move the genre forward.
There's a great moment where you see an ISA ally take out a Helghan with his rifle butt to save your bacon... is that representative of the kind of sophisticated behaviour we'll start seeing in artificial intelligence when PS3 arrives?
Jan-Bart: Yes, totally, it's just the start. Characters will be very aware, very alert to how they might be able to help you. That moment [with the rifle butt] is a good example of how it can add a little visual 'wow' to it all.
Is the Killzone sequence a fair example of what people can expect from realtime gameplay on PLAYSTATION 3?
Jan-Bart: Yeah, it's basically a representation of the look and feel of the game we're trying to make.
Have you found PS3 easy to work with?
JB: Yes, we're really impressed with it. The Cell is amazingly powerful, and the graphics CPU [the RSX, co-developed with Nvidia] in there... it's actually hard to mimic it on our development PCs, we have to see it on the PS3 hardware itself. It's really nice to be working with such powerful hardware.
As yet, high definition TV isn't that widespread, especially in Europe - are you concerned that some players won't get to see your game in as much detail as is intended?
JB: No, I think in two, three years' time, HDTV will be a lot more accepted, in Europe too. We'll start out with 720p and then [onto 1080p] as there's now this product [PS3] that people will want to buy a new TV for.
Thanks, and congratulations on the work.
because I learned it in my 1st language.
) and loving it but it looked like a game.