Killzone: Shadow Fall is going to keep things real

Cast your mind back to 2005. Flatter TVs were something that only rich people could afford, Twitter was a mere idea and gaming was easing its way into blockbuster territory. And then, at E3, Killzone 2 was shown. And it just looked too damn good, as it was later revealed. And that’s a fact that its developers want to acknowledge for Killzone: Shadow Fall.

“That was one thing where we went ‘Okay, next time around we’re going to be on a stage we’re going to make sure it’s real,’” Guerrilla co-founder Hermen Hulst said to Edge, referring to the E3 controversy that was hyped as being actual gameplay footage.

“We actually made a point of not even claiming it was real, it was as a matter of course that it was real,’ technical director Michiel Van Der Leeuw added to the conversation.

I think everybody was onboard with that, there was so much drive for people to make things real. We were working with central in London and the guys in Japan, fixing the firmware to make sure that the Facebook upload would work. It doesn’t get much more real than that.

And according to Guerilla, they didn’t even have a backup playthrough video for the live demonstration of the game, in case things went south.

“We said ‘no back-up videos’ either,” Van Der Leeuw explained. “And we fixed three bugs in the last day that were very, very rare and only happened like once in a hundred playthroughs, but we knew that three of those bugs were in there.

So theoretically, there was like a three in a hundred chance of a crash. I was very nervous seeing Stephen playing on stage and a lot of coders here in the Amsterdam office watching live-stream were also really, really nervous. But we made it through.

I never got why Guerilla looked for trouble back then, with Killzone 2. I still have the game, and even after a couple years where newer, more upgraded FPS titles have launched, it’s still a visual stunner. Killzone: Shadow Fall doesn’t look to bad either if you’re a series fan. It’s one of the launch titles for the Playstation 4, and if you haven’t seen the game in action yet, well, here ya go:

Last Updated: April 30, 2013