Killzone 2: Interview With Guerrilla

Interview with Steven Ter Heide and Eric Boltjes from Guerrilla.

Guerrilla Games’ Steven Ter Heide and Eric Boltjes are remarkably honest men. To have an interview with them quickly turns into an exercise in professional restraint; one feels they would answer any question on any topic with assured, articulate integrity. The quality shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, for these two are the respective Senior Producer and Senior Online Designer of PlayStation 3’s critical darling, Killzone 2. As I write this, the game is teetering on the edge of its commercial release, an inevitable explosion of success that will give Guerrilla Games a rockstar status reserved for only the youngest, coolest ‘dev teams’ (Bungie and Insomniac, I’m looking at you, bad boys).

It’s fortunate then, that Ter Heide and Boltjes are not driven by the media hype machine, nor the pressure to schlep around the publicity circuit. They’re driven by a passion for the game they’ve toiled away at, morning and night, for the last few years of their young lives. With nothing left to prove, they sit down with me in a Japanese restaurant in Newmarket, and let the passion speak for itself.

Killzone 2 has obvious influences from the original, but on the whole plays like an entirely different game. What was the number one change you wanted to make while creating your vision for the sequel?

Steven Ter Heide: The easy answer would be ‘jump’. The jump function is now in there, and wasn’t in the original. The bigger thing we wanted to change was the AI, making sure that every situation you go into is different, you can reply it time again and every time it changes. That’s probably the biggest thing we wanted to overhaul. There were a lot more things we wanted to change, but if I had to name one thing that would be it. That’s also the thing that people will notice, that’s what makes the game. If you have to shoot people, they have to behave realistically.

Steven Ter Heide, Senior Producer

The game has been massively hyped since the E3 trailer in 2006. How did you guys deal with the pressure since that trailer? How do you deal with the hype?

Steven Ter Heide: Poorly! No, it’s a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it’s out there and you have to deliver, so that’s where the motivation comes from – ‘ok, we’re going to prove everyone wrong, and we’re going to deliver.’ At the same time, it might have been smarter to not show just then. It was originally meant as an internal piece to show to the team: this is what we intended to do with Killzone 2. And it was still early days, then we had to stay quiet about it for the next two years. That was the biggest problem we faced, how to keep the motivation up while the forums were raging and the questions were coming in, and we couldn’t talk about it.

Do you pay attention to internet hype? Do you frequent games websites?

Steven Ter Heide: Absolutely.

Eric Boltjes: Definitely. You try not to get involved, especially in forums; you don’t want to fuel the fire. But we do read a lot of the different comments, what the buzz is, what people think. After the 2005 trailer, it was tricky because a lot of people started laying into it, like ‘it can’t be real, they’ll never be able to do that’ – and it wasn’t real, obviously. But it did motivate us to really show them that we can make a kick ass game and prove them wrong.

Eric Boltjes, Senior Online Game Designer

Do you find the levels of passion from some of these gamers alarming?

Steven Ter Heide: It is quite scary, yeah. If you see some of these responses from people on gaming forums….you shouldn’t take everything seriously. But it is hard to distance yourself from it and look away when some of these things are ongoing. Especially because people just jump on any little tidbit of news or information. Wherever they got it from, we have no idea, and all of a sudden it’s out there being blown out of proportion. It’s scary because we can’t control that, there’s no way we can diffuse things without revealing stuff we can’t reveal.

Do you guys do that with games you’re passionate about? Frequent websites and follow tidbits of information?

Steven Ter Heide: We follow the industry closely. In game developer circles you have your friends that work in other companies, and you build up your relationships with industry events. We do know all of these guys and get insight into what they’re doing. If they’re part of the Sony family, we have intimate knowledge of what they’re doing. If they’re not, there are ways of getting information, but it’s very different from going on the web and shouting out your opinion.

Just going back to that trailer. Obviously it wasn’t in-game footage – did you guys ever worry that the Playstation 3 didn’t have the grunt to deliver what you wanted it to deliver?

Steven Ter Heide: I think people took away different things from looking at the trailer. The chaos, the intensity.

Eric Boltjes: Yeah. It’s also about the animations, how people move in the world, the overwhelming sense of a larger ongoing war. Those are the things people picked up on – not necessarily just the graphical quality – that’s just the façade. The intense action was always something we knew we could deliver on.

Steven Ter Heide: [During development] The visual fidelity came in bursts, where all of a sudden things started to come together, with all the post-processing effects and level of detail – and it started to look quite close to what we originally wanted. To be honest, I recently looked at the trailer again – I hadn’t looked at it for a long time. And I’m thinking ‘that looks really washed out!’ And there’s not a lot of contrast and depth in it, and 'that weapon looks a bit off….’ You see all these little glitches here and there, and I think the actual game looks better. In the game there’s all this freedom to move around, I can look at a single object, and the level of detail looks better than in the trailer. If you look at the backgrounds in the trailer – it’s just kind of nothing, wooden planks.

Eric Boltjes: I hope people will see that. When they play the game, and then look back at the trailer, they’ll see that the game looks better in particular areas than in the trailer.

Click for more Killzone 2 images.

Do you feel that you’ve fully explored the PS3’s graphics engine? Have you tapped into its full potential?

Steven Ter Heide: Certainly not.

Will there ever be a game that looks better than Killzone 2 on the PS3?

Steven Ter Heide: Absolutely. Look at the initial games that came out on PS2, then look at the last generation titles, like God of War 2. Nobody would have ever expected that that kind of quality was feasible on the PS2. Things like Shadow of the Colossus and God of War 2 totally upped the playing field. It’s still early days on the PS3. I think we’ve unlocked a lot of its power, unlocked some special tricks to make Killzone 2 look spectacular in certain areas. But there will certainly be titles that will up the bar. There isn’t even a new Gran Turismo out yet, and that’s going to look amazing. We also know that we can do better as well – we have all these overwhelmingly positive comments right now – but we look at the game and obviously only see its flaws, because we’ve been working on it for four years now. We know all the bugs, all the issues hidden in it where we think ‘oh God we could have just fixed that, just upped the resolution there, we’ve got some memory spare that we didn’t use…’ We know we can do better, and that’s a kind of scary thing, especially for the creatives in the company because everybody’s pushing for more, and it’s our baby and we don’t quite want to let go of it just yet. But you have to draw a line somewhere. That’s typically my job – to say ‘it’s good enough. Put it in a box, let’s ship it’.

Aside from the unique cover system, Killzone 2 adheres very rigidly to the conventions of the FPS genre. Did you toss up more outlandish gameplay ideas during development?

Steven Ter Heide: It’s back to the basics stuff. That’s exactly what we wanted to do. We looked at the title ‘first person shooter’ and took a step back and asked ourselves what that means. It sounds really simple, and maybe a little bit stupid, but what does ‘first person’ mean? We wanted to keep everything in first person: the cover system, helping your buddies out – we wanted to keep a sense of immersion, dropping as much of the HUD as we could. It’s the little decisions that add to this sense of immersion. The same goes for the shooting: what makes shooting fun? We wanna see some great responses from every bullet you fire. We want the weapons to have a real weight to them. We want intricate details and functionality. Despite the Sci Fi setting, you should still have the feeling these weapons could work. It’s all these little details that form the basics of the shooter, and we wanted to just do those things really well.

You’ve refined the conventions.

Steven Ter Heide: That’s exactly the kind of thing we’re going for. Let’s polish up the basics, put production values into the basics. That’s what will hopefully set us apart, rather than tapping into other genres, getting RPG elements or open-world elements in there. Genre overlap is a growing thing right now, but we’ve looked at our strengths. We’re a visually oriented company with a strong cinematic background, so we’re going for that kind of style. On both fronts, single and multiplayer, we’re going for something that always puts you in the centre of the action. It sounds really simple, but hopefully people will pick up on this and say ‘this is fun’. There isn’t a big innovation in there, but it’s the whole combination of everything.

Were there any guns that almost made the final cut but didn't?

Steven Ter Heide: Some of the guns that are in there, you only get to play for a short bit. Like the bolt gun for instance, you only get to play that for a little while. I would like to have played with it for a bit longer! But again it’s about drawing these lines and saying ‘that’s enough’. We’ve got other guns to steal the show as well. I don’t think there were any crazy guns that didn’t make it. There was a thing for the bolt gun, you could do some tricks with it. Before we made the bolts explosive, you could actually shoot them into a wall, and then walk up the wall, like a ladder. But we made the bolts explosive to prevent this from happening, because we showed it to the testers, and they were like ‘you have to take that out. We’re not testing every single area with those bolts’.

Eric Boltjes: That’s four months of work right there!

Favorite guns?

Eric Boltjes: The sniper rifle. I like to sit in the corner in multiplayer, put on my cloak, pick em off at 200 metres. Especially when you make a headshot and those heads explode – the pay off is nice.

It feels very satisfying.

Eric Boltjes: I know! At work we have ‘Friday Fragfest’…you shoot somebody in the head and you hear swearing from the other room.

Click for more Killzone 2 images.

Speaking of the sniper rifle, did you guys feel pressure from Sony to integrate Sixaxis movement?

Steven Ter Heide: Strangely enough, not at all. We always had Sixaxis movement in mind, but people don’t believe us. Nobody at Sony told us to do it. We didn’t want it to be gimmicky; it had to be an integral part of the gameplay.

Eric Boltjes: It had to add something.

Steven Ter Heide: To us, it added to the immersion, having tactile interaction with the world. The first thing we implemented was the valve movement, grabbing hold of that valve with the Sixaxis. We realized it felt good, it felt natural. Then we started coming up with other implementations, like the Sixaxis sniper rifle, where you hold the rifle steady (using the Sixaxis). That was one of the last things we did, and there was a lot of debate whether we would leave it in or not. Some people just didn’t get it, and were getting frustrated; telling us the weapon was useless. But they weren’t holding it still!

Eric Boltjes: Once you tell people specifically ‘just hold it still, just use it for minor motion’, they would get it. The communication was hard, cos none of the other weapons use motion like that.

Despite the Sci-fi story, Killzone 2’s visuals and gameplay feel very much based in a harsh reality. Tell us about the decisions to keep things so grounded in the real world.

Steven Ter Heide: You just kind of check-listed all the words we use to describe Killzone 2 internally. Everything we came up with is ‘reality with a twist’. We want people to still be able to relate to whatever they’re doing, whatever they’re seeing. All these things should have a natural, understandable function: so you see a dustbin, it should act like a dustbin. The guns should behave like guns should, even if they’re not real weapons. That’s kind of the whole vision behind everything in Killzone 2: ‘reality with a twist’.

Eric Boltjes: Once you get into that mindset – everything you design automatically has that in mind. Even when we were thinking of new modes in multiplayer, we were always thinking we couldn’t do anything too ‘out there,’ cos it has to have that realistic Killzone feel. I guess after a while, after working on this game for four years, it became a natural way of thinking.

Steven Ter Heide: It’s the simple things as well, like in multiplayer – instead of just being told to capture the flag’, there’s a propaganda speaker telling you what to do. It fits with the universe, and gives what you’re doing some sense. It’s the simple tweaks, but all of a sudden what you’re doing feels more real. I think a lot of people buy into that sort of thing, because that’s certainly what we saw with Killzone 1: one of the strengths was its sense of reality. It was believable even though it was Sci Fi. We kept this and built on it in Killzone 2.

It feels more like Alien than Starship Troopers.

Eric Boltjes: Yeah. A lot of people also asked us why we were still shooting bullets if it was set in the future. How do you explain that? But again, it’s about keeping it recognizable. If you’re shooting lasers and green blobs and stuff, instantly you’re distanced from the weapons, you can’t relate to them.

The AI in Killzone 2 are equally as realistic, truly giving the illusion of independent thought. Has the AI in the finished version of ever surprised you by doing something completely unexpected?

Steven Ter Heide: Yeah. Outside of the overall story there are the minute-to-minute experiences that the player has, that forms their own personal story. So what we tried to do was get a lot of systems in there that compliment and feed off each other, so new things will start happening. Internally we call these new things ‘happy accidents’, where something goes ‘perfectly wrong’, and creates a great experience. The posh term for it is ‘emergent behavior’, where the AI starts to do something that isn’t programmed, and these systems are interacting with each other, creating something new. We (at Guerrilla) know how to play the game, we can play through it and get a sense of what is possible. But when somebody with fresh eyes starts to play it, they play it completely differently to us, and all of a sudden these new things start to happen. Two years ago when we first showed the game to the Press, and they had some hands on time, I saw some things I’d never seen before. A guy came into the warehouse in the opening level, and a couple of Helghast came at him. He took cover and shot one of them. Now we’d made this system where part of a Helghast hit response was when he dies, sometimes, if he was planning to fire his weapon and got shot, he’ll still fire it while he’s dying. And dependent on where you hit him, he’ll fire in whatever direction his rag-doll will fall. And this happened to this particular Helghast. He kept firing, but he fired into an explosive barrel next to him, and there were three Helghast coming up behind him, and the explosion killed his buddies. You’re standing there thinking: ‘did that just happen?’ I’d never seen that before in the game. And it’s those kinds of things that stick with people, those personal stories. That’s what we wanted to achieve. You can never predict some of these things.

Click for more Killzone 2 images.

Without getting too technical, how did you guys manage to achieve such responsive, unique AI?

Steven Ter Heide: We’ve got a big team of AI programmers, those guys worked really hard to make a system where the AI actually plans. They get sensory input from the sights and the sounds around them, their sidelines, the context of where they are in the world, the threats. Then they start analyzing, where their cover is, what their plan is. They do that over and over again. Every time something changes in the world, something gets blown up, dust is tossed up, the player moves, all these things they take into account and they re-plan, re-plan, re-plan. So our level designers, instead of saying ‘that guy has to move there’ after a trigger point, have just decided to spawn the Helghast there and let him make up his own mind. At times he’ll hear you coming and go for cover, other times he won’t. They do different things all of the time, which causes a lot of bugs, a lot of things to figure out, it makes our QA very happy! But at the same time we get these kind of unique responses.

Eric Boltjes: The designers can direct you, but the AI defines whatever happens in between. If you come into an area and you don’t use grenades, the whole level plays differently than if you do use grenades. This really adds to the replayability. I went back after finishing the single player campaign using a different weapon, and the events all played out differently. The AI was in different spots; it’s just playing the game again in a different way.

Steven Ter Heide: Same for the bots. Have a go in the Skirmish mode with the bots, this is really where all the play testing came in, looking at what human behavior was like and applying it to the AI, and it worked surprisingly well.

Eric Boltjes: During the Friday Fragfest we had lots of instances in a Search and Retrieve mission where people would split into groups, two guys would wait at the location and make sure it was secure, and two guys would go for the flag. It sounds really simple when you say it like that, but it’s those kinds of tactics we tried to project on the AI. They’ll split up into groups and co-ordinate their efforts, and it makes them feel very lifelike.

Steven Ter Heide: All the bots are named after the development team. Everybody put their names in, and then wanted to give the bots a little bit of their own personality! But that level of detail was a little too extreme...

Let’s talk about narrative – possibly the only part of Killzone 2 that’s come under fire from reviewers. Do you think that story and character in a shooter are as important as graphics and gameplay?

Steven Ter Heide: The story provides you with context, why it’s important you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s something I think we can improve on. The overall story doesn’t matter that much – (as long as) people get it, you’re going to a different planet, you’ve got to capture that guy, and that’s the end of it. What happens in between gives the player context – what am I doing in the next 15 minutes? That’s an area we can improve, certainly. The actual dialogue, we can do better in that area. We’ve made some improvements certainly over Killzone 1, where the speech was very repetitive, we’ve got better systems, but we haven’t got the dialogue down just yet. That’s certainly one of the things high on our list, that’s one of the things we can and need to improve.

And quickly a couple of multiplayer questions. Your favorite classes to play? What’s the best mishmash?

Eric Boltjes: Like I mentioned, I’m a sniper; I like the scope and the cloak suit. But I don’t actually use the secondary abilities to spot and mark, I switch it with the boost, cos that’s really handy when you’re playing Search and Retrieve, you have the objective, you have to run back. And also switching positions while sniping, you can just run from A to B really quickly, and then cloak again. That’s my personal favorite, but I don’t know if it’s the ‘best’. We actually tried to design it so there isn’t a best combination, it’s your personal preference, and we really wanted to make sure you can play the way you want to play. What’s cool as well, in play testing, a lot of people were really grounded into their roles from other games, but they tried other combinations within the roles. It enables people to mix and match other abilities, even the most hard-core snipers played around.

Do you think people will ever play as a medic?

Eric Boltjes: Actually, some people really love it. The primary revive mechanic gives you points, so a lot of people that aren’t that good at shooting will stay in the back and just revive, and they love it. When people do that, it helps your faction win, for example you can keep the assassination target alive.

Click for more Killzone 2 images.

Why no co-op mode? Was it because you ran out of time?

Steven Ter Heide: Not necessarily a question of running out of time. If you want to do it right, you have to put it in there from the beginning. You have to come up with a way to make it work, and there are a lot of different flavors of co-op out there, and we didn’t feel that it was right. We wanted the campaign to be about a single person, and we didn’t want it to be about the over-riddled problems that you face when you’re doing co-op, with the cut-scenes set up all differently. We wanted to focus on one single person and do that really well, and implement the multiplayer really well. Like with the bots, we wanted to ease people into the online modes as well.

Eric Boltjes: Yeah, it’s kind of grown on us, that position. It was not a thing from the outset that there was never going to be co-op.

Steven Ter Heide: It was more that the campaign works, multiplayer works, why do we need co-op at this point? Let’s postpone the position until downloadable content, and lets see what we can do.

So, downloadable co-op is an option?

Steven Ter Heide: Not in the near future, The first lot of downloadable content…(pause). Co-op isn’t on the schedule just yet.

Could Killzone 2 have only been developed on the PS3?

Steven Ter Heide: I honestly believe that’s the case. It’s not Sony talking, it’s by looking at the stuff, I don’t think we would have been able to pull it off on any other console. Just the sheer amount of detail we got in there, so many layers upon layers of things. The AI behavior is just one SPU, just dealing with the physics. We can offload so many things; we can do so many things at such a high level, only PlayStation allows us to do that.

And finally, is the finished game everything you wanted it to be? Anything you would change? You must be pretty happy.

Eric Boltjes: I’m pretty happy. Proud.

Steven Ter Heide: (Laughs) Can we get that on the record?

Eric Boltjes: Yeah. Just the sheer amount of stuff we’ve got in the game. The full single player, all the features we have in multiplayer, all the different environments and gameplay types. When we first wrote this up, we thought, if we even got half of this (in the finished game) it would be cool, and we pretty much got all of it in there.

Steven Ter Heide: For me, I keep seeing all of the things that people wanted to get in there in the last couple of months. But we had to finish the game. I look at the game and only see its flaws, but two weeks ago I finally got the sealed package, took it home, and played it. So far we’ve been seeing the debug modes in the office, so seeing it on my own couch was a completely different experience. It all came together. I’m enjoying myself, I’m having fun. I like the end result. I wouldn’t change anything.