The “Break it Down” Blog

I don’t know if I’m just worn out seeing shooters that are technically beautiful but lack the micro-bits of polish that are the difference between “meh” and “holy shit”… I think these bits of polish are video-games equivalent of getting over the Uncanny Valley. Not that the models have to look more and more real, but that little life-like touches are given to the game to push you over the edge of realism.

Things like little movement quirks or smirks (GTA 4 was excellent at this; they used the ImageMetrics mo-cap to achieve it). Call of Duty 4 did this wonderfully as well with excellent use of the correct amount of Depth of Field, jerks and movement to the first-person camera as well as scripted player-inclusive sequences to get you into the game.

Watching the gameplay footage from Killzone 2 I immediately noticed two things, even given how damn pretty the game looks… I may be in an overly critical state of mind right now, but they just stood out:

• Intro scene, the sergeant talking has no facial expression and barely moves his lips.
• End scene (above), the POV of the walk character is at the waist-line of everyone around him. Didn’t we fix POV issues in Quake 3?

To a lesser extent I also noticed when he takes control of the turret, the character seemed really hard-pressed to aim that thing well, there was a lot of swinging around and approximation going on which gave me the hellacious fear that Guerrilla might be forcing Six-Axis control on players… take a look and see if you agree, it seems like the player can’t aim it that well.

This sort of reminds me of Resistence 2 gameplay video… it was beautiful looking in parts, but so uninspired in the gameplay itself (NOTE: I don’t mean graphics here, both games look beautiful) it just looked so cut and dry. Killzone 2 certainly has more character and touches to it, but looks a lot like Call of Duty 4 minus the insane polish on the micro-details at this point (in the sense that it uses heavily setup sequences to immerse you and static environments that are beautiful but not physicy at all).

Just my 2 cents… it’s possible they are so far out from a release all this stuff I mentioned is coming.

Update #1: Someone from the Guerrilla dev team has posted in the Playstation community forums to clarify that the dialog and facial animation has been improved “a hundred times over”, so I’ll strike that comment.