Killzone studio ‘redeemed’ by live PS4 demo

Killzone maker Guerrilla Games says its reputation has been redeemed thanks to its on-stage unveiling of its latest FPS during the PlayStation Meeting in February.

Upcoming PS4 title, Killzone: Shadow Fall, was revealed to the world as a live gameplay presentation, and, speaking to Edge, Guerrilla said it was glad to redeem itself after its misstep at E3 2005.

Guerrilla’s managing director and co-founder Hermen Hulst said revealing the PS4 Killzone in this way “absolutely” felt like redemption.

“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’,” he said.

When Killzone 2 was unveiled for the PS3 in 2005, by way a of ‘target footage’, its was criticised for being a misrepresentation of what players could expect from the real in-game experience. Since then, its continually been used against the studio by critics and gamers.

Guerrilla’s technical director Michiel van der Leeuw was also keen to emphasize how seriously the Dutch studio took its game unveiling.

“We actually made a point of not even claiming it was real, it was as a matter of course that it was real,” said Leeuw.

“And 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.”

“We said ‘no back-up videos’ either,” continued van der Leeuw. “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.”

Target footage has been a controversial issue as the promotion of games has become bigger and more wide reaching. Many other titles have fallen foal of this. Recently, PC zombie survival game, War Z, attracted a torrent of criticism from players that were dissatisfied with what its advertising claimed about the game.