Previously in the series: The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 2, The Playstation and Me: David Jaffe, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 1, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 2, The Playstation and Me: Ted Price, part 3,The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 2,The Playstation and Me: Evan Wells, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 2, The Playstation and Me: Scott Rohde, Part 3, The Playstation and Me: Hermen Hulst, Part 1, The Playstation and Me: Hermen Hulst, Part 2
Last time, Hermen Hulst talked about how empowering Sony’s belief in Guerilla Games was as the studio was developing the Killzone franchise. In this final interview section, he discuss how the dev studio’s trying to return the favor by building the most ambitious of the PS3 first-party 3D projects. You want to know about the ins-and-outs of 3D game development? Hulst’s got you covered.
Now that the challenges of studio growth are out of the way, it sounds like Killzone 3 is going to be maybe the full flower of your maturation as a studio. Which is important, because a lot of studio entities don’t get this long a lifespan. They have a big spike and maybe they crash and burn after four years, whereas you guys are continuing a very steady growth as a game development studio. And what comes with that is more responsibility. I mean, you guy are kind of spearheading the 3D effort on the console. Talk to me about how those conversations started as far as 3D?
At Guerrilla, we’ve always been a bunch of people that have really embraced new technologies and innovations in general. The technology really gets the core team here very excited. So when there’s an opportunity like 3D, there’s a lot of us that really jump on that, and want to explore that, and get that up and running. So, from the very beginning of the conversation of 3D–and it happily coincided with us commencing on Killzone 3–we said “Yes, we’re going to do that.” That was an early call. That was kind of a perfect marriage with what people wanted to do here in the studio.
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It also works really well with a first-person game that’s known for very rich environments with a lot of detail in them. That combination–the interest in 3D technology and a first-person game with a lot of detail–made it kind of an easy decision for me to say yes from day one. Looking back at the end of Killzone 2, I think we kind of maxed out on what we could do. We pushed it to the maximum of our capabilities on the PS3. We fortunately found enough space to fully enable the full quality of the 3D experience with Killzone 3. There was a lot of optimization work that we had to do to make that possible between 2 and 3. And that’s kind of the beginning of these conversations.
Can you talk a little bit about the optimization work you have to make to get the full level of detail of Killzone 2, but still have that stuff render in 3D? I understand that might be too specific or technical, but I’m curious to what that might entail?
So, at the end of the day, you’ve got to render for two cameras instead of one. So, in doing that, it’s more costly. You’ve got to find performance in the system architecture for that to make that possible. And that’s what we did in the beginning, but that’s just the technical conversation. The part of it is the creative challenge. You do that. You open up.
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You find the extra performance cycles.
Yeah. You develop your 3D engine and then you switch it on. It’s not just technology. Then you switch it on and you realize that, in principle, it looks great. As I said, Killzone is the kind of game that’s ideally suited for a 3D experience. Pretty much everything is already in 3D. Some games, they do a rain effect, and it’s kind of like one sheet that’s right in front of the camera, and that’s the rain effect. Killzone 2 already had a lot of effects that were built up in 3D. So we had a great foundation.
But even then, with a great foundation, you switch it on and you realize that simple details need to be changed, because the crosshair basically feels like it’s glued on to your nose. And that’s not right. That crosshair’s what you’re looking at the whole time in a first-person-shooter experience. So, you got to open up a whole bag of tricks to make that work, and these are creative challenges. Now, we looked at 3D and we thought initially that the effect would apply itself dynamically and automatically. There’s more code work involved in making that actually happen. It’s got to be bounded by the next object that’s in your sight. It winds up being a big difference when you’re hiding behind a barrel or you have a wide-open view to some great vista out on the distance. So we toyed around with that. You really need some proper development time to give that the required tender loving care to get a great experience out of that. That’s why I was really happy that we made that decision on early on. Probably from a technological perspective, we would have been able to do it later, though.
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But tweaking it, it’s almost like molding a clay figure, you can always go back to it and make it better, and make it more intuitive. A lot of time went into that. Not necessarily that many resources. I don’t want to make it sound like half the teams were working on 3D, because that’s certainly not the case. But certainly iterating is hugely important in game development in general, but specifically on the 3D also.
Do you worry about it being too early in the 3D cycle to present Killzone 3 in 3D? Do you worry about the consumer adoption rate for the 3DTVs, the glasses, and stuff like that? And if you do worry about it, how do you address those concerns?
No I don’t. I don’t worry about it because I know we have a great experience in 3D for the people that will be the early adopters who’ll buy a 3D set. I think it’s going to be a great experience for them. And I fully stand behind what we’re creating. But, you’re right in saying that it is early and it will not be the majority of people who will have the 3D sets available. So we’ve taken a very simple approach, which is to let the user switch it on and off. Switch it on when available and when desirable. And switch if off, or keep it off, if he doesn’t have a 3D set, or simply wants to play it in 2D. I like these kind of things as an option. That’s why I don’t think it should be threatening or I don’t think it can disappoint anyone. Because if you don’t like it, don’t switch it on. It’s that simple.
The interesting thing is for me, that having played it in 3D, I kind of don’t want to experience it in any other way. I only want to play it in 3D. So I’m looking at my TV, which is a decent TV. It’s a Sony Bravia from four years ago, but it’s kind of looking like the old car in the garage that you want to upgrade. But that is a good point that by simple having a toggle on the option that you can pretty much insulate yourself against any kind of risks with regard to early adopters not wanting the game or something like that. I guess, one more quick question about looking forward, and how you see Sony’s position moving forward.
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What do you feel is their biggest advantage as a platform holder at this point, as a console maker, that maybe a Nintendo or a Microsoft doesn’t have? I realize you maybe biased, but maybe from as objective a perspective as you can manage?
I think there are couple. If it sounds biased, then that’s what it is. I don’t think it is. I think what Sony is, more than any other company, is a truly global and very eclectic company that really truly supports all styles of games. I think the Worldwide Studio Group–which, after we sold the company to Sony, we’re now formally part of–has got development studios, like the Ico team and the Gran Turismo team in Japan, who bring some very specific Japanese experiences.
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Ico is actually a great example of that kind of support. And even when that game didn’t sell well, the studio was still given a greenlight to make Shadow of the Colossus. Then we do very, very specific US stuff, like SOCOM. We have all those great teams in the States like Naughty Dog on the west coast. We have the Media Molecule and Evolution studios in London, and with us at Guerrilla, there’s a strong European presence, too. So I think it’s probably the most international, and therefore, probably the most complete chain of development that you’re going to find. That kind of comes back to what we started off talking about. Sony, being a Japanese consumer electronics company, the company has a very long-term vision and really takes a direction and follows that direction that it believes in.
It’s a wider technology and media company. So you can expect from the company going forward to fully leverage the other parts of the business: music, film, consumer electronics. There’s so many aspects to the business, that there really are a lot of opportunities to integrate that. So I think those two elements combined leave Playstation in a great position for the future.
Your answer just reminded me of one question I wanted to ask earlier, which is relevant to what you just said. You mentioned how the partnership with Sony early on, right after you guys formed Guerrilla, had enabled you to bring in a lot of expatriate talent, like talent from outside of the Netherlands. That multi-national vibe shows ups in the Killzone games a little bit. The characters you play are very international. They’re ethically diverse. Do you feel like that is an important aspect to the games that you guys make at Guerrilla? Would the games be more homogeneous if you weren’t able to access the larger global community of talent?
I think we are able, when desirable, to get rid of very local idiosyncrasies and local clichés. So we are aware of what is very English and what is very American and what is very Japanese. And we can kind of choose to iron out these differences because we’re aware of them or we can choose to accentuate them where possible. So for instance, if you take the accents of the Helghast versus the ISA, the good guys and the bad guys in our game franchise. You’ll notice very specific accents where one faction is more UK-based and the other is more U.S., more American English. We take that into consideration when we do our casting. But I think that’s just one of the examples of what you were referring to.