Killzone: Shadow Fall, the upcoming first person shooter title from SCE, has been under the radar for quite some time owing to its amazing visuals that were on display at this year’s E3. Now there’s more good news to follow up on with lots of promises from the developing team for the game.
Shadow Fall, which is one of the launch titles for the Playstation 4, was recently back in news when game’s director Steven der Heide, in an interview with the official PlayStation Magazine, talked about and explained the new character AI technology that the team incorporated in the game.
On asked as to how much advancement the game will see, as far as in-game AI in concerned, with its introduction on PS4, der Heide stated: “It’s always tricky saying what you could you do differently which you couldn’t necessarily do last time, because it’s always trade-off, which battles that you pick. This time around we’re able to pick more things. Rather than saying ‘okay we can’t have 60 characters but we can have 8 with great animation’, this time around we can have 60 with great animation and do some other stuff as well. I think we’re being able to pick more things.”
He went on to add that the most specific things that the company added was in terms of the game’s design and that the aim is to make the characters more responsive. “So having them look at you when you pass by, having them acknowledge your existence in the world, that they have more awareness of their environment: they know where danger is, or where attractive things are to interact with. So we don’t necessarily have it be all scripted, we can let them loose and say ‘okay here are these things you can interact with or you can do’ and they just go about their business.”
What this does, according to him, is it lightens the load on the team’s cutscene guys. “They don’t have to sequence everything out, we can populate the world and make it feel realistic and we have a variety of AI behaviour and animations.”
As an added bonus, der Heide also mentioned about the kind of improvements we can expect with the game running on PS4 rather than PS3. He stated that one of the first things fans will notice is the fidelity.
“I think that’s a number of different things at work there. Of course the increasing resolution – its running at 1080p where the last game was running at 720. That immediately makes a difference. The different lighting systems, the more HDR lighting gives lots more range in the type of light we have in this level,” der Heide added.
Killzone: Shadow Fall is set to launch on the Playstation 4 later this year.
