Jimbo_N

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KillQuake 2 final version impressions.

By Jimbo_N 12 Comments

Quake II
I now only have the last mission left in the retail version of Killzone 2 so I think this is a good time to summarize my ride to get there in the Single Player campaign. Originally I didn´t want to turn this into another Quake 2 comparison but this is going to partly be a Quake 2 comparison anyway. Lets just start by saying that Guerrilla has designed this game in a similar way to how ID software makes their games. There´s loads of stuff in Killzone 2 that feels handpicked from the shooter philosofy of ID. And by my standards this is the best score you can give to a shooter designer. Level layouts, weapondesigns, monster encounters, textures and general narrative. Killzone 2 is the equal to Quake 2 in 1996 and this means that ID Software themselves will have a hard time beating the single player experience of Killzone 2.
I´m gonna continue these impressions by just listing the more or less exact similarities between the 2nd best Single Player shooter ever created, Quake 2, and Killzone 2.
  • Both games share the exact same story that follows the first game´s story the same way aswell. Humanitys revenge on the race that tried to take their planet in the first game which takes them to this industrial planet. You are the space marine that needs to get it done.
  • The enviroments are pretty much identic in both games. The industrial "built for war" planet feels very similar and the general graphic style and atmosphere Guerrilla is going for feels like an HD version of Stroggos from Quake 2.
  • Enemies feels very alike. Strogg´s are machines mixed with human flesh and Helghast´s are genetically changed humans but when you fight them they feel, and most importantly SOUND alike.
  • Leveldesign and mission structure. The way rooms are tied together and mixed with outdoor enviroments and how you go from industrial plants to warehouses. The mission structure is very straight on objective based in both steering you to a big objective that often revolves around taking out an important part of the enemy warmachine.
  • The impact of weapons are totally awesome. Quake 2 was mindblowing in 96 when you could feel and see the impact of your weapons on the enemy and their deathanimations was lightyears above the competition. Killzone 2 raises this bar like Q2 did back then.
  • The overall colorpalette. A brownish, grey very metallic palette of a hostile planet. Stroggos or Helghan, pretty much the same planet.
  • Intros in both games are about the same. Eventually crashlanding you in the middle of enemy territory.


Quake II
The thing I want to say here is not that this is a copy of Quake 2. This is what Quake 4 should have been a couple of years ago. Quake 4 was given to Raven Software and the work they did with Quake 4 was not bad but it was nowhere near the ID Software games. When playing through Killzone 2 I feel like I´m playing the real Quake 4. This is a top notch shooter with the ID Software mentality burning fiercly behind the scenes. I salute Guerrilla for the work they´ve put into the KZ2 Single Player.  It builds up over the course of the missions and throws very enjoyable enemy encounters and awesome weapons (Lightning gun and Bolt gun...yeeeeea baby!!!) your way. The narrative takes a backseat to the action just like it should in a game of this type and the difficulty only strikes me as imbalanced in a very select few occasions.

By now I come to accept the controls but I still don´t like them. I´ve gotten used to them and I can understand the designchoices
KIllzone 2
behind them but man...the slow speed combined with the annoying acceleration really makes you feel like way to much of a tank sometimes and that will never click with an old Quake 3 Arena, PC shooter, progamer guy like me.
There´s also some other minor but very annoying things that starts to eat away at you when you´re playing such an otherwise polished games for hours and hours. First of the music could have used way more work. The generic epic tunes works well but gets old very fast, especially when there´s only like 2 or 3 tracks looping. This game should have looked back on Quake 2 again and thrown in at least a few more adrenalinepumping tracks like this one. I swear, if that track from Quake 2 would have started playing during a firefight in Killzone 2 it would have heightened the feel of the firefights 10 fold. But as it stands now that real adrenaline never kicks in for real due to the music thats just chugging along in the background and never says "alright listen to THIS and kick some ass". The more I play the game the more I enjoy the silence when the music is not playing.
Graphics are amazing..yea, you already know how amazing they are. Shadows on the other hand..looks awful. No other word can describe the often jagged AND flickering shadows of KZ2. This stands out alot when the game looks so insanely good.

I have one last mission left in the sinple player and I´m really looking forward to the grand finale, it should be very cool. I´m generally not very interested with console shooter multiplayer so i´ll see if I´ll jump in on that or not.

But let me recap here. Killzone 2 starts out strong and builds from there to become the Quake 2 of 2009. Its a milestone shooter and I´m really feeling for the guys at ID right now that´s working hard on Rage.. will it surpass this? If you would have asked me a month ago I would have said "of course". Now..i´ll just say "maybe".
12 Comments
13 Comments
Posted by Jimbo_N
Quake II
I now only have the last mission left in the retail version of Killzone 2 so I think this is a good time to summarize my ride to get there in the Single Player campaign. Originally I didn´t want to turn this into another Quake 2 comparison but this is going to partly be a Quake 2 comparison anyway. Lets just start by saying that Guerrilla has designed this game in a similar way to how ID software makes their games. There´s loads of stuff in Killzone 2 that feels handpicked from the shooter philosofy of ID. And by my standards this is the best score you can give to a shooter designer. Level layouts, weapondesigns, monster encounters, textures and general narrative. Killzone 2 is the equal to Quake 2 in 1996 and this means that ID Software themselves will have a hard time beating the single player experience of Killzone 2.
I´m gonna continue these impressions by just listing the more or less exact similarities between the 2nd best Single Player shooter ever created, Quake 2, and Killzone 2.
  • Both games share the exact same story that follows the first game´s story the same way aswell. Humanitys revenge on the race that tried to take their planet in the first game which takes them to this industrial planet. You are the space marine that needs to get it done.
  • The enviroments are pretty much identic in both games. The industrial "built for war" planet feels very similar and the general graphic style and atmosphere Guerrilla is going for feels like an HD version of Stroggos from Quake 2.
  • Enemies feels very alike. Strogg´s are machines mixed with human flesh and Helghast´s are genetically changed humans but when you fight them they feel, and most importantly SOUND alike.
  • Leveldesign and mission structure. The way rooms are tied together and mixed with outdoor enviroments and how you go from industrial plants to warehouses. The mission structure is very straight on objective based in both steering you to a big objective that often revolves around taking out an important part of the enemy warmachine.
  • The impact of weapons are totally awesome. Quake 2 was mindblowing in 96 when you could feel and see the impact of your weapons on the enemy and their deathanimations was lightyears above the competition. Killzone 2 raises this bar like Q2 did back then.
  • The overall colorpalette. A brownish, grey very metallic palette of a hostile planet. Stroggos or Helghan, pretty much the same planet.
  • Intros in both games are about the same. Eventually crashlanding you in the middle of enemy territory.


Quake II
The thing I want to say here is not that this is a copy of Quake 2. This is what Quake 4 should have been a couple of years ago. Quake 4 was given to Raven Software and the work they did with Quake 4 was not bad but it was nowhere near the ID Software games. When playing through Killzone 2 I feel like I´m playing the real Quake 4. This is a top notch shooter with the ID Software mentality burning fiercly behind the scenes. I salute Guerrilla for the work they´ve put into the KZ2 Single Player.  It builds up over the course of the missions and throws very enjoyable enemy encounters and awesome weapons (Lightning gun and Bolt gun...yeeeeea baby!!!) your way. The narrative takes a backseat to the action just like it should in a game of this type and the difficulty only strikes me as imbalanced in a very select few occasions.

By now I come to accept the controls but I still don´t like them. I´ve gotten used to them and I can understand the designchoices
KIllzone 2
behind them but man...the slow speed combined with the annoying acceleration really makes you feel like way to much of a tank sometimes and that will never click with an old Quake 3 Arena, PC shooter, progamer guy like me.
There´s also some other minor but very annoying things that starts to eat away at you when you´re playing such an otherwise polished games for hours and hours. First of the music could have used way more work. The generic epic tunes works well but gets old very fast, especially when there´s only like 2 or 3 tracks looping. This game should have looked back on Quake 2 again and thrown in at least a few more adrenalinepumping tracks like this one. I swear, if that track from Quake 2 would have started playing during a firefight in Killzone 2 it would have heightened the feel of the firefights 10 fold. But as it stands now that real adrenaline never kicks in for real due to the music thats just chugging along in the background and never says "alright listen to THIS and kick some ass". The more I play the game the more I enjoy the silence when the music is not playing.
Graphics are amazing..yea, you already know how amazing they are. Shadows on the other hand..looks awful. No other word can describe the often jagged AND flickering shadows of KZ2. This stands out alot when the game looks so insanely good.

I have one last mission left in the sinple player and I´m really looking forward to the grand finale, it should be very cool. I´m generally not very interested with console shooter multiplayer so i´ll see if I´ll jump in on that or not.

But let me recap here. Killzone 2 starts out strong and builds from there to become the Quake 2 of 2009. Its a milestone shooter and I´m really feeling for the guys at ID right now that´s working hard on Rage.. will it surpass this? If you would have asked me a month ago I would have said "of course". Now..i´ll just say "maybe".
Posted by Bellum

The shitty shadows must be universal with deferred shading. :/

Edited by Diamond

I thought of Quake 2 when playing it as well.  Biggest thing for me was the colored lighting, and the way they do the colored lighting.  The Quake 2 engine's big deal was colored lightmaps, Killzone 2's engine's big deal is hundreds of light sources, which they expressed with colored lights.

I agree the themes are pretty similar as well.  Level design can be very similar too.

Killzone 2 is always making you fight along side other computer players, which is very different than Quake 2, and I'm starting to wish FPS games would go back that way.  I'm so tired of being forced to endure low quality cutscenes, unlikable characters, and dumb combat AI.  The feeling of lonliness in games like Doom, Quake, and other early FPS is something I'm starting to miss.

I disagree that the shadows are bad though.  One of the advantages of the engine is the sheer number of shadows stored in the shadow buffer (most engines that use shadow mapping either only use a single cast shadow or store each shadow in a separate file in video memeory, Killzone 2 (and any other deferred rendering engine) stores all shadows in a single buffer file).  Other games that use shadow maps usually only do it for a single source of light (the sun) and often are equally artifact laden as well.  Really to me the shadows are the one thing that makes the game look good in the first place.

Posted by Diamond
Bellum said:
"The shitty shadows must be universal with deferred shading. :/
Nope, nothing to do with it at all.  The shadows are vastly better than they would have been without deferred rendering.  All games that use shadow mapping on any platform are limited by the very intensive requirements to filter the shadows (most games only do the most basic filtering), the memory taken up by the shadow buffers (which deferred rendering negates greatly), and the basic limitations of the techniques (which can never be resolved).
Edited by Al3xand3r

Meh, id is hardly known for their single player experiences (ok, ok, Doom was great, yeah), especially nowadays, so I wouldn't have high expectations for Rage. The worst that can happen with that is to be pleasantly surprised after all. Also, Raven rocks for SP with the right projects (think Jedi Outcast) and Splash Damage may have just surpassed id on multiplayer. So I don't know what's left for id other than technology (I love the Quake Wars engine, too bad it's the only game that used it and id are already moving to new things I probably won't be able to run on this PC despite the recent overhaul, hah).

Posted by Diamond
Al3xand3r said:
"Meh, id is hardly known for their single player experiences (ok, ok, Doom was great, yeah), especially nowadays, so I wouldn't have high expectations for Rage. The worst that can happen with that is to be pleasantly surprised after all. Also, Raven rocks for SP with the right projects (think Jedi Outcast) and Splash Damage may have just surpassed id on multiplayer. So I don't know what's left for id other than technology (I love the Quake Wars engine, too bad it's the only game that used it and id are already moving to new things I probably won't be able to run on this PC despite the recent overhaul, hah).
id could easily make awesome playing games again like Doom (I also liked Quake 1 & 2's gameplay quite a bit though).  In fact I don't see why they don't.  It's not like they are too big for their own good or too conservative in game design like some Japanese game companies.
Posted by Jimbo_N

Very interesting input Diamond. Great feedback. Especially for refreshing me some on the technical aspects that I´ve started to slack on over the years.
I am with you and I know exacly what you are talking about when you talk about the "loneliness" of The old school shooters and yeah, i kinda feel I want mroe of that aswell. Especially when you´re companions are often pretty stiff and often just end up screaming "medic...help me up".
Shadows looks bad on characters. I was not nearly clear enough on that. Killzone 2´s shadows looks stunning on the enviroments but i think that they start to flicker and look wierd on characters and especially in close up cutscenes.

Posted by Diamond
Jimbo_N said:
Shadows looks bad on characters. I was not nearly clear enough on that. Killzone 2´s shadows looks stunning on the enviroments but i think that they start to flicker and look wierd on characters and especially in close up cutscenes."
Yea, unfortunately artifacting on character faces is a limitation of shadow mapping.  Other games have the same problem, Mass Effect is a big example.  As most games now use shadow buffers, most games have this same problem.  There's things they can do to partially remedy those artifacts, but by the time we have enough power to render really high quality shadow maps, we'll probably be ready to move on to raytraced shadows.
Posted by Jimbo_N

Also. you pretty much nailed it with the colored lighting. There´s something about how Killzone 2 handles the lighting on these Industrial environments that really brings my mind to Quake 2. Well said.

Edited by c1337us

Nice write up Jimbo, I have KZ2 but it will be a little while longer yet before I can play it which is driving me insane. There are worse things in the world then being compared to Quake 2 :). I have heard alot about the weird control scheme so hopefully you can either alter it, or it is easy to come to grips with. Also this is the first I have heard about the issue with the poor shadowing effects though and it is disapointing to hear that there is so notable defect in the look of the game.

EDIT: Also I agree with Diamond it would be nice to go back in the FPS time line and not be saddled with a computer partner in every shooter you pick up. They are all fine and good but I like the old style feeling of you against everything else game play that great game like Doom and Quake gave you. It would be nice to have that still in modern games sometimes.

Posted by Diamond
Jimbo_N said:

Also. you pretty much nailed it with the colored lighting. There´s something about how Killzone 2 handles the lighting on these Industrial environments that really brings my mind to Quake 2. Well said.

Thank you.  It reminds me clearly of those tiny little orange or blue lights they'd put along corridors in many Quake 2 levels.  In Killzone 2 they like making tiny lights again because it shows off the effect better when they have dozens or hundreds on the screen.
Posted by Boiglenoight

This comparison strikes me as particularly apt since the multiplayer in both games is where it's at.  After playing through the single on both, I had no desire to play through it again (save for speed runs in Q2 and trophies in KZ2).  On the whole, thoughtful analysis.

Posted by gorkamorkaorka

Now that you mention it, Killzone 2 does remind me of Quake II. Quake II had better characters though.

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