Killzone 2 Creators: Post-Release Improvement A 'Strong' Part Of AAA Games

Author: by Staff

In a new Gamasutra feature, Arjan Brussee, development director at Sony-owned Dutch developer Guerrilla Games, joined managing director Hermen Hulst at the recent Game Developers Conference to discuss the development of the PlayStation 3-exclusive Killzone 2. The pair talked about the development of single and multiplayer elements within the game, Killzone 2's impressive rendering engine and how Guerrilla's patching philosophy fits in with the studio's move towards a service model based on continuous improvement. Brusse stated: Well, we've done patches also for Killzone 1, right? Though the systems then were less meant to do these patches, but still, we were able to do that. I was talking to some other guys out of Bungie at GDC on the idea that games don't ever finish anymore, right? So, you go into this kind of service model, and you keep on improving your game. We kind of found this issue, we investigated some things, and if we find issues that we think, "Yeah, that's a bug, we have not seen this" or "we've forgotten about this," then we can patch it ... we have that system. We're thinking about continuous improvements to our game. If we find issues, we now have a million-plus people playing the game actively -- if you look at the Killzone.com site, [that's] how many people are playing it. So they're bound to find issues or cheat. You know, we had an issue with auto-aim being a kind of cheaty solution sometimes, so we fixed that, just to make the experience nice for everybody. I think that will continue for the next half year. The Halo guys are working on Halo 3 still two years down the line. I think that's the kind of model that you're looking at. The Left 4 Dead guys, I think they did 70 patches or so? And they slip it under the curtain. You don't see it anymore, with Steam. That's the way that you need to think about these kinds of things. ...It's a strong thing that we listen to our customers and we fix these things when we find them, and just help improve the game continuously. You can now read the full feature on the creation of Killzone 2 at Gamasutra (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).