Previews: Killzone 2

You’re reading an E3 2008 preview, which we’ve broken into three sections to make it easy to sift through during this week of convention madness. Check out E3.1UP.COM for all (meaning words, screens, and videos) of our E3 2008 coverage.

What’s the game about? Uh, if you don’t already know about this behemoth first-person shooter for PS3, go load up our big Killzone 2 write-up, and then find your local paper magazine repository and pick up the August issue of EGM and read the cover story. You will love it. If you are familiar with the sci-fi FPS spectacular, you’ll probably be interested to hear that one of the big features that Sony and developer Guerrilla discussed today is the game’s kept-secret-until-now multiplayer.

What’s new for E3? This is the first time any aspect of Killzone 2’s multiplayer has been shown. The two main thrusts of it are 1) to make it accessible to pretty much anyone, even those who’ve never played Killzone, and 2) to reward those who stick with multiplayer through a host of unlockable features and community-management tools. Basically, they want newbs to play the game, unlock cool stuff, and then keep on playing with their buddies.

You start off the multiplayer game as a level 1 grunt with no neat skills or medals. But as you play more, you increase in rank (there are 12 total), which acts as a bit of shorthand for your skill. Along the way, you earn medals for things like pulling off 10 headshots in a row or being the cool-headed guy on the team when the chips are down.

It’s when as you dig deeper into the multiplayer system that you start messing with the badge system, which is essentially a class system under a different name. Before jumping into a match, you select up to two badges to wear; they are broken down into categories like "medic," "engineer," or "sniper." Each badge has two special abilities attached to it, which leads to customization as you mix them around. A developer on the team demonstrated this customization by combining a medic and engineer badge together to create a soldier who can heal people and machines with equal skill. One thing to keep in mind when you actually do this is that the primary skill of your first badge will be paired with the secondary skill of your second badge. This means you would actually get a different class and skill set by choosing to be an engineer first and then a medic instead of the reverse.

As you get into the groove of unlocking medals and skills, you might want to join a clan. Killzone 2 will support clan management via the game’s interface and its accompanying website. Clans can set up matches and even full-blown tournaments against each other, the victor earning "valor points." So, for example, your fledgling clan can attempt to take on the BigBadMammaJamma clan with its 482,679 valor points, and if your team pulls off an upset, expect some crazy valor points to come your way. Killzone 2 will also have the usual host of multiplayer features, such as being able to divide players into manageable squads with a defined squad leader, voice chat within the squads, and so forth.

What’s our take? These collectively sound like significant changes that make the Killzone 2 multiplayer experience a lot deeper and more interesting than the typical "hey, let’s shoot at a bunch of anonymous dorks" setup that typified the previous game. We’re actually looking forward to the public beta that will be up and running sometime before year’s end; if nothing else, we’d like to figure out bizarre exploits and griefing techniques and make plenty of use of them before they get fixed.