Killzone Shadow Fall is an upcoming first-person shooter title for the PlayStation 4. It is the fourth entry into the series on home consoles. Killzone Shadow Fall improves upon its predecessors in a bunch of ways including a higher resolution count. Killzone Shadow Fall has received wide spread acclaim for being one of the best shooters available on the system.
Killzone Shadow Fall is a massive game. Packing a fierce multiplayer component which has been improved even further and combines all the best bits from the previous games along with new improvements, it will surely be a lot more fun to play with your friends online. Michiel van der Leeuw, Guerilla Games Technical Director, in an interview with Eurogamer stated that Killzone Shadow Fall’s surface area must be around five to ten times bigger than Killzone 3. He also pointed out that Killzone Shadow Fall is probably a lot larger game than other cross-generation titles as the team has made no asset of a lower spec.
The surface area, I’m just guessing here, must be five to 10 times bigger than Killzone 3 was.
said van der Leeuw.
Massive games such as Killzone Shadow Fall also tend to have very large file sizes. Initially it was stated that Killzone Shadow Fall would pack a serious 50GB of download size from the PlayStation Store. With Sony’s new PlayGo technology, which allows the user to download a chunk of the main data required to boot up and play the game for its first level while the rest of the data is being streamed/downloaded from the servers online, Killzone Shadow Fall will be playable after downloading around 7.5GB of data.
Michiel van der Leeuw also explained that the studio worked very hard on optimizing the game so that the file size isn’t a behemoth standing in the way between the player and the game. The final build of Killzone Shadow Fall weighs around 40GB. Compared to its predecessor, Killzone 3, which was clocked around 41.5GB by Digital Foundry, it is indeed an impressive job done by Guerilla Games in optimizing a next-generation title so that it compresses the file size without having any kind of impact on the visuals. Guerilla Games before was going with the same approach as Killzone 3’s, that is, to duplicate textures and stream from the disc more quickly but the file size achieved with large file assets was around 180GB. Michiel van der Leeuw said that if they would’ve put all the levels on the disc then the size would be around 290GB.
With Killzone Shadow Fall being more massive than the Killzone 3 with its more open leveled designs while maintaining the file size, Guerilla Games did a tremendous job. Sony actually made special libraries for Guerilla Games as they were the first ones hitting optimization problems. This also goes to show how much Sony believes in its first party studios and is willing to work closely with the studios on their game. Not only the game but Guerilla Games also helped Sony shape up the PlayStation 4 as well as provided feedback on how the DualShock 4 controller should be.
Killzone Shadow Fall will be released on November 15 as a launch title alongside PlayStation 4 in North America.
