Killzone 3 post by Magemasher13 - Part 1

I will now explain why. Firstly, I define "hardcore" as a measure of depth of content, as well as how much the game asks of players. No one will argue that KZ games are definitely hardcore shooters, as opposed to the casual shooters like your Halo games, ultra casual games like Call of Duty, or in-betweeners like Battlefield 3.

I'll solely be focusing on the differences between KZ2 and 3 for this, we all know that Warzone, by its very nature, provides much of the games depth and hardcore status.

Killzone 2 derived is hardcore gameplay mainly from two things:

-Prolonged, player vs. player gun duels
-The spawn grenade system

(Again we are talking about differences between the two games at HIGH LEVEL PLAY)

The famous duels and legendary gunaply of Killzone 2 were caused by two distinct things, one of them intentional, one of them probably not. The first being the health system. Killzone 2's system of segmented regeneration unless healed by a medic balanced with the games overall large amount of health. Barring the assault class, it took a minimum of 4 bullets to down a person, 5 with most guns, the exceptions being Sta14 and M4. The segmented regeneration meant that players who had played for a long time without dying, would go down sooner, making killstreaks rarer, unless they used a med pack, which to this day I insist didn't work as it was supposed to.

The other thing the gun battles derived difficulty and their skill ceiling from WAS THE GAMES INPUT LAG. The game had a STANDARD input lag of 150ms. This has been proven by analysis by many different sites, look up a video. When the framerate got slowed down a bit, which happened online occassionally, it would get even worse, occassionally crossing the 200ms mark between button press and onscreen action. This was uniform, from firing the trigger to moving the analog stick. The HP patch really just adjusted the dead zones for aiming.

Now consider the following:
-Killzone 2 had as much, if not more, hip-fire recoil than its contemporaries in the CoD series, but hipfiring was not common in CoD like it was in KZ2, why? (other than the health thing)

Factor in teh 150 MS input delay (and lack of snap-to aiming) and things become much clearer. If you wanted to shoot an enemy using the sights the following would have to happen:

-Getting them centered using the analog sticks (150 ms delay)
-Bringing up your gun (150ms delay)
-Pressing the fire button (150ms dealy)
-Readjusting your aim without the auto aim (150 ms delay)
-Burst firing shots (150ms delay between trigger pulls)

IN a best case scenario, bringing up your gun and firing on somebody would take upwards 450ms, or only 300 if you got lucky and lined it up instantly. However the opposing player, who would simply fire his gun from the hip, only had the initial firing delay (150ms) to deal with. They could allow the recoil to help track the other palyer as well, so for prolonged battles hipfiring could save well over HALF A SECOND in response time. A huge deal in FPSes. So players went with hipfiring and using movement to its fullest.

The signature gunplay of KZ2 was brought about by input lag.

Next the spawn grenades. These, while I personally loved them, have to admit they were FLAWED FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. Because of this system and bad tactician could utterly SCREW YOUR TEAM in one fell swoop and since only 2 could be out at a time there was very little recourse for the good tacticians to correct it, especially if the bad tactician insisted on continually placing bad spawns.

A system that allows for a single bad player in a class to singlehandedly make his team lose is fundamentally flawed. End of story. This system also made it so that in terms of overall necessity to the team you had only the Engineer and the tactician. Every other class was so much fluff and the assault, being legendarily imbalanced, was frequently banned.

Next post I'll discuss how Killzone 3 is more hardcore an experience than Killzone 2 and THATS why it sold less, NOT because it was "too much like CoD."