Guerilla Games and SCE’s upcoming FPS title Killzone: Shadow Fall may still have about a month left before its final release, but new details revealed for the game shows why it has become such a popular game and has already made its mark on a number of wishlists for the fall. Now, it has been revealed that the game will support as many as 24 different enemy AIs in a single screen.
Recently speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine, Guerrilla Games Lead Designer Eric Boltjes brought up new details for the game.
Boltjes stated that while the engine has remained the same for the new game as that of Guerilla’s previous PS3 titles, the developing team still had to redo a lot of it, and since the architecture for the new game is different, “a lot had to be re-written.”
“For me as a game designer what I was really interested in was getting more gameplay elements on screen. More enemy types at the same time, more weapon types. Bigger areas. For me that gives us a lot more ingredients to play around with. Previously we were limited. You could have six or seven guys on screen, only two types, and it had to be at a specific range.”
When asked about the enemy AI limit for Killzone: Shadow Fall, Boltjes confirmed, “Yes. It’s about 24,” while also adding, “but that’s just enemy AI. And there are other types of enemy AI, lots of destructibility, lots of dynamic objects. Those have much higher limits but the amount of AI is around 24.″
So what happens when that 25th enemy wanders onscreen? Simply put, the “framerate drops,” according to Boltjes. “They’re all autonomous, they create their own effects. They’re busy little bees” he added.
What this means is that the player is not only getting “24 Helghans on screen,” but also all their additional effects and interactions, and “as soon as you push it over [24] then we get performance issues”.
Killzone: Shadow Fall will launch exclusively for PlayStation 4 on Nov. 15, when the console launches.
