Killzone 2 look-back: sorry, still needs co-op

You're never far from a friendly face.

Other aspects of Killzone 2 design beg the question. Guerrilla puts a lot of weight on the spectacle of opposing armies meeting, and that means you rarely enter the fray unassisted: even outside the main theatre of war, trudging across Helghan’s windy deserts or through her rancid sewers, Sev has one or more of his wingmen Garza, Natko and Rico to fall back on. Swapping out an AI for another player would thus seem to present few logistical difficulties, and the fact that comrades are not part of the visual furniture, that they can be incapacitated and require healing (rather than being handily bulletproof, as in Modern Warfare) further suggests that the developer was toying with the idea of squad play right up to the word gold.

Of course, you can’t talk your way around technical thresholds. Mathijs de Jonge (game director) axed rumours of a post-release co-op patch in January, telling PSU that “technically it would be quite difficult to implement it for the story mode as for example the mission sections are loaded in seamlessly – no loading screens , and that would cause issues with teleporting players.” This perhaps doesn’t rule out the possibility of the developer’s releasing a tailor-made co-op campaign, with all the code optimised to suit, but I’m pretty sure those in charge of the purse strings would view the idea coldly at this late stage. Given Valve’s experiences in the area, it’s intriguing to speculate on what the modding community might have cooked up if the game had been released on PC.

While we're demanding new features, how about actual playable Predator-top battles?

More cost-effective results could be achieved outside story mode, however, by taking a leaf from Epic’s book (assuming there are any left after years of slavish imitation), and again the game makes noises in this direction at intervals. During the ‘Union Storage Yard’ sequence of Killzone 2′s ‘Visari Square’ chapter, Sev, Natko and Rico must defend a scruffy sandbag emplacement nestled under the eaves of a bombed-out building against wave upon wave of Helghast infantry, armed with shotguns, SMGs and heavy machine guns. Besides dispatching the foe at ground level, you can scale a ladder and pick ‘em off as they spill from adjoining buildings, or lurk in a gutted closet to the right of the main spawn point. It’s an intensely dynamic, white-knuckle flashpoint, and one which tips many a nod to the “survival arena” match types which are now apparently standard issue among online shooters.

The germ of a Killzone 2 survival mode already exists in the ability to play unranked online matches against teams composed mostly of bots, given a deficit of human players, and I can’t imagine it being a very difficult (or expensive) feature to implement. Just thumb-tack some additional spawn points to the existing maps, build in an escalating difficulty factor and hey presto. Make it so, Mathijs. Make it so.

Happy Birthday, Killzone. The card’s in the post.