Ter Heide fired up the demo that we've all seen from the E3 press conference, from the stellar opening trailer to the gameplay itself. Unlike the finale to SCEA's showing, however, the action went above and beyond the few minutes we caught in Culver City last month. Upon watching the video again, we couldn't help but to notice the full-blown chaos ensuing on Helghan.
For those who aren't up to speed on the storyline, the Helghast are a proto-fascist race of humanoid mutants hell-bent on subjugating humanity. In the previous PS2 title, they attacked humans on Earth. In this sequel, a group of special forces have come to their home turf to give them a dose of their own medicine. You'll take on the role of Sev, a Special Forces soldier under the command of Rico Velasquez (of the first game), and have a variety of weapons at your disposal.
Ter Heide ran the demo twice, first for us to watch, much like Rockstar did during our recent demo of Grand Theft Auto IV, then to break down the technical work that Guerilla has labored over for quite some time. The game will run at 30 frames per second in 720p. Ter Heide said that with the sheer amount of stuff going on at the same time, locking in higher resolutions and framerates wouldn't work.
The game is still at an early stage; while we don't have a percentage of where it's at, we noticed that the demo was run on one of the huge, bulky PS3 developer's kits that the average gamer would mistake for some sort of insanely oversized computer. Also, some of the sequences and checkpoints froze the game for short periods of time. In the same vein that you saw some slow freezes during the E3 demo, they're in this build, as well, although Ter Heide reassured us that once the game is optimized, you won't even notice the checkpoints. That means that it's early, for certain.
The action went from the beginning of the demo to a face-off with a Helghast soldier known as "The Heavy." Before we saw the technical aspects of the demo (and understood why things are how they are in-game), we noticed a few things while watching the action: as Sev takes too much damage, the on-screen colors will become desaturated; if the screen goes completely black and white, Sev is as good as dead.
