Heide and Speak
Guerrilla Games' senior producer talks Sony, independence and how to tackle new IP
Guerrilla Games has experienced the highs and lows of the industry over the ten years since its founding, from the infamous Killzone backlash to being bought by a publisher which not only allows, but actively encourages independence.
During those years it's learnt hard lessons about setting and meeting achievable expectations, what it means to own a AAA franchise and how quickly a loyal fanbase can bite the hand which feeds, as well as seeing ever increasing critical and retail success for its games.
Today, it's a different outfit to that which sometimes struggled through the development process of Killzone and its sequel. Smarter, more comfortable and far better connected with its fans, the new Guerrilla Games is in a strong position and looking to expand with a brand-new IP.
GamesIndustry.biz took the chance to sit down with senior producer Steven Ter Heide to catch up what's happening at the studio, and what he thinks about the new directions the industry is moving in.
Actually right now, we're doing a lot of playtesting, we're getting a public beta started soon. We're fixing bugs, mostly, and making it prettier.
I think there was some initial scepticism - 'why are they focusing on that when I want this or this?' But as soon as they start seeing the bigger picture, the whole package, they understand that 'Okay, we're addressing your feedback, but on top of that we're doing other things as well, with 3D and Move, so we're creating more options for the players.
So, if you're a hardcore Dualshock fan, by all means play with the Dualshock - that's what Killzone's for - go nuts. But at the same time we want to attract a new crowd as well. Can we create that bridge between PC gaming, or casual gaming and bring those kind of people into Killzone?
That would be great for us, if we can open it up a little bit in that respect. So, it's options on top of what we're doing and as soon as people got that message, that it's optional - 'I don't have to play Killzone in 3D, I don't have to play it with Move', then it's all fine.
We also had some other people respond really, really well, saying "I'm actually going to buy a 3D TV just because I've seen Killzone and that's the game I want. That's a great response, that's great feedback for us.
Fan feedback is always very important to us, especially now we do a lot of these kind of media events. Although we start talking to the press a lot more, we're getting a lot more forum feedback. We still read that as well.
It's very difficult to make drastic changes at this point, if someone says we should do something completely different, that's not going to happen. But we we do look at what we're doing right, and what things we haven't really touched on. So we take a lot of feedback onboard.
In speaking to yourselves for instance, there's only a very small message which we can get across, there are always things we miss out on. We can't show a complete picture so people get confused. They have different questions so we try and address those through being on the Killzone forums, adjusting to interviews, taking all this new information with us and responding to what's out there.
So we're still doing all that. Right up until the playtesting in the public beta we'll still be able to take on board that feedback and integrate it into the game, but we won't be making drastic changes - we're not changing planet or anything.
There are a couple of aspects to the new IP. Obviously we've been doing Killzone for a while now, so as a studio there are people there who've been working on Killzone for close to ten years. They're saying, okay, we'd like to do something new, something different.
What that is, we don't know. Obviously we're going to play to our strengths, we're not suddenly going to start making football games. That's not on the cards for us. At the same time we want to say, 'what would the fans expect, if Guerrilla is making a new IP, what kind of games would they expect to come out of that?'
So those are the sorts of questions that we're asking. What are you looking for? But first and foremost we want to make a game that we like, as we did with Killzone. So the next franchise is again something that we would like to make ourselves, what that's going to be, I've no idea yet. We're full-bore on Killzone now, so we've had no time to think about the new IP.