Killzone: Shadow Fall’s Character AI Explained

Killzone: Shadow Fall is one of the launch titles for the Playstation 4, and it looks stunning. As visually sumptuous as it looks, though, there are a lot of improvements under the hood that all work towards making the game that much more immersive. In an interview with The Official Playstation Magazine UK, the game’s director, Steven der Heide, explains the new character AI technology that went into the game.

“It’s always tricky saying what you could you do differently which you couldn’t necessarily do last time, because it’s always trade-off, which battles that you pick,” der Heide said. “This time around we’re able to pick more things. Rather than saying ‘okay we can’t have 60 characters but we can have 8 with great animation’, this time around we can have 60 with great animation and do some other stuff as well. I think we’re being able to pick more things.

“Specifically the things that’s we’ve added were from a design perspective… it’s making characters more responsive. So having them look at you when you pass by, having them acknowledge your existence in the world, that they have more awareness of their environment: they know where danger is, or where attractive things are to interact with. So we don’t necessarily have it be all scripted, we can let them loose and say ‘okay here are these things you can interact with or you can do’ and they just go about their business. That of course lightens the load on our cutscene guys. They don’t have to sequence everything out, we can populate the world and make it feel realistic and we have a variety of AI behaviour and animations.”

It all sounds terribly impressive.

Killzone: Shadow Fall launches with the Playstation 4 later this year.