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[EGOMON]

The multiplayer isn't bad, it's just bland as hell. Like the poster above says, if you have BF4 or COD there's no incentive to play it really. It's just dull. Honestly I think Killzone should go the same way as Resistance at this point.

Am actually enjoying the MP i play it everyday but maybe because i don't have either Ghost or BF4 then again i hate COD games and didn't really enjoy BF3.

 

[Ricky_R]

That's nice even though many people did not like the game. I for one liked it overall.

Haven't and probably won't play MP though.

 

[kinggroin]

That's what launching on a hot item platform like the PS4 will do for you. Can't say I'm thrilled with its success; I found the game to be droll, by the numbers, and a chore to play through.

 

[Moobabe]

The multiplayer isn't bad, it's just bland as hell. Like the poster above says, if you have BF4 or COD there's no incentive to play it really. It's just dull. Honestly, I think Killzone should go the same way as Resistance at this point.

Is the MP anything like KZ2? I loved the change of pace compared to most other FPS out there at the time.

 

[Sid]

I highly doubt Sony/GG are blind to the mediocre critical response and even poorer multiplayer numbers for the game.

I do believe there will be more Killzone, but i think it's going to end up in Cambridge's hands to basically be a Killzone factory until Sony /GG has another title worth farming.

I hope they 'farm' this out to Cambridge,Mercenary was awesome & Guerilla has clearly lost their form.

 

[Betty]

Is the MP anything like KZ2? I loved the change of pace compared to most other FPS out there at the time.

To a degree, I think I found KZ2's aesthetic more pleasing as well as it's weaponry. Shadow Fall's maps aren't quite as well designed imo, and choke points are far more common than in 2. People really don't make the most of each map and it ends up feeling like there's a lot of wasted space.

 

[RedAssedApe]

Well deserved. I enjoyed it. Wish the online population would have been larger and frame rate locked.

 

[Sorral]

Yeah of course but we can assume the development costs of graphic blockbusters are higher than last-gen AAA.
Just trying to be realistic here :/
Sure 2.1m for a launch title is great, but it doesn't really say anything. I mean what else should people buy? There aren't many interesting next-gen titles yet imo and it's still lost money.

What I'd like to know: How many copies would a next-gen title need to actually sell to be a success? Didn't Tomb Raider (2013) sell like 4m (before the Definitive Edition) and still wasn't financally successful for SquareEnix? I thought there was something like that on GAF
Such numbers are just.... worrying imo.

But you're assuming that every budget for every game is the same. Not the case at all.
Uncharted 2's budget was only like $20M for an AAA title (not sure with marketing or not). Heavy Rain had a budget of $52.2M with marketing yet it made over $130M for Sony.

KZ:SF has an upgraded engine from KZ3 and a lot of assets reused as well as not a long development time and it is already getting close to Heavy Rain's life time sales. Not every game needs to sell 5M+ to be successful and not every company is as shitty as SE in managing their finances and expectations.

 

[LifEndz]

Big Killzone fan but SF was a big disappointment to me. Gratz on the sales and I hope the many features that were missing in SF and are being patched in are a product of the game being rushed. Hopefully the next KZ is better, but I won't be buying it until I've read a few reviews and gotten Gaf's opinion.

 

[Sid]

But you're assuming that every budget for every game is the same. Not the case at all.
Uncharted 2's budget was only like $20M for an AAA title (not sure with marketing or not). Heavy Rain had a budget of $52.2M with marketing yet it made over $130M for Sony.

KZ:SF has an upgraded engine from KZ3 and a lot of assets reused as well as not a long development time and it is already getting close to Heavy Rain's life time sales. Not every game needs to sell 5M+ to be successful and not every company is as shitty as SE in managing their finances and expectations.

They had ~3 years to make this,right?

 

[PuppetMaster]

Big Killzone fan and SF and after reading so many negative reviews, SF was a surprisingly good game to me! I think the people who played it early at launch and their warpped hype goggles on and nothing could have possibly impressed them.

Me playing it for the first time in Feb I actually felt it was probably the best KZ game I have played. Especially after playing it through a second time and noticing so many things I didn't on my first play through.

 

[Melchiah]

Well deserved. It's the showcase game on the system, and the SP campaign was pretty good despite of its flaws.

 

[Sorral]

They had ~3 years to make this,right?

2-ish years I thought. Killzone 3 was released in 2011 Feb and KZ:SF SP was done early last year from the tweets that I remember reading. I highly doubt that it took 3 full years.

 

[FunkyPajamas]

A bit off-topic, but my friend wanted to buy a digital copy on PS store and we couldn't find it. It is being sold on Amazon.com though, which I thought was weird. So is Killzone: SF only available as a digital download on Amazon.com but not the Sony store?

edit: ugh, you know what? I just searched again and found it. Sorry about this.

 

[Drek]

Yeah of course but we can assume the development costs of graphic blockbusters are higher than last-gen AAA.
Just trying to be realistic here :/
Sure 2.1m for a launch title is great, but it doesn't really say anything. I mean what else should people buy? There aren't many interesting next-gen titles yet imo and it's still lost money.

What I'd like to know: How many copies would a next-gen title need to actually sell to be a success? Didn't Tomb Raider (2013) sell like 4m (before the Definitive Edition) and still wasn't financally successful for SquareEnix? I thought there was something like that on GAF
Such numbers are just.... worrying imo.

1. Sony's first party budgets have consistently been far lower than AAA multiplats largely because porting to and customizing for multiple systems is expensive. A key component to the PS4's hardware design and why so many 3rd parties are singing it's praises is to shrink that workload.

2. Tomb Raider was financially successful for SE, they just expected more. They targeted 5M+ sales, but that doesn't mean they didn't make a fistful of money off of it at 4M sales (they did). Publishers were notorious for over-projecting titles all last generation because of the perceived need for "tent pole" releases in every quarter. This is why Capcom continually over-projected the sales of it's major IPs last generation (except MonHun, which actually is a tent pole release for them). Games that weren't financially successful where your mid-tier sellers in the ~1M range that had AAA budgets such as Darksiders II with it's ~$60M pre-advertising budget.

3. Sony's profit margins per sale are ~15-20% higher than 3rd parties thanks to the royalties they charge, so they need 15-20% fewer sales to reach profitability. That's a big chunk of money. If a third party title sells 2.1M like Killzone has it would make roughly $17M less profit for the 3rd party than it does for Sony (assuming a ~$8 royalty fee). The advent of digital distribution is only going to improve the situation for 1st parties as they'll be the retailer, the platform holder, and the publisher. It lets them put all $60 of the retail price in their pocket every digital sale.

This is Nintendo's business model in a nutshell and why they're so addicted to having their own hardware platforms. No royalties makes the 1-2M selling titles quite profitable and the 5-10M sellers into huge financial pillars for years going forward.

If I recall it's rumored that Guerrilla has 2 teams now. You don't make 4 Killzone games without having a core group of people that are really into it. We'll get more Killzone, but we'll also see that new IP Guerrilla is cooking up.

Cambridge I hope is doing their own thing.

Don't be so unoptomistic.

I don't see why it would be un-optimistic to project Cambridge as making the next KZ. Mercenary is one of the three best KZ games along with KZ2 and Liberation.

My bet is that GG isn't really a two full team studio and more like a 1.5 team studio a la the model laid out by inXile when they did their kickstarter for Torment. They have two core teams of lead design people who each work on their own projects. When team 1 is in full development team 2 is in pre-production. As team 1 no longer needs certain types of staff as much (art staff for example) they're rolled over to team 2's project that is beginning development. When team 1's game goes gold the rest of the staff migrates over to team 2's game for the bulk of the game's development while team 1's core leadership goes back to the drawing board on their next title.

This seems to be the structure within Naughty Dog, and it makes a lot of sense. The last chunk of any game's development is very heavily focused on coding and QA/QC. New assets aren't being churned out at a similar rate to early development and therefore far less staff is needed. The alternative is outsourcing art asset creation or laying people off. Neither is a great strategy.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next move for Killzone is for Cambridge to pick it up with some collaboration with the core Killzone: SF team while the majority of GG works on their new IP. Then once Cambridge has the game pretty much off the ground the KZ:SF team will move on to a new IP or follow up to Cambridge's KZ game that the majority of GG can transition to once their current new IP is finished up.

 

[Into]

Not a huge fan of it, i have to admit that. It is pretty and, unlike Killzone 2, very colorful for a dreary, glum, FPS game with hints of the Berlin war in the future type of deal.

I hope they get to make something else now, we say this about every developer, but this one i actually *REALLY* want them to do something else.

 

[Hyunashi]

Not a fan, found it boring but the best looking launch game easily. I personally dont feel it deserves 2.1M and I can only hope GG can get a decent plot going for their future games. Power to those that like it, but its time for something new (thankfully that rumored new IP!).

 

[Amneisac]

This is what we call being in the right place at the right time. KZ was the definition of generic. I still don't regret playing it, but it is so forgettable. It's going to be that .99 game in every game stop one day soon if it really moved this kind of numbers.

 

[kinggroin]

Not a fan, found it boring but the best looking launch game easily. I personally dont feel it deserves 2.1M and I can only hope GG can get a decent plot going for their future games. Power to those that like it, but its time for something new (thankfully that rumored new IP!).

I can't even agree with the visuals argument. They're great don't get me wrong, at least technically, but I was more immersed by and impressed with the visuals and aesthetics in Ryse and Zombi U.

Resogun and Tomb Raider are easily the best two looking titles on PlayStation 4 for me personally.

 

[Chuck Norris]

Does that include refunds from the 1080p debacle?

 

[RoboPlato]

I liked the game a lot. Big step up from KZ3.

 

[driver116]

That's pretty fantastic, looks like SF2 is all but confirmed then. Let's hope it will finally be a masterpiece.

 

[Always-honest]

I liked it a lot. First "next-gen" game for PS4 and there were some pretty great levels.
It wasn't perfect, but it was also victim of an anti hype train by people who forgot that gaming required interaction and brainactivity.

For a launch game, i wasn't dissapointed. But there are some areas where Guerilla needs to step it up a notch or two. Art-direction was sublime though.

 

[Jawmuncher]

Even though a good chunk of the sales were due to it being the only worthwhile exclusive at launch. At least this means we'll be in for some more killzone. Hopefully whatever team did Mercenary handles the series going forward.

 

[RoboPlato]

Even though a good chunk of the sales were due to it being the only worthwhile exclusive at launch. At least this means we'll be in for some more killzone. Hopefully whatever team did Mercenary handles the series going forward.

I think they probably will. They didn't get their name changed to Guerrilla for no reason and the main GG studio is working on the new IP.

 

[Melchiah]

Yeah of course but we can assume the development costs of graphic blockbusters are higher than last-gen AAA.
Just trying to be realistic here :/

1. Sony's first party budgets have consistently been far lower than AAA multiplats largely because porting to and customizing for multiple systems is expensive. A key component to the PS4's hardware design and why so many 3rd parties are singing it's praises is to shrink that workload.

 

[mcw]

Hey, Drek, this was a really great post that made a lot of good points; thanks very much! I still have a concern about one thing, though, and would like to get your thoughts on it:

1. Sony's first party budgets have consistently been far lower than AAA multiplats largely because porting to and customizing for multiple systems is expensive. A key component to the PS4's hardware design and why so many 3rd parties are singing it's praises is to shrink that workload.

Well, sure, but what they've talked about thus far in regards to time and effort savings is focused on development-- programming, testing, iterating. But the reason why games like Assassin's Creed have so many people working on them is art, right? To make a beautiful game, you need a lot of time from a lot of artists, and that's where you end up spending so much money. Artistic expectations are higher for this gen than they were for the last, and I don't think there's much Sony can do to help with that.