Zero Punctuation: Killzone: Shadow Fall

[Sniper Team 4]

No you are not the only person who thinks the Helghast are actually the bad guys. They are the bad guys and anyone who tries to deny it needs help. Yes, their anger and their desire to get Vekta back is warranted, but the way they go about it makes them evil. Killing innocent civilians of both races (fuck, in Killzone 2 Radec kills one of his own soldiers for a dress code violation). Stealing nuclear weapons and using them on their own civilians. Trying to blow up Earth with future sci-fi nukes.

And the ISA didn't even pull that dick move. The ISA's orders to Sev and his group were to surrender to the Helghast. Obviously a bad move considering what the Helghast would have done, but those were their orders nonetheless. And yes, Sev never intentionally nuked Helghan, he was trying to stop Stahl from blowing up Earth and when the ship full of nukes crashed, it set off a chain reaction with the raw materials still in the planet and BOOM.

The ISA certainly aren't white knight 100% good all the time good guys (especially in Shadow Fall, where they changed their name to VSA for some reason that was never explained). But the Helghast are most assuredly 100% the bad guys with absolutely no gray areas at all. Or at least the Helghast military is. They are evil sons of bitches.

Glad to hear that. I see so many people posting that the Helghast are the victims that I was starting to think I had missed something major in the games I played.
And the move I was talking about was back when the ISA and Earth literally kicked the Helghast out of their home because they weren't sharing enough of their profits with Earth, over a hundred years before the first Killzone game. That was a pretty low blow, sentencing them to exile on a hostile world because they lost a war no matter how you look at it.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

There is nothing in this world that would justify forcing us to buy a clunky new console.

 

[Thanatos2k]

There is nothing in this world that would justify forcing us to buy a clunky new console.

If Suikoden 6 came out I'd buy whatever console it was on.

 

[Evan Waters]

Just a quick question about the whole not liking the current console generation due to lack of backwards compatibility thing. Were people really prepared to pay the likely $600 - $800 for one that did have native backwards compatibility?

but but backwards compatibility!!!! It is the most importen part of the console! Yes, I'm getting sick of all of this. I would not be prepare to pay 7000 kr (700? or more) or more for the same console with backwards compatibility.

It's not so much that BC is some kind of obligation, as that without it, both consoles have really anemic libraries which don't justify etc. etc. etc.

I mean, it always takes new consoles a while to build up decent libraries, but at this point the smart thing for a consumer to do is wait a while and buy a console after it's been out long enough that you're spoiled for choice of what to play on it. Which I'm not sure is a smart strategy for the manufacturers.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

pffft You guys are still banging on about backwards compatibility? IT WOULDN'T HAVE WORKED. Emulating the last gen would be impossible simply because we don't have the power to do so and to put old hardware into the machines along with the new hardware would make the consoles about twice as large and a lot more expensive than they are now.

As to the "clunky new console" bit, I don't see a problem at all personally. So no, Yahtzee. I'm not going to put that asterisk after every positive thing you say. 'Cause it's wrong.

 

[camazotz]

I am shocked that Yahtzee liked KZ:SF....or at least didn't not like it. Blown away, really....I've been playing it and liked it a lot (so as a rule of thumb if I like it I expect the game to get trashed by either the critics or the fans) and honestly thought the FPS part of the equation would have been too much for Yahtzee to get past. Wow.....


EDIT:

On the whole backwards compatibility issue. It's very simple really: if the consoles were backwards compatible then the following problems would arise for Sony and Microsoft:

1. a vast and seemingly endless array of existing titles, a great many of which are very cheap, would now be in direct competition with the costlier new stuff.

2. Neither of them would be able to re-sell the older games they choose to port over as new console special editions when the originals are out there (i.e. Tomb Raider for ex). If you can buy the older version for cheap then the port will make less money.

3. It is very likely that they have two console generations' prior data to determine that the short term (1-2 year) return on offering backwards compatibility is far costlier than the actual potential earnings. Doing backwards compatibility is, judging by the way it was handled last gen, a game by game affair that requires updating every game to work properly on the new console. Even with the last gen we had limited Xbox to 360 compatibility and as for PS3...well we all saw that they dropped that as part of "project make our console affordable."

 

[gamegod25]

Agreed that while a decent shooter it doesn't justify buying a PS4 just for it. While I appreciated making the morality of both sides in a gray area rather than the usual stark black and white in most games, it also meant that there was really no one for me to root for or identify with. Everyone is either a raging asshole or just bland and uninteresting, including the two main characters. The Helgast are understandably pissed about having their home destroyed but then they were planning do the same thing to the humans in the first place, not to mention invading Vekta and mercilessly slaughtering civilians in the first place. Not that the ISA are any better, developing biological weapons "just in case" and leaving their own people to get killed while evacuating their homes.

The shooting is solid but could have used more weapon variety, I really missed the amazing weapons from the second game. The owl drone is nice but like most gimmicks it falls to the wayside the longer you play and mostly you'll just use the attack function. The only really standout thing is the beautiful visuals, though even then you'll get stuck looking at the usual dull brown and gray ruins and such at parts too.

 

[Azaraxzealot]

Just a quick question about the whole not liking the current console generation due to lack of backwards compatibility thing. Were people really prepared to pay the likely $600 - $800 for one that did have native backwards compatibility?

I would've been more likely to. I have to sacrifice a lot of surface area to keep both my PS3 and my PS4 (Which was a gift), and when I want to play one or the other, I have to dig the HDMI cable out of one and plug it into the other because my monitor has only one HDMI port. Call it first world problems if you want, but it would've been damn convenient to just have one device.

Maybe you should consider one of these:

The problem is less about first world problems and more about us not having to pay twice for games we already own or having them only available via the whims of a server that could break down or be taken offline at any time. Sure you could say "well then just don't sell your PS3." Ok? Well what happens when that PS3 breaks? Eventually support and production of the console will cease. Then in order to play your games you either have to pay for a monthly streaming service that could go down at any time or buy another of that console for a hugely inflated price. People seem to think the whole argument for backwards compatibility is laziness, when it is in fact a consumer rights issue.

Not only that, but it is an issue of preserving our history. Like Extra Credits said, there are so many games that are just... gone. Disappeared due to companies not doing backwards compatibility and consumers just accepting it. You would expect your new computer to utilize software that at LEAST ran on the last OS, why can't we expect the same from games?

 

[Zontar]

it wouldn't be that expensive to do

Could you explain why it wouldn't be that expensive to do?

It's because the issue is a software one, not a hardware one. If Sony wanted it could be quite possible to make PS1, 2 and 3 games run on the PS4 without modifications to the hardware.

 

[camazotz]

Just a quick question about the whole not liking the current console generation due to lack of backwards compatibility thing. Were people really prepared to pay the likely $600 - $800 for one that did have native backwards compatibility?

I would've been more likely to. I have to sacrifice a lot of surface area to keep both my PS3 and my PS4 (Which was a gift), and when I want to play one or the other, I have to dig the HDMI cable out of one and plug it into the other because my monitor has only one HDMI port. Call it first world problems if you want, but it would've been damn convenient to just have one device.

Maybe you should consider one of these:

The problem is less about first world problems and more about us not having to pay twice for games we already own or having them only available via the whims of a server that could break down or be taken offline at any time. Sure you could say "well then just don't sell your PS3." Ok? Well what happens when that PS3 breaks? Eventually support and production of the console will cease. Then in order to play your games you either have to pay for a monthly streaming service that could go down at any time or buy another of that console for a hugely inflated price. People seem to think the whole argument for backwards compatibility is laziness, when it is in fact a consumer rights issue.

Not only that, but it is an issue of preserving our history. Like Extra Credits said, there are so many games that are just... gone. Disappeared due to companies not doing backwards compatibility and consumers just accepting it. You would expect your new computer to utilize software that at LEAST ran on the last OS, why can't we expect the same from games?

I'm not sure why we are holding the console maker up to a higher standard than so many other manufactured products out there. There are tech and gear in the world that went out of production over time and were never replaced, or backwards compatible, and we don't miss that stuff, due to obsolescence. It becomes history as a matter of recourse. If you tell a manufacturer that they need to make a product that is backwards compatible indefinitely, or must be maintained into perpetuity, what you are telling them is that they no longer can equate their profits to the actual life cycle of the product in the here and now, but must look at it as a burden of maintenance into both the past and the future.

Sure, old consoles aren't supported anymore by the original makers.....but they do have a support network. You can find enthusiasts for old consoles who work to keep them running, repair, trade, sell and continue with their hobby in a more historical way.

A bigger question relates to the nature of a game sale: if you can no longer play a certain game on the PS3 (say it breaks in 2019, the day after the PS5 is released) are you going to be incensed that the only way to then play The Last of Us is to pay for a $5 download from PSN? Because that's what we currently have for a variety of PS1 titles right now, and my hope is that we'll see more PS2 titles show up in the future. I think for my purposes being able to access these games in the future is more important to me than being able to play them on my old console. And yes, I will pay a bit for a new port of a game on a newer machine, especially if it means the game will now exist in a medium (digital) that transcends the physical media it started on.

 

[Griffolion]

-snip-

Ah okay, so you know a bit about hardware emulation. How easy would it be to emulate a cell broadband processor on x86 and 256MB of xDR RAM?

 

[alexus87]

Yeah, your analogy isn't really that good.

Germany and the Allied Forces didn't bid for Europe, with Germany winning the bid, expanding and making a profit and then taxing the bejeebes out everybody until the butthurt Allied Forces thought, fuck it, let's just go and take something that doesn't belong to us by force.

Vekta belonged to the Helghan Corporation fair and square, they bought the planets (vekta + helghast) and during the First Extra Solar War, UCN basically invades Vekta.

 

[Azaraxzealot]

Just a quick question about the whole not liking the current console generation due to lack of backwards compatibility thing. Were people really prepared to pay the likely $600 - $800 for one that did have native backwards compatibility?

I would've been more likely to. I have to sacrifice a lot of surface area to keep both my PS3 and my PS4 (Which was a gift), and when I want to play one or the other, I have to dig the HDMI cable out of one and plug it into the other because my monitor has only one HDMI port. Call it first world problems if you want, but it would've been damn convenient to just have one device.

Maybe you should consider one of these:

The problem is less about first world problems and more about us not having to pay twice for games we already own or having them only available via the whims of a server that could break down or be taken offline at any time. Sure you could say "well then just don't sell your PS3." Ok? Well what happens when that PS3 breaks? Eventually support and production of the console will cease. Then in order to play your games you either have to pay for a monthly streaming service that could go down at any time or buy another of that console for a hugely inflated price. People seem to think the whole argument for backwards compatibility is laziness, when it is in fact a consumer rights issue.

Not only that, but it is an issue of preserving our history. Like Extra Credits said, there are so many games that are just... gone. Disappeared due to companies not doing backwards compatibility and consumers just accepting it. You would expect your new computer to utilize software that at LEAST ran on the last OS, why can't we expect the same from games?

I'm not sure why we are holding the console maker up to a higher standard than so many other manufactured products out there. There are tech and gear in the world that went out of production over time and were never replaced, or backwards compatible, and we don't miss that stuff, due to obsolescence. It becomes history as a matter of recourse. If you tell a manufacturer that they need to make a product that is backwards compatible indefinitely, or must be maintained into perpetuity, what you are telling them is that they no longer can equate their profits to the actual life cycle of the product in the here and now, but must look at it as a burden of maintenance into both the past and the future.

Sure, old consoles aren't supported anymore by the original makers.....but they do have a support network. You can find enthusiasts for old consoles who work to keep them running, repair, trade, sell and continue with their hobby in a more historical way.

A bigger question relates to the nature of a game sale: if you can no longer play a certain game on the PS3 (say it breaks in 2019, the day after the PS5 is released) are you going to be incensed that the only way to then play The Last of Us is to pay for a $5 download from PSN? Because that's what we currently have for a variety of PS1 titles right now, and my hope is that we'll see more PS2 titles show up in the future. I think for my purposes being able to access these games in the future is more important to me than being able to play them on my old console. And yes, I will pay a bit for a new port of a game on a newer machine, especially if it means the game will now exist in a medium (digital) that transcends the physical media it started on.

Well that's short-term thinking, which is what killed many a great companies and has caused entire species to go extinct. The fact of the matter is, Microsoft Word 1995 still works on Windows 7, and you can still save documents in that format (and even older ones) even today. Why are game companies held to a much lower standard? I do agree we should go digital, but not that the games should exist in some nebulous "cloud" that could go down due to unforeseen circumstances or because the company just decides it's not worth it to keep the servers running.

These "networks" you speak of have not saved games and hardware from simply disappearing from history. You could argue obsolescence, that they deserved to be forgotten if the companies decided not to support them, however, how many games existed out there that people once played and had fond memories of that they just can't play because they can't find it (think Gubble 2 for PC) even through illicit channels. You can jury rig consoles for decades as has been shown by retro console enthusiasts, but remember that this last generation was built largely on proprietary hardware, so how many people do you think will be well-versed in the ins and outs of the PS3 cell architecture? Even many top developers don't know exactly how it works or how to get the most out of it (including Naughty Dog).

And yes, I AM advocating "...that they need to make a product that is backwards compatible indefinitely, or must be maintained into perpetuity, what you are telling them is that they no longer can equate their profits to the actual life cycle of the product in the here and now, but must look at it as a burden of maintenance into both the past and the future;" because, again, short-term thinking has never worked out. It's cost companies uncountable amounts of money, wreaked havoc on the environment, and has caused the entire world to plummet into economic toil. I will once again use Microsoft and its OS's as an example, they work very hard to keep their products as backwards compatible as possible, and it has translated into success. In any programming class, one of the most basic principles you will learn is making your program as widely compatible as possible. I am not holding game manufacturers to a HIGHER standard, I am holding them to the tech industry standard (of which they are a part of, and that is irrefutable).

At the very least, Sony and Microsoft could have made your purchases on their DIGITAL products translate forward. As it stands, all your purchases on the PSN and Xbox Live are null and void once they decide to discontinue their product and your PS3/Xbox 360 breaks. There really is no excuse for that. You now have to buy all the PS1 and PS2 and Xbox and all digital classics/games all over again for no good reason.

 

[Azaraxzealot]

Just a quick question about the whole not liking the current console generation due to lack of backwards compatibility thing. Were people really prepared to pay the likely $600 - $800 for one that did have native backwards compatibility?

I would've been more likely to. I have to sacrifice a lot of surface area to keep both my PS3 and my PS4 (Which was a gift), and when I want to play one or the other, I have to dig the HDMI cable out of one and plug it into the other because my monitor has only one HDMI port. Call it first world problems if you want, but it would've been damn convenient to just have one device.

Maybe you should consider one of these:

The problem is less about first world problems and more about us not having to pay twice for games we already own or having them only available via the whims of a server that could break down or be taken offline at any time. Sure you could say "well then just don't sell your PS3." Ok? Well what happens when that PS3 breaks? Eventually support and production of the console will cease. Then in order to play your games you either have to pay for a monthly streaming service that could go down at any time or buy another of that console for a hugely inflated price. People seem to think the whole argument for backwards compatibility is laziness, when it is in fact a consumer rights issue.

Not only that, but it is an issue of preserving our history. Like Extra Credits said, there are so many games that are just... gone. Disappeared due to companies not doing backwards compatibility and consumers just accepting it. You would expect your new computer to utilize software that at LEAST ran on the last OS, why can't we expect the same from games?

Just so you know, here's a complete list of consoles that have full backwards compatibility with a previous system:

PS2
Wii
Wii U

Three. In the history of gaming consoles, there have been three. I'm not arguing that backwards compatibility wouldn't be cool, but it's ridiculous to think that there's some precedent that means gaming companies have to do this. Putting it in a modern console, especially the PS4, would either drive prices up massively or reduce functionality in other places - it's just impractical.

And yes, games will disappear, just like everything else in the world that is around for a significant length of time. Committing it to a streaming system helps that - probably a hell of a lot better than just putting it on the next console in a row. And how is this a consumer rights violation?! They sold you a game for that console, there wasn't any small print on the side of Metal Gear Solid 2 that said 'by the way, you'll be able to play this on all of Sony's consoles until the end of time!'. Backwards compatibility is a feature, not a bloody human right. Just... no.

There's a precedent set in the tech industry, which games are part of. You would be upset if no software you currently ran on your computer just didn't work in the next OS (especially when the current OS stops being supported and your computer eventually breaks), so why are game companies held to a lower standard?

Committing to streaming system would NOT help in the current state of the world with the way internet infrastructure is. Most of the world is NOT connected to the internet, and you are immediately cutting out a huge potential audience for the sake of.... what? I don't understand how not having backwards compatibility helps me as a consumer other than giving me a cheaper console that does nothing I want it to do. At any time a company can just shut down the servers when they feel like it (see: EA), and then when the streaming service is discontinued and all your money is gone and wasted, THEN will you still be on their side?

It may be impractical, but the games companies dug this grave themselves by choosing to make proprietary hardware. The rest of the tech industry and the lowest levels of programming education ALL stress compatibility and fail students who do not make their programs flexible and compatible on a huge range of systems while firing employees who do the same. The games industry should be held to the same standard, since they are part of that tech industry.

 

[Xan Krieger]

-snip-

So you're assuming equivalency of cost between backwards compatibility and the Kinect?

Didn't they say the kinect was about half the cost of the system? How much could backwards compatibility cost compared to that?

 

[smithy_2045]

-snip-

So you're assuming equivalency of cost between backwards compatibility and the Kinect?

Didn't they say the kinect was about half the cost of the system? How much could backwards compatibility cost compared to that?

They more or less said that the Kinect is the difference in cost between the Xbox One and the PS4. So about $100US.

How exactly do you put a price point on backwards compatibility though? It's pure speculation how much it might've cost unless you were part of the dev team and were part of the decision making process behind choosing to not go with a backwards compatible console.

 

[orangeapples]

You wanna know why Sony dropped backwards compatability from the functions list when they were designing the PS4? Because NOBODY thought it was a good idea when it was on PS3. Sony said, "Look, this machine can play BluRay movies, PS3 games and any PS2/1 game disks you own!" and people responded, "But that's $599! I'll just hold onto my PS2 and get a 360." That's right, the reason there is no backwards compatibility now is because their fanbase said, "that's too expensive and dumb." You can blame every person who owned PS2 and moved to 360. Now that Sony has the cheaper machine everyone expects backwards compatibility? You didn't support it last time and there is no reason why you would actually support it this time. You say you will, but you wouldn't. With PS4 at $599 and XB1 at $499 guess what console everyone would have bought.



Now onto the game at hand: Both the Helghast and ISA are dicks.

 

[RicoADF]

Just a quick question about the whole not liking the current console generation due to lack of backwards compatibility thing. Were people really prepared to pay the likely $600 - $800 for one that did have native backwards compatibility?

Yes, yes I would. I paid $1000 AUD for the backwards compatible PS3 and would have happily paid that premium for a limited edition PS4/XBO console and left the cheaper standard version for those that don't care. Honestly both consoles could have done it :-/

Captcha: cold shoulder - yes, and the designers deserve it for being idiots.

 

[oldtaku]

I also completely gave up on the plot on this thing in the first 30 seconds (still in the intro movie) where we are informed that Space USA blew up the planet of the Space Soviet Nazis then.... gave them half their home planet to colonize.

That was so goddamn stupid I was out for the rest of the game. I don't really know who did what to who, or why. On the other hand, the combat was kinda fun, especially the open sections and the drone. And it was pretty.

So exactly like every other Killzone game (except the Vita one), but with much higher frame rate.

 

[Triality]

I can say with confidence that this review stands apart form others in recent memory for being a multi-hit combo of hilarity. The bit at the beginning with the caveat, the jokes deeper in, it all gelled so nicely. This was Yahtzee in his best form. Good show.