Speaking during a developer session at Eurogamer Expo today, lead designer Eric Boltjes explained why the single-player runs at 30 fps, and multiplayer at 60 – yet both outputs are a native resolution of 1080p.
“The reason for that is tricky,” said Boltjes. “Running 60 has become this Holy Grail. Suddenly people think if you run 60 your game is better. Technically, that’s not really true. But what it does do is it makes decisions go from input to on-screen a lot easier.
“Graphically single-player is even a step above multiplayer. There’s even more destructibility. We analysed what 60 brings. 60 in multiplayer is really important because your reaction time is a lot shorter. In single-player it’s actually a lot longer. It’s not because our AI is stupid, but because you simply have more time to react. We said we don’t need 60, and we want the graphical push.
“With multiplayer, having a constant 60 is not actually better than having a ‘lot of the time’ 60. It sounds weird, but it’s actually true. Because usually in the moments where we’re going to drop framerate, either you’re already dead or it’s too late anyway.
“I think our game, graphically, especially multiplayer, looks a lot more detailed and vibrant than a lot of the other games we are in direct competition with. We didn’t want to make any graphical concessions. We didn’t want to say, we can run at 60 constantly if we just half the resolution and take out all the destructibility and remove all the glass, for example.
“We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to keep it really pretty and try to make it 60. We can’t go out and say we’re always 60, because that’s lying. We’re very close. And I challenge anybody to notice, without Digital Foundry looking at it, that there are large drops.”
Killzone: Shadow Fall is a PS4 launch title coming with the console in November.