Gameplay and Levels.

Gameplay
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Gameplay is the choices, challenges, and consequences that players face when playing a game. A game is its gameplay, without it, it’s just a television show.

Victory conditions – how to win: In Killzone, you must kill everyone (in your way at least) that opposes you in each of the various zones(levels) This is the case for the story mode at least. In the Battles modes, there are other types of gameplay/objectives, such as killing a certain amount of foes first and capturing the enemy’s base. In the story mode, once you have beaten each of the individual levels(met the victory condition – not dying and reaching the end of the level as well) you move onto the next level until there are no more levels, at this point the main victory condition has been met (beating all levels).

Loss conditions – There is essentially only one way to lose in Killzone’s story mode, and that is to die. Taking enough damage to get killed is the only way to lose, and this generally happens when you are shot too many times, but an additional way would be by tripping a laser sensor rigged to explosives, or being blown up by other forms of explosives (grenades, rockets).

Interactivity modes – Interactivity is how the game is played in one sense Interactivity modes are who or what you play against or with. In Killzone, the player plays the story mode against the computer and no one else. However, in the battlegrounds area, the player(s) can play with another person, either locally or through the internet, on the same team or against them. You can team up with a person to play against other people or against a computer and can also be grouped with the computer fighting against the computer. So the game features both Player-to-Game and Player-to-Player modes, but lacks Player-to-Developer, at least from what I’ve seen –the game is not constantly updated and doesn’t need to be maintained as an MMORPG does. As for player-to-platform, you use the PS2 controller, to control what is on the television screen. I believe you can use a headset when doing online play to communicate with others.

Game theory – this involves types of conflicts and how players respond to these conflicts.

- Zero-sum - Killzone is predominately a zero-sum game. You compose a side, the enemy composes a side – in the end, only one will win, the other will lose. This goes for the story mode and the battlegrounds mode(with one possible …oh what’s the word.. to the rules.. exception, that’s it.

- Non zero-sum - In some of the battleground mode… modes, you can team up with another person to beat the enemy, so it is still a someone will lose someone will win situation, but you can work together to achieve this goal, as your interests don’t oppose each other’s.

Types of challenges – challenges are often linked together and are related to the game’s genre.

-Explicit – Killzone is an FPS, as such, nearly everything is immediate and intense. You run around the level and when you come across bad guys, engage in a firefight with them until one side is dead. If you survived, you move along until the next battle. Types of enemies vary from level to level and spot to spot so you’re never sure what exactly you’re going to face (unless you have already gone through a spot before).

- Implicit – some implicit challenges in Killzone would be deciding the best course of action to succeed in a level – to engage in a front-on, all-out assault or crawl through the vents picking people off from above while staying concealed… Choosing which character you want for a particular level is also an implicit challenge – sort of – each character has their own advantages and disadvantages.

-Intrinsic and Extrinsic Knowledge – As an FPS, Killzone is a pretty straightforward game that follows the lines of other FPS’s – shoot things. There is however some intrinsic knowledge that the player must pick up while playing the game, such as how certain weapons work. Many weapons have two types of firing modes (the primary and secondary), the only way to find out which does what is to use them. Then there is the case of a particular weapon.. it is not a gun, but rather some manner of laser + GPS tool that you use to select an area that’s of a fair distance away. When you “fire” this weapon, you don’t shoot anything. Within a few seconds however, missiles rain down from the sky on your target… destroying anything in range. It took me a few tries while playing the game to get the kinks and nuts and bolts of this weapon down.

The main piece of extrinsic knowledge used in this game from the outside world is – bullets, grenades, and rockets kill people. Know that and you know how to defeat your foes.

Challenges and goals –
- Advancement- beating a level in Killzone means you go onto the next level, thus advancing through the game to higher and harder levels.
- Conflict- Once again, Killzone is an FPS, combat is one of the key points to its playability. You are on one side, the Helghans are on another- you try to kill them, they try to kill you. There is also non- violent conflict in the game, namely Jan and Luger’s sexual tension + issues relating to that, and Hakha and Rico’s semi-hatred towards each other based on who the other is.
- Capture- One of the Battlegrounds modes involves taking over the enemy’s base or supplies – this is capture in its purest form – taking something while avoiding death.

Balance – balance is crucial to a game, if a game ain’t balanced, no one will want to play it.
- consistent challenges- as you progress through the game, the levels get harder; this keeps it interesting and worth playing from beginning to end.
- lack of stagnation- there is no way, at least that I’ve found, to get stuck in a level without being able to move forward. If this however does happen, its easy enough to just restart the level – they aren’t excessively long so redoing them is not that big of a deal.
- lack of trivial decisions- nothing really pointless to pick in the game—who you want to play, what weapon you’ll use of the ones available, and how you want to go through certain parts of some levels (full-blown assault or stealthy), you choose these things based on your preferences and needs.
- difficulty levels- From the options menu, there is the ability to choose the difficulty level you want to play on, so inexperienced people can succeed and have fun and hardcore players can challenge themselves with hard settings.

Symmetry – the simplest way to balance a game- giving all players the same starting conditions and abilities. In Killzone, the story is not what you would call symmetrical- its you (and possibly up to 3 of the other main characters) against an entire map filled with enemies. You start with one or two weapons and a limited amount of ammo. Good luck!
In the Battlegrounds are, the player can make these choices and set the symmetry or balance to whatever… you select how many NPC’s characters you want on your team, how many characters the computer’s side has, the difficulty of the NPC’s as well as other options such as whether or not friendly fire is on. So you can make each team perfectly balanced, give you and your team a clear advantage, or give the enemy a major advantage (you against 7 difficult-leveled NPCs with no friendly fire).

Dynamic- dynamic balance allows players to interact with the game. In Killzone, this is primarily done through restoration.
-Restoration- the game world is unbalanced and you must restore it. The majority of levels in Killzone are based in Human-controlled areas (the colony of Vetka) which are overrun with invading Helghast soldiers. Your primary task is to eliminate these invaders and restore human control.



Levels
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Levels are the environments, scenarios, and/or missions in a game.

Structure – levels structure a game into subdivisions, organize progress and enhance gameplay. Killzone is structured in a linear form, with one level leading to the next, starting with the first and ending with the last.

Goal – the goal in Killzone is to progress through the levels by eliminating any foes and reaching the end point of the level that generally ties into the next level. There aren’t a whole lot of side objectives.

Flow – You almost always have to kill the enemies that are in your way, though, I have never tried to run past them to get by. The levels are generally rather linear with the occasional shoot-off in direction possibility, but it is rather easy to figure out where you are supposed to go and how. In some spots there is more than one option for getting by an area, you can take the hallway or the vent shaft, climb a ladder or not. In the end you’ll still get to the same place.

Duration – Levels in Killzone aren’t excessively long nor are they ridiculously short. They find a good mid-ground and a player could do one in a sitting and possibly be satisfied, or do a handful without too much grief. It is also possible, if you are on the more intense side of gaming, to do all the levels in a single sitting, though I wouldn’t advise it. In the Battlegrounds modes, the player can choose the length a level will last, either timewise or points/kills. You can make a mission last 10 minutes or 30 minutes, 50 kills, 100 kills and 500 kills as well as in between.

Availability – Killzone has many levels, both in the story and for the battlegrounds. Once you have beaten a level in the story line, you can go back and redo it as much as you want whenever you want. In the battlegrounds area, you select one of several maps that the play session will be played on. If you decide you don’t like a map, you can quit it and redo the “mission” on another.

Relationship – The levels in Killzone’s story line are all linked to the level before it and after it. For example, one level takes place in a run down part of a city and you navigate through the buildings and streets until you come to a point where you finish the level and start the next, its in the same city, but a different part, that is not as rundown and this part of the city leads to a park that is part of another level. All the levels flow directly into the next. Another set is: military base, space ship, space station- each its own unique level that have a clear organization of events.

Progression – Generally levels in Killzone get harder as you advance through them, though this can also be attributed to the player – someone is good at/likes something while another is better at something else. End levels are clearly harder than starting ones, there are more foes, they have higher armor and health and do more damage to you per hit or are more accurate with their aim.

Time – There is not really time in Killzone other than it moves forward from level to level. You can take as long as you want in a level, it will have no effect on the game- so feel free to grab another drink while your character idles, nothing will change while you are gone (just don’t leave when people are shooting at you.) Levels do not go from day to night, but as levels move on time passes as a way of advancing the story line.

Space – the physical environment of the game. You are always on the ground (even if that ground is in space), so there is no flying you control and thus no problems related to flight.

Perspective and camera – It is an FPS- first person shooter – you get a first person view and nothing else, other than cut scenes which show things from many views (mainly third-person / television show-esque)

Scale – Everything in Killzone is scaled to be a size that is appropriate to what it would be in real life if you saw things through your TV screen. People are a certain size and that size fits buildings the way the person-building ratio works in real life. Weapons on the ground are about the right size one would expect them to be, however ammunition is not, it is scaled up so that is easier to see and grab, the same for health packs, though those I have not really seen in real life as there is no object you can walk over to fill up your health bar, we don’t even have health bars!

Boundaries – Boundaries in Killzone are essentially those in real life. You can not walk through walls, you can not climb up broken ladders, you can not fit into vents that you are wider than, you can not walk on water or float in the air (if you wander off the edge of a giant crane/platform you will fall, and you will likely die.) There is the occasional locked door, but these doors are never unlocked, you just have to find a different way.

Realism – The game isn’t completely realistic in environmental and character graphics, but it is pretty close. It certainly isn’t cartoonish or childish- it has real world like objects and people, so it does display the environment realistically... while not completely or as much as some newer games.

Style – Killzone is rated M. It takes place in a war-torn world; things are gritty, dirty and rundown. There’s haze/dust/fog/gunpowder/dirt floating in various areas and the overall feel is that you are in the middle of a war. An urban, semi-futuristic war, there are billboards and vending machines advertising things (they are generally torn or otherwise beaten to hell), slums, massive amounts of debris everywhere, particularly in city streets and buildings, trenches plowed in the dirt, pools of blood on the ground, and dead bodies lying around. The sensation/vibe is that this is a dark game in a place set in bad times with danger lying around every corner. In other words, it’s great.