Killzone HD tweaked to be 'more familiar' to players of Killzone 2 and 3

Some HD remasters have been quite lazy, simply taking old code and pumping it out in 720p. Guerrilla Games is putting a bit more effort into the upcoming release of Killzone HD, however. Not only is the game getting a bump in resolution, but there are quite a number of tweaks being added in an effort to make the game better.

For example, "the team even solved a few bugs we hadn't discovered when the original Killzone went to gold master," technical director Michiel van der Leeuw revealed. The game's release on PS2 meant that post-release patching simply wasn't possible.

"Where possible, the Killzone assets we retrieved have been resampled or recreated at a higher resolution," senior programmer Frank Compagner told the PlayStation.Blog. "Textures, for instance, were originally designed at twice the required size and then downscaled to fit into PlayStation 2 memory. For PlayStation 3 that's no longer a concern, so the game uses the full-sized textures."

Not only are the textures better, but additional tricks should make the game a bit more high-definitiony. "The frame rate is smoother, the shaders are of a better quality, the LOD settings have been tweaked to nearly always show the highest level of detail, and the engine now applies MSAA filtering," van der Leeuw added.

Because the PS2 and PS3 have different controller sensitivity, the controls needed to be tweaked. Guerrilla took advantage of this necessity by changing the controls "to something more familiar to players of Killzone 2 and 3." That doesn't mean you'll be able to jump in the game, however. "No, something like that would require extensive changes to the levels, to prevent players from climbing out of the geometry," Compagner noted.

Killzone HD will be available as part of the Killzone Trilogy, or as a standalone release on PlayStation Network. Both versions will be available on October 24th.