Guerrilla Senior Producer Steven Ter Heide does not want to show you a fancy CG trailer for Killzone 3. He does wants to see you in a nice pair of 3D specs, though, to go with your new Sony 3D TV.

After playing 25 minutes or so of a frosty oilrig level, trying out the new weapons and jet pack, I had a chance to talk with Ter Heide about how Uncharted 2 influenced Killzone 3's story, how 3D will improve your aim (sort of), and the pressure of living up to a CG target trailer....

BITMOB: So the Helghast are supposed to be tougher this time around?

STEVEN TER HEIDE: The Helghast -- at the end of Killzone 2 you kind of felt like you had the upper hand, the technological edge on the Helghast. You had the better equipment, the more impressive weapons. But at the end of Killzone 2, with the big ships coming in, that's really where the Helghast fleet has been hiding, and they take along all these new technological advancements that they've been developing.

Things like the jet pack, the Wasp gun -- that's Helghast technology. They're evolving a lot faster. A lot of these big weapons that you get...because the I.S.A. fleet is now decimated, basically you have to scrounge for weapons and pick up anything that the Helghast have brought along. So there are a lot of different things that they're developing, things like the jet pack, that's completely new, and it changes your gameplay experience.

At the same time, the Wasp gun, the really big guns, the minigun that we start with [in the demo], that's also a Helghast weapon. These big gyro-mounted weapons as well as the jet pack, they go back to what we did with Killzone 1 and Killzone: Liberation. In Killzone 1 you also had these big weapons, and we really wanted to reintroduce that to the Killzone universe. We always take inspiration from our previous games -- because Liberation had the jet pack, we said, "That's a really cool feature, let's transport that in." Some of the things we take from our earlier games, but there's a lot more coming in the other levels that I can't talk about just yet.

BITMOB: Were you upset when you saw that Halo: Reach was going to have a jet pack?

STH: I'm never upset about what other games do. If you have to get upset about those kind of things, then you have no life -- there's so many other things out there. People have to realize that developing these kinds of games and the features for them, it's not a matter of weeks, it's a matter of months. At the beginning, you start looking at your crystal ball and thinking of ideas, things that you want to generate, and then you start generating them. And at some point you'll find out that somebody else has done the exact same thing, and had the exact same idea. It's going to happen.

We just want to make sure that it's ingrained in the Killzone experience, and it's adding something to what we're doing. And I think the way that we're actually approaching the jet pack is something that is very akin to what we did in Liberation, that's actually where it came from, and it's a completely different experience.

BITMOB: In that same spirit, are there things you've seen in other games and thought, "That could work really well in the Killzone universe as well, if we put our own spin on it."

STH: Absolutely. We play a lot of different games. Recently, the big hitters that were out there with Uncharted 2 and God of War 3, those are really [inspiring] games. Uncharted really pushed the boundaries in terms of storytelling, so I think, well, what really worked about their storytelling and what kind of elements can we take from that and introduce into a first-person action game?

What things could we do, because story, traditionally, is one of the things that we haven't been very good at. A lot of people have flagged the Killzone story as [something] that can be improved; there are some weaknesses there. So let's look at the leader in the genre and see what they do storytelling-wise.

Same time, God of War -- bosses on top of bosses on top of bosses -- it's awesome in terms of scale and the stuff that they're doing. What can we do in terms of those kinds of elements? So it's more concept or inspirational things rather than one-to-one mechanics. We look at the general concepts of a game and see, OK, can we translate that into something that would mesh with all the other things that we have.

BITMOB: So how did you adapt Uncharted 2's approach to storytelling...does the protagonist have a lot of one-liners like Nathan Drake?

STH: It's not so much one-liners -- I think what they did really well is take sort of a more lighthearted approach and not take themselves too seriously. And that's something that people commented on Killzone 2 as well, that the game's very serious, very dark. It's not supposed to be a lighthearted war, but to be so dark and grim about it, it's not going to help either. So we're going to take a more lighthearted approach, and steer away from kind of the grim overtones that are so present in Killzone 2.

It's those kind of things that we take -- and of course we're looking at the cut-scenes, and how they did the facial animation, and what kind of things really worked for them -- and try and translate that into what does that mean for a first-person game? Obviously we have a lot of different rules to work with, but at the same time that gives us our own twist on their ideas as well.

BITMOB: Are you changing anything about your development process in order to do that, like getting writers involved earlier?

STH: Absolutely. We're always looking at the development process, because, well, the team changes, there's new people coming in, some other people are leaving, there's new pressures, new ambitions that we set for ourselves. We want to make sure that we get the right talent in for those kinds of things, so in terms of storytelling we've gotten in a writer specifically to write the story rather than have some of the guys on the team do it. Let's get somebody fresh in, take a look at the previous games, see what can be fixed, and see where we want to take the story.

And at the same time we know that a lot of the strength of the story lies in your delivery, that's something that obviously came from Uncharted as well. If you've got some proper actors in there and the chemistry between the actors is good, they'll start to kind of improvise on the lines and make the story a lot better, because it feels more natural that way. So we're also looking to bring in a lot of Hollywood talent this time around to make sure that the chemistry is there, and the level of acting elevates the storytelling as well.