BITMOB: Do you worry that you might be ahead of the curve in terms of 3D?

STH: I don't worry about it. It's a great addition to an already great game. First and foremost, the game's got to be good, because 3D is not going to make a bad game any better. But it is going to make a good game even better. I think once people play it -- there's a lot of skepticism around there, but what we've picked up so far in terms of the response, from the press as well, is that once you start playing it you do notice that it has an added benefit. It's really awesome to be in the middle of that war. The sense of immersion is greatly increased. Something with Killzone that we always want to achieve is to really put you in the middle of that action

BITMOB: Relative to all the time that goes into making a triple-A title, is it all that much work to make a game 3D?

STH: The work for 3D is relatively small. Obviously, you have to render everything twice, so that's a hit on our tech team, who had to already push the engine to the next level just to create the game that we want to make.

And at the same time there's a couple of design choices, or design problems, that you need to solve. Most of the game works in 3D initially, out of the box, because the game is made in 3D. The 3D world is there, so rendering that is easy. But the things that don't belong in a game world, things like the HUD elements, those you have to work on. What layer of depth do they need? What do we want to do with the crosshair, because the crosshair is one game element that you can't really get rid of? That's something that involves additional work on top of what we're already doing for the normal game. But it's not that much -- most of the content, it's just one-to-one.

BITMOB: Guerrilla Managing Director Hermen Hurst just stood up on the stage and claimed that 3D makes the game "easier to aim, easier to navigate." How does that work? Easier to aim, really?

STH: It's something that you have to experience for yourself. As soon as you start playing in 3D, because you're able to read the environment a lot better -- and that's just my personal opinion on it -- I'm now able to see where things are a lot better.

Obviously, if you played a regular game, it's always kind of a directional trick...we have to make the player understand what the path is, which things are behind which things, so you can understand the level of depth in there. 3D does that for you, so you're able, with these oilrigs that we've got, you're able to see all the platforms that you can reach a lot better than you were in the normal game.

And we have to fix that for the normal game as well, to make that as readable, but 3D adds that additional layer where all of a sudden you can see that that guy is slightly exposed there, he's going to run around there, it makes it easier to predict what's going to happen. I think that helps your aiming -- if the predictability is a bit better, it helps your aiming.

BITMOB: Hurst was recently quoted about the enormous pressure the team was under after the Killzone 2 trailer -- have you ever commiserated with the Evolution guys, considering that they, similarly, had to make a game that lived up to the original Motorstorm trailer?

STH: Yep, that's always the case if you come out with a CG trailer of what your vision for the title is, you're going to have to live up to that vision. That's a daunting task, because the expectations are sky high. People will [say], well it's just CG, it's not going to happen, the machine's not going to be capable of that. It builds the pressure. But at the same time, when we made that trailer, we made it because we said, this is what we think Killzone 2 will look like.

So it was our own ambition that kind of was our downfall in that respect. The fact that it's in the public domain, and there's actually a fanbase out there that then starts knocking on your door, saying, where's the game, I want to see, and it's got to be one-to-one as good as that. That's obviously something that's a little bit more daunting.

It takes a long time to develop these kind of games, so if you have to remain quiet for the first two years and not be able to respond to all the forum comments where people are going, "Oh, they're not going to be able to pull it off." And you're looking at your screen thinking, "Yes we are! It's almost there!" But you can't say that yet. You can't go out there until it's ready.

And I think this time around, with Killzone 3, we're not showing you CG this time, we're showing you actual gameplay. Kind of a departure for us, but I think this is the right way to do it. To get the game into your hands and have you form an honest opinion about what it's like to play the game, rather than look at a pretty movie.