Guerrilla tried to make Move mimic mouse control

Guerrilla Games tried many different motion control implementations for Killzone 3 before settling on the control scheme which will ship with the game on February 25.

One such idea was to replicate traditional mouse control with the Move controller.

“Moving the Move would act as mouse input, pressing the Move button would ‘pick up’ the mouse. Some people preferred this over the current scheme, but most people did not understand it,” Tommy de Roos, Guerrilla Games lead game programmer, told ars technica.

According to de Roos, the team also experimented with gestures, some of which actually made it into the final build.

“Throwing a grenade using a throw gesture was really cool. Losing your aim and turning your back towards the enemy with a cooked grenade in your hand was less appreciated,” explained de Roos. “So in the end, the only gestures that survived were the ones that felt natural and did not interfere with your aim.”

The reload gesture – a twist of the wrist – is one such motion gesture which made the cut.

Guerrilla also attempted an on-rails version of Killzone 2, but decided against the idea once they realised “all encounters would have to be re-scripted,” creating a huge amount of work.

It’s hoped that Guerrilla’s efforts to make motion control work with an FPS can now be expanded upon by other Sony studios.

“We’re open to share our experiences and are encouraged to do so by Sony; we’ve already been contacted by several studios,” said de Roos. “And I guess most studios will learn from this the same way as we did: analyse it and try to come up with better ideas to improve upon it. I certainly think that there is still a lot of progress to be made in this area.”

We found the motion controls in Killzone 3 to be pretty impressive, certainly offering a solid enough experience to suggest better is to come.