Killzone Visual Design Book Review
21Killzone Visual Design is an exceptionally good video game art book. It has art from all six Killzone games. The images are from various stages of the design process, but a lot of it is finalized concept art. Throughout the book there’s commentary about why the developers designed things the way that they did.
0:00 - Introduction
0:36 - Quality of the Physical Book
1:04 - Content
5:10 - Aesthetics
6:22 - Nostalgia
6:41 - Backstage
9:11 - Closing Remarks
QUALITY OF PHYSICAL BOOK
-9.25x12.25 inches.
-The pages aren’t numbered but by my count there are about 205 pages.
-I really like the cover and think it’s very cool looking. It feels sturdier and tougher than most art books.
-I think the quality of the images is probably above average. I’m not sure I’ve seen better.
CONTENT/INNARDS
Variety of images and image types
-Some art is from early in development but most is more finalized concept art. More than most video game art books, there’s a wide variety in the types of art on display.
-For example, there’s a page with business logos they designed for the nice city in Killzone: Shadow Fall.
-Another section has some artwork contrasting the two sides of Vekta in Killzone Shadow Fall.
-It has a cool 4 page spread showing the evolution of the ISA and Helghast soldiers.
-There’s a page with a bunch of guns and the material they’re made from. Right next to that is an image of a gun exploded out so you can see all the component parts.
-The guns and machines section have lots of iteration style artwork. In these areas you can see how well prepared they were to make a variety of machine monsters for Horizon Zero Dawn.
-There’s some rough 3D renders.
-There are images that are like a storyboard of how an explosion might affect a building.
Organization
-The book starts with an overview of the design philosophy of the developers and the rest is broken up into chapters. It has its own names for the chapters, but they’re basically: Design Philosophy, Helghast, Vekta, Mechanical Units like machines, Guns, Sci-fi stuff, and how they handled destruction.
Is there writing or insight from the artists and developers themselves?
-Yes. And when it isn’t specifically from them, it’s directly about them and incidents during production.
Quality of writing.
-I think the writing is much better than average. The captions are less flowery and pointless than many other art books, and they accent the rest of the content.
Does it have what you want it to have?
-I’m biased toward books that offer insight into game development, so I really like the contents of this book. There’s a ton of well-explained insight into the design philosophies of the developers.
-A lot of the commentary was pretty broad and it would have been nice if there were more commentary about individual images.
-All in all, there’s a good amount of content from the Killzone series.
AESTHETICS
-Most pages are full-page art, and the art itself is good, so overall is has a very pleasing layout that feels less clinical and spreadsheet-y than most other video game art books. It's hard to claim the aesthetics are anything but unusually good for a video game art book.
-I really liked how many full-pages of art are in the book, including some 3 or 4 page illustrations.
-The cover and pages have a sort of matte finish that feels more pleasant and luxurious than most video game art books. It's just nice to hold and look at.
-A couple of the translucent pages just don’t work, like the one with gun models. You just can’t see them properly. I don’t think this is a very big deal, though.
NOSTALGIA/AFFINITY EVOKED FOR THE GAME
-As for nostalgia, this book made me want to play all the games to notice the things I’d been reading about. I actually DID replay two of the Killzone games after looking through the book.
BACKSTAGE
-Throughout the book and in the introduction, it mentions how things are designed with form following function - in other words, they would think through how a tank would actually work and then design it’s appearance afterwards. I think most people probably didn’t notice this attention to detail in the linear Killzone games, but Horizon is a great format for people to notice how talented they’ve been all along.
-There was an interesting story where in the very early stages of creating Killzone the developers were deciding who would be fighting who, maybe humans fighting aliens, or clones, Then they realized that he most engrossing way to highlight the issues of warfare is to have humans fight other humans. They decided to highlight this by naming the game “Kin,” but Sony said the game wouldn’t sell on that name and they named it Killzone. Apparently the .exe file for all of the Killzone games is Kin.exe.
There are 17 book reviews in Season 1 of my series “Mike’s Video Game Art Book Reviews.” I hope you enjoy them!
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