A long, long time ago in a month far, far away, Sony released a PS4 video where you could see the Play as You Download feature in action (alongside some pretty bad acting), with Killzone: Shadow Fall as the title being featured (skip to 1:20):
Guerrilla Games Lead Designer Eric Boltjes detailed exactly how they went about creating Killzone: Shadow Fall in a way where it could be downloaded in pieces (via OPM): “Basically how that works is that we’ve split up our engine in such away instead that instead of having to have everything to work you can download parts of it. And a large part of the game is obviously the weapons and gameplay mechanics.”
The actual level isn’t the biggest piece you need to download though, “So before you can start playing we have to look at, well, what does the first level contain? Well it contains these enemy types, these weapons, these textures, these sounds etc.”
Boltjes continued:
We make a package out of that, and that’s the first bit you download which is a lot smaller than the entire game. So once you have that part and where it gets really interesting is that level 2 might have the same enemies types, just a few extra. So to play level 2 it’s actually not a lot more data to download.
After you’ve done that first initial download, you start playing level 1, in the background it’s downloading level 2, level 3, level 4, depending on how fast your internet connection is. Hopefully, there’s going to be wait times, but hopefully there’ll be a lot less wait times than having to download the whole game.
Since Killzone: Shadow Fall is expected to take up 50GB, Play as you Download will be a very welcome feature.
Are you planning on downloading Killzone: Shadow Fall? Let us know in the comments below.
