Killzone Explains How Play As You Download Works

A few months ago, Sony announced that the PS4 would have a “play as you download” feature, which would allow quick access to the early levels of the game. In an interview with Official Playstation Magazine, Eric Boltjes of Killzone: Shadow Fall explained how the feature will work. 

A large part of any game, especially a first person shooter,  is the game mechanics and weapons — the things that persist level to level. To get past this, Boltjes mentions that Guerilla Games “PlayGo” system (which allows for simultaneous play and download) will download the game in sort of packets. The level design is actually a smaller portion of the download, and so it then becomes a matter of what is included in those early levels: 

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. We make a package out of that, and that’s the first bit you download which is a lot smaller than the entire game.

The idea is while you play Level 1, the game can begin downloading the features, textures and scenery that debut in Level 2, and so on. That way you can play the game, while it downloads. At least in theory. 

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.

With this system, Boltjes and Guerilla Gear hope that they can lessen the impact of fixes and patches — though not entirely limit them. New content, new weapons for example, would still have to be patched into the game. But weapon balancing? “That we can do on the fly.” 

Will you be downloading Killzone: Shadow Fall?  What do you think about this new system?