Killzone 3's managing director Herman Hulst exhales relief and plops into a deep couch. For the past 15-minutes, Hulst and Sony publicists huddled over an unresponsive plastic gun called the Sharp Shooter -- the latest PlayStation Move peripheral. The crack team disassembled, reassembled and calibrated the device. Then did it again. Finally, something clicked -- what, seemed unclear. But the pay-off was worth the wait as patient stander-bys took their turn blasting away Helghasts like tin targets in the world's most elaborate shooting range.

From our couch a few feet from the demo display, Hulst beams with pride at his work.

1UP: What differentiates Killzone from the glut of cookie cutter shooters on the market today? Jetpacks? Melees? PlayStation Move?

Herman Hulst: It's a sci-fi game, so it's very different in that sense from more modern combat style games, but it is very much grounded in reality. You do the stuff that you expect you can do right now, but it's in the future, so we'll let you strap on an exoskeleton, we'll let you fly in an intruder.

As for core gameplay, I think the lean-and-peek mechanics that force you to play the game a little more technically, they're very much core to the Killzone experience, but now with these brutal melees... We like the Helghasts so much -- they're to a certain extent what defines Killzone -- that we wanted you to be more up close and for longer periods of time. So at times we draw you out of cover and right in front of these guys, you have face-to-face contact with them.

So it's kind of both; they're both part of the gameplay. And the cover thing, we're elaborating that. You slide into cover. You vault over cover. And sometimes these things come together in a very emergent gameplay way. You vault, you do a brutal melee, you see your buddy do a brutal melee, and then your enemy also does a brutal melee to another buddy of yours, and the whole thing comes together in terms of the core gameplay mechanics. I think that's when the game's at its best.

1UP: We see so much of the Helghasts, but don't know who they are. Will we finally learn about the average Helghasts as characters?

HH: At the end of the day, the Helghast's seek dominance. You started in Killzone 2 with a preemptive strike, not so much as retaliation, but to make sure an invasion of Vekta wasn't going to happen again.

I think the tables have turned in the sense that the Helghast now feel that they're being invaded. The main nemesis was shot [at the end of Killzone 2] by Rico, your buddy. We now show multiple characters that are vying for power. There's the leader of the army; there's the leader of the advanced weaponry. Each want to take [the former Helghan Emperor] Vasari's place. Through that conflict, you as the player almost get thrown in the middle of a civil war of sorts. You get to experience a lot more of their society. There's a lot more dialogue. There's more character building of the Helghast. It's conscious decision. That's where we wanted to take Killzone 3, to sort of explore more of Helghast society.

1UP: Will we see Helghast domestic life? Like what do they have for dinner? Do they shower in those uniforms? Will you humanize them?

HH: You see a lot more of that. Of course, more of the leadership. But you go through some areas and see how they work, what they do, how they experiment. You get to understand them much more.

More personalize than humanize. You get to understand them better. Will they be human? That I don't know so much. I think you get a better understand of their motives in the game. Where they came from, what they do, what they want.

1UP: Is the Killzone 3 story simpler than those of the previous games?

HH: You always need a simple overarching story line. But within that there are more sub-stories. You run into some challenges. You discover some evil plans that you need to sabotage.

I think the way we're telling the stories is a big improvement from previous games. In terms of character building, it's a lot deeper. From the ISA side, where you as Seth are kind of in the middle of a triangular relationship with Rico -- your buddy -- who's very gung-ho, and then Narville -- your captain -- who's very much a military man. He just follows and gives orders without thinking about it too much. And you as a player, you have to suss out the best approach. Both of your fellow characters are in a sense ineffective. So you have to find a way.

1UP: How much development time has gone into 3D?

HH: I'm a little bit careful to... let me rephrase that... 3D is a great feature, but it's an option to the game. I don't want people who don't have 3D to have a suboptimal experience. That said, if you play it in 3D... you see some of the cuts scenes and sequences in 3D, they look outstanding. They really pull you into the action. You're more than ever submerged.

But we don't want to alienate the core audience. The same with Move. These things are options. They're great options. I think they're here to stay. Just like we moved from mono sound to stereo sound. You wouldn't want to go back after awhile. But you don't force people to buy another transistor radio. When they're ready. We have to listen to the audience in that regard.

1UP: The game's running at 30 frames per second with and without 3D. Where's the power coming from for 3D? Were sacrifices made to maintain the frame rate?

HH: You know, look at it for yourself. We found a lot of power after we completed Killzone 2. Just to give you an example on the graphics side: we pulled a level from Killzone 2 into the Killzone 3 engine and it ran at 50 percent. That's how much power we've been able to find.

You can see it in split screen co-op. We had to do the double rendering anyway. I don't think there's that much that's suboptimal. Of course, there's some trickery you have to do. But at the end, what I think is much more core than the resolution or frame rate issue, because that isn't an issue with us, is the amount of tender love and care you put into things like the HUD -- things that are blatantly obvious if they're wrong, like if there's a crosshair that's just right in front of your face. That's what pulls you out of the experience. Or, if there's so much detail on the screen that you get overloaded. We blur stuff like that out. We make sure it's comfortable one the eyes and that it's intuitive.

1UP: Killzone 2's running at 50 percent capacity, now? Where did all that power come from? Is the PS3 so complicated that all that extra power was waiting to be found inside?

HH: Sheer optimization. We have a very talented technology team. They just kept hammering away at it. They just found more space and unleashed more power, basically.

1UP: Are you sharing any of this juicy knowledge with other studios?

HH: Sure, yeah. The tech directors in particular. They regularly talk and share concepts. People always think we share engines, and that's not so much the case, because we're making very different games. We're the team that makes the FPS. You can't just exchange an engine, but you can converse and exchange concepts. I think on that level, the biggest chunk of collaboration happens.

1UP: Have you done anything in Killzone 3 to attract people unfamiliar with the Killzone brand?

HH: What we always do at Guerilla is look at the areas we didn't do so well and improve those. We try to find the greatest strengths and push them so hard that no one else can touch them. So we talk about the graphics and going way overboard with that.

But on areas like accessibility, I think we had some difficulty spikes in [Killzone 2]. I think we're much more balanced on that. We had some issues with controls, if you remember. We tried to catch that and fix that after Killzone 2 was released. Controls work so much better now. There are no more issues with that. There's no lag. You press a button and you see the action on the screen in real-time. So across the board, we look at every issue that's mentioned in the reviews, in the user tests, and we take them all, we fix them.

We try to broaden it by implementing features like Move. And Move implemented in the gun peripheral. I think that brings in an audience that isn't necessarily familiar with the DualShock. It might be a PC gamer that's not used to the two analog sticks. Sometimes it's more intuitive for people to have a Move-like control.

We also have an easy mode that's got a full-cross hair lock -- very easy to play. But if you find that too easy you can just have camera lock. And if you want to show that you can excel without any of the locks, you switch all the locks off. So you can customize the game.

1UP: After three games, do you feel being a console exclusive has helped you or hindered you in any ways?

HH: Um, I think that the more you can focus on what the product does in the box the better the experience. I hear that from a lot of developers. And we're putting such an emphasis on really getting the maximum out of the PlayStation 3 that it shows in the game. That goes for the graphics, but that also goes for the 3D capabilities, it goes for the Move, it goes for everything that we do. So we try to really leverage what the PlayStation, as a family of features, has got to offer. We try to optimize that.