A few months ago, when you said first-person shooter and PlayStation 3 in the same sentence, people started talking about Killzone 2. Then, Resistance 2 popped up on the radar and started flexing its multiplayer muscle as well as a sooner release date, and the buzz about Killzone 2 seemed to taper off.

Guerrilla Games is trying to change that this E3. I just got out of an hour-long presentation from the company's Senior Online Game Designer Eric Boltjes, and the stuff Killzone 2 has planned is pretty sick.

The presentation started with a trailer comprised of material that was captured in the game. The trailer's been floating around the web since the wee hours of the morning and is even embedded right below this paragraph, but if you want a quick rundown, the movie displays a mess of arenas that look like dingy, abandoned warehouses and rundown cityscapes with a troop of ISA soldiers moving through. Then, a battle between the Helghast -- one of whom is rocking a wicked cloaking device -- and our boys breaks out on the ground.

This is Killzone 2, so of course the gameplay and graphics look great, but the real meat of the presentation followed the clip. Boltjes says the designers set out to create an online multiplayer mode (sorry, no split-screen) that everyone could enjoy, that you could play as you wanted, that would inspire team play, and that would create a community.

Something For Everyone
To begin with, let's verify that Killzone 2's going to support online matches for two to 32 players and, according to Boltjes, look as good as the single-player campaign. This means that at the most basic level, you're going to be able to find an affair that fits you size and visual needs.

When you start a match, you'll either select Quick Join or Regular Join. The Quick option tosses you into whatever match it can with players of your caliber, while the regular option lets you choose games based on one of the game's eight maps, five mission types, and so on. When you create a match, you can specify what maps to play on, how many players, what kind of weapons, and what missions will be used.

Have it Your Way
Player progression is going to be a huge deal in Killzone 2. There are 12 military ranks to ascend through, 46 ribbons and medals to unlock, more than 100 player stats to dig through, as well as an extensive badge system to flesh out and master.

Let's start with that badge system. There are six player types including engineer, medic, scout, assault, and saboteur in Killzone 2's multiplayer. When you start, you'll need to play to unlock every class of character, but when you do, you'll be given that badge's primary special ability -- a medic can revive fallen comrades, engineers can toss out sentry turrets, etc. If you keep playing with that class, you'll unlock a secondary ability as well -- medics can toss out med packs, engineers can repair stuff, etc.



That's cool and all, but what's neater is that you'll be able to merge classes if you like. Let's say you love reviving people but could really use the ability to repair machinery. You can combine the medic badge with the engineer badge to make -- you guessed it -- the medic engineer. You can make any combo you want, but whatever badge you put first will give the final product its primary ability, and whatever badge you put second will add its secondary ability.

As you increase your military rank -- basically your XP that is displayed after every match so you know how far you've got to go -- you'll unlock more of these badges. Use the badges and you'll unlock medals. Use the medals and you'll unlock secondary abilities.

Oh, and then there's the completely separate events that will unlock your PlayStation Network Trophies.

Another neat function debuted by Boltjes was Killzone's spawn mechanics. If you're like me, every now and again some nerdburglar gets a lucky shot off and drops you in a multiplayer game. When this happens in Killzone, you'll have a map pop up on the left side of your screen where you can cycle through the different respawn locales and the right side of the screen will display video in real time of what's happening at whatever spawn point you're scoping out.

Now if you spawn into a firefight, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Killzone's also trucking out what Boltjes called dynamic missions. There are five types of battle for you to take out your aggression in -- which include Assassination, Body Count, Search & Destroy, as well as Search & Retrieve -- but when you start a round, you don't have to settle for one mission. In a demo video I saw, the ISA finished up a Search & Retrieve mission and as soon as they were announced as the victors, one of them was targeted for a Helghast Assassination mission. The orange-eyed team surrounded the squad, blasted the target, and won the mission. Then, another mission popped up challenging the ISA to plant a bomb. They did, the device went boom, and the boys won the round 2 to 1.

Teamwork
What's going to make it easier for you and your team to wreckshop in Killzone 2 is the squad option. When you're playing, you'll be able to tap a button and invite teammates to squads of up to four players. This grouping function allows you to see your squad's health and badges, it gives you your own chat channel, and it opens the ability to spawn on your squad leader. Only eight squads are allowed per faction.

Although it sounds helpful as hell, Boltjes ran a quick video to showcase the true power of the feature. In the clip, a solo ISA gunner tried to take a reinforced turret spot manned by three Helghast in front of a lone entry way. In a second, the lone dude was obliterated. On the next attempt, the solider brought a friend, popped into a menu overlay, formed a two-man squad, and suddenly had the vitals on what his buddy was doing. The new guy placed a turret at the entry way (something the original dude told him to do after seeing his badges) and stepped up to provide some cover fire while the original dude used his boost ability to run at super-speed to the back of the enemies. The original dude could see how his friend was doing via the health bars and had plenty of time to get behind the occupied troops and fire off a life-ending RPG. The squad then placed some bombs before the bad guys could respawn and won the day.

A Killzone Kommunity
Squads are cool and all, but Guerrilla is intent on taking Killzone 2 further than that. Once you get going online and open up the option through the basic rounds of leveling up your military rank, you'll be able to join or create a clan for up to 64 total players. These groups will be awarded Valor points -- a Killzone 2 currency -- that can be put on the line in 16-player v. 16-player clan challenges, which are basically fights under whatever mission setting the groups agree to. See, Clan A would challenge Clan B and each would risk some Valor points. Whichever clan wins the fight gets the points.

There are also clan tournaments that up to 256 clans can participate in. You can risk and win valor points here as well. Now, it's important to point out that you can only be in one clan at any given time. If you tire of a group's shenanigans, you can leave and join up somewhere else as long as your clan's not in a tournament. Guerrilla doesn't want you quitting a losing team and joining the squad beating you.

These points play into Killzone's practically OCD obsession with stats. There are going to leaderboards for individuals, friends, clans, and clan members as well as stats based on daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time performances such as headshots and the like. If you can't get enough of scoping these figures on your PS3, you can sign on to Killzone.com, synch your PSN username, and check out all the figures there.

In fact, Killzone.com is going to become a pretty handy portal for people who go off the deep end with this game. On the site, you can invite folks to your clan, track your military rank progression, check out what medals you have and what you need to do to get the next few, compare medals, see folks' favorite weapons, and the list goes on. Clans will have their own spaces on the pages where you can see who's in the group and who's the MVP, you'll be able to search for Clans, and the page will even display featured match rundowns that give you the skinny on the when, who, and how many Valor points are up for grab.

Whew
With the formal part of the presentation over, Boltjes ran another trailer that was really an extended look at the first one. This time we got to hear the banter between the folks playing as the ISA as they made their attack on the Helghast. Shots were fired, turrets were manned, and all was right with the world. At one point, one of the soldier's ran up and set some C4 at the exit to a building. He doubled back, and then setoff the payload when the Helghast began to come out of their dwelling. It halted the initial batch, but soon another swarm attacked the area and a sniper took up an elevated potion. None of the ISA guys could get a shot off on the scout, so one tossed a green smoke grenade.



It called in an air strike. Soon, an unmanned sentry 'bot flew in and lit the sniper up. An AI-controlled weapon, the 'bot will patrol until someone takes it out.

In yesterday's single-player preview, I wrote that Killzone 2 kept finding ways to impress me. That is definitely the case here. The servers are global, the clan system sounds awesome (Who'd be down for a Podcast Beyond crew?), mixing and matching my badges sounds like fun (Please let me be able to cloak and boost.), and the Killzone.com community sounds like something I'd love to be apart of. If you're looking to be a part of the Killzone 2 cloth sooner rather than later, Guerrilla's planning a public beta later this year. Looking to life post-launch, the Guerrilla team said that they're investigating online co-op as a DLC possibility as well as the tanks I got to see yesterday.

Info on this multiplayer mode has taken its sweet time getting here, but it's definitely lived up to my expectations -- although I wish I could customize how my characters look.