Killzone: Shadow Fall lead designer talks about new OWL attack drone

While developer Guerilla Games has been pretty quiet about its upcoming PlayStation 4 game Killzone: Shadow Fall, it has finally given some information about the game. Namely, a blog post on the offical Killzone website talks about the OWL attack drone. Lead Designer Eric Boltjes talks about the OWL, which is an advanced hovering attack drone used exclusively by the Shadow Marshalls.

The OWL has several tactical abilities that players can use in the game, and all of these abilities are accessed with the touch pad on the PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4 controller. The OWL has four modes: Attack Mode, Zipline Mode, Stun Mode and Shield Mode.

The OWL attack drone gives versatility to the players

The Attack Mode of the OWL orders it to move to an area and attack anyone within range; alternatively, you can tell it to focus its attacks on a single enemy. Zipline Mode makes the OWL fire a zipline, which allows Shadow Marshalls to use the ziplines for speedy traversal. Stun Mode is like Attack Mode, except it creates an area-of-effect shock blast that turns off nearby electronics and stuns humanoid enemies within range. Shield Mode creates an Energy Shield right in front of the Shadow Marshall, allowing his bullets and projectiles to pass through but stopping bullets from coming in.

Talking about where the idea of the OWL came from, Boltjes said,  “We wanted to give the player more control over buddies in our game, and we quickly gravitated towards utilizing our futuristic theme to create something very technologically advanced and also extremely useful in the field. It was important that it was easy to use in the fray of battle and have suitable abilities for every type of situation the game throws at you, on top of all the other abilities/weapons the Shadow Marshal has at his disposal.”

Killzone: Shadow Fall will be hitting the PlayStation 4 sometime after launch.