Killing Floor 3’s dynamic tech that makes zed heads ‘flower’ when you shoot them will haunt me for the rest of my days, but also I have to see more
I’ll level with you, folks: I’ve never sat down and pondered the precise number of ways my head could be minced, mangled, and maimed, and that’s probably why no one is ringing my phone off the hook to come work on Killing Floor 3.
The devs love their gore, you see. You can tell because a new documentary cut from PCG (that’s us!) and Tripwire—alongside talk about influences, approach, and philosophy—details KF3’s evolution on the studio’s Massive Evisceration And Trauma tech.
That’s MEAT tech for short, because of course it is, and it was first introduced back in Killing Floor 2. It’s the system that lets you do all sorts of horrible things to zombies: persistent blood splatter, limb removal, that kind of stuff, and it’s looking even more absurd in its KF3 iteration.
“We really doubled down on wounds on zeds,” says Tripwire founder Dave Hensley. “We really wanted a dynamic gore system. We wanna be able to dismember any limb in any order, we wanna apply wounds to it, and different damage types of different wounds all visible on the zed at the same time.”
But I gotta admit it’s the head-shooting tech that leaps out at me. “One thing that’s always felt great in Killing Floor is shooting things in the head,” says disturbingly chipper creative director Bryan Wynia. “[In KF3] their heads are made up of multiple meshes, so that it can essentially open up like [a] flowering head. Basically every time it randomises what that head could look like.”
Which, yes, the phrase “flowering head” will stay with me at every meal between this day and my last, but just in case you aren’t convinced, you can catch a glimpse of a sequence of exploded zed skulls while Wynia enthuses about them. They look like unique and exotic orchids: Equal parts impressive and horrifying. I… think I want to see more? Oh no.
