It's about damn time this game was officially announced to the public, that's all I really have to say. Tripwire Interactive, by way of PC Gamer, has blasted the lid off of Killing Floor 2. From the looks of things, we're headed to a version of Paris that has certainly seen better days. You know, days where it wasn't on fire and there weren't disfigured specimens roaming the streets.

Some hot new features to look out for in Killing Floor 2? Well, first off, the team plans on making gore a big part of their game.
"When we started designing the game we decided gore was going to be the most important feature," says David Hensley, art director on Killing Floor 2. "We were really inspired by Soldier of Fortune, the GHOUL system. We wanted to outdo Soldier of Fortune's gore."

Hensley uses a pistol to slowly tear apart Cysts. The Cysts are new, weaker Clot variants—the underdeveloped killer babies of the genetic freak family. Each zed in KF2 features 19 points of dismemberment. "You can blow chunks off their head to reveal skull," he says. "Keep shooting the skull and it explodes, revealing brain cross sections. You can cut them in half vertically, horizontally."

The gore system at work in Killing Floor 2 is called MEAT (Massive Evisceration and Trauma). As an added bonus: When you're slicing and dicing the enemies to bits, the blood splatters made against the walls will now stay around for the entire game. Steve Gibson notes that they are using "really clever tricks" that allow them to modify textures in the level in real time. He claims there's no additional rendering cost with this method and it allows them to keep blood splatter around from the start.


Next up is a new co-op game lobby that will be included alongside the old, reliable server browser. What's more is that the new level cap for Killing Floor 2 is 25, but with a raised level cap comes a few tradeoffs.
Hensley opens up a co-op game lobby—an addition to KF1's classic server browser—which is quickly filled by five Tripwire testers elsewhere in the office. Most of them play with level 25 perks, KF2's new level cap. Two skills unlock every five levels, but only one can be equipped from each pair. There's always a tradeoff. The Commando has to choose between a damage boost and a skill that shows his entire team the zeds' health bars.

The new perk abilities add variety and, more importantly, a longer level curve for players to work on. In KF1, players could go months without earning a rank up, and each perk had only six ranks. "A big goal for us this time around is to make sure the endgame, playing the game for a long time, is much more entertaining and has a lot more replay value," Gibson says.

That's not to take away from the new abilities for the specimens, as they also gain a few new tricks based on difficulty. Raising the difficulty now changes the AI behavior of enemies and actually gives them some new abilities to attack the player with.

What else is new for Killing Floor 2? How's about a renewed focus on "animation fidelity," especially for their weapons?
Tripwire's guns, already renowned for their realism, also benefit from Killing Floor 2's focus on animation fidelity. "Guns shoot at such a high framerate, if you animate the gun at 30 frames per second, you're only going to get six frames per second when you go into slow-mo to show that gun animating," says Munk. "We started experimenting. What happens if we animate our weapons shooting at ridiculously high framerates? Using the Bullpup as an example, we animated at 242 frames per second, which gives us 22 frames per shell that ejects out of the weapons. In slow-mo you can actually see every kickback."

There was no release date for the game given just yet. However, more information on the game is expected to be revealed tomorrow, so perhaps will find out then when Killing Floor 2 might be released. It does seem as though Tripwire Interactive is looking to put this game up on Steam Early Access at some point in order to pull in community feedback. Until then, enjoy a few more screenshots.