Echo is one of the central characters in Guerilla Games' Killzone: Shadow Fall. She also appears in multiplayer expansion Intercept, released this week for PlayStation 4.
The scion of Helghast's ruling class, she was fathered by a
Vektan, placing her at the center of a vicious rivalry on the planet
Vekta. She is a skilled spy and combat operative.
Echo was played by actor Jamie Gray Hyder, probably best known for her role as werewolf Daniella on HBO's
True Blood.
In a recent interview with PlayStation Blog, she talked about the
challenge of playing Echo, and of acting in a motion capture studio.
"You've got a camera strapped to your head one inch from your face,
and you're wired up to a mic, and you've got this suit on," she said.
"It requires so much focus and it's really hard work physically, but I
enjoyed both those aspects of it.
"All of the visuals given to us by the studio definitely helped us
understand our characters. It does take a lot of imagination, and that's
why it's so similar to stage acting for me. You don't have a costume or
a set, so you have to develop a full character in your mind in order to
take this giant empty studio space and really make a universe in there
for them to live in."
Echo is undoubtedly a popular character in the game. Gray Hyder
(below) said she worked hard to get a fix on her personality. "She
knows what she's there to do; there's no confusion. In a world with so
much chaos going on, she's totally focused. For me, that was such an
important part of the character. She's on a mission and it didn't matter
what was going on around her; she's a lone wolf."
Guerrilla sought to bring Echo and other big characters into the
expansion, even though it is not a single-player story campaign. "One
thing that immediately came to mind when we started development [of the
expansion] was that we needed to bring back some of the strong
characters that we had in the single player campaign, such as Echo,"
said game director Steven ter Heide. "They appear as boss characters in
Intercept.
We've created an AI commander in the background that strategizes based
on how your team is performing. It can throw different types of troops
onto the battlefield and issue different orders so the game is
continually changing. Then, when the tide really needs to turn, it can
throw in one of these boss characters, which is where Echo comes in."
"I'm so glad Echo was so well received, especially when there aren't a
whole lot of strong female characters in games these days," added Gray
Hyder. "It's great to be able to set a precedent like that, and to have
gamers respond so positively was awesome to see."
