The Official God of War III Thread - In the end, there will only be chaos !

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NowGamer is given exclusive access to one of the year's most anticipated games

“I don’t want to sound like we’re being secretive or guarded or anything like that,” God Of War III game director Stig Asmussen wanted us to know as we talked to him exclusively about his latest game. “The thing is I’ve seen a lot of game trailers, game demos, or movie trailers that when I finally get around to seeing the movie it’s like I’ve already seen it if you just take the ten commercials that I’ve seen and put them together. It just ruins the experience and the only difference is I got to hear the swear words. I never want that to happen to our game, so we’ve put out the one demo and we haven’t put out a whole ton of screenshots. Every time I put out more I get a moan from the team, ‘we’re giving away the whole game’.”

The detail on Kratos is suitable ramped up for this PS3 version

And yet here we are. Sony Santa Monica has been incredibly protective of every last scrap of information regarding God Of War III. As Asmussen explained, Sony has made available very little ahead of the game’s March release, but anticipation has remained high. It was a rare treat therefore for Play to get the chance to lift the lid on the game a little further. While Sony is fearful of revealing too much before God Of War III’s release in March, it would be fair to say that God Of War doesn’t need to be rammed down our throats to make an impression. The fact that it managed to beat off competition from BioShock 2, StarCraft II and Mass Effect 2 as the most anticipated game of 2010 at the VGAs is testament to this.

“That’s one of the advantages that we have that we’re kind of a known quantity and we have the luxury of reputation from the first two games,” Asmussen explained. “We don’t have to show all of our cards. If this were our first game, like with God Of War we had some pretty extensive demos of that. At E3 I think we had about two hours of stuff and then we had a big demo that came out before our release of the Hydra battle, tons of screenshots and everything, but you’ve got to get people excited about the game and at this stage with this being the third game and everything we can live off our reputation a little bit.”

Of course it is a reputation that is richly deserved having been built and moulded by the extraordinary efforts made in both God Of War and God Of War II. Kratos arrived on the PS2 like a blood-soaked whirlwind and blew the competition away with his fluid combat, aggressive kills and epic set pieces. The staples of the series were set in stone from the first moment we started playing these games and Asmussen has been wary of changing too much or moving this sequel too far away from its origins. “In general what we’ve found is that with the first two games it’s become expected that you start off with at least the base of mechanics that you were left with in the other games,” was his interpretation. “So you’ve got the Icarus wings and the double jump and the Golden Fleece. All that stuff is still there, but we’re finding in playtests that there’s a lot of people that haven’t played the previous God Of War games and just teaching two games’ worth of stuff without adding anything else on top of it can take a great deal of time.”

This appears to have been the great dilemma of God Of War III. How can the team in Santa Monica give fans of the series the new content they desire and perhaps even deserve while not alienating players who may never have played God Of War, but are desperate to play it now? God Of War III begins as its predecessor ended with Kratos leading the Titans in an assault on Mount Olympus and the beginning of a new Great War and that means starting with many of Kratos’s abilities and arsenal. According to Asmussen it’s all been about pacing how and when Kratos draws upon this catalogue of items. “We’ve created a lot of mechanics, we want to keep as many of those as possible and we want to add new stuff too, but we don’t want to make a game where we’re teaching people all the time,” he says. “There comes a point where you’re an hour and half into a game and you’re still teaching basic stuff, then you’ve got too many mechanics. There’s a way with the flow of the game whether its eight hours long or 20 hours long that you can bring those elements to the player, let them get acclimatised to them an hour or hour and a half between each other and then it doesn’t really feel like you’re learning.”

The Blades of Athena: one of gaming's greatest weapons.

Moreover there has been the issue of simply balancing Kratos himself and not overloading him with special moves and abilities. For instance Asmussen and his team played with the idea of being able to pick up and use weapons left on the battlefield or torn from the hands of his enemies, but found it more problematic than enjoyable. “There’s a fine balance of how many upgrades and abilities you can give a character and still be able to successfully tune the game,” he explained. “We did in the past have the ability to take weapons from characters and then throw them and use them in the environment for a limited time or doing super-moves with them, but it ended up on the cutting room floor because of that fine balance that we need to have of making sure that we’re not overloading the player.”

That’s not to say that there won’t be new tricks up Kratos’s sleeve. The God Of War III demo has already shown us the Cestus gauntlets, ridable harpies and Cyclops and the new layout of the quick-time events that show Kratos at his most ruthless and sadistic. Asmussen confirmed there would be more beasts and more weapons to look forward to that you haven’t seen yet, but wouldn’t be drawn any further on them. As he mentioned earlier, the benefit of being on its third game means God Of War III can convince you it’s worth playing without ruining all the surprises. What can be safely discussed are some of the new areas that our exclusive screenshots reveal for the first time. As Kratos leads the attack on Mount Olympus we will see the home of the gods in all its magnificence and glory for the first time, and then smash it to pieces.

The Chamber of the Gods, for instance, is a very revealing area of the game according to Asmussen. “You do explore Mount Olympus in the game and one of the things that you get to do is come across where the gods actually live,” he revealed. “You can expect to learn a little bit as you go through there about the gods, their lifestyle and their surroundings.” Beyond the Chamber of the Gods lie the Olympus Gardens and these play a varied role in the lives of the gods and perhaps all of Greece. “The Gardens are kind of a sanctuary for the gods to find peace and it’s the one spot of Mount Olympus that’s a place of beauty where they can have their solitary moments,” was Asmussen’s summary. “That’s their little piece of Eden they have there. You might surmise that while life doesn’t begin there, it is a source for what keeps nature going. We all know that Gaia started the Earth, but now the gods have taken a grasp of all of that after defeating the titans in the Great War, that this is the setting where everything grows from.”

God Of War III has lost none of the series' sense of scale.

Putting Kratos in a place as important and integral to the life of the world as that seems like a risky move and it is perhaps because of the importance of the Gardens that we see a bronze man, being referred to as the Brute, guarding the area and attacking Kratos. This almost labyrinthine-looking area will pit Kratos against the large metal man and his more than intimidating hammer. Thankfully some light QTE work will see his hammer stolen and used against him. And the QTEs are an element of God Of War that is worth dwelling on. Again and again they deliver exciting and extraordinary moments and yet QTEs are so often a divisive gameplay element. It made us wonder what Sony Santa Monica’s secret is.

“I think it all comes down to how we stage them with the animation and the design, basically joined at the hip and making sure that all of the actions and button prompts immediately cause some type of event on the screen so they feel linked together and timed perfectly,” is Asmussen’s take. “It’s also important that the scripting of the moment that you’re watching is compelling and always stays within the character of Kratos.” Now with two games behind it the team in Santa Monica couldn’t be better versed in how to make these moments work at their best and may even have a few surprises up their sleeves in terms of delivery that we’ve yet to see.

“I think you can expect to see us evolve them a little bit more in God Of War III,” Asmussen proffered rather enigmatically. “You can see from the demo that we’ve moved where the buttons are placed, but we’ve also changed how we approach them a little. I don’t really want to elaborate on that any more as there are things that are kind of fluff like the amount of gore we’ve got in the demo, but we’re also doing some things that are a lot more, if not cutting edge, then out of the box for our game and you’ll see those in the final product. Things that you might not expect to see us do I guess.”

Having said all that Asmussen was very complimentary of God Of War’s so-called competition and the way they implement similar ideas to those of his title. “We always look at the Devil May Cry games or Bayonetta, which is a great game, and Ninja Gaiden,” he revealed. “Those games in terms of nuts-and-bolts combat stuff offer a lot of inspiration to us. I just played the demo for Dante’s Inferno and I thought the controls were really tight on it and I thought it was interesting. The Capcom, Devil May Cry games kind of do their own thing and they have their own language and it’s fantastic and as I said we’ve learnt a lot from it inspiring us right from the original game. There are other games that seem to be drawing inspiration directly from the language that we have built and Dante’s Inferno is doing a really good job at that I think.”

Hammer time.

However, God Of War III is expanding on what the franchise has seen before and attempting to push well beyond anything games like Dante’s Inferno or Bayonetta have attempted. Another location in the game revealed to us for the first time is a gigantic open room that’s filled with huge wooden crates suspended from the ceiling. “The cubes that you see hanging from the ceiling have a tentative name, but I’ll have to come up with a final one, which is the Great Caverns,” said Asmussen. “The idea of the Caverns is that it’s one of those larger, macro puzzles that you’ll find in God Of War where you’ll come across this area multiple times and you’ll have to assemble something.” As a puzzle it is on a scale we’ve never seen before, dwarfing even the armoured Cyclops that Kratos must face on the surface of these cubes. However, mastering this area is key to your progression through the game. “With those big cubes you’re putting together a set piece that will grant you entrance to another elaborate set of puzzles,” summarised Asmussen. “So it’s a large set piece that you can manipulate and it allows you to progress to another set of challenges.”

The Caverns look to be one of the largest locations ever created in a God Of War game, with each cube acting as a sizeable platform for battle. This all begs the question of just how much Sony Santa Monica is managing to squeeze out of the PS3 to make God Of War III that much bigger and bolder than before. We’ve often felt that God Of War finally had a console that could truly realise the epic scale of the world Kratos inhabits and areas like the Great Caverns would seem to prove this, but it’s not been easy by any means according to the game’s director. “The power of the system allows us to do a lot of things that we couldn’t do in the past. It’s kind of a blessing and a curse, because you can do it, but you also have to figure out how to organise a much larger team to be able to do things that are so complex and when the expectations are so much higher on this machine.”

Asmussen believes we’re beginning to see games move past their basic mechanics and onto something much more dramatic and emotionally fulfilling. “You can see just a few years into this generation just how much more believable these games are now, blending the line between what’s a nuts-and-bolts gaming experience and what is more of an almost theatrical type experience while making those really cohesive together,” he told us. “I think tapping into the power of the system is one thing, but all of the new features that it exposes and makes available need to be learned and be used properly and we have to make sure we’re not overwhelmed by them. If you’ve got a thousand knobs to fiddle with you could just sit there and fiddle forever and not get anything done. There’s another fine balance between organising the technology and making sure we’re productive using it and getting things done. I think you can see a lot of games that look like they have a lot of promise through screenshots or movies that you see and they don’t really live up to that promise.” But one game in his mind has managed to pull this all off. “To make something like an Uncharted 2 where the whole product is harnessing the technology and utilising it is quite a complicated task,” he concluded.

The PS3’s power alone isn’t a miracle worker though and there are some things that while valued by Asmussen, he simply doesn’t see working in God Of War. Despite persistent rumours of multiplayer or co-op gameplay coming to the series for the first time, he insisted that no such features would be coming to the game despite how cool they could have been to see. “To be honest with you we’ve talked about it a lot, we’ve looked at it, we had some good ideas and with co-op I think you could definitely do some cool things with this game,” he revealed. “Doing one of our mini-games with two players at the same time would be pretty cool. There’s a lot to be said for that and I think the big thing with God Of War III was that adding something like that to it would disrupt the experience we had for the first two games. I can see how it would be great for gameplay and it could be great for sales. There’s always this push for multiplayer games because it obviously increases your chances that people aren’t going to return the game after they beat it. We had to keep on following the rhythm that we had set before and I think something like co-op or multiplayer would be tampering with that.”

But there is that question of value. Is a single-player game enough these days? Do PS3 gamers expect and perhaps even deserve more for their money than that? Again Asmussen’s reasoning is sound and unwavering. “I can understand why people might have those expectations because there are so many games that have the single-player and multiplayer experience, but one thing I would say to that is very few games do them both well,” was his reasoning. “You say that you get better value because you get the multiplayer experience, but most of the time it’s at the cost of both of those. I would say there’s only a handful of games that do it right and most of the ones that do have a very small single-player experience, like five or six hours. So it kind of depends on what you want to deliver to the player. Of course the player wants everything, they want a game with $100 of gameplay and they want to extend that with multiplayer that is the best in the world, but there is a limit to what we can deliver and as a team we have to decide what we think we can do best.”

And by concentrating on the single-player experience and making it the very best it can be he hopes that God Of War III players will form an attachment to the game that long outlives its playing time. “I grew up playing games long before multiplayer games and I had no problem just picking up a game that was a single-player experience and if it was really good and I felt that I got my money’s worth I would keep it. It’s just like getting a movie that you feel you have a connection with. It’s something that represents strong personal feelings that you had while you were playing the game.”

Another way of extending the life of a game beyond its release is offering downloadable content and this is something that a number of games have utilised to great effect in keeping the interest of gamers and avoiding the dreaded fate of being traded in for the next big release. Asmussen confirmed to us that God Of War III would definitely be seeing some form of DLC to help extend its shelf life into 2010, although he’s not sure just how big it will all be. “There are definitely things that we’re planning and that we’re looking at doing with DLC. None of it is written in stone. It’s stuff that can be easily added to the package later on. I expect that there will be some DLC stuff, but will it be as big as a level? At this point in time that’s very difficult to say. There will be a little bit of DLC and we have the hooks to do a lot more and we have the ideas of things that we could do that would be really cool.”

Something else to look forward to in the future from God Of War III is 3D according to Asmussen, who seemed very excited by the technology, due to launch on the PS3 near the end of the year. “I know that it is something, having talked to one of our engineers, that we could do. We don’t have one of those 3DTVs so we wouldn’t be able to see what it looked like if we’re able to do it and I’m sure that it would require a little bit of ramp up to do it, but from my understanding it’s not incredibly complicated.” But how would it actually look? Would Kratos come bursting out of the screen? Asmussen thinks it could be more like looking in on a small world, living inside your TV. “I imagine it would be kind of like looking through a window and seeing a miniature world or something like that, a three-quarter perspective, little world or diorama. It will not be in God Of War III unless someone is sneaking something in that I don’t know about so that when the TVs come out we just flick a switch and it works, but if it’s really easy to do and there’s an interest there’s no reason why we couldn’t discuss in the future adding a patch or re-releasing the game to work with the 3D stuff. I’d love to see it happen. I think it would be cool as shit.”

Interestingly, though, Asmussen is not such a big fan of the idea of a God Of War movie. While his faith in Kratos is unshaking and he thinks he would translate to the big screen well, he doesn’t trust filmmakers to handle him properly. “The question is can Hollywood do justice to a good game story?” he pondered. “It hasn’t really been done yet. In most cases it seems like they just take the brand and the two-sentence pitch of that brand and then they do whatever the hell they want with it. I think a lot of the games that have been turned into movies had pretty strong characters and were strong franchises, but they were butchered. I wouldn’t want to see that happen to our game. I’d rather just not have a movie come out at all.” However, he admitted that it swings both ways between the film and gaming industries. “You know what? Games butcher movies all the time, too,” he conceded.

None of which answers what is perhaps the most important question as this epic trilogy draws to a close. What next for Kratos? Surely this isn’t going to be the end of one of the PlayStation’s most iconic characters. “If Kratos at the end of the game was shot off in a rocket to another planet and we were never going to see him again or he died in a nuclear explosion or something like that you can always find a way to bring somebody back,” Asmussen believes. “Soap operas have done a great job of that in the past. Or you could do the prequel type stuff. He is a lucrative character and Sony has obviously made an investment in him that’s really worked out and the fans really love him, so if you’re in a situation like that you can always bring a character back.”

But he did still have a word of caution for those who believe that God Of War could carry on indefinitely. “We’re telling a story in God Of War III that closes the trilogy and the question then is how often can you continually make these products before they start to lose a little bit of their lustre and it just becomes a situation of ‘it’s another year, I can expect another God Of War game’. I certainly don’t want that to happen to this franchise. The franchises that have been the strongest have been the ones that knew when it’s time to take a break.”

There are no breaks imminent for Sony Santa Monica or Stig Asmussen right now, though, as their focus is fixed firmly on finishing off God Of War III in time for its March release and making it the extraordinary experience we’re all coming to expect as standard from this series. “I’m thinking solely about God Of War III right now. We’re definitely dug in the trenches right now. We’re at a point now where the game is done and we’re just trying to make it great and that’s a lot of long hours. It’s always like ‘what are we doing next, what are we doing next?’ and it’s very immediate and it’s all God Of War III.”

credits to NowGamer.com