Sony Santa Monica’s senior producer Steve Caterson has revealed that the team deliberately slowed God of War III’s framerate down from 60 frames-per-second during development in order to provide a cinematic effect.

The framerate for God of War III runs between 30 and 60 frames-per-second with v-sync enabled to stop tearing and Producer Caterson was more than happy to explain the advantages of this:

It’s interesting; God of War 2 had some tearing going on with it, but with GoW3 there shouldn’t be any tearing at all and the variable frame rate helps us out with that. We’ve also got some good code in place–that you can’t tell is working–which helps to make sure frame rate drops are gracefully executed. By graceful I mean that you won’t see any tearing.

In some respects—and I know I’m going to get shredded on the boards for saying this—we intentionally slow things down. We want to show you what’s going on in some scenes. A good example is this one huge creature who grabs Kratos and, if we showed that at speed, you would just never even see him. So we say, ‘ok slow the camera down, zoom in—there he is! Doesn’t he look cool?!’ and then we ramp the speed back up and put you back into the action. It’s a pacing thing.

Also, there are some small pauses in the combat that some people though were slowdown because there were so many guys on screen but it’s intentionally there because it makes the hits feel more impactful.

In a way it is understandable what Sony are trying to do here, after all the game is visually stunning to look at, so to be able to take all this in at a slowed down pace is surely a good thing, however there will no doubt be those out there who consider dropping the framerate as a cop out on Sony’s part.

Via Playstation University

[UPDATE] - Sony Santa Monica’s director of technology, Tim Moss, has corrected the above quotation (and our interpretation) by explaining that although the team does slow down the action in God of War III, this is not the same as the framerate dropping:

“We slow timestep so 1 sec of game lasts >1 sec for dramatic effect. NOT the same as slowing the framerate,” Tim Moss tweets.

I'm 100% sure this game is going to blow my mind. If it goes above my expectations, I'm buying my friend a copy.

i kinda agree though. in some older games i played, i got satisfaction out of there being some lag when i hit/damage a large group of enemies

I thought that avoiding tearing was a good reason to lower the framerate... why are they giving this strange excuse then? >_>

pretty cool:

“The E3 content is over a year old,” Feldman writes on the God of War forums. ”The team has learned a lot since then, so the final game should reflect that effort. Off the top of my head features added since E3 include: anti-aliasing on the CPU – looks much better then the 2x at E3; motion-blur that works for the camera, object and inner object; lens flare/god ray tech; reflection and refraction; improved character lighting; and improved texture streaming – the E3 demo was problematic and had blurry textures due to streaming not texture authoring. That has been fixed.”

more thing's being offloaded to the Cell processor.

Because it's the truth...

yeah I'm not buying it - why couldn't they spread the animation of the huge monster grabbing Kratos over more frames? We don't want to see stuttering.

we do not know if there is going to be stuttering

what we do know there has been people who have played the game and have review it to be very good.

some people may not like it , and that is fine but I am going to wait to pass judgement on this game because the first 2 ware fantastic. In my opinion the DEMO was very good, so I pretty much do not have any doubt's about the quality of the game.

Sonic 2........good times.......good times.

sounds  like he had a blast.