God of War 3 Interview: We talk to the game's director Stig Asmussen to learn new details about one of 2010's biggest games. For the full story, be sure to check out the December 2009 issue of GamePro, which features an exclusive God of War 3 cover story loaded with new info!
God of War 3's director Stig Asmussen recently talked with us about some of the colossal challenges his team faced when bringing Sony's flagship action franchise to the PlayStation 3.
In this exclusive interview with GamePro, which is part of our December 2009 God of War 3 cover story, Asmussen also discusses future downloadable GoW 3 content, why multiplayer won't work in a God of War game, and how the team is still thinking about adding Sixaxis support. Read on for the full interview, plus some exclusive screens and artwork for God of War 3.
GamePro: There are extraordinarily high expectations for God of War 3. The series is coming to a new platform and it's been over two years since God of War II. Do you think you've reached the level of polish that God of War fans expect? Do you feel like you're finally there?
Stig Asmussen: In theory, yes, I definitely think we've reached that. In practice, no, I think we have a lot of work left to do to get there.
Both of those games, God of War and God of War 2, had an incredibly high level of polish. Everyone understood how much setup we had and what worked in the fiction of the games. We all have to get everything done to make sure everything falls into place with God of War 3.
And if it does, we'll be in really good shape to offer an experience that's as good as, if not better than the previous games. If not, well, everyone will be unhappy.
GP: What was the biggest challenge that came up during the development of God of War 3?
Stig: Well, the biggest challenge is the complexity of everything. Many things that we're trying to do in the game crosses multiple departments. What we used to be able to do was get three or four guys in a room, saying "This is what we're trying to achieve here," and pretty much rest assured that those guys would be able to go off and make that happen.
Now, the technology is so complicated, and the level of detail that's expected is so high and intricate, it crosses multiple departments. So, something that used to take three to four months takes twenty, twenty-five, forty, or even fifty, and requires a level of communication and management that is incredibly complicated.
It could be incredibly small, something you see in the game, like the "Helios Head Rip" for example. That probably involved 15 people to get that one thing done. It took multiple iterations. A lot of that was the process of just learning how to do that, and getting the technology right. And a lot of that process was making sure that the proper communication happened between all those teams of people.
GP: Do you feel pressure to show some restraint when determining the amount of gore to put in God of War 3? How do you know how far to push the overall level of violence?
Stig: Well, I think that with the lightning quick kills, that's something that's part of Kratos's character. We have an opportunity on the PlayStation 3 to make those things really come across.
But we've got to be careful because we're treading a fine line, and we want to keep falling into that canonical realm. We always have to make sure that we keep it real personal and in the fiction of the game. When we have these discussions in these meetings about how we execute some of these gory moments, it tends to always get to the point when we're laughing about stuff, and I think once we're laughing, we've probably pushed it too far. [Laughs]
GP: The demand for providing some sort of multiplayer in games has grown tremendously over the years. Even franchises like Resident Evil, known predominantly for their single-player content, have integrated multiplayer support to satisfy this demand. Have you guys played at all with the possibility of including a multiplayer mode in God of War 3, maybe with co-op? Or is that something that just doesn't fit?
Stig: Well, why don't I ask you a question? How did it work in Resident Evil 5? Do you think it was better, or do you think they should have stuck to a single-player game?
GP: Well, I thought it took away from the terror, because it's a survival-horror game, and you're supposed to have this overwhelming feeling that your life is on the line. When you have another player who's able to assist you every time you run out of health; that takes away from how scary the game is.
Stig: Hmm, that kind of sets me up for my response, then. I'm a huge Resident Evil fan, but I got two hours into Resident Evil 5, and I wasn't playing multiplayer, either. I stopped playing, which I've never done before. Previously, I've beaten them all. With God of War 3, there's a story we want to tell and an experience we want to deliver, and multiplayer doesn't fit into that.
Does that mean we don't have conversations about multiplayer? No. Of course we have conversations about multiplayer, and there's a lot of things we think about.
Imagine two Kratos characters running around at the same time. Once you do that, the story becomes something more about an experience between two players and less about something that we're scripting.
So, you have something like Left 4 Dead, which is sweet, but we just decided with this game, there's a certain way that we want to tell it. And staying with what we've done in the past, we want to complete the story in a way that was familiar to everybody.
GP: The challenge rooms have appeared in all the other God of War games and (assuming they'll be in God of War 3) have they evolved in any way? Are you doing something different with them for GoW 3?
Stig: OK, we'll talk about online, which is one of the things we discussed earlier. It would make a lot of sense to be able to download them. That's something we might see in the future. So, maybe you'll see the game ship with a certain amount of challenges on it, then later on, we might put a download pack out with new challenges. It's a good way to keep the series going.
We have different enemy types to work with, and the enemies do a lot of different things. Challenges are usually based off mechanics that are built in the game, so all the new mechanics will allow us to do different challenges.
For example, now that you have creatures you can ride, maybe we'll put in a challenge where in a certain amount of time you have to get on a Cyclops and kill a certain number of enemies in a certain amount of time. Or, maybe you have to use the Cyclops to get through a certain type of hazard or area or something like that.
So, the new game mechanics are what allow us to create new challenges. Those are something that we usually do really late in development, and we haven't even started on the challenges yet.
There are some ideas in people's heads and other ideas on paper. It'll be interesting to see what we come up with in the next two months.
GP: How long is it going to take to complete God of War 3? Is it a longer experience than previous GoW games?
Stig: That's tough to answer because we're still tuning it. I think it's safe to say the game should fall in between 10 or 20 hours, depending on how good of a gamer you are. If you're pretty hardcore, you can do it in 10, and if you're very, very casual, you can do it 20.
GP: As far as the large-scale puzzles in God of War 3, do you foresee that these will add a bit more play time to the game?
Stig: Hmm, not that much. If you try to find all the secrets and stuff, you might add another 20 percent on top of it.
Most of that stuff is going to come from the first run. I think people are going to be pretty driven by what their task is at hand. God of War 3 is a very linear game. It's always been a very linear game; so don't expect branching paths or RPG elements or side-quests or anything like that.
GP: Was there anything you had in development really early that you had to change or get rid of all together when making God of War 3?
Stig: Uh, everything? [Laughs.] Definitely the Titans stuff, it took tons of iterations, and until we launch the game, we won't have it down to a science. But we have a system down where it's definitely going to be worth it.
A lot of things depend on how we "play test". We get people in the room to play the game and if they don't get it, but it makes complete sense to us, we have to adjust it and play test it again.
But, I can't think of anything in particular that we're still spinning our wheels on. To a certain extent, everything you try is a new process, especially when you try it with new hardware. These are things you take for granted and have to be done a bunch of different ways.
GP: With God of War 3, it looks like you guys have really bridged the gap between cinematics and the in-game graphics. In the past these have looked drastically different from one another. Now it's almost not even noticeable. Are there any pre-rendered scenes in the game anymore?
Stig: That's something that we've always strived to get better and better at. I think God of War 2 did it much better than God of War, and the original did that really well for a game of its time.
One of the issues that you're constantly dealing with is that you have things running in the game's engine, assets running as an MPEG, and then you've got the high-resolution footage. Bridging the gap between them, it always creates a whole new series of problems. In God of War 2, we could never get the quality of compression for the high-res assets or the in-game assets to match those same in-game assets.
Plus, they don't run at 60 frames per second, they run at 30. So, even if you got the compression completely dialed in, your eyes will still notice the subtle change.
And then you have the high-res stuff, beautiful high-res cinematics, that we have in the first game. We looked at those and said "we think we can do this, or do better than this, in-game." And if you look at the trailer we put out, with the Titans scaling Olympus, that's all in-game footage, and it looks better than the high-res cinematics we did in God of War 2. So, we achieved that.
The other part of the problem is sometimes you have to make sets so big, there's no way you could render it in-game. You'd still have the MPEG issue where you'd have to use extra memory to render out these massive, massive scenes.
In those cases, we'd create our own custom compression editor that works with the PlayStation 3, and it works really well with the scenes we're showing in God of War 3, where you can't tell when you've gone from cutscene to gameplay. As long as the buffers are all set up properly, they all work great.
GP: Is it more of a blessing or a curse to be working on the PlayStation 3? It's an awesome platform, but there's got to be some huge challenges too, right?
Stig: Well, the tough thing about going to the next generation is that you never really know what the hardware will do until it ships.
You're pretty much ironing out problems until that day, and we're still doing that. But the good thing is that we already had all of our gameplay code from the first two games.
We just enhanced it and built stuff on top of it. We hit the ground running in terms of setting up level design and everything like that. But we had to theorize what the technology was going to do later on down the road. For the most part, it's worked the way we wanted it to.
GP: One of the things you guys eliminated at some point in the development process was the Sixaxis support. Are you completely done with it?
Stig: No.
GP: Oh, really?
Stig: We're not currently using it, but that doesn't mean we won't get something in there by the time it ships. I can see a lot of different uses for it.
We're trying to get everything done with God of War 3 first. But that's something that I would like to use if it feels really good. There's no reason why we can't include pulling off quick yanking motions. Not anything like getting on a balance beam or something like that. [Laughs.]
Also, I don't want to do precision control. It doesn't really suit the game or the kind of things you would expect Kratos to do. For example, when you're ripping off Helios's head, maybe you can shake his head violently with the Sixaxis... if you choose to do that.
![[Ooooo]](/images/smilies/nuevos/sorprendido_ani1.gif "Oooooo")
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. Que mejor forma de esperar a GOWIII que disfrutar con 2 de los mejores juegos de la historia. La duda que me queda es si vendra en español, sino me lo compraba ahora mismo.![[boing]](/images/smilies/nuevos/pelota_ani1.gif "pelota")
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![[+furioso]](/images/smilies/nuevos/furioso.gif "muy furioso")
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