In the original God of War there are "bonus videos" showing Kratos's brother seeking revenge, and the image of a modern day soldier walking into Pandora's temple in ruins. Are you following up on those?
Yeah, you are talking about the outtakes; the director's ideas about those animatics. There are definitely really good ideas in those things. It is a lot of good inspiration. I would leave at it that. There is good inspiration there and that kind of stuff could possibly work its way into the game, like inspiration from those things, but not anything directly.
I think those were sketches. I have never been able to talk to Dave Jaffe about what his intentions were, but I think they were kind of sketches of really, really good ideas. I don't know if that is where he was planning on taking God of War, but there is definitely an influence coming from those regardless. I was actually just looking at those a few weeks ago ... and those are pretty cool.
The Colossus battle in God of War II was enormous and huge, and a fun level to play. How can you top that?
"The risk is that, when you are making things really big, you can get lost." |
The risk is that, when you are working with scale and making things really big, you can get lost. That is something that we definitely recognize. We just always have to make sure that we area guiding the player properly. That is where experience comes in. We have done this a few times, or a couple of times, and we know we can fall back on mood and feeling. We know how to fall back on that stuff.
Now we might be deciding something that is different. The method we have designed might be different from the way we did it before, but the intent still remains the same.
How are you planning on bringing other players up to speed on the series? For a lot of new PS3 owners, this will be their first exposure to the God of War franchise. Could you repackage the first two games somehow?
Right. That is a good question too. It is huge. I would love to port those older games over, but that would cost millions and millions of dollars. So how do you get people up to date? We are trying to come up with clever ways ... we have a plan. I think the plan is very, very solid. I think when you play the game, right off the bat, you will get what the plan is. We are actually going to focus test the plan to make sure that it works. If it doesn't work, we will noodle with it again and focus test it until it does work.
When you really think about it, I estimate that you could probably tell the story of God of War and God of War II, the things that are relevant, probably in less than four or five minutes. It doesn't have to be ... Like they say: a picture is worth a thousand words. So if it is video, that four minutes can become even less. So there are definitely ways that we can do it.
God of War had a very dark tone to it. It reminded me kind of like a cult movie. Then God of War II became like this over the top, huge Hollywood blockbuster type thing in its presentation. I think God of War III is going to find a nice place in between those two.
"We're damned if we do, damned if we don't." |
But I also think that the way we approached God of War was great, but I think that if you could kind of combine those, you could get something that is really amazing. So when you have those big moments, you should really bring things down so they feel a bit bigger.
Speaking of big moments, are you bringing back the sex minigames?
Well, we're currently trying to figure that out. We're basically damned if we do, damned if we don't. If we don't put one in, the fans of the series will complain about it, but if we do put one in, people will complain about that as well. We don't want to feel like it's something we just stuck in there, so right now we're exploring the best way to handle it.
