Reinventing God of War

[Music] I'm sure many of you have already seen some of my amazing colleagues talks everybody's been sort of crushing it this year at GDC and it's super exciting but it was a little bit more pressure on me so it says out there that the talk is reinventing god of war but I realized as I was writing it that I was covering a lot of stuff that that really smart people and really good people were already going to cover in their talks in a much better way than I was so I was trying to figure out what would be a really good talked it would be much more specific of the things that I do on a daily basis so I'm doing something about pitching and doubting which is pretty much what I do the entirety of a project I talk to people and beg and sell and then you know try to either quelled out from other people while the whole time experiencing a tremendous amount of doubt myself it is fantastic it is exciting it's not a very glamorous job everybody thinks is glamorous but really it's just constantly stressful so in April of 2013 I started talking to Shanna stud still and I initially had a pitch for the game and it was a little bit like this I don't even know if this is the exact thing I said but this is essentially what it was right I want to do something really huge and bold and the arm gestures are extremely important when you are talking about [ __ ] you have no idea about so when I say leave you better stuff I'm moving my arms around it's gonna be huge and low and you raise your voice every once in a while and you know we're gonna turn everything upside down and just freak people out there was nothing of substance to that initial pitch but she was still interested and actually continued to work together because she figured eventually you're gonna figure it out and you're gonna get it so I came back to the studio in June of 2013 right it was like the first 15 days of June that I came back and started working with a bunch of people and tried to formulate what it is I wanted to do with this game that wasn't just huge and bold and lots of arm gestures and after four weeks I put together a pitch and I was going to be pitching scott roadie so the way the organization works is Shannon Stotz Dale who I had mentioned earlier she's heading up Santa Monica she's sort of the first gate that I went through right and then Scott roadie is sort of overseeing all the other the the studios within North America so he's kind of the next gig the person I have to pitch on that list and then you have Shuhei Yoshida who is kind of like the scary gate that I have to pitch and then after that it gets up to Shawn and by that time I pretty much probably have it figured out so it's a little bit less scary but something I realized when I was putting this presentation together is everybody above me as a [ __ ] s in their name they all work for Sony their names begin with s and I realize like you know progress upwards in this company is all related to the whether or not you have an S in your name so today I'm going to change my name and I added a few SS at the end that way there's nobody that's going to overtake me and I will be the vice president of vice president so if you have any questions about vice president I am the person you're going to come to I'll probably outsource it to somebody else so that I can probably finish read dead most of the time that's not a real email so don't try to contact it it won't get you anywhere so moving on to a really smooth segue like I just did so what I'm going to do is something that nobody outside of the company has seen it is the very first pitch that I did for Scott rody that kind of kicked this entire thing off and I ended up doing variations of this pitch throughout the duration of the game so I'm gonna break a little bit in the middle and then switch to one that was from a little bit later and then I'm gonna talk a little bit more specifically about doubt about the doubt that I was feeling throughout all of this and kind of encapsulated in a very long-winded story that I'm going to tell so this is gonna have director's commentary I'm not really going to do the pitch officially mostly because it was like five years ago and I'm old and I really can't remember every single thing but I can kind of poke fun at all the stupidity that I had at that moment and you can all see how something like this game started out really bad really bad so starting off right away we're using the old logo because it was four weeks and I even put that at the bottom of the presentation that was to repair Scott that I had only had four weeks to work on this so please lower your expectations so it's August 14th 2013 and this next image was not actually in the original presentation I would just do a verbal description of this but I added it in so there's a couple images I had to switch out to make this thing work but I would talk about was the idea that all the mythologies of the world are kind of like this Hubble telescope image they are like galaxies individually spread out throughout a complete universe and the world is the universe and all the mythologies are sort of origin stories of various cultures throughout the world beginning at the beginning of time and stretching all the way out so at any given time all the mythologies exist together concurrently and they are simply separated by geography so it was important because some people had the conception that hey create us at the end of nine Worth's we destroyed the world well he destroyed that what they believed the world was in Greece which was their world everybody believed their world was the only world in fact we still believe that today so initially we were talking about this concept I didn't have a really good word for it so I was calling it a reboot but I knew that I didn't want to continue to call it a reboot because keep calling it a reboot a lot of people would have these misconceptions and all this baggage that comes along with what a reboot is so I wanted to explain what the reboot was by using one of my favorite things in the entire world Star Trek right so the Star Trek fans and it's fantastic so I would talk about this concept of Star Trek nemesis right I had that classic sort of familiar high end TV focus appeal it didn't really broaden the audience it was sort of appealing to people who were already Star Trek fans and then the new reboot the JJ Abrams one in 2009 kind of brought in that sort of new feel the cutting edge and honestly the thing that was most important thing I put in Orange was this idea that there's was an origin story so they were telling the story of Spock and Kirk and kind of going back to the days of the Academy and you can see I at the beginning was calling it God of War for because I didn't have any idea what we were gonna call it I thought I was gonna put a subtitle at the end of it so I was like whatever was called gone before because I didn't want to confuse anybody if I called it just God of War and then I ended up just calling it God of War it's fantastic so what does this mean right it means that directors are the worst artists on the planet and I just grab an image off of Internet the internet and I actually have a it means a reset right it means we're going to reset everything but in a different way right we're not gonna go back and say what we're gonna do is tell Kratos his new origin story now we're gonna actually continue the timeline and reinvent the field and the important part of this was to say that we did so much work developing the character of kratos why would we throw all that out and start on a new character because you just have to build all that backstory again so we're sort of treating the first seven games like the chapter 1 of this character's life but he still needed as a character to grow we wanted to grow the character we wanted to grow the world everything need to expand out and give you a sense that something was going to be different and you know wanted to in the initial pitch because I didn't have a lot I wanted to talk a little bit about the studio as well so talking about how the studio was gonna play to our strengths because we were really good at making action-adventure games we wanted to make sure that we stayed on that track of making action-adventure games but we wanted to broaden our skills right open things up and feel like we were progressing forward because for a long time we kind of got stuck in this rut of doing hey we did the last game let's pile some more stuff on top of that so we wouldn't really go in and just kind of rip things up and then when you are asking executives for money usually you do things like the next two points I'm a little embarrassed about them but I'm going to show them anyway you say things like own the action-adventure genre yeah and I at the time was just like I was like cringe-worthy when I was saying it's like you know it's that aspirational goal man we're gonna we're gonna do something great and I think for me and I think for the rest of the team the concept was that we were going to own the work that we had done that we were going to really truly stand behind everything we had done and really try to excel at all of that and then this one this truly is the one that you say when you want people to give you money great game of the year this is four weeks in are you say we're gonna do that and even I thought that was total [ __ ] but I was like all right you know this is we're gonna do this and it was that that level of enthusiasm even though inside I'm going like yeah right you know this is not gonna happen but it will get people really excited so moving on to the the narrative continuing the timeline growing the character continue to sort of hammer that same point home that we're not restarting anything it is the same creatives that you know except we're gonna figure out how we're gonna change it and while I was sort of on my travels after having left right for three fully started something I had learned from a bunch of different directors was this adage of simple story complex characters and full disclosure I did not listen to this first rule so the first year there are several points in here that I ignored that I was telling other people we need to do this and then I totally screwed up so I ended up having to reboot the reboot of the script so we wrote a script for a year and it was the wrong script right I was sort of realizing that okay I wasn't paying attention I wasn't making this about the main characters and the story sort of meandered a little bit and kratos seeking a fresh start so this picture right here is sort of what people thought of kratos before we sort of released the the demo in 2016 right it was like angry Kratos the guy who killed somebody at the beginning of a cinematic and just kind of stood there until the cinematic ended he was just an angry violent scary guy and you know not only did he need a fresh start but I think the player needed a fresh start as well they needed a new perspective on this character and in a way you know I'm getting older the studio has been around for a lot longer so I was looking around at all the people that I've been developing games with for like ten years and and we were all old and the interesting thing was this concept of breaking the cycle right and it was so multi-layered because it was breaking the cycle for us as a studio kind of getting caught in that rut of saying well you know we did the last game let's just keep putting things on top of it instead of really digging in and saying we're just gonna rip this thing up and figure something new out it was me as a developer sort of having some sort of confidence and in what I was doing and trying different things having a little bit more confidence to try those things even though I would experience doubt all the way through all of this but it's also Kratos kind of breaking this cycle this cycle that he had since the beginning of the gods sort of screwing with his life him being an absolutely crap father him sort of blaming the rest of the world right that was one of the big aspects of Kratos his character was it's everybody else's fault this isn't my fault it's other people's fault that's why I'm such a jerk and the key to breaking that cycle was gonna be this father-son story here's another point in which I completely lost the plot for the first year of the game and ended up writing a story that assumed you already knew the relationship of the father-son and we sort of had to go and reboot that now this was an important aspect this was really trying to cement the concept that this isn't a new Kratos this is the same Kratos who's just a lot older so that means he still has this monster inside of him I was using the example of the Hulk a lot so I would basically say that in the previous games the Hulk was out all the time it was all 100% the whole kill kill kill kill smash right no Bruce Banner whatsoever and in this one I really wanted to experiment with the idea that he was primarily Bruce Banner and he was struggling to actually keep the Hulk inside so this monster that he was keeping inside this monster the the Kratos that everybody knew was gonna be something that he struggled and failed because failure is such a huge part of what we do that everything in my life just sort of ended up in this damn game and he would struggle throughout all of this and something I was really excited about was this concept of teaching in the narrative experiencing the narrative in the play so that you were kind of training your son you are teaching him about his your life right you were teaching him how to be a god and he was kind of in turn teaching Kratos how to be a human being something he had forgotten so long ago and to some degree we succeeded you know there was a lot of things that I really wanted to do I remember I was constantly talking about the teaching and making that the focal point of many other pitches and everybody always said but yeah how are you gonna do it I don't know we'll figure it out later which is what we all do we just figure it out later and another just stellar graphic I mean if anybody wants me to do any sort of side hustle artwork for them I'm free that's so good so the game pillars were not sort of their traditional game pillars that we were talking about this was kind of the aspirational goals of what we were going to do with the game and starting off something that in the beginning of god of war all the way back in 2003 when I was there we had always talked about this concept of the pick-up-and-play game the fun an accessible game and it seems obvious that you say we're gonna make a game that's fun and accessible because you know who wants to make a game that's completely obtuse but I I realized that we needed to say that there's a lot of things that we needed to sort of reinforce and tell each other constantly to sort of change the way we were thinking and the next thing was really important in that I remember all the way back at the beginning we used two words to describe this game in literally every single instance brutal and epic and I was like we can never say those damn words ever again because what we would do is using those words which helped us sort of fall back on our old habits our old ways so I made an attempt to try to figure out how do you replace brutal well unflinching of course the the idea of the sort of unflinching close and personal combat with all my early programming to seed the concept of the no cut camera so four weeks in I was not bold enough to tell people that I wanted to have a single camera shot throughout the entire game because I knew it was crazy but I was starting to at least see this idea so throughout the presentation I was actually putting things in so eventually I could say see we already talked about this so you agree that's fine right and then this one is again another one of those hey give me some money I'm gonna say something that literally every freaking game does we're gonna make an interactive and immersive world yeah everybody does that but again wave the arms say it loud and then people are like all right here you go the next one this was another very very obvious like seamless narrative seamless play and character development this was where I started telling people about this idea of constantly going you know in one sort of experience I always feel like you can't even tell the difference between any of it so in the early god of war games the big thing that we had done was the no loading screens which was a giant hassle on the first game a lot of arguments over that one because so many things that you have to do so many unseen problems and so many people have to contribute to try to make that work and the nOCA camera was the same thing it was just me assigning a lot of work to the entire team it was insane and and here's a an awesome failed point I couldn't not use the word epic I couldn't find another word that actually worked really good in fact throughout the entire game I ended up just giving up and saying alright fine I biggest the one I'm just going to accept because like operatic was not working and most of the other things are not working and what I really wanted to highlight was this idea that in the previous part of wargames we have exploration so we had like you know chests on the main path that you're at we had a hallway with a chest or a hallway that would go to a room with a chest but I wanted to really broaden the exploration I wasn't really admitting how big I wanted the game to be at this point because I thought it would freak people out so I was just like yeah it's gonna be a little bit bigger don't worry it's all good well it's like 10 hours 10 hours man I'm not crazy alright and something that Eric Williams and I had talked about in this early early time was this this on this concept of simple and honest right and this idea of being honest with ourselves being honest with the team and and really getting back to this this concept of the simple mechanic being fun finding many ways that something individual can have different purposes and getting back to the basics right getting back to the basics not only for the studio of focusing on the things that were really good on but really getting back to the basics of what this franchise was tearing everything out and kind of finding the things that were sort of the load-bearing walls of everything the next thing was the the play pyramid and this this image I am shocked that legal let me keep this in but I'm super excited about it because the road was a really big influence for me I had written a short story early on that was kind of a tone piece that help people understand it was kind of the foundation of what the beginning of the game was and you know it was written in the way that was just saying the father and the son so even in the entire short story I never mentioned the name Kratos and I didn't mention a trace because I hadn't figured out the name until like 2000 end of 2016 or something like that because I'm super lazy when it comes to coming up with names I'm terrible at that but the play pyramid is this concept there saying what is making up your moment-to-moment gameplay right and in a way it's basically saying and anytime you're playing the game if you're not doing one of these sort of three core things and you just need to evaluate whether or not you should put a ton of effort into what it is you're currently doing it's a way to evaluate want to add somebody to the game is it is it contributing to these sort of core concepts but I wanted to add another element inside of it which was this sort of central piece so that the game was about either narrative combat or exploration and every one of those things fed into character development so didn't matter what we were doing everything had to help further the arts of the characters everything had to help get you into the minds of the characters so that you would never feel like oh this is the time where you're telling me the story this is the time where I hit things and this image looks really bad and in all all defense to the artists who helped me I asked him 10 minutes before I had to meet with Scott rody if he could do something so this is better in 10 minutes than I did in probably four weeks but I'm gonna skip ahead now to the 2014 God of War pitch for Shuhei Yoshida okay so this one was a little bit more refined I had already made the mistake of writing the wrong story and telling the writers that we had to throw that story out and that did not go well and then we started over I kind of needed to buckle down and figure out the skeleton structure of what the entire game was so that I could then spend the next three years doing these three hour-long pitches of walking people through the story and then having them look at me at the end and go like how many teams are gonna work on this game this thing is huge so now you have a little bit fancier PowerPoint right and also you can see that instead of narrative is his father son and this was a reminder to myself the person who originally came up with these rules to follow the damn rules that I had actually set out to do and the father son was to say the whole game story was supposed to be about the relationship between these two characters not necessarily about all these plot II elements that we were really excited to explore so all that sort of fed into the concept of character growth and the father-son story really is this kind of relatable human story so much of the moments in this game are just ripped from the lives of people on the team the writers myself and this rule the second one is really something that that I picked up while I was working with George Miller and he knew and had sort of been reinforced by so many other people but I didn't really get it the first time he told me he's like you always got a dramatize your exposition I was like okay cool it just seems like that's what everybody does and that is absolutely not what everybody does it's insane so he gave me this example and it is a play that he went to go see and and there are these two women on stage sitting on a couch and in between them is a foam and they start talking and the phone begins to ring and it rings a couple of times before one of the women goes oh well are you gonna answer that and she says no no it's probably my son I don't want to talk to him and they continue talking for a little bit and the phone keeps ringing and the other woman finally says you know what maybe you good answer that what if he's sick what if he's hurt oh no no no you know we're not really good right now she starts talking about the fact that they got into an argument and the phone keeps ringing and this is pre answering machines which is why that phone is gonna keep talking ringing until somebody answers it and as it's going the audience you find yourself kind of creeping up on the edge of your seat a little bit and it's agitating you're getting agitated like the other character because you wants her to answer the damn phone and they go and go and what you you find out is that you are getting all of the exposition about this character's relationship to her son that normally if we were lazy like a lot of the times I am very lazy you would get from Irving the explainer who just comes onto the scene and tells you here's all the backstory this is the the sort of situation that I had but in that moment what you got was a feeling of empathy and a feeling of connection to a character because you were under stress you were taking part in the drama and finding out about all this sort of boring backstory information and that stuck with me hugely because in what we do we can kind of translate that to play versus watch and there was so much in the game that we wanted to create in a play experience right but it's really really expensive you have all these sort of fail States and everything that you need to do so we did a lot but there was still a lot more I felt like we could have done we just kind of continued to run out of time and said all right we have to pull these things out but then compensated and then every once in a while some other things got interactive so now the combat aspect really the most important part of this one because I continue to love referencing Marvel is this idea of Marvel Comics versus Marvel film so Dave Jaffe when he was pitching the original game back in 2000 well I came in 2003 but he was doing it in 2002 before that would always talk about God of War as heavy metal magazine Meets Clash of the Titans right it's sort of this bombastic comic book very mature adult fantastic sort of experience and you know what we were trying to do is bring it into the modern era right and the games that we are playing the games that are exciting as today we wanted to bring this in there and we were looking at the way that you know Marvel would translate comic books into film right my mom would not read a Thor comic but should be damn sure she's gonna go see Chris Hemsworth as Thor right so I was like as long as I cast Chris I'm good right my mom will play the game but that transition really showed that you can take something fantastic and bring it and expand the audience and get them to connect to the work that you're doing and the context in the the drama was also another important thing of saying a lot of us make games that have comment in them you know it's fun it's it's very sort of frenetic and exciting to have comment in your game but a lot of the times you don't have any context of this combat within the drama of your game right to actually feel like oh the combat means something in the overall goal and coming up with that simple goal at this time I had known that we were going to take the ashes to the top of the mountain everything started to feed into this goal that was simple everybody understood it very quickly in the game and you were able to feel like each one of these sites meant something even more and to certain degree we succeeded certain degrees you know we can continue to do better and all of that the exploration was a whole new thing for this game because I wanted it to be so much bigger than anything that we had done and at the time when I was pitching this talking about the mechanics that would encourage discovery and exploration we didn't have those mechanics we were still figuring a lot of us I found in fact the engine wasn't completely ready a lot of things were like LEGO pieces all over the floor and I'm trying to hey we need to come up with new verbs of how to make puzzles and it's like okay but how we can't even build anything in the engine right now so that was very stressful this time especially when we were doing exploration was one of the more stressful things like honestly the whole damn project was stressful but but there was a tremendous amount for me of this doubt in wondering you know are we gonna be able to finish any of this stuff because there's just so much to get done and the character grows everything feeding into that one I had really started to cement what this meant continue to say teach right even though I had no idea how teaching was going to take place in the game had that fallback I'm like okay well upgrading is kind of like teaching your kid gets better throughout the game but thankfully working with a team they end up kind of contributing so many different ideas that make that initial kernel of something a lot better but it was important to actually see these characters change not just in their dramatic arc but in their sort of visual as well as their play so that actually feels like what you're doing is growing with these characters experiencing their lives so the pitching of all this stuff I would be pitching all the way through the end of the project it would just continue ad nauseam that's really all you do it's like selling cars to the team every day over and over and nobody buys a damn car that's what's [ __ ] up about it but the doubt also continues throughout all of this experience and I know that everybody in here who makes games we all experience failure every day we all experience doubt every four minutes science man I totally looked that up it's every four minutes so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to tell a story now because I [ __ ] hate PowerPoint presentations and I'm gonna talk about the e3 2016 demo so this story encapsulate s' so many versions of doubt so many areas of failure that we experienced on this project and and is kind of for me one of the most interesting clips of game development so initially we knew that we were going to do a reveal we had honed in on e3 2016 as being the time we were gonna do that reveal but I had no clue what it was gonna be was it just gonna be a logo were we just going to show a quick clip of the game we're gonna try to show a cut video together right I was going to try to sell people on a no cut camera and cut a bunch of shots together that wasn't going to work or what we're gonna actually try to do a demo which was insane right like the first time you're gonna review your game and you really don't have all the pieces together and what are you gonna do you gonna actually play a demo live on stage I totally chose that one because because the the the thing was far away it was like 9 or 10 months away so I was like yeah let's do the hardest thing and I I feel like I do that all the time which is I agreed to do something really hard and then right when it comes time to do it it all all my chickens go home to roost I'm like what the hell man why did I agree to this so I started writing up different demo ideas just really jotting stuff down quickly and at the time we had not figured out the beginning of the game I'd written the short story back then but we had not settled on hey that's gonna be the beginning of the game we were focusing a lot on the middle section of the game so some stuff in the mountain if you've all played the game you'll understand this part inside the mountain and so I said oh you know what I'm gonna do that I'm gonna write a demo up it'll be inside the mountain it'll end at the elevator kind of going up and I'll be a big scary monster reveal at the end that screams and then you go to black all [ __ ] dramatically is so cheesy but I thought it was really great there was a part of me that was saying this isn't so good so I was sending it to people on the team and I think they were just being nice and they're like yeah sure that's cool right either oh sure that's cool is not the response you want when you send somebody at anyone right everyone 3,000,000 yeah so I got some notes from people and sort of settled on it we were like all right this is this is good but I there's always something inside of me that was saying I don't think this is very good but to be honest there is always something inside of me that is saying this is no good and you suck so I was like all right whatever I'm gonna ignore that and we were gonna have the the events people the PR people and the marketing people all coming down to the studio and I was going to do the pitch for them and it's kind of the same thing as this where you just get up and you wave your arms around a lot because you're asking for money and you draw on the board and and and it looks really great in photos right so I I get in I start doing the pitch and I realize like five minutes in that everybody's starting to fidget in their seats some people are checking their phone I'm really losing them and I start to speak louder because that totally makes the audience come back and that did not work and about halfway through the pitch I realized this is absolute crap and you were right to think it was crap because it's crap but I'm still giving the pitch so in my mind I'm starting to think like of ways to eject like okay what can I do here I need to come up with a better solution this is not working and I start having a few ideas of potentially beginning of the game a few visual ideas that are coming up while I'm just running on autopilot on the pitch because I figure why try it sucks you know they're they're not having fun and I get all the way to get the patient and you know race yeah cool all right yeah nobody outright says it sucks that's usually only on the development side we're very honest with each other but people in the PR and marketing groups they're all very nice they're very good people and they will just say it sucks when they leave the room or when you leave the room so I was like all right thank you everybody you know we I left the room and I think somebody had talked with Shannon immediately afterwards and said that was bad you know like it's a you know it's not terrible it's just not that exciting we've sort of seen it before and they're right everybody does that the exact same demo forty three so I was like all right I was not feeling good I went to Shannon and I said I want to take another crack at this because I don't think we've nailed it I don't think we have the the idea down and she was like ha thank God I was like feelings come on no she was really cool about it she's like ah rebar log because she never calls me by first name she said barabara go ahead figure something out so I wrote up a quick sort of skeleton of what it would be what ended up being the demo that we were doing and we got on a conference call with the the events and PR people because they were like dude the first one sucks I'm not coming down for that like just do it over the phone which really sucks pitching people in person you get the big arms thing that's that carries like 50% of the work most of the time and then you could draw on the board which is like another 25% so I really don't have to do a lot of work verbally and then when you're on the little speaker phone thing it's pretty much as all you what you're saying and and surprisingly the really rough pitch worked and they were like okay this is really good you know thank you for taking our notes to heart and I was like I'm not gonna tell you that it wasn't your notes but yes thank you for giving me notes and I took them all to heart and I redid everything based on what you were saying to me so they were like alright well we're gonna come down in another two weeks and we'll talk a little bit further about what we're gonna do so they come down I give them a full pitch with the bigger arms thing you know and that goes over really well because everybody loves in-person pitches and at the end I couldn't resist I threw in a little joke and I said you know and then we can get bear and and he could play live Orchestra the whole thing haha and then one of the guys who is in charge of throwing these events he's like the the guy who does all the stage stuff and everything his eyes just get really big like super excited and I was like wait what what happened and he looks over at somebody and you could tell there was a conversation that had happened about this before I threw that joke down and I was like oh interesting alright and then they they basically did not talk about it any further than that and then said what we're gonna do we're gonna do the stage show bla bla bla bla bla and they said we'll be down in another couple of weeks we'll show you a little bit more so then another couple of weeks go by I almost forget about this because we're starting to really figure out how to structure this entire demo how to build it and when they come down the the guy whose eyes got really big had this little diorama he had created this like little mock-up of a theater stage right and it had these little slots where he could put transparencies in to show you like what the things like the curtains or the the stage things that they would put in and he was so excited he was like it's like when I get excited about something he's just pitching this he says we're really excited about doing the live performance to the live orchestra and I was like wait what it was like this is really good and you know we were talking about this so we're really gonna make it happen we already talked to bear and I'm like you know inside knowing [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] but outside I'm going like cool let's do this right so they give the whole breakdown of all this stuff and and again it's still pretty far away so I'm all right I'm like all right fine we'll figure this out but at the time we're going through really stressful times because one engines still getting built - the lighting was maybe 35 to 40 percent of what it was gonna end up being in the final game and that was actually what we're gonna end up using three three so we were there was just no way we're gonna get that done art direction we hadn't really been able to figure out exactly what our art direction was going to be we were arguing back and forth a lot we had some ideas I had some specific things the art director at the time had some specific things and we were just really trying to hash that out at the same time try to figure out the comment trying to figure out the enemies we were literally every aspect of the game that you could try to figure out we were trying to figure out so we were trying to take an inaugural flight in a plane while we were building the plane and also drawing the blueprints of the plane as it was taking off is fantastic and incredibly incredibly stressful so as we're going closer it starts to hit that I'm gonna have to play this thing live right and it's gonna be nine minutes so I start rehearsing and I'm gonna rehearse for like two months right and I think and there's a bunch of members of the team here so they'll probably agree with this I hope this is probably the greatest time for the team because I was basically playing for the team well they all shouted notes at me and then my brother long emails of like you need to do this you're doing this wrong you did this you suck and it was it was fantastic because I I had to perfectly hit all these moves in an order well we were also trying to figure out which moves were going to be the best moves to put in order what we're also designing them and animating them and make them work and bless them they figured out several tricks to sort of put the bumpers in the bowling lane the director version of it so I couldn't screw it up too bad so they had removed some of the potential catastrophic failures that an idiot like me could do if I hit the wrong button but still I had to time everything I had to use the sticks I had to actually do all the combos and everything like that I had to position myself correctly so I still had an opportunity to mess it up I had many many many opportunities that I could mess it up and then a lot of my playthroughs would mess it up which was you know the the facepalm for everybody on the team every time be like I think I got it this time and I play for everybody and they'd be like no you're you're rushing this part you're not doing that part I was like ah who's like the entire team is the director at that point and I was just like taking note okay yeah that's good all right all right good very very stressful but it was so much work that I was like alright you know I think I could handle this no big deal and as we're getting closer now in previous count of war games the thing I was remembering so much about e3 was like I gotta more - we were burning demo disks at like 6:00 a.m. the day of the show to drive them down and put them in the machine so people could play them on the floor so we really like went right up against the edge but in this e3 we had to be done two weeks before so two weeks before e3 we had to be finished which felt weird I think to most of us going like man III thought for two weeks it feels weird we're done what do we do with ourselves make the rest of the [ __ ] game right but I was also then just rehearsing over and over and over again and stressing about okay I have to hit this and then we had a couple of rehearsals with the orchestra but it was all leading up to the day of the show right and and throughout all this time I am constantly just in my head having this voice of like you're gonna screw it up and having all these potential mess ups that I could could do and on the day of the show there was gonna be a dress rehearsal and then immediately after the dress rehearsal you had a little bit of a break and then the actual show would start so you kind of do it twice and I went down and you know the plate to go in that we had not told anybody about the game so it was a complete surprise that God of War was gonna be at this show I mean one of the PS exes I might have said yeah we're working on a God of War game but you know nobody paid attention to that and I basically had to like put a hood on and nobody like anybody would [ __ ] recognize me anyway like at the time like I don't think anybody had any idea who the hell I was but it was all for me I was like yeah I gotta go stealth in the back entrance and so I get in and I am just like I hadn't slept the night before I maybe slept 20 minutes I was so freaking nervous and just constantly going over the the demo in my head and you know on the drive down there there was a cameraman in the car interviewing me and I was already nervous but every damn question he asked me made me more nervous because it was really like so you're afraid you're gonna screw up how specifically do you think he'll screw up and when you do that screw up what do you think's gonna happen what do you think people gonna say on reddit right and I was like you know I haven't gotten that specific in my neuroses to say like what is reddit gonna say but I'm there now dude Thanks so I get in there and we we do our dry run and this is the first time we did the fail run right and that is that you have a kit a backup kit and then the sort of ultimate fail the catastrophic sort of fail is you have to stand up and they turn on your mic and then you sort of apologize to the audience that you suck and that we're gonna just roll a video and that hadn't been real for me and tell that moment I talked about it but when we rehearsed it and I had to like stand up in that empty theater and say sorry it didn't work I was like man I do not want to do this again this is a one and done thing because that's scary like like not only is it screwing up the demo is scary but the fact that it doesn't crash you know is something that you're hoping and hoping and hoping and if it crashes that's just it's normal that's game development right it's it's no big deal but it's still crashing in front of a whole audience of people sucks right and I did not want to do that and it's a testament to our incredible team that our game is pretty darn stable at that point so thank you to them so I did the thing and then Kevin Scharf who was a producer at the time and I went back into the green room now the green room was basically just like curtains like a box of curtains backstage had a couple tables and a little bar and there was some water no booze searched everywhere no booze which i think was a good thing I probably really would have screwed up if there was booze there so we're sitting there for four I guess we had 45 minutes before the show was gonna start the actual show and we're just kind of hanging out and I'm going through everything in my head he's trying to keep me calm but anybody who tries to keep me calm it's just making me less calm and I'm stressing more and worrying about all the things that could potentially go wrong when the curtains pop open and a Japanese man pokes his head in and looks around and they just quickly closes it and I'm like weird it's like that was weird right Kevin and he's like yeah that's strange and then it was like whatever it's Los Angeles of whatever that's normal so we're sitting there for another couple of minutes and all of a sudden an extremely dramatic fashion the curtains burst open and this group of people files in and at the back of that group of people it's at a Okajima right bathed in light [ __ ] magneto tiles below his feet right and I was just like oh wow and then I suddenly became like five-year-old me I was great and he does the the head a oka Gmail like head nod and then I do the whole like so like just walk in sit down at the other table as our talking amongst themselves and I asked many like the next five minutes trying to think of an opening line right like to go over there and be like so you come to III often I came up with nothing but it distracted me away from being stressed out them and then I realized I'm not gonna go over and talk to this guy so I'm just gonna go back into my own little world and about five minutes after that one of the guys stands up walks over to our table and says hello we are going to eat Panda Express it is going to stink we're sorry then he bowed and walked back to the [ __ ] table that I really thought it was weird and I actually at that moment contemplated whether I was having some [ __ ] up fever dream and that I had not yet gotten up unfortunately they had called I actually interesting the I actually asked Kojima if I could tell this story because I thought oh I should get permission before I could say this publicly and I contacted somebody that I know that works with him and asked him about it he said yeah okay hold on then he got back and he said yeah Kojima doesn't even remember that and I was like oh that's sweet fantastic I make a hell of an impression right so I they basically curtains open again time to go right then it's the heart beating like absolute mad I'm like oh crap oh crap oh crap so Kevin and I get up and they're escorting us back to the thing powers on my my lav mic which just reminds me that oppa tential e we could have a catastrophic failure that sucks and we're going up the stairs and as we're going up the stairs to the balcony everything's gonna start right very soon people are already in the theater the orchestra is all there I realize that I forgot everything about the whole demo like and that was a horror story of mine going like home and it's like going in and taking a test and you forget everything but I didn't think that would actually happen and it legitimately happened I was so amped up about this I was so scared about all this that I legitimately forgot what I was supposed to do I couldn't remember the first button I couldn't remember the cue that I was supposed to come in on and I was like ah crap and we're sitting down and Kevin sit next to me and I'm like do I tell Kevin that I don't remember any of it because maybe he'll remember the first thing and that'll get me started but if I tell him that makes it real so if I just keep it inside then maybe everything will be fine right so I'm just stressing the whole time like oh my god oh my god what's the first thing what's the first thing I literally can think of almost every game that I'd ever played except what I was supposed to be playing at the time and at a certain point in the overture I had been able to see the the kind of tablature screen that was was playing for bear as he was composing or as he was conducting and I was like oh it just came back to me like an image on the the screen made me realize like oh I got a hit start at that point when it says 110 okay yeah I got it and then it kind of just started to slowly fall into place and it turned out I think several people on the team had said that you know I did pretty good I didn't screw it up I think it was the best I can get you know that it actually worked out really well and in the end it actually did work out really well people responded very positively that reveal of Kratos we were really excited about crates coming out of the shadows but I don't think any of us had any clue the kind of response we were gonna get for that so that was super overwhelming and awesome right and I think the important thing about all of that about an entire thing besides the fact that I hung out with Kojima a while he ate Panda Express and he was not kidding it [ __ ] smell like orange chicken back there for like an hour who was crazy was that throughout all of it all of us and me especially was this I was experiencing doubt at every single step of the way right it was this sort of imposter syndrome times a thousand this feeling of what I have to say isn't valid what I'm doing isn't all that good and pushing through that breaking through each one of those walls kind of led to well sadly another wall of doubt that would be there but that was sort of the process that was the process of pushing through all of that and ensuring that we could get to that end results and there was times even right before in that two-week span before e3 where we're kind of refining a last bits of things in the the play experience where there was even members of the team very good people you know not malicious whatsoever they weren't being mean about it but they were nervous they were telling me oh my god I think you're gonna screw up the franchise like this is this is a terrible way to presented one person told me why don't we have a boss fight at the end we should have a big boss fight I think another person even suggested we should have Balder on a dragon kind of come up when they're at the deer and be like and looking for you all these crazy like like last-minute suggestions that I was like oh my god no and and I was basically just saying don't worry everything will be fine even though inside I'm going over I'll go [ __ ] oh [ __ ] oh [ __ ] oh [ __ ] oh [ __ ] and it's something to remember I think for all of us and what we do at any time the next time probably which is you know five minutes from now you're gonna be hearing that voice in your head or the voices directly around you or the people that you work with that say that you're wrong you you have nothing good to say you're going in the wrong direction why are we doing this you suck you're a jerk well the last two are just me talking to myself remember that those voices are wrong and sometimes they're right because if you remember all the way back at the beginning I was actually right to doubt that crappy demo because it was crap right and that's the messed up part about doubt in general is that it's right as much as it's wrong and it is up to all of us individually for each individual situation to be honest with ourselves to trust ourselves to trust the people around us because they're the ones who really do all the great stuff anyway I just sort of bask in the limelight of their awesomeness and really endeavor to push through every one of those [ __ ] doubt walls because on the other side is always something better than where you were at from the beginning so there you go that is my little chat that's GDC thank you everybody how much time do we have perfect oh wait thank you see I got a slide for thanking you okay so we have ten minutes and we could do questions so feel free to ask any questions except the following two questions what are you working on right now or is there going to be another God of War I can't answer that [Laughter] - don't ask you blew the [ __ ] horn because we're not gonna tell you that's like the polar bear and lost man I'm not gonna say anything about that all right great fire away my friend hi sorry you talked about a situation with the e3 demo which is great where you listen to some intuition that you had to change it preemptively I was wondering if you could also give an example of a time when other people's feedback other people's notes were actually really informative in you changing your mind and process oh that's a lot of examples my mind receives many times okay there's there's a really good point in the game where the the son becomes a jerk right and we had a whole slew of gameplay that we needed to build around that so there was about an hour of gameplay where he was a jerk and we had to cut it so there was a point where production wise timewise I had no more big arms were gonna give me more money that I just had to I had to get rid of it but that meant that a huge chunk of the story was getting cut out and we needed to figure out how to put it back in place and I was like okay you know what we're just gonna do something really quick we'll do this small piece will do a small cinematic because I had been selling people for so long and begging people for so long to put more effort in do this can add this extra thing that I figured this was the thing that's gonna break them if I ask them to go too far and the animators the cinematic group were actually the ones that went far beyond the initial ask so I thought oh we'll be fine if we just do this one little thing like no no no I think we could do something even better and they worked with Eric Williams they actually came up with the moment that something and we talked about way early on in the game which was I wanted to see at Reyes try to be rage mode right but we ended up not getting it had had I not cut that stuff we would not have had the animators be superheroes and actually make that cinematic when Modi returns and then at Reyes gets all raged out right they brought all that back and it was sort of their contribution they're pushing that that added something I think that was so critical to the arc that I was not even able to see thank you yep fantastic yes hi Cory thank you so much for the talk thank you I'm an audio guy a little bit hello audio guy hey yeah that's good I can't hear you my biggest fear yes so as a big fan of the series one of the biggest things the shockers for me was when you went from the voice actor of TC Carson to christopher judge yes I mean I hit it like the first like three hours of gameplay honestly in three hours it took you three hours to not hate it I I'm working harder next time I've got like PC Carson was Kratos he is amazing yeah so like how did you like but then I ended up really loving Christopher judge I like wow this guy's he made the new Kratos what made you like decide to make the switch it was a complex series of decisions so in the early portion of the game we had used TC in ascension a game and I did not work on but I had heard some of the stories of how it works and TC was actually in the suit right so that they were shooting a lot of these scenes on there TC is a smaller guy that he is a classically trained dancer and when he moves it is almost impossible for him to not move [ __ ] gracefully he just floats he's magical right and it created a lot of work for the animators afterwards they have to kind of reanimate to make him feel like Kratos this big imposing guy right TC was absolutely sort of a product of the ps2 era where you could you could do all the animation and you core the voice afterwards but to get the scenes that I wanted I knew I had to have all the actors on stage because we were doing that one single camera shot we experimented a little bit early on where we got a stand-in person that was large and they would be crate us they would perform on the stage and then we would go after the fact and record TC so we started to run the numbers on that one we started to run the time and apparently like 20 36 was when we'd finished the game if we did it in this method it was insane how much work it would end up being so it was very for me a difficult decision because he's such an intrinsic part of the franchise but I knew like okay if we're gonna do this we're just gonna have to do this I'm gonna have to commit to recasting and it turned out to be one of the hardest things right to people that were hard to cast Balder and Kratos both of those characters took almost you know three three and a half years I found a kid like in the first set of auditions it was ridiculous so I thought everything would be that easy it was not thank you so much yes thank you yes sir excellent talk excellent game both initiations and all the awards you are awesome and I think we all here agree no my head is just getting huge now thank you you mentioned that you originally pitched the game in June 2013 right which a game that some of us may know came out around that time the Last of Us I haven't heard that what's about yeah there are some I mean obviously there's like a lot of similarities between the two even though both games stand on their own and they're very unique were you worried at any point that people would draw the comparison and whether there could be negatives to debt or not I think a little bit you know there was a little part of me that said when I played that game it was this sort of awakening moment I think for this industry now prior to this game a lot of great games have been doing very dark and very intense subject matter so it's not as if they were the first ones to do it I don't think they claimed it either but they were the first ones having a broad audience for this to show me to show everybody else in the industry that people wanted this kind of content that people actually were interested in something that challenged them emotionally and I thought okay this is the opportunity this is the opportunity now that people are actually claiming for content like this I did feel a little bit that people were going to make the comparisons and boy howdy was I write the first like year after the announce was basically just like the Last of Us of War and every other variation on that one right I really did like all the the gifs that were created after we released sort of making kind of all of that but I think as we were developing we all realized that we were going in a very different direction the two games are so so very different but the fact that we were in close we were personal and we were trying to tell this story about two characters struggling to have a relationship you're never gonna be able to escape that right that is the the same way that you know many movies that very high-level concepts that are similar always gonna have the same comparisons but I think each thing sort of always stands on its own right thank you thank you yes sir they're both oh my gosh sorry what's your favorite thing that you have to cost or the got costs what my favorite thing do what what's your favorite like feature or thing that you have to cost in order oh my favorite thing that I had to cut does everybody remember the Eagle in the background of Helheim yeah yeah that one there was that one was in all the way from the beginning when I had to write this story the skeleton of the story I just added some Eagle into the story because I couldn't figure out how to end it and I had to pitch the whole story to the team so I just threw something in there and I wanted to figure out a way to how to keep this eagle in and the art director actually had fallen in love with the Eagle as well so he was pushing to put it in an animated even when we had to cut it as a boss so we had to cut as the boss he ran out like the so many bosses that we were planning we just had to cut because it takes so many people so much money so much time to do one of these bosses because we are crazy people perfectionists and we want to make them awesome and big and there was actually a moment where the Eagle sort of randomly appeared in one of the levels like skunkworks style so I was like oh man is making a comeback and I think one of the producers had referred to it as oh man that Eagle is like a giant [ __ ] you to production right and I love everybody in production but I also really love that phrase that was hilarious thank you wait over here no more let's do one more cuz I totally messed these guys up I skip them so there you go I was wondering about the e3 demo you were talking about how they tried to add bumpers let's make sure you try yeah to mitigate the chances of failure what were some of those bumpers that were added they had situations where I wouldn't be able to do certain wrong moves in certain areas so that if I enter as own or an area they would make sure that the the combo would click the way that I needed to click it but I still had the position properly and time each one of those but I couldn't accidentally suddenly pull out like a special move or anything like that they had put some sort of invisible collision bumpers that kind of helped me cutting corners or times when I had to walk and rotate the camera so there's a lot of times where I was walking around and I I'd have to do these like really smooth camera sweeps to kind of give people the feeling of so majestic so we found all these ways to kind of make it just a little bit easier without automating anything because we still wanted that feeling of oh yeah it's actually me on the sticks doing this alright I think that's it thank you thank you everyone's saying the red shirts are saying we're done [Applause]

Channel: GDC

Views: 339,479

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, god of war, cory barlog, game development, sony, sony santa monica, ps4, boy

Id: aIb-Lt7WX_s

Length: 59min 49sec (3589 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019