We Play God Of War II With Its Director Cory Barlog

hey everyone Joe Juba here and I am joined by Cory bar log the director of the new God of War hello everybody and also joined by Tim Abramson who is going to be playing God of War to a blast from the past let us step in our time machine you feeling confident oh I don't know man so I remember thinking that this intro was such a like badass payoff to the end of the first game yeah connecting all the way you sat down in the throne and picked up right there that's a really big unlike trying to connect things so that it feels like when you end one thing you're picking up almost right where you left off that's why the end of this game spoilers for anyone right in the back of Gaia you know going up to take on Zeus is was always meant to be the very beginning of three I just love that feeling of if you wanted you could play all three back-to-back and feel like it's a continuous adventure yeah well I remember at the end of the first game the sort of sense of like okay so like I've beaten Ares and now I'm a god and how do you how do you follow up on that like how did pay off on that promise yeah that was a lot of pressure to figure out like one how do you pay it off and then also take them back down a peg so that they have somewhere to go right because like it's the Castlevania Symphony of the Night thing was sort of the inspiration of feeling like you know beginning of that game you're super powered up and then death steals all of your stuff and then you want to get it all back I was like I love that that was a really cool moment from my sort of early gaming history so I kind of was inspired by that for this whole beginning to have the big action beginning you get all of your toys you can do so much stuff and then Zeus takes it away spoilers yeah and it's got to be hard to like Matt make players feel cheated when that happens though yeah I mean it's invariably there is the the collection of players that are going to feel cheated but I mean hopefully narrative Lee we kind of brought them along for the ride yeah we had an early conversation about the claw of roads and saying we really need to make a scenario in which the Colossus was still under construction and the reason that it was sort of destroyed wasn't because of you know sort of being lost to history during some sort of battle but really was it was embodied by Zeus and killed by Kratos yeah and just destroyed by creatives so at what point during the development I actually should have pointed out in addition to directing the new God of War Quarry was the director of God of War to the game we're playing yes first director to come back for a second go-around yeah second round of pain so at what at what point in the actual like timeline are developing God of War two when did you make this intro sequence this was the last one of the last things that we had done we were deliberately holding off on our opener we wanted to make that the last thing so that we had learned all the lessons we could possibly learn the engine was running the best it could artists had sort of found all the tricks they could find it was basically the wait until we are our best selves before we tackle this yeah which worried the production team greatly there was a point actually where the producer was so frustrated that we hadn't started on it that he just modeled the interior of the Colossus and kind of set it up and it was just horrible the metrics were bad you couldn't jump on things properly Mike Chang the lead level designer was very frustrated and saying you know why did we do this and they were just like you're not doing it and I'm very frustrated we need to get this done it's hard to get everyone to have faith to say just wait till the end and we worked Oh some pretty long hours to get this thing done but end of the day eric williams the was the sort of lead comment guy on this thing and was able to pull together through all the crazy experiences i couldn't understand how that would be stressful though because you're serving it's you have your one chance to make your first impression at the end right and if that doesn't come together could sort of be a problem yeah yeah and we knew the high level it was like okay the you're gonna essentially be stalked by this massive Colossus throughout this journey on the city and we had the concept art and a few key areas and then a bunch of big ideas but yeah I think it made all the production and the even the leads also very worried just because it was in its concept way bigger than this if you can imagine like at the time like it was just it was longer like anything I ever do it just feels like it's just so blown out it's like James Clavell presents you know it's like a Kevin Costner movie all the time I just go way too far with it but it's having learned that you have to have a lot to get rid of you know you have to have a lot to sort of sort of sacrifice you know and reach a compromise and say okay I'll get rid of this but we need to keep this I always have this this thing is and no matter what game we worked on I think this was even with the handheld games the the first two games and the third game and even the current came people like always pointing out kratos is a god he can take down these giant creatures yet he struggles with a chest and i was like guys this is a concession you just sort of have to accept it's like people who question you know where does batman fill up the gas in the Batmobile before it was nuclear-powered yeah you know you don't imagine him at 3:00 in the morning trying to get a fill-up and i think it is it is just one of those concessions that in order to get the dynamics within the game yes sometimes it's you have to struggle and press the button to lift up a gate yeah but he can lift up you know the world with atlas and it is then you'd never I think be able to have any dynamics in the game if it was always adhering to that one reality yeah so in the new god of war does Kratos ever have to gingerly balance across a beam we don't have that but we do have several moments that kind of harken back to the idea a little bit so you can see that the the Colossus handshake a little bit we were experiencing then and still now experiencing some problem with I don't know if I'm 100% correct on the way this is defined but the sort of floating point math and calculations that the Colossus was so big that his center point is so far from the zero zero zero point of the world that the math starts to get a little bit wonky and the compression starts to get a little bit shaky so they said stop making things so big little did they know we were gonna end the game with something that was 20 times larger a hundred times larger than the Colossus so I was always laughs at saying this is really the easy part wait till you get to the next game so yeah like it making things really really large in a world that is continuous is a dramatic challenge for the programming team are always fortunate to have such smart people the idea of telling the god of war team to stop making things so large right like hahaha fools [Applause] so was the was the Colossus at the time that you did this like the the biggest the biggest thing you'd try to do at this point I think so yeah we we had a the big version of Ares and you know the Minotaur in God of War one and that one evolved over such time like we first were doing this the idea of creative stepping into the catapult and launching himself up wasn't part of the original pitch we knew we were gonna figure something out but it was just kind of one of those late-night you know what we should do is you try this and I think that's honestly a lot of our boss battles kind of begin with a core idea but it's just getting all those right people together that just say I have this really crazy idea and at first you know it's a good idea when everybody goes no no no no that's crazy and then I'm like ooh that's definitely what we should do if you don't like it because you're afraid of it then we should try it interesting was there ever a point in like the the planning of this sequence we're like Kratos and the Colossus sort were sort of both huge like Kratos and Ares style duking it out there was a thought like when he starts he was already gigantic I mean we're like you know we should do the first round should be the two colossi like you know rampage moment where they're just destroying the city and then through the process of the fight Kratos gets reduced down and that died due to scoping so that first round where Kratos and the Colossus were huge just kind of became okay well we've already done it with Ares so if we had to lose something let's just get you to the point where you're seeing David vs Goliath right because the the first tests everybody was like yeah I couldn't really tell the scale and we were actually gonna let you play as giant Kratos approaching Rhodes and destroying a bunch of stuff so that in the city you have Kratos punching these buildings and stuff like that so basically you are gonna be approaching Rhodes and walking through this Canyon and just like wrecking little like seaside cities and stuff because you know that's what you do as the god of war you just destroy stuff and it was kind of the am I good guy in my bag you don't really know you sort of playing today I'm having fun at this but then you kind of realize a little bit later oh wait those were that those were sort of innocent people maybe I don't know the controversy here of when people have the mini games the sort of quick time event mini games they say oh I don't want any more QuickTime events there so over and then when they don't have them they're like why don't you have QuickTime of mini games I personally like after making this one the second one was like okay I kind of sort of done with these sort of QuickTime events yeah the random button press ones I think they're cool you can create these cinematic moments but I was far more partial being able to manipulate the core mechanics and figure out ways to take down enemies I mean I like the the finishers in that but at one point we started to just make these things so long yeah the Zeus fight at the end man so many potential screw-ups you could have I started like swimming I took for granted yeah you know it was one of those things where when when we did it I was just like oh and got over one they had already kind of nailed most of the 3d navigation so I was doing most of the animations to kind of get the mechanics working really good but when we started the new god of war and I was talking about like alright well here's these core mechanics that I would like to include talking about the swimming and talking about a secondary character having full three-dimensional navigation yeah right and also when you're swimming in underwater you can't talk right so there's this point of like when we were doing the the initial stuff of the boat and then being able to go in the water and potentially swim it was a time where you really couldn't enjoy any of the stuff we're doing in the boat currently which is all this great character building and world building and storytelling and development of the characters so it's one of the first things and the new game that kind of got ended up getting dropped of saying we'll do this later because it really is a greater technical challenge than I ever thought because it's like you take it for granted you just sort of had it yeah and the earlier ones but man it's really hard well and it's also hard to just like like so many games have swimming or water sections or whatever and I feel like that's a hard thing to actually make fun right thank you right Michael and to feel right like that's the thing is that you take it on the challenge you're spending a considerable amount of time really nailing the feel of that and it's like alright what's important here is more about the at Reyes kind of involved in the entire game so it's the pick your battles sort of thing especially in this one the sort of inclusion of the grappling and really kind of expanding upon the grappling was very important yeah so like coming out of coming out of God of War the first one which you also worked on like what what was sort of top of the list in terms of areas areas to improve for God of War two um I think I wanted to to create an even greater suite of moves but also really get you into the action as much as possible more of these events the foot smashing through the wall and you having to like push it back and that just being a small event in a much larger experience the idea of you know that Thomas Jane Punisher movie where he was fighting the Russian and they're just destroying the whole house its slamming the refrigerator in there and on his head and just this feeling of a fight that could feel like not just you arrive at the boss fight location you have the ball fight but the boss fight can extend across an entire level yeah right and it can tell a story throughout all of it that was kind of the one defining thing is feeling like you never really could feel a beginning or an ending to a level like my philosophy always was this feeling of I don't ever want anybody to go this level is this and this level is that I just wanted to feel like the adventure the journey is a whole yeah a whole experience and you never really can tell where one begins and one end yeah I think and I think now my memory of this game has gotten a little hazy over the years but I do I do i do remember specific areas but yeah I don't remember them being sort of discrete in that way you're talking about it right oh yeah you're in the second area of the game yeah so it's like you finish this you get on the Pegasus you fly out to the end of the world and then on the way there you end up stopping at this mountain and then continuing on and it feels like the thrust for me has always been that feeling of like you're getting the call to action and you're kind of going on this journey and it never really feels you know level two chapter one yeah yeah like well I appreciate games that do that I just kind of like that feeling of never being reminded that I'm kind of in an experience like this that it's not breaking up into chapters well I think it helps too with both the first out of War and this one sort of have half times when you sort of return to areas that you've been in before but sort of like with new capabilities or with new keys that you live you know for even seeing it from a different angle yeah like you're climbing above something that you were not before I think that that kind of folding intimate self design is very great I mean I love playing games like that where it feels like it's hub based in some ways but it's also simply just you know this cyclical figure-eight sort of design yeah it's got to be tricky to do that too without making players feel like they're backtracking yes oh that's a delicate balance and even then you're always gonna have some players or just feel like yeah no matter what you do if they've seen the area before they're done you know and I think for me that's that's definitely an okay thing to see an area but have a different take of it a different perspective so I see I see this first level had a wait to die that's fantastic you are still playing far better than I yeah I see I see this intro sequence like this makes a lot of lists of like best opening levels to games and little like that which I think it's I mean I think is well deserving was there like what what would be some of your favorite beginnings to games apart from God of War series hmm I would say the the opening to Last of Us is phenomenal in the sense of world building and character that one sticks with me yeah quite a lot very happy with what we're doing on the current game but nobody seen this that doesn't really get Sun fair yeah I say that the the opening of the the game and how we kind of handle it is different than we've handled it in the past but they're still the the sort of DNA of how we want to kind of have a big splash at the beginning I think my initial philosophy was that Indiana Jones action opener the very first thing you do is action and I think that always led us to lean perhaps into the very surface level of Kratos as a character and I think being able to take our time a little bit and appreciate the the build so that when it really does hit you it kind of hits you much harder but it's you know the the opening of a game is very difficult and I think you need to each gaming you work on and anything you plan never turns out how you originally intended to it evolves over the entire course of the project this is one of those things too because we waited so long for this we ended up figuring out a lot of the gameplay as we were going right and he end up having a lot more stages and I think if we were to completely design it out in advance that we would have ever allowed but we just sort of her feeling our way through and finding what was fun and what people are responding to in the play tests so I reminded me a lot of the the story that Spielberg was telling about Raiders that when he was gonna shoot that fight scene with the MA knowing plane and he still didn't know what the MA knowing plane looked like and it was supposed to be just one punch and the fight scene was over um and he kept asking like hey guys what is this gonna look like I got to start planning what my shots gonna be and there you know was a lot of drama about getting the the MA knowing plane so it didn't arrive until the day of and he had no idea what it looked like and then when he gets on set and he sees it he goes oh we have to make this fight scene way bigger so he and the camera guy basically just improvised and kind of choreographed the fight scene on the day of the shoot and he said it was some of the most enjoyable filmmaking he had done up to that point in his career and I was like that's a lot of the times these sort of late-game pieces are you know me and the the comic guys kind of just improvising and adding and figuring out what is the best and it was honestly the Colossus was the most stressful but also the most fun you know that in the barbarian king that had that great like he drags you sequence and we sort of I think went farther than we ever thought we would on every one of these moments really yeah we would just need something very big and think okay we're gonna have to scale this back and it turned out we could go even further in some cases than we ever thought we would so before we before we started recording here you were you were talking about how one of the one of the games that you played that he's sort of a reference for God of War action or at least pieces of it in there was like was huijin guy I think is sort of I think it's fair to call that a kind of obscure ps2 game oh that's that's totally obscure PSEO game very difficult to find when I wanted to get my own copy of it even at the time like when I really came out it was still very difficult to find I think I may be one of the few other people who's even played that game because I that way came around for us but like what can you think of other games that you played that like served as reference or that were you know had little elements that you thought oh that's a good idea that we need to try and work in here yeah I mean uh man blood will tell is that the one where the guys collecting the body parts it's basically like a story about a guy who is wrong and has all of his his body parts cut up and removed and sent to different parts of the world or something like that and what he's doing is going and getting his vengeance and going back and like collecting each body part so you're actually getting your arm back and well it's really just a bizarre bizarre game there was really neat elements inside of that game huh rygar the whole 3d remake they had some really interesting elements that I played that on the we were making gotta wear one and I was like oh there's some neat stuff in there like booj ago I was you know there's some really rapid-fire moves that they do the way they did their counter system you know there's some some of the stuff that we were looking at for potentially using wall run which I you know don't think we were ended up using a lot of that but you know that the grapple system you know had a little bit of the inspiration from that even though there wasn't really a grapple since it was that freedom of movement in fujian guy felt well yeah it was a giant playground I was like I want to figure out how we can recreate that or get a little bit of that into this game because it was just so freeing even though that game was very empty yeah it really just felt like you were moving from empty space to empty space but their combat system was fantastic you know I remember I always felt kind of bad for Rygaard because that was a game that criminally underrated man yeah I mean like so late and I feel like people really liked it for the for the small bit of time that it was out before God of War yeah and then it then God of War sort of overshadowed it in a way that like I think yeah now people think back to games in that style and it's god of war and not rygar that they yeah they think about yeah it's interesting because I had a similar experience to the the first games I worked on in the game industry it was called requiem avenging angel yeah terrible name but it was a first-person shooter where you played an angel and it has some neat ideas you could boil people's blood and explode and you could turn him into pillars of salt okay so conceptually there was some neat stuff in there but when our game was getting finished is when the demo of half-life 1 came out so we were right in the last stages of finishing we're probably about a month away from finally when the the free demo of half-life came out and everybody at the office played it you know went home for the weekend and it played it and came back and pretty much just said like we're dead like like like no one is gonna care about this game like we are our entire game is like half of what the demo of half-life is yeah it was insane like and I'm very sad and very depressing so I feel like rygar had a similar sadness yeah because it is a great game why I play that game a lot and while we were making this and realized there's so many neat things I remember trying to put this second the the sequence together and actually get them to have archers there and trigger dialogue that says there he is get him like all of those little setups which we take for granted now we're so hard to do like the sequence later in the game when you meet the soldier who's dead in the bog and having him talk yeah you know and and communicate with you feeling like you're going into a bit of gameplay but it's really a cinematic incredibly long time to set that up and it was like didn't work for the longest time in the game what was what was complicated about it just getting the character to stay in place and play an idle animation until you went up and interacted with him and then it would trigger into the cinematic just the alignment of all of that stuff yeah the little peekaboo sequence here this uh was almost cut because we weren't confident that it was gonna do because you had to like tilt Kratos forward drop them in there like just we had a gray box version of it it was really janky indignant Kratos shouting of the sky a good portion of his life is spent screaming at the clouds then the Blade of Olympus is sent down the only thing that can defeat this is very much like that whole like you know create the disease and then sell them the cure yeah yeah this is a the essence of Zeus he creates the problem and then he gives you the the ability to take care of it only to realize that it was the trick to read critism its power because Dad cannot have son overshadow him it was like the essence of this entire game really is this this sort of struggle with your dad right yeah and the first drafts that my dad and I wrote together on this one we were kind of trying to figure out like I was steering him in this crazy direction and he kept saying you know like is this really the way to go are we really is this a story that is connecting with people you think it's gonna work I'm like oh it's totally gonna work and we would argue about it back and forth and it was through those arguments that that I think both of us sort of realized like you know what it's really a father-son story in the sense that it is the Sun like growing to a point where the father is fearing him yeah and that that sense of like the Greeks had that that sort of constant cycle right Zeus he knows how he treated his dad so clearly he's like my son is gonna do the same thing to me and I better do that first does Kratos know that Zeus is his father at this point in the story uh no no he doesn't he doesn't find that out until a little bit later but that isn't this game yeah yeah yeah yeah we actually maybe we the funny thing is there is inside the menu of God of War one there is a line in the in the song where someone is singing in the background and they're actually saying nobody called it yeah I didn't even catch a tape Jaffe actually told me that are you kidding me like it was totally in there I think we actually do tell you in the first game because you know the gravedigger is actually soos constantly referencing back and I think he you know he calls him his son at the end of this whole sequence yeah yeah so he basically says refers to him as my son but I don't know if we fully refer to him as father yet yeah uh-huh yeah I remember it speaking of got stuff it hidden in got a 4-1 those like the potential ideas for sequels or follow-ups and yeah it was like in the extras menu yes that's Jaffee's way of making sure that whoever directed the next game had to do something that he had already come up with I don't know if he didn't think that there was gonna be another one or what but I was just like man he already had laid out like all these different stories so but it was good because it kind of gave a little bit of information to mine so that people could see it and realize that like you know the reference towards demos yeah actually became pertinent in Ghost of Sparta yeah and that was actually the original script for three so the the script that I wrote for three had instead of what was her name I can't remember the little automaton girl that they used in the labyrinth and three Pandora Pandora there you go and why did I not remember that I was going in a totally different direction there but that actually was referencing more to Wars demos hmm so that's you would end up leading more back to demos as opposed to kind of Pandora the box and hope and all that stuff yeah yeah and then when that was cut out I was like cool that works for me because then I'll just use the demos angle on the Ghost of Sparta script which after I had left that was one of the first things that I had done was wrote the goes as far the script oh yeah yeah and that's that's another interesting point like for this series a lot of people think of like mobile or not mobile like hit the handheld versions of sort of being like lesser entries in the series or something oh yeah no we we treated them as part of the sort of core thread yeah yeah yeah they killed it like I was very happy working with those guys well you you've mentioned to Dave Jaffe and in the first game but he he was involved that for a bit of the production of this one right a little bit I mean he definitely these games pretty much shreds you when you finish one of these so your brain is just scrambled eggs at that point and it's very hard to get back into it so he was off already immediately doing his thing and I think I would check in with him and we've had several conversations you know I think in the early months and then he kind of faded off did his own thing then came back I think when we had gotten about 60% or 65% of the way through the game yeah and then kind of gave some notes on various aspects of it which some of them was like this is great that's a really great idea and then others he was just like I don't like this at all you should really just cut this completely yeah I don't really agree with that so I'm just gonna keep going round there we go and you felt like you had the sort of the the license the sort of creative control that you had to make the game you wanted to oh yeah like he was pretty insistent on that right from the beginning of saying you know one I'm tired I don't want to do this but you know you got to kind of make it your own and I think that was the the thing we pushed with all the directors each time a new person was taking over you they really had to find their way in to the story something that worked for them there was a lot of rules that you sort of stayed within the the Canon but beyond that you know we wanted people to have the freedom to sort of tell the story that they wanted to tell because they were going to have to be in the trenches for the years and struggle yeah and is that is that the sort of message you like did you pass that along to Stig when he took on four three yeah you know it was a interesting because we had gotten a lot more of the development so that when I kind of stepped in on to you know we were finishing up one when we talked about this so I started doing drafts of various scripts and ideas and was working with Jaffee early on but with three I was already on already laying out a lot of the game already writing a whole script so he sort of inherited a lot more than I think any of the other previous directors had yeah so I think for me I was just like look you got a lot to work with here but you go wherever you need to go it's you you got to live with this thing for the next few years so it just come your baby yeah whatever you gonna do with it except I sort of did the same thing Jaffe did with the whole secret endings piece by ending to going up a side of the mountain you really I gotta get out of that one you pretty much have to pay off the guy if I like it kind of locked him into that and there was like at the end of this one similar things were the secret murals are kind of placed there and they did the similar thing at the end of three they placed a few secret murals which you know may or may not have Canon connection to them hmm and that you just mentioned the gaya fight and that reminded me this is the game with the revelation that like the narrator from the first game was an actual like character yes was that known during the course of the first game or was that made for - that was me kind of like as I was trying to look at connecting all these things I was like it'd be really cool to sort of take a little bit of that stranger than fiction concept of the idea of the the narrator crossing over yeah into the life of the the narrated this also I think for me one of my sort of greatest creative blunders when it comes to not establishing it strong enough it was a really good lesson in I had a lot of opportunities that I could have introduced it better and really made it a smoother transition so that it felt like it naturally developed you know we cut a lot of moments and and and acknowledgments of Kratos kind of hearing so there was never really the the moments in the gameplay building up to here where the narrator starts talking and he almost acknowledges that he's hearing something yeah he doesn't necessarily hear the exact words but he connects a little bit so that the transition doesn't just become he gets you know pulled down into hell and she pulled him out it's a little reference back to the Athena pulling him out of the water thing but I think there was more I could have done to that to actually make it smoother huh it's interesting it's interesting for me to hear you say that just because I like I remember that that moment just being jaw-dropping for me where it was like oh really yeah we're like Kratos had died and that was something I could not allow and I'm like wait a minute the narrator's in first person who is this which I thought that that alone would have been the nice transition but we had a couple of other moments where he was like huh you know like he was acknowledging it wasn't full-on like I hear everything but it was just we would indicate just a tiny bit so that when you get that sense of the narrator switching from you know third to first you're like oh my god some people like that some people didn't but we didn't I think the other problem with this game for me at least was we always had the the phantom of the ashes reveal all over our heads because it was such an amazing moment in the game the first game that oh my gosh here's a character who's wearing the ashes of his dead wife and child yeah that's a really hard reveal to top right and it became the touchstone for a lot of interviews on the second one how are you gonna top that how you gonna top that and I think we sort of got stuck in this cycle of believing that was our job was to top whatever we did in the previous one and I think that led to a lot of stagnation in our grow because we became sort of this constant in this constant competition with ourselves we were in one-upsmanship with ourselves instead of really saying what's the what's the core story you want to tell here what's what's interesting how are we driving the character in the world forward while also growing things yeah so I mean I think oh yeah you got a you use that first you got to stun him with that and then go up and get the sword so you're basically trying to get the opportunity and each phase it gets a little bit like a little bit more complicated or harder to sort of get back yeah so what you're doing is you're actually sacrificing your sort of powers into the blade right so that you can make it uber powered up but you're also making yourself weaker which is this whole trick yeah so it's basically like you're you're able to use this ultimate weapon which is a vessel for the powers of a god and that will help you defeat this but really it's just a trap like Admiral Ackbar says it's a trap I forgot it so he lost his hand in one of those one of those wheels before yeah what you had trapped it in there that was the thing we like to do which sometimes wasn't part of the original boss concepts is really kind of dragging things out and connecting so the losing of the hand in one phase and then the hand returning as part of the fight yeah when you're on the Griffons and you kill that one guy with the spear of destiny and the Griffon crashes and then later when you're on the island you find the dead Griffon and you find the spear yeah yeah like those kinds of things we we like the idea of them but we usually would figure them out as we went and went this is the perfect opportunity for something like that yeah and then maintaining that flexibility to kind of say okay this is it we can use this here that's a big part of I think why these games turn out the way that they do because we don't always hold ourselves to oh well we didn't design this from the beginning it must be like this it's really just that freedom say this would be amazing if we tried this mm-hmm yeah so you can see your whole magic bar is going down first you sacrifice all your red orbs and now you sacrifice your magic bar no I'm like piece by piece you're sort of giving it into the blade I do like that there's at least I mean obviously people like players can see the strings behind like we need to take away your powers but I do like that explanation better than just like the beginning of a Metroid game where for whatever reason samus just like doesn't have all the stuff right picked up last time well the inspiration for this one was again go back to half-life which is you know honestly I think most game designers and game makers in general have some point of inspiration from half-life it was such a fundamental shift in how we play game time we make games how we look at games but the beginning of that game unlike most other games really put the player in the position of power when it came to the inciting incident right mm-hmm it wasn't just something happen and I got to fix it it was a scientist saying hey Gordon help me out here yeah then yeah yeah go over and do this and everything you did led to the opening spoilers of the rift to the other world like you did this so you're invested in you need to fix it yeah I was like I when we do this I love the beginning of sympathy at night but death just sort of shows up and takes all your crap what are you thinking you're gonna get more power you're gonna do something to defeat these guys essentially sacrificed all of your powers one by one like one by one you gave up all the powers and then beta me you feel super powerful you have this great weapon you're like look at me I'm awesome not realizing that this is gonna lead to your undoing yeah yeah like look over here the misdirection will kind of lead you to your undoing as our love of army of darkness I like the idea of the Colossus being winded do ya supernatural monster everybody's got a stun State it's just so natural it's always so yeah so it's funny that you you have to find these ways to build in the design tropes but in a way that like can be as natural as possible and then sometimes you just like screw it there's no way to naturally put this in yeah and then BAM now you're inside and this was the part that the producer had built and it was described as like it's a circular traversal all the way to the top and we'll do you know some navigation and some combat throughout and they just looked at it as oh well that's really simple you just described I guess build that right and the producer had been an artist before so he thought it's no big deal and just metrics wise it was just a disaster none of the jumps were consistent he kept falling down all over the place it was a it was a really good lesson I think for him and many other people that has a lot more that goes into designing a level than just building it in 3d right like there's there's a lot more thought that has to go into all of that yeah well I think that I think that we're not going to go through the whole interior sequence of the classes here but I just wanted to say thanks for you know thanks for sitting through and adding some commentary and some insight here for us absolutely it's fun to actually see this after all these years and Tim thank you for for playing I know there's some challenging bits there but we appreciate it I made it very dramatic for us too great job yeah so this was and this was actually the ps3 version not the ps2 version the collection but oh and there it is there's a mantastic thanks again guys perfectly ended

Channel: Game Informer

Views: 206,000

Rating: 4.9169707 out of 5

Keywords: game informer, god of war, cory barlog interivew, sony santa monica, santa monica, sony, playstation, playstation 4, playstation 2, kratos, god of war 2

Id: lgYBFee9Lbs

Length: 41min 17sec (2477 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Babaskaba]

GoW II is a masterpiece of action games.

[u/Titan67]

I think a GOWII remake from the ground up would be my favorite game ever. This game is the reason I’m really not that worried about the next one since Cory is in charge, again.

[u/[deleted]]

I'd love to play God of War 1 and 2 on PS4, weather it's just simple remasters of the HD Collection on PS3 or from the ground up remakes I'd be happy!

[u/namekuseijin]

GoW2 was one of the most graphically impressive games on PS2. It's also my favorite in the series so far.

I have high hopes for the new game, but game itself is not part of the old series, it's a completely different game with completely different gameplay featuring a completely different Kratos.