The creative director of the action adventure God of War, Cory Barlog, told how difficult it was working on one of the most successful PS4 exclusives of recent years. At the testing stage, the game was criticized by everyone: from ordinary gamers to the director of SIE Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida, who called the Santa Monica Studios project “terrible”.
Barlog announced this during a speech at the Devcom 2018 conference, which is currently taking place in Cologne. According to him, the Santa Monica team had to face both technical difficulties and criticism of design ideas in the future game.
Technical problems were associated with the parallel development of game components: one group created the engine, another created game mechanics, the third designed game levels. Because of this approach, the developers could not create a playable build for a long time, and when they succeeded, the game looked very raw.
The second difficulty was the scale of the project, which did not allow Santa Monica to test the game on its own. Corey Barlog had to seek help from Sony’s laboratory in San Mateo, California. According to him, the testers’ reviews were disappointing: many did not like the new style of the series and game tasks like the quest where Kratos sends his son in search of a certain plant. It seemed ridiculous to the players that a hero of the scale of Kratos should collect flowers to advance the plot.
“People actively defended the franchise and didn’t hesitate to tell me exactly where I screwed up, in their opinion. This forced us to critically evaluate all our work,” said the creative director of God of War.
Santa Monica prepared a playable demo for the annual PlayStation Experience exhibition in December 2017, which Shuheya Yoshida decided to get acquainted with. The build came out very raw — the frame rate was constantly falling, the game mechanics and the combat system worked every other time. Corey said that during the game Yoshida didn’t say a word, just shook his head. When he finished, he silently put down the gamepad and left. Balrog later found out that the director of SIE Worldwide Studios called the game terrible in a conversation with one of the company’s employees.
Despite doubts, negative reviews and technical problems, the Santa Monica studio team was able to consolidate efforts and solve the tasks set. Shortly before the release of the game, Shuhei Yoshida visited the studio again and played the current version, and, according to Corey Balrog, this time he was satisfied.
“I learned this lesson — to solve a difficult task, you have to stop looking for easy ways and work far beyond your comfort zone, even when it’s very difficult for you,” Corey Barlog summed up.
Santa Monica’s hard work has been rewarded — the new God of War has become the most successful PS4 exclusive in 2018. As Sony itself acknowledged in the report for the 1st fiscal quarter of 2018, title sales “significantly exceeded the company’s expectations”, contributing to the growth of quarterly sales of PlayStation 4 games by 36% compared to the same period last year. The title itself set a record for the fastest sales among PS exclusives: over 3.1 million copies were bought worldwide in the first 3 days after the release.
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