God Of War Team Wanted To “Raise The Bar” In terms Of Experience With New Title

There’s a lot of factors that go into making a good video game. Visuals, gameplay, music, but it’s also the team’s intent in terms of what they want from the game. The upcoming God of War title for PS4 is changing the franchise in many ways. Gone is the frenetic hack-and-slash game with the story of killing all the Greek gods you can get your hands on, and in its place is a more personal story of a father and son trying to honor the woman they loved.

The whole experience is different from top to bottom, and that’s exactly what Creative Director of the game, Cory Balrog, wanted. But it wasn’t just their desires that mattered, it was the gamers. When speaking about the games’ combat system with Finder.Au, Balrog noted that it was the gamers and their desire for a challenge that helped influence mass changes.

“Look, I think players have raised the bar over time and certain games have increased the challenge so much,” Barlog said. “Jason McDonald is our lead combat designer and he came to me and did this sort of mad drawing of all the different ways he wanted to manipulate the system [for Give Me God of War difficulty]. He told me “I want to take this farther than we’ve ever gone before”. So we separated the difficulty out, made it so that it was a super commitment – you can only do this difficulty and you can’t jump out once it’s been selected. And then he started breaking it down with all of these charts of different things he wanted the enemies to do.”

To their credit, God of War is now the highest-rated PS4 game of all time, and it hasn’t even come out yet. All the positive word-of-mouth is set to bring the game a lot of sales, we’ll see how much when the game launches on the 20th.