Interview with God of War 3 Game Director, Stig Asmussen

Redmond: How far ahead will the demo come out before the game?

Stig: I assume that the demo would come out weeks, months, or a couple months before the game comes out so people can really understand what we are trying to do.

Redmond: What are some unspoken aspects of his personality that you wanted to bring out to the forefront that weren’t as evident in the first two games?

Stig: I think in general it’s making sure that strain and everything comes across and you see that when he rips an enemy apart, you will actually see his muscles flex and his veins pop. We’re working on ways of setting it up in our CS mini games where the camera gets really close and kinda shows that off and you’ll definitely see it in the cinematics. But that’s the easy thing, everybody kinda understands the personality of Kratos on the outside so we’re working on the outside first. The story really involves what’s more happening on the inside. Like I said, we’ve really enhanced the density of mesh and how many joints that we have in the face using techniques like blended normal maps. We’re really going to be able to show emotion. A lot of things don’t need to be spoken with Kratos, where in the past you needed to say words, now we’re going to be able to show the nuances of emotion in his face.

April: Was there anything you had to cut out of the previous two games because of the limitations of the PS2, that we might be seeing in the third one ?

Stig: Absolutely…absolutely. Like I said, we couldn’t do real Titans. we couldn’t work at this level of scale. Some of the gory stuff that we were showing at that level of detail we absolutely couldn’t achieve on the PS2. Kratos, that character that you saw there, he’s more memory than the PS2 could take – quite a bit more memory. So it’s not even something that we could consider from a base level, you know, the technology has given us that and I think we are going to be able to tell a better story because of the motion and the flow that we can do with the cameras and like I was talking about, we are going to be able to express emotion better and lighting is a huge thing. So something as simple as the grunts – we always have the grunts in our games, they are kinda of a bread and butter character, they’re kind of a staple. The reason why is because they are flexible and they’re fun. And the grunts, one thing we have always tried to do in the other games is to make interchangeable and swappable parts and random animations and stuff. What you are seeing right now is that no two grunts are exactly the same. If you watch the crowd, the crowd all moves in a very natural way. In some games you see everybody is doing the exact same animation, standing there, none of our guys are doing that so we got that stuff working now and at this point it’s a matter of making them better.

Redmond: What are the other unique challenges when you have all this new stuff to play with (technology) and no reference point?

Stig: A very easy limiting factor is something called a budget and a schedule. I am told as a Game Director not to think about that stuff but it becomes a reality all the time. The fact of the matter is creating assets on this generation takes a really long time. So to a certain extent, we’re bound by that but there are limitations to the technology and part of that is that we’re building a new engine from the ground up and all the features that we want aren’t available from day one, you know we’re still adding in new features in every day and it takes time to learn how to use those things. There’s a lot of cool things that you can do with this system but it’s not always available.

Redmond: Your doing a lot of new things with the game play, what was one of the hardest to incorporate – was it the rideable monsters and aside from the scale and all that, was there a number 2 somewhere?

Stig: I’d say based on what we’ve looked at today, the hardest thing has been rideable creatures. Even though Todd died while he was playing it, it feels really good. It took a while to get them there. I can honestly say that game play of what you guys just saw is rock solid. It’s fun, really fun.

April: I noticed the Cyclops reacted – batted away enemies – when you stabbed him in the neck, is that something where you are going to have to constantly press X or some button combination or is it automatic while you are on it?

Stig: You take control of him when you mount him and the left stick controls his movement and the buttons will actually perform an action. Right now Square is, for the Cyclops, is kind of like a sweep attack, Triangle is a ground pound, and the Circle is the kill.

April: Can you be bucked off if you don’t use it right away?

Stig: Not yet..I’m not sure if we’re gonna do that but it’s something that we’ve talked about.

April: So once you’ve taken control of him, he’s yours until you decide to get off of him?

Stig: We’re working that out. We’re looking at different options like does he have a health bar, is it for a limited time, that stuff will definitely be sorted out by E3.

Redmond: How much space did you want to give to gamer’s for their “stuff” (in reference to what’s displayed like a health meter so-on.)

Stig: I look at a game like Dead Space and I think it’s awesome that they were able to do it with absolutely no clutter the way the game was designed in game. The bottom line is that there is information we have to give out and we’re trying to streamline that but you know our system has worked well in the past and that’s another good point too, as far as the UI and the shell of the game, we could definitely have way more options the PS2 didn’t have and we’re designing that just like any other part of the game.