God of War is easily one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed games of the past year, and while it has hit huge success post-release, it was not always so certain that the PS4 game would do the franchise justice. Speaking at Devcom 2018, the developer-focused event at Gamescom, creative director Cory Barlog got candid with the audience and told them about some of the challenges he and his team faced during development, including the time Shuhei Yoshida, the head of SIE Worldwide Studios, came in to play the game. It didn`t go well.During playtesting of the game, much of God of War was still looking rough, reports Gameindustry.biz. `Part of it was that we were building the engine and tools, as we were building the mechanics, as we were designing the mechanics, as we were then designing the levels,` Barlog said. `All of those groups had to build everything at the same time.` He added that many playtesters had intense reactions to the game at this point, accusing his team of `ruining` Kratos after seeing certain cinematics and gameplay.As the God of War team was about to release a demo of the game, with only six months to go until release, Shuhei Yoshida came to the studio for a playthrough. `I mean, the framerate was terrible, everything just felt bad. He`s playing, he`s got scrunched up shoulders, head shaking a little bit,` said Barlog.`He kinda just shook his head and walked out the door...He never told me how he felt. In fact, he only told one of my friends, who he saw at a party. [Yoshida] said, `Oh, you`re working on God of War? I just gotta say, I played the game the other day. I was horrified.`` He added that this was a turning point in rallying his team to get the frame rate back up and work out some of God of War`s core issues.In the end, Yoshida returned to play the game a second time. `He played it again, and you can see the two different poses of Shu. Horrified is much more rigid. The second time, he was not horrified. It was super good. Very ...
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