God of War Side-Scroller Was Briefly Considered

With a Metacritic rating of 91, God of War: Chains of Olympus is the perfect example of how to successfully take a cherished console IP and bring it to a portable platform. In a new roundtable interview, IndustryGamers spoke to three PSP developers about bringing console franchises to the Sony portable, and Ready at Dawn revealed an interesting tidbit about its own design approach to Chains of Olympus.

Dana Jan, lead level designer on the game, revealed that Ready at Dawn briefly thought about making the game 2-D. "There were early discussions of making Chains of Olympus a side-scroller rather than 3D in case the experience couldn’t be fully realized on a handheld," he said. "This really fueled us to prove that it could be done."

Thankfully, Ready at Dawn pulled off the God of War experience in 3D on the portable beautifully, and we enjoyed every minute of it at the time. The studio certainly had trepidations at first, though. "Games like God of War don’t usually translate well when they are brought to handhelds. The gameplay, graphics, animation, sound, etc. have a tendency to ‘differ’ from their console counterparts," Jan said. 

He added, "We knew from the beginning that God of War had a distinct visual style and an epic scale that had to be recreated on the PSP in order to do the franchise justice. With God of War 2 hitting shelves prior to Chains of Olympus, it quickly became evident that we had an even higher standard to hit with the visuals. It took us some time to reverse engineer the many components that make up the look (it's deceptively complex). The art department faced the huge challenge of fitting all the animation, textures, geometry, and FX into a fraction of the memory available on the PS2. They also had the task of creating expansive environments with incredible detail and many one-off visual set pieces. The God of War franchise was a great opportunity to push ourselves and our technology as much as the PSP hardware."

Be sure to check out the complete roundtable piece for more on PSP development.