God of War is set to storm retailers on March 16, and there's probably no bigger game in Q1 than the final chapter in Kratos' grand adventure. Sony Santa Monica is well aware of the importance of the impending release and the franchise to the PlayStation business. IndustryGamers had the pleasure of chatting with God of War III's Senior Producer Steve Caterson about the challenges of meeting huge expectations for the game, among other topics.
IndustryGamers: Tell us a little about yourself and your personal history in the gaming industry.
Steve Caterson: I've been in the industry for 15 plus years, so I have a few arcade games to my credit. I've worked on console games for about 10 years and specifically been with the God of War team for 7 years; I was art director on first, producer on second and senior producer on the third.
IG: So you've gotten first hand experience with how the series has evolved.
SC: I look at the launch titles on the PS2 and I look at the experience of God of War and I compare how far things had come and it's really night and day, but the hardware is the same. They really know how to use it after a few years. Now, I look at some titles early gen on PS3 and think, 'Wow, what will they look like eventually? Will the difference be even greater?' I just get the feeling we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg.
IG: Speaking of which, games like Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2 have all come out and really pushed the boundary on what was thought possible on the PS3. Was there a general sense at Sony Santa Monica that God of War III had to push the PS3 in similar ways and not simply be “God of War HD”?
SC: We always try to do that and we're always trying to outdo ourselves. It's come up in a number of times in internal meetings; the biggest example was the opening of God of War II, fighting a big colossus. Once we got it up and running, we were like, 'Wow we really did it this time!' but later when we were planning for God of War III, we said, 'Wow, we have to outdo the colossus.' It was really worrisome; we didn't know how were we going to do it! I think we succeeded this time, but it's quite a testament that [the developers] can keep outdoing themselves. I originally told my wife three years ago, 'There's no way we outdo this.' For the first year or so I thought, 'Ok it'll be on par' but that's just not good enough for the guys at Sony Santa Monica. I've played it a few times now and I think, 'Wow they did it again.'
Great detail on the Blades
IG: The God of War series has developed a reputation for graphics that are impressive on a technical level – the Pegasus section was very impressive and I heard that it was something Cory Barlog had to push very hard to get through. Was there any sort of comparative technical hurdle you had to get over with God of War III?
SC: I think the biggest was the Titan gameplay stuff. We had committed to that at the end of God of War II. We're going to be starting it on a Titan, there's no way around that. And it was very scary and we had people working on that and day one of mocking it up we just thought, 'this is going to be hard.' It was a challenging task and it pushed everyone - animation, production, art, programing – to learn new things to make it work. We had an internal team dedicated to it. I haven't run into Phil Harrison lately, but I showed him some preliminary God of War III stuff back in 2007 when he was President of SCE Worldwide Studios and he was not sold, I could see it in his eyes. I could understand; we had to show him something pretty rough. The Titan portions weren't last minute, but it took the entire length of the project for those sections to really come together. That's part of the power of the PS3 coming through – we used pre-rendered stuff for certain story sections of the previous God of War entries, but this time its all in-engine.
IG: How cognizant was the team that they needed to grow God of War and, at the same time, not muck up what was pretty good to begin with?
SC: That's always known and it's the same philosophy. We've applied the same philosophy to the whole trilogy. We paid attention to the stuff that people said didn't work and one of the things they said was that weapons the secondary weapons felt bolted on and not very well integrated. We heard and recognized that, and we fixed it by saying, 'Let's make everything integrate better with the Blades.' We take all of the weapons and make sure they're mapped 100 percent like the Blades; if I have a launch move with the Blades, it works with the Cestus. We've added some variations and differences - maybe instead of knocking and enemy away the same move might bring an enemy towards you - but we've tried to merge the familiarity with the Blades with the other weapons and allow users to change the weapons on the fly. These are the sort of changes we feel will give users the maximum experience with the game.
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May 5, 2010
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