SONY SANTA MONICA STUDIO’S CREATIVE DIRECTOR CORY BARLOG DISCUSSES THE CHALLENGES, HURDLES, NAYSAYERS AND TRIUMPHS OF HIS ATTEMPT TO MODERNISE GOD OF WAR AS WE GO HANDS-ON AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES OF THIS PS4 EPIC
VERY FEW GAME FRANCHISES AND EVEN FEWER HEROES IN THOSE SERIES ARE AFFORDED THE OPPORTUNITY TO GROW OR AGE. VERY FEW GAME SERIES MANAGE TO SPAN THREE GENERATIONS OF CONSOLES. VERY FEW DEVELOPERS ARE GIVEN THE TIME AND TRUST NEEDED TO PURSUE SUCH EVOLUTIONS. BUT THEN, VERY FEW SERIES ARE GOD OF WAR, AND VERY FEW HAVE A LEAD AS ICONIC AND MAGNETIC AS KRATOS.
But times have changed, and the angsty, tortured, anti-authority antihero is moving with the times, much as his makers have. “We as developers here have grown,” Sony Santa Monica creative director Cory Barlog tells us. “I personally feel a lot of parallels in the fact that he left Greece and wandered, and I feel like I left Sony and I sort of wandered, and during that time I learned a lot.” Barlog returned to the studio in 2013 after a few years away working with Avalanche and Crystal Dynamics, having started out as animation director on God Of War, working his way up to writer and game director through to GOWIII before he left in 2010.
“I met a lot of people and I experienced development from a lot of different perspectives. I experienced a lot of different creative voices and understandings,” he continues. “After I finished the Tomb Raider game, I realised I wanted to make something that has a bit more dramatic weight and meat on it. The earlier [God Of War] games, they had some dramatic weight, but I think they were sort of reflective of that ‘thumb your nose at authority’ attitude of making an antihero. There weren’t a lot of antiheroes at the time. It was an interesting thing to tackle, and then after that it was like the second Prince Of Persia was a darker, meaner Prince and everyone was making the antihero. So it became the note that everyone’s hitting, and not to say that we weren’t also just hitting a singular note. I think that when we started working on this not only did I have inside me the desire to make something that meant a little bit more to me, I think everybody I was working with had the exact same feeling.”
And so Kratos has been wandering. For how long we’re not sure, and Barlog isn’t telling. In that time, however, he has left Greece and travelled north to a strange and in some ways far more magical realm. He attempted to isolate himself, but somewhere along the way he met a woman and they had a son, and now things are a bit more complex again. This all feels a little more sedate and emotionally contained than the Kratos we once knew, but underneath it all the Santa Monica Studio knows that what’s inside him cannot change. “During that time I think there’s a belief in his mind that he thinks he’s better off being away from people, because clearly when he’s around them he
