Speaking to TheSixthAxis at a press event this week, Sony’s Jason McDonald, part of Santa Monica’s God of War team, said that that PS3 has “been pretty good to us” and talked about how much they’ve managed to get out of the current hardware. “The PS3 has been pretty good to us for that,” he said regarding adding all the new features to Ascension from God of War III. “Whenever we decide to add all of these systems, we can do it.”
Have they reached the current limit of what the PS3 can do? It doesn’t sound like it yet. “We’ll never know if we’ll reach a limit until we actually do,” said McDonald. Mark Simon agrees, saying they get asked that often.
“People ask us that, which I think is natural, and at the end of God of War 3 people asked if we’d got all we could get out of the architecture and how we can graphically display stuff,” said Simon. “Then we rewrote our renderer, added in a new way to do lighting, added a layer painting system, this thing called Wonder Tech, which gives you two different layers and one light turns one off…”
“We added animation blending [and] IK systems, so that when you climb around on walls, Kratos’ hands are moving around on a rock wall which is organic and not flat, like it was in previous games. So you take all of those technological advances from game to game and you give our team three years, the same hardware, you don’t make us rewrite it to go to next generation, and we’re able to really make a huge gain.”
“That’s all beside the fact that we also have multiplayer, where we had to take the entire game code from underneath and rewrite it so it will run across a network,” he added.
Want to read more? Click here for the full interview.
The Von Braun
Well, dunno about the hardware, but as a God Of War fan (see my post in the Metacritic score thread), they’ve wrung more than enough from the story.
New culture of mythology to tackle on PS4 please, or no sale.
It does’nt matter how impressive your game engine is, if your level design and gameplay mechanics make for a frustrating exp.lot of players never going to see all you’ve achived as they’ll switch off long before the closing credits.
Great to see the potential of PS3 being tapped into, but reading reviews of the game, looks like whilst beingtechnically ‘inferior’, God Of war 3 is the more coherent game.
yiddo
I’d say Norse mythology next. Norse or Egyptian could be great.
KeRaSh
I’m hoping for Egyption or Mayan. Norse mythology has been done way more often.
yiddo
I know what you mean, but not in God of Wars style there hasn’t. I just think a Norse GOW would be immense. Mayan and Egyptian would also be great too. I just want to see them try something completely new.
KeRaSh
I’d like to see Santa Monica tackle Egyption mythology, while Ubisoft takes a look at the Mayans. :)
yiddo
See I’m the other way around. I think Ubi could make a great AC out of Egypt. Some of the old Egyptian cities were immense.
KeRaSh
Yes, but AC games usually resolve around society, not mythical gods and I’m more interested in the beliefs of ancient Egypt than their society (but the society with pharaos and slaves would be still very interesting!).
With Mayans and their sacrificing rituals, I think that would still be a great foundation for an AC game. While their cities don’t feature many high structures besides temples, they are surrounded by jungles with high trees and mountains.
yiddo
I think ACIII to me proved why they need to stick to cities. Maybe they could have more open, outside areas. But the frontier in ACIII was boring as hell, and was a massive dissapointment. I’d rather they stuck to the citys as the pure core.
Also I know AC’s dont revolve around mythical gods, but religion has always been a big aspect of the games. Add in the fact that you have TOWCB who are god like beings, and Egypt could be a great setting. Cities embroiled in slavery, power hungry pharaohs, the aspect of how big gods were in their culture, corruption within the economy and markets, through the jewelry businesses among others.
Hell, the plot could be immense. The end twist being that one of ‘The Ones Who Came Before’ (as some of them believe in enslaving humans) could be behind the building of the landmarks/in control of the slaves, with one of the pharaohs being one of them in disguise.
KeRaSh
Very possible and it would be very welcome. I also wouldn’t mind both AC and GoW using ancient Egypt as the groundwork for their new installments.
I actually wouldn’t mind losing higher structures and some of the climbing in AC. Climbing high buildings in AC1 was fun. It was still good in AC2 but it’s just filler content in my eyes. I’d prefer it if they focused on the assassination’s and just have a very fluid parcours kind of system without the need to tediously keep pressing up and sometimes to the side just to climb up a big structure.
skibadee
as a God Of War fan so happy they made ascension if you go to metric there is not one negative review 9s 8s 7s.
Kaminari
“It does’nt matter how impressive your game engine is, if your level design and gameplay mechanics make for a frustrating exp. lot of players never going to see all you’ve achived as they’ll switch off long before the closing credits.”
How the PS4 is going to change that? With the flip of a lever?
KeRaSh
Well, considering they sacrificed half of GoW III’s FPS to get GoW:A running the way it does kind of hints at the fact that they have hit a wall (if not THE wall).
Kennykazey
Both GoWIII and Ascension run at a dynamic and fluctuating framerate, varying between 30 and 40 FPS for the most part.
Alex C
Gow III is much closer to 45. Ascension close to 30. It’s a big difference.
Kaminari
@Alex
No. The average fps recorded by DF is 40. Not quite the “big difference” you claim.
skibadee
yep not sure where you got half from.
Kennykazey
What is this? There’s no new information from the interview, so looking for hits?