I’m going to say it straight off the bat: God of War is my favourite franchise…ever. Sure, a certain Mr. Drake is making that a difficult decision, but Kratos’ adventures really do tick all the right boxes for me; so the wait for God of War 3 is a painfull one. But, in an interview with GamePro magazine, Stig Asmussen – the game’s Director – has shed some more light on the series and what it has taken to get the 3rd installment ready.
The first interesting piece of information that Mr. Asmussen has eluded to, albeit very vaguely, is that DLC will more than likely come in the form of Challenge Rooms. You remember these? In God of War I you spent hours getting to level 9 only to die and have to start from the beginning again. Makes me angry thinking about it!
…maybe you’ll see the game ship with a certain amount of challenges on it, then later on, we might put a download pack out with new challenges. It’s a good way to keep the series going.
It would certainly make sense as the Challenge Rooms do provide a lot of potential DLC. He even mentioned that they may create moster challenges such as: ‘Complete a challenge by riding a Cylops’. In regards to Multi-Player; there is none.
With God of War 3, there’s a story we want to tell and an experience we want to deliver, and multiplayer doesn’t fit into that…Does that mean we don’t have conversations about multiplayer? No. Of course we have conversations about multiplayer, and there’s a lot of things we think about…Imagine two Kratos characters running around at the same time. Once you do that, the story becomes something more about an experience between two players and less about something that we’re scripting.
I have to say that I am quite relieved about that. The thing that grabs me about the GoW series is that its plot and mythology are so engaging. It bettered any Blockbuster movie, in my opinion, and it would be a shame to sacrifice one the main foundations of the game, just to satisfy recent trends toward multi-player. Stig likened it to Resident Evil 5. He says that he was a huge fan of the Resi series but ‘stopped playing Resi 5 after a couple of hours’ as he felt the multi-player aspect was detracting from the whole idea of the survival-horror franchise.
He was also asked about the length of God of War 3 and, again, Asmussen was vague. He hinted that a pro-player would probably be able to complete in 10 hours, whilst a novice might take 20. This isn’t a massive addition to the time it took to complete the first two but, speaking from a personal POV, the re-play value is huge. But Asmussen quickly added:
If you try to find all the secrets and stuff, you might add another 20 percent on top of it.
In case you haven’t played the second game; hidden amongst the blood and guts of Hades and beyond were special ‘Urns’. These ‘secrets’ unlocked certain elements such as Unlimited Magic and Invincibility for when you played through the game again. I’m guessing that the ‘secrets’ Asmussen speaks of will be of a similar nature.
It is certainly worth reading the full interview as he also talks about the effort that it has taken to get Kratos ready for release and ready to match the hype and anticipation.
Source: Game Pro