God of War 2: Divine Retribution developer interview
Sony is getting ready to unleash the God of War sequel at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May, 1up.com went to the new director on the game, Cory Barlog, who’s replacing well-known director David Jaffe (now the creative director) for an exclusive first look at what to expect from the upcoming sequel.
1UP: Obviously the first had lots of action, but it had lots of adventure. Would you say that this one has a little less adventure?
Cory Barlog: No…from an adventure standpoint there’s some pretty amazing stuff we’re holding close right now. We’ve got a year until we’re releasing, so we’re going to start releasing stuff intermittently, but we wanted people to understand that first and foremost I understand where we are with the franchise and where we were in the beginning so that people [don't think] we’re going to come out with that dual analog thing or something like that. We’re not changing it.
1UP: You do have more action, though. You have more combos and more moves in that vein, right?
Cory Barlog: What we’re doing is refining it. I wouldn’t even say that the action quotient has fully increased so much as that…there are all these things that I wanted to do…ways that I wanted to integrate magic and weapons into combat so that it wasn’t so clumsy. I don’t want to say that it was really clumsy in the last game so much as that when I’m playing it I want to be able to launch a guy up into the air and switch to a weapon before he lands. These are even the smaller aspects of God of War 2.
From the story perspective it’s definitely… the adventure is equally balanced with the action. But the puzzle solving and the platforming is sort of on the same level, kind of turning the puzzles in a different direction in some respects. Some we’re bringing back, like the ones with story elements, the story driven puzzles. Stuff like burning the guy in the cage, to me that really defined the character. It really made you think like Kratos. You had to decide what he would decide in order to continue the game. Those kinds of things, I want to continue making the player have to make those kinds of tough choices.
1UP: You mentioned there are going to be some cool bosses in the game.
Cory Barlog: We’re definitely bringing in a lot of really cool minibosses, not even just cool because it’s a cool fight, but because you’ll recognize them from mythology. To me as a fan of these things there’s a lot of cool things that I would appreciate, but from the big, eventful, massive boss perspective…things like the minotaur, Aries, these were things we worked on massively in the first game, but really we started a bit late. Now we’re starting way earlier and we’re going to get pretty amazing stuff and get a wider variety.
God of War 2: Divine Retribution is set to hit stores in February 2007.
