Raising Atreus for Battle in God of War

[Music] hello everybody welcome to the most boring talk here at GDC you've all made a mistake coming here but seriously thank you for coming there's a lot of good talks going on right now so thank you for choosing this one so what is this presentation about it's about at risk a companion AI in God of War for those who don't know God war is a third-person action melee game with like RPG elements and this talk will focus mostly on the combat aspects of at Reyes go over the hows and whys and take you through the journey of creating a trace so before we start Who am I my name is hi Otto I'm a senior combat tech designer I've been working at Santa Monica studios for over eight years and these are the titles I've worked on in the past and before I start let me tell you how I ended up working on at Reyes it's a little bit of story time so one day I was tasked to implement and design

a trace from scratch I was like why it's why I have no desire or like experience making a companion yeah so since I want to keep my job I went on the internet and searched how to make you know a good companion you know yeah I like yeah okay yeah I like to copy and paste a lot of codes so that's my workflow usually so anyways what I found was I saw a talk by max teickhoff he did a talk about Ellie in the Last of Us and he said he treated Ellie like his own child so I was like okay if that's what it takes to make a good companion a I so be it so next day I got a picture frame of a trace yeah yeah but the problem here is that I don't want kids or even have kids I'm like what am I doing with my life right now so so fortunately though I treated trace like a friend that plays you know games with you you know a friend that knows

what you're gonna do and vice versa you know you have you can just play games and you know what you're gonna do and he knows what they're you know they know what you're gonna do so it was like some kind of teamwork and that change of perception ultimately influenced some of the decision made when building a trace so enough about me who is at Reyes he's a son of Kratos small child you know I'm born in the harsh Norse mythological mythological setting uses a bow primarily and there's no formal training and this clip I'm going to show you is just showcasing white race does in combat I'm not gonna go into too much detail right now no he's doing a mixture of both economist behaviors and directive actions and the main thing here is that you don't even know if you like look at this and you don't know what the game is all about or whatever but you can see a trace helping you like a teammate yeah

he looks pretty useful I guess that's what we were born so as long as you get that that's all yeah and that's it unfortunately it wasn't always like that and this is how it all started so like any respectable designer I guess like I started with core pillars the first pillar being supporting the player Kratos is a main actor in the game so you know at Reyes need to be supporting greatness second pillar is he should not hinder the player he should never get in the way of the player that's just a big no-no third thing is if he ever does something it should always be helpful it should never end you know it should never make the player feel bad whenever a trace performs an action and lastly and maybe most importantly you should not have to babysit him you know and if any of the last three points actually just goes bad the game will immediately

feel like a bad escort mission and we tried really hard not breaking any of these rules so these core pillars are pretty good but the real question is who are we supporting right we're supporting Kratos a one-man army he's killed Titans gods just went to hell him back he'll more gods and then you kill a lot of guys and nobody was saying oh you know what you know what greatest needs a child to fight with it in battle I'm a genius right nobody was saying that maybe except for one director but you know yeah yes a real question is how do we support a literal God of War a child and how he's gonna support him so it's all about the framing like how do we approach this problem you know when you look at movies like Marvel you know and the Marvel movies you see a Thor he's just destroying enemies left and right kind of like Kratos right I mean you see guys like Hawkeye maybe not as you know impressive as Thor but he's doing work

but the main thing here is that they're working as a cohesive unit they're a team right and then when they're whenever they work as a team they they can finish their goal quicker and you know this framing was a good step in approaching on traces raw so knowing this framing what were the next steps to prototype prototype bunch of things and we do a lot of inspiration from all like single-player games with good companion II eyes and also we looked at multiplayer games where your teammates will help you up so cooperative and also team-based games so looking at all these archetypes were like what's the first thing we want to try out so we tried at rates being an initiator an initiator is a character who will start teamfight and will give you or give their teammates a huge advantage when the fight starts or usually and that's what we did so in the next clip I'm going to show you trace

does exactly that find your angle boy yes sir so he does a couple of things first this first quick he's gonna just help out some arrows that's what he did other things removing enemy weapons kind of useful not bad or even rooting enemies using the tree that's kind of useful I guess and then you know summoning crows I wonder where we got that inspiration from you know yeah so all these look good on a paper but there were two main issues with this number one the players exhibited a play pattern that we did not want to promote you know the players were kind of like sneaking around in the battlefield they're like Oh what kind of trace use and it almost felt like a stealth game and that's not something we want foremost so already that was a big

problem number two was when players actually use a trace it was really mindless because you would just say oh just interact with that and then your dime so the first point I made you know be making the game feel like a stealth game that was a problem so we didn't address that but we're like okay if he's kind of mindless to use what if he was more involved in combat you know now what if he you know what if we can change his behavior to be offensive or defensive so in the next clip I'm going to show you the first half at Reyes is kind of offensive he's going to be you know distracting guys in front of you and the latter half is going to be helping you out when you get hit and sorry for debuggers I'm so sorry I'm so sorry yeah so right here he's gonna distract the guy on the right it's gonna shoot him and then he's gonna distract the guy kind of in my huskers and he does is every like so he kind of keeps a healthy

like the cycling through all who he thinks is the best target to control their attention away this was kind of useful is interesting next thing we try this this is the defensive mode you see here cRIO Scott hits and at race will try to help you yeah that's interesting yeah so note that you know it Reyes is going behind the player you can only help out when he's actually behind you so you know this action is kind of helpful I guess you know you can do always do some things but there was a couple of problems with this too you had too much control over at Reyes like in the heat of the battle people didn't even try it or like changes behavior like I'm attacking this guy I have no time to think about what the behavior trait should be so that's problem number one number two was during this time enemies were dying like three hits you know we were fighting humanoid

like human bandits so as a god he should be able to go them relative easily so they were dying three hits so a tres couldn't even do shine in this kind of environment but the silver lining was when he was actually distracting enemies in front of him it was actually pretty useful so I'll talk about that a little bit later but first I want to point out that around this time we actually took a trace and we split him into two core traits one defining his autonomous behavior and the other defining is directed actions directed actors is when the player tells a trade us what to do so when we actually split these apart it was actually easily easier to work in isolation and I was the right call so back to what I was saying where when he was distracting enemies on his own like autonomously that was really useful so I want to kind of dig deeper into this with harness behavior so next thing we tried was okay you know what if he actually behaved like a real player when you're playing like an FPS game your teammates will hopefully try to like handle threat from the other

side of the map and you'll handle another side of the fight or map you're kind of essentially splitting up the battlefield and at race did exactly that so in the next video I will show you trace is divine the field in his own way slow for debug again but all the circles are on the enemy that's who it raises focus on and in this RTS esque camera you can see what's happening great traces kind of no divine about feels right and you know this actual game view if your tray is passively yeah no people don't play like a game like this we play like this feeling translate a lot move a camera like crazy changer focus no and you briefly maybe see a trace like what is he doing there I have no idea what was he doing who knows I'm just gonna go back to fighting this control

I mean ogre so is a huge issue and honestly at this point I was like oh man I suck I should probably update my resume I'm gonna hit but you know there was key nuggets of goodness when I was doing all these things I was like you know what I'm gonna do a little deep dive and kind of list out all the core issues that I'm seeing right now and yeah when I actually did that I actually identified three issues first one being presence people didn't even see where he was number 2 was perceived impact even if he did something you don't know what the impact is that is for combat now 3 was weak enemies not necessarily at racism problem but it was adding to a problem so let's address these three issues presence this is the reality can any of you guys see where a crisis I'll give you guys a second I guess yeah nobody right probably yeah because he's not in the picture

I'm just kidding he's actually right there he's laying on the ground like that and this was a reality even if he's on screen you can even see him and the fact that we can't have you know the camera cuts and stuff so you know we had to adapt to that and you know that exasperated issue but there were three things that actually helped his presence now first thing was make him use a bow as a melee weapon number two is dynamic poses number three is changing his positioning behavior so first thing him using a male bow has a male weapon completely unintuitive I would an archer use a bow as a male weapon well it turns out you know when archers are shooting they're doing this like still pose right and so when you're scanning the battlefield you'll see oh yeah it has that pose but the arrow went somewhere I can't make the connection who he's shot but the moment he uses it bow as a melee weapon he's using a you know more fluid animation and then you know he's next to an enemy so you can make the you can now like add one and one together just by scanning the

battlefield and that helped his presence immensely you saw a lot more interesting things happening in the battlefield and number two was my favorite dynamic poses and people you guys might be thinking uh why don't you guys do it at the beginning on to even design broom like I know you guys might be thinking that but there's a thing called us wanted to be grounded the game was ground at the beginning we couldn't do these you know jumping movies and stuff like that but we had a great tonal shift and that restriction kind of came off a bit so we were able to have a trace jump up in the air we essentially kind of dialed up the anime knob by like thirty percent were like alright this is a right amount so you can see this pose in koma combat you can see here he's like occupying like the second half or just the top of the screen that's fantastic there's a lot more noise and you see what's happening when he's trying to stab enemies you kind of arc his back and kind of hold his pose it's fantastic and even his his profile

he actually goes sideways and you know when you actually see a small child becomes sideways in battle you actually noticed that really immediately yeah and when he's grabbing enemies you know he would tower over enemies he's a small child so he's trying to look bigger than he who years so you hold that pose grab enemies and worked out pretty well and again when he's doing melee attacks he's putting his entire weight into it and when he does that kind of motion you really notice it so even if you're doing all these interesting combos or whatnot you notice a traitor's kind of coming in with you and it's fantastic and my favorite pose of all is this one him kind of kneeling down ish to do like a dash attack and we need whenever he did that you knew he was gonna go into position like as fast as possible and speaking of position that's my next topic you know intuitive does not mean it's going to be interesting so initially we

want at Reyes to be like safe and he's a small boy after all and he's using the bow as a in a range weapon so he's kind of moving away from threats we even gave him a straight set so he can actually change his position really quickly but what ended up happening was he looked really erratic because he was trying to find a safe spot and not only that since he's evading all the enemies nothing interesting will happen on its own he's just like carefully avoiding enemies so we're like okay let's make it like slightly more interesting let's make him stand his ground a bit let enemies actually bump into him and see what can happen so when that happens we decided that if a trace like swings his bow or like you know there's some offensive action that leads to some kind of positive outcome it felt great now with this when we tell it race to go somewhere he's gonna actually stand his ground and with that we're like what's the best place to put him and it's behind the players target you know when the players focusing on the enemy like he has a field of view and right behind the enemies also somewhere where players

can actually notice him so when we actually moved or try to position that race behind the enemy target or the players target that's where the magic happened actually on his movement actually now had an intentionality he was moving there for a purpose and the purpose being like double-team the target or fighting us and when he did that it was you know it didn't look contrived he came on-screen with the reason when he was actually dividing the battlefield like - earlier like when he actually came on-screen what is he doing he's just charging it's about I have no idea what he's doing so when you did this it was fantastic and you know like property mates when they you know go into position you know to you know set up an alley-oop or a bump set spike you know a trace case is just you know being the crap out of your target like they all had a good reason to move to a position so that's fantastic so this is a small clip of a trace posting up to the players target I gave myself like a three four second rule where it takes around that time for I traced kind of come up on screen and try

to post up next year target yeah so all this was possible because of my favorite tool and game development or Bing thanks John I am NOT above using warping I use it everywhere like the moment I can warp I just do it like I even have a script that allows me to like you know just copypastas something you know the warp will just happened and the main thing was you know I want to make sure a trace was a reliable teammate not a realistic teammate and that was the most important aspect I have focused on because when whenever a trace needs to come in and help with the hero I want to make sure it happens at a timely manner so the logic of teleporting is pretty straightforward you take if he wants to go to a target he takes the edge of the frustum of the saga camera and then he picks up point closest to the target I'm kind of early simplifying it but that's

how your teleports when he's off screen and I'm going to show you a video clip of him just teleporting everywhere I just popped in there and he's gonna like attack that guy and obviously when he teleports you usually cannot I mean you can buy most of them you cannot see I'm him teleporting and what's funny about this teleporting behavior is that he's actually a lot more reliable when he's off-screen because he's helpful teleporting constantly if he's actually far away he needs to run towards your target so I was an interesting thing so with all this fantastic teleporting all these things we did you know we felt that his presence was actually improving and we're like ok let's focus on the other things now so perceived impact you know when he was actually dividing a battlefield you know people might have seen it but they're like what am I gonna do after this like after you divide a field what am I supposed to do like they don't know what to do so instead of at

Reyes focusing on the macro aspects of the battlefield we were like what if he actually focuses on the micro aspects of the battlefield what I mean by that is he's going to be now oops sorry focusing on the players target so whenever the player does something is a target a trace will be extremely reactive he's constantly can what the player is doing so knowing that what kind of actions did a trace take these are some of them so if you launch an enemy that Reyes will keep him juggle see and if you ground an enemy a tripping enemy he'll keep him grounded now if you kick an enemy into a wall you know a tracer will keep him pinned to the wall if you're hitting in that an enemy trailer just grab and so he can't move and if the enemy is just constant blocking your attacks you're just break his block by tripping him and these are just a couple of them there's a lot more the main thing here was that he extends

the enemies vulnerable state and allows players to attack the enemy and kill the enemy quickly and every time I trades did this this was when the intentionality of the player and a tray is kind of aligned a player doesn't want to kill the guy quicker and then a traditional mouse so when he did that the Tres felt like a better teammate as a whole so perceived impact people are now feeling his impact alright he's kind of useful now but the weak enemies not Trey's problem but you know we resolved it by you know increasing the health of enemies obviously but if the enemy actually gets stronger you know it doesn't mean that race should do more damage so you know he helps the player out the main thing he should be focusing on is creating more shortcuts for players to dispatch the enemy this was really important because you don't want a trace to take the spotlight of the player so the next video I'm going to show you I'll show you a clip of a player killing a dragger without a trace

is help in the latter half you know he's gonna kill druggers with the help so all this is taking about 14 seconds and which is pretty bad I guess but if you use a Reyes he gives you shortcuts and kill them pretty quickly [Music] the main thing here is not only does he provide short cuts he actually provides you other options in combat as well so if he's like grabbing an enemy and they decide to launch him at radius will kind of slam the enemy down and create like a huge concussion and you know that was that was how he actually helped the player even though the enemy got beefier it creates constantly provide these shortcuts so it's actually fantastic and

you know while we were working on these mechanics there were some finding key findings that what that weren't very obvious so timing is everything not every time it's a good time to follow up so if the players like aiming with his you know acts on a reticle and the trace happens is like not the guy away that's terrible so you have to be mindful when he can attack other times when you know the player is actually wailing on a guy it's okay for trades to actually come in and help you out and the key thing here is that you know the best actually the best time for our trades to help the player is when the player actually does like a really strong move or whatever where there's a long recovery time because during the recovery time usually the players can't like move and stuff like that and that small beat that window they can actually register what a trace is doing so when the trace is jumping off the players back that's when people really notice and so just because you found that great time to attack doesn't mean you know the

actions are going to be helpful you know not all support actions are useful actions you know if if the attacks are extremely disrupted we have to be mindful when we're gonna do it for example if players are knocking enemies off the ledge and stuff like that and a trace happens to kind of interrupted by hitting them out of the air that's disruptive that's really bad and also conversely like if conversely if the player is you know causing a stumble reaction on the enemy and at Reyes comes in just cause a basic reaction he effectively negated the recovery time of the enemies so it needs to we need to respect their reaction hierarchy of the game this is a really simplified reaction hierarchy there's a lot more reactions but I just simplified about that's a that's the idea and the main thing here is that you know we have to we have to predict that players in tangency essentially so if the player is doing some kind of actions make sure whatever a trace does is going to

enhance what the player wants to do and that's kind of how how we design his attacks and this is kind of seeing everything in action this is kind of early but this is when I was like III maybe I get to keep my job maybe I'm doing something I'm smart he's actually doing helping you out anonymously yeah I mean there was more tuning that need to happen but this had all elements of a trace kind of helping you and this is just purely autonomous you're not telling a trace to do anything so this all looked good and we were like okay maybe that playtesters can now play with a trance but look good but it was only helpful when players were actually offensive remember I said that race is going to be

reactive to your actions so it turns out when players are on you know whether they're low on health they start to become very padded or very defensive this is your defensive a tres can't do anything after that so we're like okay we need to come up with couple of helpful behaviors to allow players to become more offensive so some of the helpful behaviors were now calling out threats especially attacks for coming out of office creamy you can't look behind you so it was a perfect way for a trace to call them out another thing is she sometimes it protects you from off-screen attacks most people didn't notice this but it actually happens quite often other thing is reviving the player this is not really a behavior per se but it's it's another like resource mechanic that allows players to become more offensive when they're kind of low on health and finally my favorite detecting danger thank you Sam so there's this danger meter where a tracer is detecting if the player is in danger or not and fee if this meters hits a certain threshold I

traced this like a spread shot and pulls enemies away here's a video of that so he's gonna do right about now and he just pulls a bunch of enemies towards him and you can just only fight one enemy and you know the the danger meter was based off of the number of enemies around the player his health and also the types of actions you know kratos was doing like if he's blocking or defending or dodging that meter went up in the moment you actually perform an offense of action the meter actually just reset and just join your merry way and honestly this thing wasn't to promote defensive playstyle we were just making sure that there's some brief moments where players can actually take on the offense when they're in trouble and this extended like the intense fights longer which was me which was good so with all the Thomas behavior kind of in place you know it was pretty much done and we were at a good place so now I

want to talk about the directive actions so the directed actions a Cadis unbutton we always we always wanted a dedicated son button and we examined these on-demand actions actually and before we actually dive into those ideas we had to ensure a couple of things number one they have to be reliable and when I say too reliable it doesn't mean it needs to like destroy the enemy what I mean by reliable is if you press that button whatever action Tracy's gonna do it needs to happen what if you know a trace like jumping up in the air or whatever we have to offer all the actions in a way where it could be interrupted and that also meant that his update loop can't be round robin because all the actions will be delayed other thing is it shouldn't disrupt the player you know when a tree is gonna perform an action he can come from all sides of the battlefield so you don't know where he's gonna be shooting at so whatever he does is should not cause and grief to the

player and if trace does something you have to make sure that players will know what's gonna happen to the enemy the the player is actually sorry the players are actually operating on a moment-to-moment basis so if something random happen it's gonna throw off their game and lastly the actions need to be super helpful if you use the action and you know it causes some you know harm to the player or whatever it nobody will be interest in using us so so knowing all these really ok these are pretty solid let's try making ice arrows focus on crowd control so when this went int I was like alright this is pretty good what can go wrong ice arrows now he's slowing down enemies nobody's slowing down enemies right now but obviously as you guys may know you know Chris you know has it Leviathan max it used to be the blood acts by turning

through the light of the Mac so the moments I put in the ice arrow I had to try just to remove it because I was competing with the Leviathan acts figuring out what Kratos is going to do was first and foremost the most important things I had to concede so the next thing I did was all right maybe a crowd control isn't the right answer what if we you know just try out damage let's just try it out and we just exactly what we did his arrows actually did damage he can use his knife to regenerate his arrows we also added some kind of risk factor to see if it's interesting to use it and this video is a trades just using his knife as a weapon and it's not showing like his arrows being regenerated but the arrows and the knife kind of operate the same way you shoot or you stab somebody and then something will happen so you see right there he actually killed the guy on the ground there and then when he was in action he's just not the guy on the right but

then he killed the guy on the left it's sort of like what's going on so so the issue at hand were you know the the results were very random looking you know if the enemy had hata like you know full HP and then you use a Chris he'll probably knock him down but the enemy's low on health and use a trade to immediately kill him so it looked very random second of all you know when you're actually trying to use at Reyes that risk later we added was just not engaging at all when you're fighting multiple enemies and you're focused constantly changing if you happen to press the Sun button and he actually gets knocked down or something like that you no longer want to use a son so that risk later was already like a bad idea and lastly there is no synergy these two systems like the regenerating of the arrows and killing enemies and the hero actually doing damage they kind of live separately on their own so there was they weren't even talking to each other so that's all bad so the first two two

points of it being looking random and risk later being bad okay we can't do anything with that but let's remove that but let's try to focus on maybe promoting some kind of teamwork with this a mechanic so we came up with the tagging mechanic where you shoot an error an enemy they get tagged and then you could detonate it using your shield and there to do that you had to press l2 twice or l1 twice actually detonate the charge and when you detonated the enemies actually fly back is no longer gonna do a lot of damage it caused a really good reaction so it looks good but the mechanic was hidden behind the l1 button and most people didn't even engaging so we're like okay so what if like any kid causes this like explosion let it detonate right well if you do that like in this clip right now throws the apps and the enemy gets phone back that's really disruptive you know if you tag an enemy and you won't launch an

enemy in the air you know what's gonna happen is you're gonna go up in the air or if he's gonna fly back who knows like now we're like destroying the hierarchy of the reaction is just all bad news Plus this also discouraged me from using a trace when comm being enemies so if I'm like hitting guys and I want to keep arrows being pelted on the enemy the next is gonna send him flying so this was a terrible idea so it's really back to a drawing board and honestly at this point I was like I don't know what I'm doing I'm just gonna just keep the thing how it is and let the system kind of stew for a bit and we just kind of waited it out and see what happened and key things happen that made me want to work on the directed actions and they are player mechanics were finalized the player didn't change as much there were a lot more constants to work with so it was a lot easier to frame how to support Kratos second you I came on board about one year before ship so net finally saw health we finally saw status meters a crates

can now feed into those meters which was great and we got the stun system on board this was like the best thing ever because now a crates can apply stun and allow players to just you know rip enemies in half he wasn't really competing with craters because the Sun system just allows players to live criticism power fantasy so just because that race can apply more Sun was okay and finally while we were working at Ray uh you know autonomous behaviors we found out that distracting enemies was it really was really helpful so you know I got all the ideas and just kind of like mash it together and I kind of created the runic arrows so the first reason why you want to use your arrows is because it applies Sun and the poles enemies aggro away which was very helpful the secondary reason is to apply damage and also a place that affects so

if you want to shock enemies and hold them in place you would do that and the more nuanced reason why you would you you would want to use it so that you can extend your combo so if you launched an enemy you can kind of keep shooting at them extending them the combo and whatever and also when you actually did that the enemy's back side will be turned because remember how a trace will now be behind your target if you actually pull the enemies attention their back side will be turned against you so now hitting them in their back was very very beneficial so these mechanics were actually very good and then we have to also make sure that using this was really intuitive so when you actually pulled aim using the l2 the arrows need to hit the reticle a we ensure that it goes through environments make sure that the arrows actually hit the reticle and if you aren't using the reticle we just guess who we think the best target is some targets have higher high priority because enemies like the revenant or the nightmares most people tend to use the

arrows to defeat them so we prioritize him higher and this was good but balancing these arrows was actually a big issue people didn't realize that you know you can actually be performing an action and a trace can also be performing action together with you so you can be attacking just mash your score button and in trance can also attack even when you're getting hit you can also mash that button you know interrupt the enemy and knowing that you know these arrows would constantly interrupt and and on top of copied off Cory or a director wanted to spam today's arrows as fast as possible so that just exasperated an issue so how we dealt with that we limited the rate of fire of the arrows and limited the ammo count which is pretty easy I guess but the other thing I also did was I actually slowed down the rate of fire like one frame every week without it getting noticed yeah yeah I know I know

I'm a jerk what can I say yeah and Cory would ask me this you slow down the rate of fire I'll just chalk it up to a bad frame rate who knows like I can't tell so he probably knew about whatever but the main thing was that ah you know it was about adding these key and vulnerabilities to enemies so if the enemy is about to do like a really you know signature attack we made sure that can't be interrupted otherwise we were just completely trivialize the enemies and my favorite thing the runic summons and you know you just like kratos traits can perform these special ruining attacks and this was actually added probably towards the end of alpha and beginning of beta when we were a feature to complete so me and a couple of people that didn't care about job security we were like let's just check this in because it's really cool and you know it turned out pretty good it actually fit into traces fantasy so many animals talk to animals and it was great it was a you

know productions a problem after that so putting it all together the main thing is player commands the square button it needs to just interrupt everything that is the main thing we have to keep in mind number two is making sure his autonomous behavior like when you trip an enemy or you launch enemy he can follow up reliably that makes him feel like a good teammate and lastly this behavior where he's actually just doing something on his own like bumping into enemies he will play you know he was suing his bow apply some stun he'll cause some happy accidents those were actually important because every fight will now no longer feel like the same so that was actually very useful and I wanted to kind of dive a little to some of the additional systems the trace kind of dealt with so death no death we want to follow the core pillars of a trace we didn't want to babysit player TRAI so we you know make sure you

can't die and if you were a bad parent I mean if you're about a player you might you might just leave a trace on the ground like okay I don't care I don't I don't care if he's you know incapacitated that was okay if you didn't want to help but Trace that was fine so we're okay with that second thing was player customization early concept people wanted to teach at race through like actions like oh I'm gonna teach my boy not to you know attack you know or be you know whatever right that was a really bad concept but we we just made sure that you're allowed to customize a trace through gear and skill tree you know so if you wanted a trace to become a heel bot or if you wanted to be a nice sharp shooter or he's good at applying stun you can all do that through gear and the skill tree we or I work backwards on that so after a trace was done I just took what was cool about trace and just shoved it into the skill tree my god this looks kind of good that was how I worked and honestly the

resources used to upgrade the skill tree and the gear I made sure that there's an aspect of like sacrificing your own improvement for your child you know like so your resources you have to sacrifice to see your child grow up you know it's like a reoccurring theme parenthood or something I don't know that's that's what I heard so we we actually put that in and then the last thing is you know these behavior nodes that were really strong so all the autonomous behavior he did we made it so that it's easy unlocked so the moment you spend a little bit of points or some points into trace you saw a massive gain and we have to make sure that the moment you know you invest in a trace you feel like it was worth it so there are a couple of key takeaways here number one at Reyes is really like an AI mechanic and we ought to make sure that using him was really easy easy to perform you just mash a square button he does shots and also for people

that are advanced you know I talked about it earlier where you can like you know Commodore taxon stuff like that we at me I had to make sure that was actually in there but the true skill is if you actually pay attention to a trace you know a trace always paying attention to your action but if you actually pay attention to trace what he's doing and you become a better teammate for a trace that's when a true teamwork happens so if a trace is running towards it enemies you know he's gonna trip in you can land a cleave with the greatest of ease you're like oh that was so easy it's when both you and a tree is kind of play off of each other that's when the true teamwork shines that's when I get to cry because it's so beautiful and you know the main thing is the intentionality of both players are aligned and this was interesting narrative so it was kind of hard for me to do something because at the beginning of the game you know at race camp eat is crazy killer right he

needs to be kind of you know a little bit weaker so all of his autonomous behaviors were kind of kind of it was kind of stopped so the only useful thing about race was using the score button so at the risk of making a trace feel kind of weak and kind of useless we have to do that to fit narrative leave and towards the end of the game we have to make sure that Reyes kinda just becomes a jerk and he doesn't follow your directions anymore so if you play square button he doesn't do it it feels like a really bad companion guy but narrative Lee it all made sense and this was like a really big takeaway for me you know I like to go on YouTube and just watch you know videos of reaction videos of things happening because I'm like that and then I would see people fight the last fight with the stranger and you will see a trace do all these crazy things like he's doing like these backflips he's shooting arrows in the air and he's like summoning snakes and stuff like that and people like yes that's my boy doing all

that stuff and the people are actually proud of a trace you know so like the all the investments they made it culminated into the cinematic moment where they're like oh yeah that's so cool I can invest so much into him he's doing all these things and when people saw when people saw the growth and narrative Lee and in actual like gameplay and when it creates did all those things in the cinematic people more like oh what is he doing why is he doing that people were actually like yes that he's doing that because I taught him to do all those things and when he did that you know the game actually felt like a more cohesive and it was really good and obviously you know we were reimagining the game combat changed frequently so we have to be pretty agile old ideas became relevant really often and vice versa and we have to make sure that all the scripts and all the ideas were very modular you can actually copy and paste and just remove all these ideas so that you can actually iterate a lot quicker

and final thing you know combating doubts the pretty much the final boss of every game development I think you know it's getting the right people to believe in your systems really really crucial because you know like during development a lot of people will ask me so when is it race going Scott hahaha my oh that's really funny and that's like a constant constant thing I have to deal with and you know I even had you know some people you know high positions too hung over Triscuits you know kind of cut you know here's the exit plan and stuff like that I'm like okay thanks so much confidence to me thanks but honestly like rallying the right people to garner support is the most important thing because when you do that you know people start to stay late with me and kind of play tests and give me feedback they would create assets for me to kind of prove out an idea and this is kind of true for all game systems right like you know obviously but when there's so much doubt in the future having these key people to help you out

was really really helpful so doing all that how well did at Reyes do IGN said yeah a trace his impact cannot be understated he's both an asset to the story and in battle Thanks GQ was like yeah my biggest takeaway from the new god awards that of developer has finally cracked how an AI companion can be the best part of videogame and only took 20 odd years to do it thanks to you here thanks but my wait no that's not the punch line no no the best quote is from rice bean and cheese from a reddit thread and he says the boy is one of the better AI companions in videogames thanks rice bean and cheese and really this was a team effort everything from cinematics and behaviors outside of combat helped realize who a trace is and you know that was it so thank you that's it thank you for coming

to this talk [Applause] thank you thank you yeah yeah sorry sorry there's a little bit more sorry and the slides are terrible I'm sorry so tomorrow you can check out me here's talk about evolving God of War combat if you're gonna take take a closer look of what we did in combat go check that out and now I will distract you guys with this video as I take a Q&A session so no questions will be asked please I can't see you no one's gonna ask me questions sweet these are all prototype videos yes so you mentioned that a Trias response to what hit create

hit reaction you caused on an opponent I was just wondering under the hood if at Reyes looks at which like attack the player uses or if it looks at like the targeted opponent which state they're in sorry so can you repeat that again so I was curious you mentioned that at Reyes looks at behaves differently based on which hit reaction the targeted opponent yes yes I was wondering if it looks at which attack the player is currently using and it whether or not hit or if it takes a look at the the opponents state right so the question is when notorious decides to attack does at race look at the enemy state or what the players doing we actually look at the enemy state because depending on what the player does his power level whatever could be completely different so calculating that we couldn't do so we based it off of in like the reactions so if an enemy were to play like a reaction

that might be you know we don't want to disrupt it at race will so perform an attack but it wouldn't cause any reaction so we would preserve their reaction okay okay thanks yeah yeah you mentioned a few times how important it was for you guys to have that feeling that whenever you press square something happens yes and your companion is doing things how did you dealt with all the aspects where it was impossible for the gameplay reasons so either he was out of arm or he was visibly occluded towards the target so he couldn't take a shot did you had situations like that and how did you feedback that to the player that he knows that something is going on but it's wrong right so the question is you know we wanted to retain the score bun to be very reactive but sometimes it's not reactive because you know a trace is in trouble and stuff like how do we deal with that that is a very good question so when he can't shoot the arrows there were actually very limited reasons why he couldn't number one is if he's

actually incapacitated incapacitated that was actually the players fault for making that happen so we were okay with the arrows not responding to that with the arrows him actually running out of arrows he just says arrow is constantly maybe it's not the best way but he just vocally tells you that he's out of arrows yeah aside from that it wasn't really yeah I think that's about it actually so didn't run into trouble of him not seeing the target that you're pressing the square if because I can easily imagine him being behind a tree visibly and right being able to reach the target that you're trying to attack yeah so the question is you know what if a trace can't physically shoot at the target we just allowed it yeah we just made sure the arrows actually goes through everything and hits the target itself makes total sense I can't so sorry that's fine okay so thank you again for doing this and I just had a quick question that I obviously know game development is a very fluid process but you mentioned a couple of times that you sort of started out knowing that you wanted at Reyes in the game and you

mentioned a couple of times of people joking about taking him out or things like that or yeah but that would have affected both the storyline and the combat right so sort of it's sort of maybe this is the wrong question but what was how was how did at Reyes fit into the initial vision of the game and how much can you tell us how much it sort of evolved over time well I'm here to talk about the combat aspects we thought the quarry about that but yeah I mean from the onset of the game we always want to trace kind of grow with his father and kind of help you on fight so that was there wasn't always an aspect of that but like you said I'm sorry the question was what was like the vision of a trace and like you know we were always talking about cutting at Reyes so how do we deal with that yeah so the vision we always want to trace kind of grow with you and stuff so that was always there but you know the combat aspect we were like okay maybe it's okay to actually remove the combat aspect and

let Atria's kind of be like a set narrative piece to fulfill like you know the father and son relationship so we had back-up plan which I didn't never wanted to do but we had backup plans yeah thank you yep hey so when you were doing with the warping of the child around did you ever have to worry about the time it took for him to warp like oh I saw him really far to my right I'm gonna fight enemy left and then he just also ended up here instantly and you wanted more to take like yeah I reckon or two instead of instant yeah so the question is do we care about the realism of teleporting from far away it's closer yeah I didn't care like I was like I'm just gonna talk about immediately because first and foremost if a trace it becomes really unreliable you kind of don't want to use a trace as much so I made sure the reliability is key and realism is kind of just down there okay yeah thanks yep hello yeah so thank you for the child was pretty good so I was there how did

you use a scripting language or something to do all these or yes the question is do we use a scripting language interesting enough we actually got a real scripting language Lua probably happen maybe a year and a half into development yeah before that we didn't have anything like that cool thanks yeah hi my questions about how in a lot of the cinematic moments particularly near the end the camera plays over and swaps between Kratos init Reyes as they're swapping through particularly fighting the stranger yeah on I can't pronounce it the big snake at the end but with their thoughts as it was developing through combat of having the camera emphasize the traces actions and kind of moving over the shoulder with them or was it always locked behind in this third-person perspective well speed of a camera me here we'll talk all about camera stuff but you know if you're actually playing the game and the camera just takes over like without kind

of like you knowing it's very disruptive as well so yeah we never I mean we entertained the idea early on but we're like no it is a terrible idea we don't want to you know focus on what a trace is doing during combat because you know if we did that you know you could be hit out of it in some places there's a lot of issues with that so we didn't go with it okay thank you yep hi my question is I'm curious about the design process of individual resolution scenes I've noticed that most of your design pillar core pillars are more like constraint like no death and no babysitting so how do you find a idea to start prototype in plane tests okay right so so the question was how do we prototype things when the core pillars seem like more like restrictions I mean they're like guidelines of how we want so so honestly when we're prototyping we had restrictions of you know create a

trace can't you know do these crazy things right but the main thing was when were prototyping we wanted to make sure a trace is a good teammate and as long as he's a good teammate and follow those core pillars we were ok with any type of prototype so that was kind of like the basis of how we went with you know all the testing and stuff so not sure if that's answers a question is the picture still on your desk yes I don't even have a picture of my wife yeah I suck how do you make sure that a trace is helpful at the beginning of the game before you get all the upgrades right towards the end yeah so the question is how do we make sure trace is useful at the beginning of the game without getting all the upgrades so you know how at the the hierarchy I listed initially about you know him the the commanded actions being

very useful we just did that so even it as a base level if you just spam Square there's level views that's actually helpful so he applied stuns you can now grab the enemy pulls the enemy away so you know we just just pretty much banked on that mechanic and it worked out pretty well hi so this video reminds me one thing which used to be talked amongst Chinese players do you know the game actually among our players have another name as the God of War and hey old father so the reason reason why is when for either player when they play the game they were freed okay so archers on da and they can and he can cause high damage so my question is have you considered about keep the two parents the damage caused between the critters and our troops so you're saying a so the question is how we considered balancing

damage based off of what sorry yeah so the patterns the damage caused between these two characters oh yeah so sorry so the question is how do we balance the damage induced characters yeah at radius actually doesn't do much damage his arrows actually do very little damage the only time you can that he actually does damage if you actually gear him to actually do that I chose never should have liked take away the players spotlight the power fantasy we just ensure that you know at radius will always support the player and killing the enemy quicker so does it both fighting so when I was claimed both fighters Valkyries and I will keep practice um button until the post died and two to maximum the damage right of that so so you so what do you say is just to limit the sounds limited archers damage into the lower lower than the creatures right yeah so I guess the

question is do we like lower the damage of trace damage so yeah yeah I mean I mean yeah as a trace like you know even if you upgrade him a lot he'll never surpassed Chris's damage that's like the rule we said so you know when we're balancing these things and you're finding these Valkyries we're like okay nitrates can do you know maybe six shots within like this kind of timeframe and we know you know what his damage per second is when we kind of bounces health and the toughness and stuff like that so that's kind of like the process we took so I don't that answers your question I'm sorry all right I guess that's it alright thank you all for coming [Applause]