Taking an Axe to God of War Gameplay

[Music] so thank you for all for coming i'm here to talk about god for combat in this talk we'll go into some of the details surrounding the design decision design changes to our combat system in the last god of war i'm not going to get into a lot of technical details but there are a lot of other combat related talks that i'll reference later that go deeper into some of the concepts i'm going to mention here so first a quick introduction my name is jason i've been at sony santa monica for over 14 years and i've worked on every god of war i was the lead gameplay designer on the last god of war and that meant i was involved with almost everything gameplay related from bosses to enemies to kratos and atreus so over a third of my life has been spent thinking about kratos and what he can do i literally have dreams about it at this point it's it's really really strange but with me was a team of very talented combat designers some of which are inside the studio right now are inside this building and uh also old school god of war

veterans derek daniels and eric williams who were combat designers in the first two god of wars back in 2005 and 2007. so the development of this game was definitely a team effort so previously we made these games and the changes in each game was mainly about variety you know we wanted to make each one bigger grander more weapons more enemies more bosses we'd make some small refinements to the system each time but nothing too major so after 10 years or so it was exciting to try to do something new so what now we're going back to the drawing board this one would be about reinvention we wanted a new combat system that felt new and fresh this game was still called god of war though so we would try to retain what our team and our fans loved about the game so we'll talk about the path in this talk of how we did this first the vision what do we want to retain from the previous god of war games and what were we going to reinvent so we start with the vision and our director corey gave us multiple

pages of vision in the form of a book and this was given to the entire team and detailed the major pillars and direction of the game all studio departments would read this book as an initial guiding point of figuring out what to do so i had a lot of details of narrative art levels or whatever who cares about that i cared about combat gate lead gameplay designer so i jumped right to that section so what i found was the desire for a complete overhaul the camera would be close like a third-person camera or third-person shooter the game would have strafe controls like last of us and a melee focused game the chaos blades the most iconic thing about kratos were going to be replaced with a basic axe ui like combo counters were gone we were taking out circle grabs and mini games and a little kid would follow you through this entire journey so yeah the initial response to this was well how are we going to do any of that i mean this is the way the game looked like before that's the way most action games look like at least melee action games and the blades that was such an iconic weapon like how could we lose those but we did a few early tests and this is

what it looked like so we put in the camera we gave him an axe put in a bunch of shirtless dudes and we used our existing tech together get things in the game and the results confirmed every bias that we could have dreamed of it was terrible like it was really hard to see anything like that you're trying to hit this guy floating guy for no reason just this was not inspiring any kind of confidence so the next question on everyone's mind was was why like why were we doing any of this it felt like we were removing god of war combat from god of war everything we had been building up at this point would be thrown away replaced with a game that could potentially feel nothing like it so what did we do we started zooming the camera out and we played it again so here's some footage of a zoom out camera view a little bit later in development and kratos could attack all around him like he used to be able to do the enemies were starting to appear behind kratos so we were starting to get feedback of what let's let's remove the strafe controls why do we have those in the game and of course they were asking that with this viewpoint no games control

this way and while we're getting some positive feedback on this camera it still wasn't zoomed out far enough like people wanted more and i know what they wanted they wanted that familiar scent you know as we started zooming the camera out you started to see all your enemies and making the same type of combat decisions you were making in all the god of wars so if we zoomed out again it would bring us right back to where we were comfortable and it was clear that's what a lot of people wanted us to do and to be honest i kind of want to do this too i mean we were just starting out here we knew within a year we wanted to put a snippet of gameplay together how we're gonna get this done so that's when i decided to zoom the camera back in and honestly this decision was gonna haunt me for a long time i mean here i was embracing the very thing that seemed to be creating all our problems but i felt we were simply running away from the changes as opposed to really breaking them down and figuring them out i mean i was kind of used to this in god of war you know in the years i've worked there we had pegasus and god or two we had giant titans gotta wear three we had multiplayer and god war ascension is like every single time there's something impossible that it feels like you cannot do and that's what this seemed like so this

was our chance to tackle new problems so let's tackle them and that meant first accepting this vision goal the game would feel close and personal you are in there with kratos now and not just watching him from afar and as far as what we wanted the game to feel like let's take another look at that vision book and maybe read it this time and once you ignore the knee-jerk reactions to some of the details of the changes there were actually a few excerpts that gave us some clues of what to do kratos was older and he was more deliberate in this game and by playing on people's real life expectations we'll create a more intuitive and inviting gameplay loop this quote was interesting because was talking about trying to add some intuitive gameplay mechanisms to games like this or or melee action games that usually are kind of abstract it's hard to understand how to how to play those things so this made a sense as a path to changing the game old god of war was partially about flinging your blades of chaos in every direction hitting enemies everywhere you can make some deliberate choices but they weren't the focus your goal was to hit as many enemies as you could at once and use your crowd clearing abilities as much as possible so let's make

controlling kratos more precise and deliberate let's not focus on only the issues with the camera and strafe and all that let's focus on design ideas on how to make this game more deliberate and solve the camera along the way so when we think about that word deliberate you know first awareness is the first thing you have to think about because with this close camera just being aware of the enemy takes effort being aware of the arena itself takes effort we would need to tune enemies accordingly to allow player time to take in their surroundings so this meant slower paced combat the blades in combat in the past were very very fast and this time we would investigate slowing things down a bit and this would seem to work well with giving the player more time to make deliberate decisions and lastly your choice of target was much more important now the blades used to hit many targets at once your axe would be focused on one at a time so to tackle those camera changes we aimed to make a close camera that was a balance between visibility and intuitive control it needed to be just close enough that strafe always made sense but just far enough that you could see immediate

threats to your sides prompting the desire to move and reposition so i drew some icons to kind of help us out here so this was the old god of war with the camera zoomed out kratos in the middle and everything in view and if the enemy were to appear outside of you we would actually usually disable that enemy he wouldn't be allowed to attack because we were trying to put everything on screen at once this is partially why in ascension kratos started to become like a speck on screen as we try to get grander with more and more enemies on the screen now we're trying to put the camera really close to kratos but our first test had the camera this close so if an enemy was actually right out there hitting you and you wouldn't even see this enemy um so we would want to zoom the camera out just a bit so you can see him but not enough that you could think you could turn around and hit him and if that enemy started to go off screen well then we'd expect the obvious like you should just turn around and take a look at him so we implemented these changes and then we got this and the result was positive people were now controlling kratos a little bit more intuitively they were at

least looking around kind of similar to a third person shooter and trying to find their enemies and it was kind of fun to actually whip around turn around and keep track of what's going on and also didn't play much worse than our previous zoomed out test because there was actually a lot of other problems to figure out so we started playing more attention to the axe itself because when you think about the blades of old they had you know a strong power and mythical fantasy they had chains and they were on fire and the axe that was currently in his hand though it felt like you could just go to home depot and buy that thing like it was it was simple it wasn't interesting no mythical touches like the awesome blades that made them feel powerful so selling this power was a big part of kratos fantasy as a character fantasy for this weapon have a chance to live up to the mythos of the blades it had to be powerful so let's start trying to add some interesting components to the axe to emphasize the feeling of power and deliberate decision making we decided to start simple and make the axe combos short the blades had a 8-hit combo that took

some time to get to a powerful finisher a shorter combo would get there faster and that might make it feel a bit more punchy powerful it would also work better with a tight camera since it would be a shorter period of time locked into an extended combo sequence vulnerable to attacks from the sides next to give the axe a fantasy of its own we tried out a simple concept what if the axe stuck into enemies these ax sticks were a concept that corey and others liked very early as it gave the axe a distinct feel from previous weapons and other games so the new god of war we would actually connect and pause the axe inside the enemy and play an animation of kratos ripping it out and this was one of our early implications everything was full synced animations between kratos and enemy and this looked and felt powerful and it also was slowing the pace of combat kind of like what we wanted to do making things feel more deliberate so this was a good starting point in making the axe feel unique and different within the game you would kind of get in there with this kind of combat system and assassinate quickly with short combos then you'd whip the camera around and find your next target everything we had

been talking about thus far but this wasn't enough to make the axe feel special not in compared to the blades anyway there are also wasn't anything really more intuitive added by this so while all this was going on animators were hard at work creating animation previews for various ideas for the acts these are just animations that they would use to kind of prove out or or potentially show us what combat could look like so one day our lead animator mehdi animated this idea by himself so you see it has everything that we've been talking about close camera really short cameras or combos really short but then right here he throws the axe away to protect the trace it slams his head in the wall so i remember when i first saw this that like first of all the axler looked awesome but how would we ever do this like kratos throwing his iconic weapon away that we're trying to make feel special what if he didn't pick it up what if he just left it there so we kind of dismissed this idea for a while until one man named vincent napoli our lead systems designer

made the critical suggestion to call back the acts in command with a like a certain norse god prototypes were made partially with our amazing programmer george maul who's sitting right there and not making me say this at all and it immediately resonated with the team the concept was deliberate it encouraged the player to look around and attack everything with precision with the axe gone he could target someone else with his bare hands the concept also worked with our new camera i mean who would have known that a third-person shooter camera could use some third-person shooting so the aiming with the reticle from this vantage point was actually very intuitive and it was hitting that goal as well and lastly it was mythical and this one was a big deal because at first the initial direction of this entire game was very very grounded so the axe was very simple but this gave the axe that something special similar to how the blades had its chains and it opened the door to more mythical additions to the axe later on so at the end of that first year of development it was time to put together a playable snippet of the game and we called that first playable

the goal was to implement all the ideas with higher fidelity and art necessary to showcase the vision so that included the close camera showing the new perspective of the world shorter combos and slower pace the ax sticks showcasing power our brand new axe throw and a functioning atreus i know we haven't been talking about him much late just thus far but he was a very difficult part of this game like the entire time corey was reminding everybody constantly that we can't cut this guy even though everybody wanted to because it was so difficult so at this point in first play but we kind of just wanted to get him in working and he wasn't an integral part of the combat system just yet we're also trying to hit all the key words we've been talking about close in personal combat deliberate and mythical and powerful so here's a snippet of that first playable and everything's looking good the art team was knocking it out of the park and before fight any fights begin it feels like you could appreciate exploring this world from this viewpoint and the axe throw was in there and working you could recall at any time and then we had these very long ax

sticks when kratos would actually land attacks that felt powerful and the combos are shorter so you just get rid of this guy real quick and we also showcase just some basic strategies of what could happen where if you threw your axe to one guy and kick another guy off the edge so mission accomplished you know we did everything in one year like at just every in-game development knows you get the hole in one it just works perfectly it didn't because it didn't play well so here's some footage of somebody actually trying to play that content and what you'll see is a lot of kratos evasion and a lot of backing up and you'll see why in just a little bit he's trying his best to hit these enemies but not get much luck he swings here up hit out of it let's back up again throws his axe one more time because the safest thing you could probably do jump at this guy nothing happened okay well let me try to mash into him a little bit hit out of it

again let's back up and this was like the whole game right here like everybody just backing up and running away from everything and i think that this last part of that video really is telling because if you look at what happens after kratos swings twice he blocks and he didn't have a shield at this point so he was blocking just like this but if you look at the enemies on the screen nobody's doing anything like he's just blocking because he's afraid that they might do something because they don't have any he doesn't have any time to respond to what's happening on the screen and this is very not god of war at all like all this backing up all this fear and at the end of this demo we showed the player this because it's supposed to hype you up on some you know big class fight that you can get at the end of this but after actually playing it the only real player response was that so what was missing you know we had a cool looking game there but it wasn't god of war yet and we weren't retaining that feel so now we're going to talk about how we aim to do just that and the design decisions we made to ensure this game continues to feel like god of war

so first we look at that word and deliberate because maybe that was the problem all along after all seems like all these decisions that were making the game deliberate was setting on us on a road that we didn't like but i believe the problem was more that the word deliberate doesn't mean careful god of war was not about being careful you can make meaningful decisions without having to worry about everything so what do we do now so we think about what god of war actually was and we deconstruct the best of the previous combat system and ensure it's brought back into the new system we wanted players to feel similar to how they felt in previous god of war games in this new perspective the tricky thing was trying to get this to work without sacrificing the vision goals so we had to continue to remember those so when we think about the god of war feel we break it down into a few god of key components one versus many playful combat and power for all and i'm going to break down each one of those categories shortly so for one versus mini god of war was

always about this kratos had this built into his chains so everyone could see kratos take on hordes of enemies and feel confident that he'd make it through alive we knew that we had to make crowd control accessible if players were going to retain this confidence and the blades were great at this even while mashing square while axe was currently terrible so while we were thinking about what the blades could used to be corey told me of a thematic phrase that was used to describe the blades a long time ago in the original god of war and i like phrases like this because it can help ground future decisions that fail to match the theme so that phrase was ballet of fire and i laughed when he told me this but when you think about it the term really describes the feel and look of those blade attacks the footwork the elegance a powerful mythical fire shredding everything in sight twirling around hitting all the enemies in every direction but we couldn't take that approach with the axe because of the camera angle we also wanted to give the axe a different feel so we wanted to create a

thematic tagline that would encapsulate this feel and this is what we came up with plow the road and because we really wanted to feel this way we wanted to feel like you could just dive through hordes of enemies and and not have to worry about anything and we accomplished this partially by causing the enemies you attack to hit other enemies behind that enemy so when kratos attacks an enemy that enemy plays a reaction and he bumps into enemies behind him bringing everybody backward and what ends up happening is that kratos has this protective zone in front of him the entire time he's mashing that button so simply mashing r1 feels a little bit safer and more powerful in the simple groups of enemies before we added this the enemies behind the attack enemy would either slide around and attack player or disrupt the flow or slide off camera this would encourage players to poke attacks and never complete combos like we saw in the first playable so we wanted him to just shred through enemies the player should not be afraid to track into the group because that's what kratos was all about the axe would do it through sheer power as he plows the road ahead

it also made crowd control a little bit more deliberate you couldn't twirl around and hit everyone everywhere but you could face a direction and drag a crowd of enemies forward this was also a step in alleviating some of the cameras with the cl or some of the issues with the close camera since kratos could charge into a crowd and keep them in front of him with each attack and you probably noticed while looking at that that we sped up those axe attacks our axe sticks because that those ax sticks were like the bane of my existence for a very very long time it's like they were slowing everything down making it very hard to fight everybody liked the power and the feel of those things so we tried to actually do a dynamic solution where the axe would embed temporarily but it wouldn't stop kratos from actually moving or rotating or doing anything made the game feel a lot better and instead of slowing kratos down with those slow axis that we had let's just slow the enemies down using something else frost and similar to the blades and fire the axe having frost and ice was mythical it would add intuitive effects enemies struck by cold would be slowed or frozen and you could easily understand how that might help you in crowd control slowing

the enemies down and finally it gave context to a lot of special area of effect attacks that kratos could do to attack multiple enemies at once to help that once versus many concept so all this was nice additions to help that one versus many but it was also helped our next part of god warfeel which is playful combat and what i mean by play here is that it should be fun moving kratos around linking various moves together or having fun knocking around the enemy cast all of this should be enjoyable before even worrying about the enemy designs or specific obstacles specific obstacles you will face so let's start with why this is important with the player's moveset there's a lot of chaos in any game with lots of enemies on screen which we knew we wanted and players needed to be able to react quickly to what they see if they start an action they should be able to change their mind instantly and to help explain the importance of this i'd like to reference an apple design talk called designing fluid interfaces this talk discussed some of the philosophies

on making their iphone ui feel fluid and good to the user and there's some great parallels to gameplay design they use this example that if somebody started walking across the room and wanted to change their mind and turn the other way they don't have to wait until they get to the end of the room to make that decision because this is reality that's what people do all the time they start in action and they stop it whenever they want so when users are not capable of doing that in the user interface it just feels bad not connected with their expectations so he designed everything in the iphone ui to be interruptable they described it as making the ui feel like an extension of yourself and that's how we've always felt about kratos and god of war games are old if you think it usually you can do it we allow cancelling moves into other moves we prioritize defensive cancelling since those are the typical actions people want to do spontaneously in a car you might be able to live with slow acceleration in most scenarios but you would like to stop instantly to avoid accidents but in special scenarios we do allow some offense to cancel other offense if it's special enough so here's a small example with our launch move

so if press r2 you do this launch and that's the move in its entirety but you can also cancel that at the end of the recovery frame into block or you can cancel it right after the hit frame into block or right before the hit flame or just right away and we allow this cancelling because simply pressing the attack button shouldn't be a risky commitment in a god of war game when you want to encourage we want to encourage players to play with their moveset so let's look at how we apply this logic to our new concept the axe throw the ax throw has two primary commands l2 to pull aim and triangle to recall the axe we wanted to ensure that these actions had a god of war style canceling to ensure that they felt right so we allow you to cancel the l2 throw or the pull aim in scenarios where you're most likely to do it just after an action or after an attack this allows players to follow up most actions with a quick axe throw we could have let you cancel the entire attack with that but then you might have a hard time doing combos hitting an enemy and then following up with this the recall though was special we allow

that to cancel any time so if you look at this right in the middle of my kick i just cancel that it looks a little weird but we're okay with that because the feel of recalling when you want is more important you can even cancel that recall with an evade as shown here because we prioritize defense and when you combine everything together it could look like this this is kind of crazy chaotic just canceling everything all the time you could look at this and wonder why you would even want allow this in the game but it also enables things like this controlled deliberate cancelling if you sidestep cancel mid combo we allow that combo to continue if you keep pressing attack rewarding that decision and that allows persistent evasion while progressing your combo so we don't mind the chaotic results because most players won't make the game look that bad but they will feel the difference if they weren't allowed to play with the moveset in this way which is why we wish to retain that from the god of war of old next the other part of playful combat is

playing with your enemies and we used to do this with the two core attack buttons in every god of war so let's deconstruct their purpose before they were square and triangle but now they were r1 and r2 because of the third person camera most people would probably reference those as light and heavy attacks and the light tacks were pretty straightforward they gave us weight to the most basic offense to allow the player to do simple combinations of attacks but why would the player ever press that heavy button what's the player choice when they're pressing that button damage sounds like a good start it's called heavy attack after all but in play tests it sometimes tends to be ambiguous we didn't have any damage numbers on the screen we didn't have any way to show that it was doing that much damage so how much damage would it need to do to be worthy of use if it does too much then it competes with ever pressing the light button and if you penalize me for pressing it well that doesn't seem as fun you could give it a distinct ability such as breaking blocks that gives it a good reason to exist but only if you're actually fighting a character that blocks so we wanted people thinking about pressing this

button most of the time not only in specific scenarios what about heavy reactions we had that in first playable bigger reactions feel good in general but if there's no difference strategically that nuance wears off over time and that's where we were at in our first playable demo the answer for god of war is that we actually don't only call it this heavy button we call it the setup button because its purpose is to set up the enemies for further attack we do this with a large enemy state change that gives more options to the player after hitting that character launching for example leads to an enemy air state that encourages players to follow up and attack them in mid-air and launching is inherently playful because you want to see how long you can keep them in the air like playing paddleball and the significance of this is that enemies are designed to be punching bags that aren't meant to die right away i used to run around and say this in the studio all the time where it's like the punching bag it feels terrible and people would look at me like i was nuts and i didn't have the sweet gdc presentation to make it clear you know because what i meant by that is that in god of war players are supposed

to play with their enemies they're not supposed to die that fast we want enemies changing state constantly as you knock them around so let's go through some of the various hit reactions to the new god of war to get more details on how we did this and i'm going to split them up into two camps normal reactions which differ mostly in translation and recovery time and set of reactions that are designed to encourage some kind of player follow-up and we actually had more reactions than just this but this suite was the core of what existed in the system and the game became more fun once we added these back so starting with the simplest we have basic and all this is just a reaction that's short enough or long enough that you can continue your combo but if you look at that drawer and how long he kind of sits there especially after this one attack right here that was actually good because it gave us plenty of time to look around and not have to worry about the enemy even after one hit stagger is a more intense version of this reaction which results from stronger attacks from the player like a sprint attack longer recovery means even more time to make decisions

and for us first setup reaction we have launch and launch just feels good and powerful for all the reasons that we said it took us a long time to put this back in the game because we were trying to make the game feel grounded but this reaction is just too fun it's fun to juggle it's fun to follow up and it's immediately clear difference between r2 and r1 spin was a reaction we had in the past but it had greater purpose in this new god of war because from this new camera angle positioning enemy's backside is intuitive and desirable this reaction allowed the player to expose an enemy's back without any positioning and lay into the enemy's back at will making you feel powerful trip was a quick way to get the enemy on the floor tripped enemies would remain on the floor longer giving you even more time to make decisions and flyback was a knockback reaction usually flyback would happen at the end of a combo because we kind of want to eject the enemy from kratos after completing that combo that kind of forces a choice on a player either i follow up and i chase them down or i fight somebody else it's a nice little uh pacing break within our combos and the enemy that gets knocked back it's other enemies as well which

all slam into walls they all get ringed out it's very god of war and with this new camera angle we had an opportunity to emphasize our wall reactions so any basic hit would cause most enemies to slump against it for a long recovery time before they can move again and that's a really long recovery time so it helps with that one versus mini thing where i can knock a bunch of guys into the walls and turn around and not worry about them for a while um and we also had a wall bounce if enemy was knocked against the wall with force like that so similar to kratos move sets reactions themselves are designed to be cancelled into each other this encourages constant constant offense on the player since most enemies will always respond a very god of war trait and tougher enemies will typically have limited reactions that be less playful so an example of a reaction like that is twitch and this basically is a reaction that the enemy recovers from so fast that they are allowed to attack again this makes the player feel a little bit weaker so we got to use this reaction carefully we had one playtest where we went overboard on these reactions because later enemies had

almost all their reactions being demoted into twitch to make them feel harder and every day i would see this one player kind of get his soul crushed more and more as he was trying to play the game and the game was getting harder and harder and nothing was working and and his soul was just like dying right in front of me and on his last survey which is a basic question about the game he responded with this because exactly what you want to hear in a play test so this did give us some good information on what difficulty feels good and we learned from this when we tuned our hard harder difficulties because anybody who's played our harder difficulties probably knows we actually do use twitch for a lot of the bass r1 attacks we want to encourage people to kind of move around and use their deliberate abilities like setups but what we learned is that we don't demote the setup reaction so launches still work tripping still works all that stuff still works you just have to think a little bit more when you do it so let's look again at the axler concept and see how that contributed to playing with your enemies in god of war so to throw your axe you'd hold l2 and

from that you can press r1 for a light throw light throws just cause normal reactions most of the time nothing too exciting there but precision hits will cause those setup reactions so you could hit him in the head and spin him around giving instant access to his back or you hit him in his legs and trip and give him that extra recovery time to make decisions so just with that move alone you have two options that you can make a follow-up decision up right afterwards or i could have pressed r2 and do my heavy attack that's slower to throw but with no precision advantages but like a true setup butting button landing this attack will change the enemy's state into frozen so when he's in a frozen state he's just sitting there sitting duck you can just go and wail on him or you could kick this frozen enemy and you can kick the enemy into other enemies slowing them or knocking them to walls and make them shatter and it helped us a lot because this was like a technique that a lot of people wouldn't know at first so they'd feel good when they learned about it and would give you a lot more time to handle your enemies because you could apply frost to everyone right from the start of the game so through this mix of r1 and r2 play

you can have a lot of fun just playing with enemy reactions with the axe thor alone making the axe throw a participate in playful combat is what formally cemented it in the god of war play style and all this playful combat leads to improvisation and all games have improvisation to some level but for god of war it was important to make sure that it was a combination of playing with your moveset and playing with your enemies if you allow the player to do that the players can create non-can combos that they can improvise so if you have all that you can get the game to look like this a very deliberate long combo that brings them all the way across the level kicking them into this wall and all these enemies are tuned right now to not even attack or do anything because this was like a barometer check that we always use to test the fun factor of the game is it fun just to go in this test level and knock guys around i'd be in meetings doing this while talking to people if i'm not enjoying myself there was probably a problem because if you couldn't do this then it probably meant that our tools just weren't playful enough or at least not as playful as the old god of war games

so the last thing we wanted to make sure we retained was that feeling of power because obviously we dedicate a lot of time making sure the game the player feels powerful but what you really want is everyone to feel powerful not just the gaming elite so in the past god of war games we always had some kind of god mode meter and that meter gets full and the player gets access to some powerful attacks often this meter is fillable by resource or combos or combat skill but it's also driven by lack of skill because it filled up when the player got attacked so even if you're getting your ass kicked you're often given the means to come back and win and this allowed everyone to feel powerful no matter how well they were doing at the game so like the axe and the blades that needed a thematic phrase and we came up with this monster out of the box because and once again we had a theme that we could look back on to ensure our future decisions were in the right direction and the theme here was that kratos was letting that monster out that we all knew that he had from the previous god of war games because this was a sequel as a continuation

and this is the moment where you'd feel the most like he used to be and this rage meter like previous god of war titles would fill up as the player made mistakes and took damage and also fill up a bit during attack so this made it more likely to be available when players needed it and ensured you get to see kratos at his most powerful that all players could do that and kratos uses bare hands in this mode and at first we fall down the same kind of deliberate path as everything else but we realized quickly that players didn't want to feel or feel deliberate while playing this they just wanted that old-school feeling of god of war they just wanted to feel powerful and making it less deliberate actually succeeded at that another important thing about rage mode is that it provided a get out of jail free card when the player is in trouble out of all our cancelling rules rage mode is the most flexible and can be used out of most reactions and negative states for characters we wanted this to be reliable so when the player is in the worst states they can feel that turn the tide when they activate raid mode so here's a player using rage mode and he's going to usually actually just use one button but you can

see the effect it has on the enemies much greater than anything else that you could do normally so when players would break out this mode they would get that sense of like oh yeah this is awesome and they'd have to go back and kind of be more deliberate feeling but then they would go back to that when they needed it it was a nice pacing flow for the combat of the game so we had deconstructed that god of war feeling that we wanted to bring out of players by bringing some key things back um simple effective crowd control for one versus mini fighting a playful combat system that encourages improvising with kratos moveset and an enemy reaction set that's built around knocking enemies around like a punching bag and a simple no-brainer method of filling the power fantasy for everyone but we still had a few elements to think about and that's when we talk about reinventing the gameplay loop because even when we added all of these things the kind of meta of the game or what you were thinking about moment to moment was actually very similar so there are a few additions we needed to make to fully reinvent the game so we already had a head start here i mean just changing the camera view was causing us to rethink how players

handle kratos and assess threats but if you think combat wise again the moment to moment was pretty similar so there's other things we wanted to investigate so while we're thinking about all the ways we can make the combat system more deliberate naturally we thought about a stamina system this is a regenerating meter that you need to attack and defend and run out of it you get tired and you can't do anything for a while at first it seemed to hit all our goals it was deliberate measured it would certainly make you think about the attacks that you do but we scrapped that one really early and because we felt immediately that it wouldn't feel like god of war and since we deconstructed god of war we know what that means we want kratos to be overly offensive we want uh your options to be available as option as often as possible defense should always be available we didn't want players to have to stop and think too much before reacting to what was on screen so in short it just reduced our playful combat so we scrapped it that's not to say stamina is bad a lot of games use stamina in great ways it just didn't match that god of war feel that we were looking for now there's another trope though that a

lot of games have that would fit well with our direction and this is why as we started playtesting the game we started to notice this behavior so kratos was you know kind of going past enemies knocking them around and you would turn around and get a look at everybody and kind of have no idea who you last hit no idea how much damage you buy and apply to anyone if only there was some way to reveal that information and of course there was life bars this was dead symbol it added target prioritization in a way we never had kill the enemy with the lowest health we had talked about life bars before but it was always rejected because we didn't want players really thinking about this we liked them just going in there and having the playful combat and knocking enemies around we didn't want them to think overthink about what damage they were applying but this addition favored our deliberate camera control for the reasons i gave you could look you could stop looking at an enemy look at somewhere else and then turn back and understand exactly where you left off and it favored the direct attack style of the axe because allow you to pinpoint enemy and kind of drill them down with health if you that's what you wanted to do

these were added late in the project in the last year of development but it was something that felt fit like a glove with the new vision and it opened the window to the next concept we wanted to reinvent which is grabbing enemies because grabbing enemies was a huge part of god of war i remember when i first arrived in the studio that was the thing that made the difference for me first off it's like kratos was actually grabbing guys i didn't do that in other games i was playing so from the get-go we knew we wanted to have these signature kills again the question was how previous games you would damage an enemy until they were low health and then a circle would pop over the head and you would grab them we had been doing that low health thing for so long felt like we needed to change that so we wanted to retain the feeling of dominating your enemy like that but reinvent the gameplay loop for doing it so with that initial line in the sand and especially the original line in the sand with no circles over enemies heads we had this pre idea pretty early in the project use meters to grab enemies so instead of that rage mode i was talking about what if we just filled up a meter and every time that was full you could grab an enemy

this was actually featured in our 2016 e3 demo when everybody thought he was going to pull out his blades with spartan rage he instead used his rage mode to go grab this troll at first it seemed to hit all the new vision goals reduction of ui over enemies heads deliberate usage of grab whenever you wanted as long as you had a meter and a heavy dose of improvisation because part of the reasons why this was an interesting idea was that players could now start the fight with a grab if they wanted to they didn't have to attack anyone they'd have to weaken anybody but this failed miserably because of the same problem that we've had in every god of war with this meteor everyone saves it or they forget about it until they're in trouble this meant long fights where enemies or players wouldn't grab anyone they killed 20 enemies maybe grab one if that so that sense of kratos dominating his enemies repeatedly throughout fights just wasn't happening and it felt like a big part of the game was missing now note the rage mode that we i was talking about before does have this feeling where it's like you could save it and all that but it was this burst of power that you actually didn't want to happen all the time so that was great

but for this this is like a chord to kratos character we wanted this to happen all the time so what about a stun system sun system had been brought up before god of war ascension actually had a stun system of people if you actually remember that an enemy stun meter would gradually fill when enemies attacked and it will start to decrease when you stop attacking so the player is encouraged to continue attacking as much as possible when the when the meter's full the enemy would get stunned and then the enemy could be grabbed but the meter and ascension was invisible you couldn't see it and it made it difficult to balance and hard for players to understand but remember those life bars that we added late in the project so as we were implementing those life bars we also re-changed the entire graph system within a few days right before a play test production loved us they couldn't get enough but we believed in this because we thought that this would actually be the thing that now would give you a deliberate way to choose to grab enemies so when we put it in the results were huge immediately players were grabbing enemies and fights and kratos was starting to look like kratos again the gameplay loop was familiar attack

enemy grab enemy but the difference was now that the player could deliberately choose strategies to stun enemies versus damage them and we could now reward all those deliberate actions we've been talking about for so long like hitting enemies in the back slamming him into walls you know bare hand attacks versus the axe all of those would do more stun so all those deliberate actions we were thinking about now had a direct global purpose that resonated with kratos core fantasy and once that dam broke allowing all that design information we began adding even more to it first the sun bar as mentioned then the r3 button because we couldn't put circles over guys heads but r3 is under life bars that was a go and then fire and ice element damage as well and even more and just like that we went from single damage system to a multi-damage giving players even more reason to change attacks depending on what type of damage they wanted to apply to the enemy so the stun system and damage types emphasize another old god or concept which was the happy accident and happy accidents is a non-deliberate action

that alters players actions an example is the parry system in most god of wars perry and block are both on the same button l1 if you press on one you'll block but if you time it correctly you'll parry so what ends up happening is that sometimes you'll just try to block but perry by accident because he just happened to time it right and that was a happy accident one that a player could take advantage of and turn the tide of combat it also reminds people that the perry exists if they forgot making it more accessible so these happy accidents lead to deliberate actions like finding a 20 bill in the ground and picking up not turning it into your local police station and instead going to the store and buying something so while performing basic concept combat you would see the enemy's stun meters changed regardless of what people were trying to do they'd be hitting on the back knocking the walls unintentionally but in doing that actually adding stun to all the enemies so nearly stunned enemies would prompt players to actually start strategizing towards stun if they weren't thinking about it before and if they just accidentally stunned an enemy well that's even better just grab them that's great so this worked for fire and ice and all the other status effects as well and it really added a different feel to the game

so we have this new emphasis on uh target prioritization with the life bars and multiple damage types stunned being the most important because that's the one that allows you to grab enemies but there's still something i haven't talked about in a while and that's this little guy and as mentioned early earlier atreus was initially not an exciting endeavor on the combat side this tiny kid was tagging along kratos all the time made it seem like he would be a nuisance that would disrupt all the stuff that we're talking about but there were some interesting ideas there right from the start early on the idea of a sun button would separate him from the typical ai companion that you might find in other games you'd press this button you could actually take control of them briefly and we everybody envisioned this in their head where kratos would launch a guy and you'd press this button and trace his arrows would juggle him very god of war very immediate that's what we wanted to do but power i mean we've been talking about that a lot for kratos but didn't feel like that was part of a trace's journey his fantasy

wasn't about power so when thinking about atreus i liked thinking about an old quote from michael jordan and his quote was talent wins games but teamwork and intelligence wins championships and that quote fit this vision kratos has all the talent in the world but to complete this new journey he would need atreus and so a good thematic tagline for atreus was simply being a great teammate and this made sense all our inspirational art has been showing this the whole time kratos and atreus were a team so all design decisions should be centered around selling atreus as a great teammate so if you think about sports or your development teams what would you consider a good teammate probably somebody that doesn't get in the way team is better with this teammate on it probably somebody that helps the team succeed the teammate has value you probably want this teammate to take direction get results and you probably don't want the teammates to wait to be asked you want to take some initiative and do some things on their own and almost more importantly he was a god

of war teammate so he should take part in all the stuff that we talked about before that deliberate vision the one versus many concepts and playfulness and reinventing the grab with the stun system so the sun button was atreus taking direction each shot applied more stun to enemies than damage this made atreus a core part of greatest grab system right from the get-go giving instant value in most encounters it also separated him from the power fantasy of kratos because treyas wasn't the one doing the grabbing kratos was his shots also distracted enemies so this took pressure off the player creating a subtle bit of crowd control in his own way it also presented their backs to kratos which is a good setup because the players could take advantage of that and lastly uh that playful combat we were talking about which worked exactly as we thought like launching a guy and shooting a guy in the air kind of doesn't get old it's just that kind of old school god of war feel that we wanted but some people forgot to even press this button to be honest we give them all these sweet abilities only for

players to forget he even exists we'd have a play testing like hey what'd you think about him he's like i don't know i forgot he was even there so but that's until he started taking more initiative and atreus didn't wait for kratos to actually give a command to do anything he could decide to attack even combo juggle enemies on his own these autonomous attacks also added stun meaning he could stun enemies on his own even if the player didn't notice all this directly each time it happened all of this was helping with crowd control and these autonomous attacks also contributed to the happy accidents that we've been talking about you could strategically change your plan based on what you might see atreus do in the distance which is what you want out of a good teammate so here's an example of treyas taking part in all these systems try to keep an eye on atreus throughout he's going to come in on the right side so there he is he's going to jump on this guy enhance this reaction for me that's cool then he's just going to stun him so i can grab him beat him down that's cool he's going to boot this guy in front of me that's convenient i'll just chop him up

he's going to follow up on that guy knocking him down that's great tripped this guy for me some free crowd control no problems with that he's going to come here grab this guy give me enough time to chop this guy in half and lastly when i kick this guy backward he'll kind of launch him on his own do some juggling all without me pressing a button give me plenty of time to do that and that's when we had all that in and working when we had all that in and working that's when trace officially became a part of the family playtesters were giving him positive feedback and corey didn't have to remind everyone that he would never get cut because he never would we'd all get fired instead so that's because gameplay-wise he was talking to all our systems everything from the vision to what we needed to retain from the older games and to what we wanted to reinvent in the whole new game in fact the trace himself is probably the culmination of everything we were changing about this game so some final thoughts on this

determine your vision as early as possible because if it's strong you should be able to use it as a guiding point throughout i'm a fan of those thematic phrases i've been mentioning like ballet of fire and plow the road and monster in a box because it's something very simple to explain and then refer back to if you're heading the wrong direction like i mentioned all of this as if we were like brilliantly making all these decisions every step of the way but we weren't there was a lot of hindsight as 2020 here also deconstruct your inspiration and break down the players choices since we were making a sequel that partially meant us looking back on our own games but honestly we deconstructed many many games along the course of development to determine what type of field we were looking for and lastly determine your gameplay loop because specifically those player choices on what you intend to add hopefully these choices go well with your vision in order to make a cohesive feeling game and also hopefully bring something new to the table that's unique to your own game compared to others so for us that started with that vision of close and personal

deliberate mythical power but while we did that we wanted to retain the one versus many that playful combat and that power for all and lastly we wanted to reinvent the game as well starting with that close camera new emphasis on target prioritization multiple damage types that the player could choose between at any time and that great teammate in atreus and it was all those things combined that allowed us to take an axe to god war our gamepl designer hayato is giving a talk later today called raising atreus for battle and god of war this talk will go in depth on how atreus became a great teammate and much more and if you're interested in knowing more about how we solve problems regarding that close third person camera please check out the talk from me here our now lead combat designer he has a talk called evolving combat and

god of war for a new perspective that goes deep on the choices we made to actually land that close camera feel thank you so much so we still have a little bit of time for q a if anybody's interested in that and then after that i will go to a wrap-up room somewhere you'll be able to find me hi hey what's up uh awesome talk awesome game thank you so much oh thank you um my question for you is uh it was a super huge surprise you know midway through this game where it's like you know i fell in love with the axe i bought in like i'm into it it's like by the way here's your blades back i'm curious how that decision was made in terms of like was i always like in the vision book that like kratos would sort of discover this ancient power and after making all these like you know deliberate decisions about the axe how was it uh what was it like making the blades fit into this new combat system right yeah so the the

blades were not in that vision book at first it was all about the acts it was all about this new feel for the game eventually in a few revisions we knew that the blades were coming back in story mode we hid that from everyone but we knew and um and i think that the next question was how do we use how do we convert the blades to kind of fit this vision so a lot of that came from just the third person camera alone you know because the way things that we were learning about the axe in terms of holding enemies in place and and keeping enemies uh you know burning or freezing or whatever they applied to all the things for the blades as well so when we worked on the ax we actually probably delayed work on the blades probably too long for comfort for some people but what we were doing is kind of finalizing what the axe was going to be and then it was easy to apply that to the blades afterwards awesome thank you very much thanks for the talk um is there anything in hindsight that you think didn't work well or that you would do differently next time oh yeah i mean all that stuff i talked about i did that a lot sooner yeah like uh i think i think uh they're

whenever you're doing something new there's always a lot of doubt in terms of what you're doing there's a lot of second guessing and sometimes that can distract you from actually moving forward so i we actually did do a good job of getting out of that haze quicker than i than it seemed like we would at the time but but i think it could have been even quicker we could have gotten to some of these decisions even faster if we kind of bought into the vision earlier and as far as like the final product goes do you feel like there were decisions that you made that you like like if you got there sooner you could have developed i don't know this system more or something like that oh yeah well i mean there's always i mean there hasn't been a god of war game that i've made that there wasn't something that we could have added at the end um thankfully we keep making them so maybe maybe we'll make another one all right thank you yeah hi great talk um so can you talk a little bit about some balance challenges you faced in terms of forming combo moves especially when you started adding more elements like fire and ice into the game yeah um so the question was like how do we balance like all the damage types so every single damage type had a way to

be scaled on difficulty and per enemy and everything like that so we would decide on an enemy bases like which ones could stun faster than others what else how would we bring that done sorry excuse me bring that down does the trace stun is that too easy we'll bring that down or maybe the axon is too easy bring that down sorry i punch stuff a lot when i'm talking um so uh we we essentially just had tuning and parameters for all those separately and then as we were tuning the game we would go into each individual circumstance and change that as as needed cool thanks oh yeah i'm sorry i didn't even see you i'm sorry um was the um third-person camera the only reason that drove you to move the attacks to the shoulder buttons and follow-up question is how long did it take you to give players the option to go back to the face buttons oh um so the question was like did we have the shoulder buttons as an initial um thought and yes it was like the moment we knew that there was a third third person camera immediately the shoulder buttons were

the things we wanted to use it actually took us a long time to add an option for the face buttons as well and that was kind of mainly that as through development we started adding more things to kind of satiate everybody that might want to play this game and one might want to play it a certain way so we added the face buttons mainly for that but the true way to play is probably the shoulder buttons for us thank you and sorry thank you um so uh one of the things i've noticed is that you mentioned like players for example forgot to use atreya's button yeah you should something like that and i was wondering there's this issue in many action games where players will use like a third of all your the ability cool abilities you have in the game and i was wondering how do you deal with this issue because i mean how do you deal with the possibility that there's this player or there's maybe a lot of players that will generally use like the most basic attack dodge basic attack dodge how do you deal with this issue that

kind of turns the game into a little repetitive thing yeah so the question was that um when you have all these abilities and players start forgetting about them like what methods can we use to make them remember well not only make them remember but give them a reason to use something else sure but the boss basic attack right yeah so so what you're talking about is probably the most difficult part of gameplay tuning yeah because as you you know even in our game like there was some people that on certain difficulties probably just didn't touch certain stuff you'd have to determine what is important for them to know and what you can live with them not knowing so for example in our game like easy and normal difficulty we kind of didn't care if you didn't do certain things so if you just played the game and ignored part of it still were having fun that was fine for us but the harder difficulties were tuned to kind of uh raise the value of those concepts so a lot of what we try to do is we would look at analytics of what people are doing and how they're playing the game and if we see them like a good example actually the runic attacks where people would equip one runic attack and have that equipped the entire game when we first put all runic attacks in and part of that

was just because the value of the other ones just weren't apparent like people couldn't tell the difference between one versus the other so they just stuck with one so we would keep tuning that and making it more pleasing feel-wise more pleasing value-wise until we start actually seeing more people start to use it and unfortunately you kind of have to take that as a case-by-case spaces you could just forcefully remind them say hey press this button or you have lock and keys where it's like hey this enemy forces you to do this if you weren't doing it before but we try as much as we can to try to make sure the value of all these are unique and different enough that there's some scenario where you can make use out of it yeah because usually we can you force it a lot of players are just not really like that yeah cause it just feels like work then so you kind of want you know to encourage them to do it encourage them to want to do that by the value in the specific thing that this move is adding so you also you said that you defined as a team okay this the players can live without knowing and but this they have to know oh yeah absolutely like there's some you know when you look at our combat system there's so many things in it we can't expect a hundred percent of

people to know everything but there's certain things that we know we want them to to do such as grabbing enemies that was important to us we really wanted players to do that so we highlighted r3 over the life bar and we did all these things to make you want to do it all right thank you yeah um so i know you uh touched a little bit on how the player would manage enemies a little bit regarding um you know adjusting the camera slightly but there was two talks i believe last year one regarding doom and one regarding uh hellblade where in doom enemies would have a ticketing system where only certain number of enemies could attack at a time and uh for hellblade um all the enemies would try and go from the periphery or behind to the player's um front uh so they could manage all the enemies that way i was wondering if you guys had a similar system for either of those or if um if an enemy could attack they were just going to uh so yes we did have it so the question was like the when enemies circle around kratos was there some kind of system controlling all of this uh and yes there

absolutely was like ever since the first god of war we've had like a fight circle system where enemies would similarly have some kind of token it's not exactly the same but something like that where they would have this aggression meter and a certain amount of enemies that can kind of fill that meter and when it gets too full characters can attack and actually you're kind of kind of getting into the details i think in mahir's talk so you'll get a little bit more information on that but but essentially yes we did because that's the only way you're gonna be able to do this like if you have enemies all swarming you in no way to control it it just is unplayable so we've always had that hi um thank you for your talk my question is about atreus so how did you balance him to not take away intentionality from the player say for example i'm waiting for an enemy to attack me and i really want to parry him um but then before that happens atreus stones him oh right yeah yeah so um the question is like how do we prevent atreus from like just screwing you over so so this was actually a big part of the trace's design and a lot of the iteration because a lot of the things

that treyas does is designed to not take him away from your position so a good example is like when he comes up and he grabs a guy when he does that all he's doing is making it easier to hit the guy that's already right in front of me he's not pushing him aside or doing anything that's going to stop my view similarly if i'm pointing my reticle at an enemy that'll be the worst time for kratos or sorry atreus to knock him out the way so we have a lot of checks to make sure that what atreus does actually only enhances what i'm probably already doing so another good example is if i knock the guy away and he lands over here it's fine for a trace to come here and just kind of beat him down you know but if he moves him then that's going to probably screw me up if i was going to evade and follow him so we try to make sure that all everything atreus does is just an enhancement on what i'm doing so he never gets in the way thanks hi you mentioned at a certain point switching to multiple different resources in combat and i'm wondering if you ever got to a place where you were worried that you had too many or where players would be confused by all the different element options and if

not how did you avoid that yeah yeah so um so the question was like once we started adding all the damage types and various things in the game what happens if when did it become too complicated or were we afraid of that and the answer to that i think is the entire studio is constantly afraid of that especially if you're not a combat designer like everybody else is just you know always scared about everything you're gonna add especially if they're playing the game themselves and they're not doing those things so that's where play tests help a lot you know because we had about 20 people each time coming in playing the game and then you would hopefully see within those 20 people a variety of things that they're doing because again you don't expect just in one playstation play session for everybody to gravitate towards everything but everybody has their own you know play styles and you try to put things in the game that kind of contribute to that play style so we would look at that and try to see if players would start to gravitate towards it and if we started to see things to be a bit too complicated meaning that we'd ask them and see if they understand this or we have no idea we either try to simplify it or make it so they can't understand but someone to my answer to the other question it's like we were okay if you

didn't know some things thank you hey jason thanks so much for your talk it's good to see some of the magic behind the scenes my question is regarding um how this combat system interfaced with bosses were there any special considerations or adaptations you had to make yes absolutely i mean the bosses especially the big bosses like the dragon like they always have their own kind of system in terms of how they're going to attack you because they're kind of outside the combat system um thankfully other characters like the stranger no spoilers you know but the stranger you know it's like he was a enemy that was in our combat system so we always have special considerations for any special case things that need to happen but generally characters like that operate within the combat system thank you hi great talk thank you very much um i've been playing god of war since god of war one back in i don't know when i was young i guess and um uh i've always been able to beat them on the hardest difficulties or my favorite parts of games like this especially in god of war three uh jumping into this game uh obviously from the get-go you can't play the game with

hardest difficulty because it's like you're clearly not ready but like uh i jumped into the difficulty above normal yeah and it demolished me so i don't know if i'm just like kratos really old and angry or if it's something that um a big thing i noticed about the difficulty was that it's sort of just extended enemy life bars to make them take a lot more hits as opposed to other games that have just made it to where the time to kill is the same but the damage outputs are higher so there's a lot more risk and reward was there a lot of talk uh in the studio of doing that deliberately for the purpose of a lot of the juggling mechanics you were talking about oh yeah i mean there's a lot of gameplay tuning i mean i can say that we didn't really extend a character's life bars just to make more juggling happen but usually what we're trying to do is we're trying to emphasize some of the more deliberate decision making so some ideas like oh i can launch a guy and throw the axe and pin him into a wall for an instant kill doesn't matter how much health they have things like that were things that we were trying to promote on some of the harder difficulties so we would tune their health up slightly but hopefully not too slightly that it felt like you couldn't win but more so that we wanted you to kind of take part in some of those deliberate decisions that i was talking about so like like in that

example where you could freeze a guy and kick an enemy into multiple guys that gives you a lot of time to kind of make these decisions but if you don't do that it probably will be a rough experience yep oh i think we're out of time so thank you i will head to the