My reaction to the new God of War E3 footage
32Right, this new God of War footage was definitely not something I expected.
Seems God of War has been redesigned to a very drastic extent, and I would call it a courageous move from the devs, had the new genre been anything else than the most bland, modern action adventuring imaginable.
To re-cap, the 10-minute demo footage we saw is 50% watching cutscenes, 30% running forward, and 20% fighting. To me that is an alarmingly high ratio of noncommittal fluff to good gameplay, and if the rest of the game is anything like that, it definitely deserves the descriptor "bland".
I mean, isn't anyone else sick of these modern style of games that try to be movies? Games shouldn't try to be movies. It's a misguided aspiration from the start, since games and movies are conflicting forms of media. Every second we spend watching unskippable cutscenes, doing dreary QTEs, or even running through explosive set pieces that pose little actual challenge, is a second not actually spent with the core gameplay. Too much of cinematic flourish and a game will slowly transform into unsatisfactory fluff... and right now God of War is geared to be far fluffier than I had hoped for.
And as a design choice that goes hand in hand with extreme cinematic aspirations, the game's mechanics themselves seem streamlined and not particularly interesting. Does this game even have a jump button?
Perhaps this game is a victim of the "committee design" mentality? Someone higher up wanted to cash in off the success of The Last of Us or something, with the kid sidekick and all the banter as you move around the place? I just don't get it. Not only have Santa Monica fixed something that wasn't broken, but the prospect of making God of War into a modern action adventure game with probable pseudo open-world structure seems not only an absurd, but also an outdated decision... wasn't the market over-saturated with this type of games at one point? But we'll see.