God of War III lead designer talks graphics and development

IGN Australia managed to catch up with God of War III lead designer Todd Papy and the short interview shed some light on the graphical and technical aspects of Kratos and his knack for killing everything that moves. Since the dev team has a lot of PS3 power to work with, Papy has plenty of room to learn, to polish, and to share knowledge with other developers.

IGN Australia managed to catch up with God of War III lead designer Todd Papy and the short interview shed some light on the graphical and technical aspects of Kratos and his knack for killing everything that moves. Since the dev team has a lot of PS3 power to work with, Papy has plenty of room to leanr, to polish, and to share knowledge with other developers.

“Well, we’re in LA, so there are a lot of game developers in the area,” he said, mentioning his frequent trips to Naughty Dog, which is a convenient five-minute walk from their studio. Insomniac is also nearby, which only down the road in Burbank. “…so we have that luxury of being in amongst Sony developers out there Â– and they’re always in our office and we’re in their office!” he exclaimed.

Since God of War III would be Kratos’ debut on the PS3, the mighty god-slayer will have to undergo several changes from his PS2 beginnings. “Well, just working on the visuals on PS3 hardware, making that jump from PS2 to PS3 was a huge challenge. We’re still learning new technologies and new tools and we’re very, very happy with the outcome of the demo,” Papy said.

Framerate also became an issue, since the dev team was faced with the balancing framerate and environmental detail. “Our framerate is variable between 30 and 60 [frames per second] and so far the reaction on the framerate from players has been that it looks really good and plays really good,” he said. ” Well, we want to achieve a balance of the two, right? We want the game to look amazing and play amazing!”

And as far as amazing goes, Todd Pappy is very proud of their work with Kratos’ massive new buddies. “I think the centrepiece is definitely the Titans Â–and I know Stig from the studio’s already been talking about this, so it isn’t new information or anything, but it really is the Titans. Dude, they’re huge. That’s it Â– you’ll love it.” Papy also adds that we’ll be seeing “a few” of them in action. We’ve already seen Atlas, and some of the trailers were on Gaia’s massive foresty back.

Massive like the Titans, the PS2-to-PS3 transition would no doubt feature a graphics boost, and Papy is confident with what they’ve got so far:

I kinda always wanna show off the art, but from the design side, there are new items, new weapons Â– and for the blades, there are all kinds of new moves. But the graphical effects play to this as well; when you’re playing through something and you’re like “oh, I’ve seen this before,” we’ll add all kinds of new effects and animations to them. They feel new again.

My eyes are already itching to see what those are, and I bet yours are doing the same.

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