GoW: Chains of Olympus could have been a 2D side-scroller

Thank goodness the guys at Ready at Dawn are wicked talented! Did you know that they actually considered porting God of War to the PSP — as a 2D side-scroller?!? A travesty! But as I said, thank goodness they’re wicked talented.

This trivia was revealed in an interview with Dana Jan, God of War: Chains of Olympus lead designer. “There were early discussions of making Chains of Olympus a side-scroller rather than 3D in case the experience couldn’t fully be realized on a handheld. This really fueled us to prove that it could be done.”

This hawtness in 2D??? Bah!

It’s not that they didn’t believe they could pull of a 3D PSP version, no that’s not it. But you see, they had to be realistic. And reality showed that sometimes, games from consoles don’t translate beautifully into their handheld versions.

“Games like God of War don’t usually translate well when they are brought to handhelds. The gameplay, graphics, animation, sound etc. have a tendency to ‘differ’ from their counterparts,” he explained.

“We knew from the beginning that God of War had a distinct visual style and an epic scale that had to be recreated on the PSP in order to do the franchise justice. With God of War 2 hitting shelves prior to Chains of Olympus, it quickly became evident that we had an even higher standard to hit with the visuals.

It took us some time to reverse engineer the many components that make up the look (it’s deceptively complex). The art The art department faced the huge challenge of fitting all the animation, textures, geometry, and FX into a fraction of the memory available on the PS2. They also had the task of creating expansive environments with incredible detail and many one-off visual set pieces. The God of War franchise was a great opportunity to push ourselves and our technology as much as the PSP hardware.”

Again, let us all breathe a sigh of relief.

Via [Industry Gamers]

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