What have they done to God of War?

By Sam Coles:

When I first saw the reveal of the new God of War I didn’t know what to say and when I had a good think about it I thought what on earth have they done to it? I want to talk about it briefly and how this new God of War completely misses the point what the series is about.

Let’s start with the obvious with the third person camera which does not work in my opinion, the camera was fixed in the previous games and some people complain about fixed camera angles. The fixed camera angle works well in this type title works because you have a wide look on what’s going on during fights and you can see every angle of attack with this zoomed in third person perspective you can’t see everything around you.

The third person camera does not work for this type of combat because God of War is not a slow paced game like Dark Souls where you can take your time with strikes, its fast with loads going on which require quick reflexes. What I can also see about this God of War game there are going to be lots of scripted sequences and don’t bring up the argument of the quick time events because they were quick and you could fail them and there were actual consequences when did fail them.

The other problem I have with the new game is that they are trying to make Kratos a sympathetic character and it doesn’t work because Kratos is an objectively bad person he kills anyone who gets in the way of his progress innocent or not. The whole point of Kratos was that he is an angry and violent person who thrives on violence because it’s a power fantasy where you destroy everything. I just don’t see Kratos going from a guy poking a person’s eyes to a loving father. I don’t think having a cinematic game for this game would work because at the end of the day God of War is all about the gameplay because what is the first thing you do in every game before this one? Gameplay!

The final point I’m going to bring up is that the notion that every game needs to have a good story in order to be a good game needs to go away, don’t get me wrong I like games with good stories but when it starts to get in the way of gameplay then I have a problem. A good example of a triple A game that has a thin line of context with great gameplay is the new Doom where the game hands you a gun tells you to kill things until the credits roll. Good stories have their place in games but game developers need to focus on gameplay first and foremost look at the Order 1886 they made it like a film and it got a lot of negative comments about it.

That is my opinion I hope I get to see more of the new God of War and maybe it will prove me wrong but what I’ve seen it looks boring and completely misses the original idea of the old games so come on Sony show me real gameplay next time.