SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t played God of War, do not read any further as I’m about to talk about one of the biggest spoilers of the game. Scroll below angry Kratos to read more...
2018’s God of War was a breakthrough for the series, completely reinventing the muscled demigod Kratos by having him work his way through fatherhood and toxic masculinity all while fighting the shadows of his past. One of the pivotal moments in the game is when Kratos returns home to unearth his Blades of Chaos, hidden below the floorboards you walked over right at the beginning of God of War. Bound to his skin with chains, they represent the life he’s tried to hard to leave behind and help Kratos fight enemies in Helheim to eventually get the ingredient that saves his son Atreus from his sickness. And those Blades, and the touching scene introducing them, were almost cut from the game. Yes, seriously.
Cory Barlog, Creative Director at Sony Santa Monica, revealed the stunning bit of news to Gamespot, saying that “the payoff that we actually got [the Blades of Chaos] right, that was always in question. We didn't do the blades until probably the last year [of development]. We worked on the [Leviathan] axe for so long that there was a possibility that the blades were going to have to get cut because they were just taking so long to get online that everybody said, ‘Look, it took three and a half to four years to do the axe, you're never going to be able to do the blades in time’”. Thank Odin that wasn’t the case.
Cory continued, explaining that most of the difficulties with the Blades came from making their combat feel right. "We had a good year of animated chain moves that were just like, ‘That doesn't feel right, that doesn't work'”, he said, “and with this new camera angle where you have the camera behind [Kratos] it's very different … You don't get the same visual as when you have a side view of Kratos shooting the chain blades out. Seeing it from an isometric view, seeing it from a side view, you get a better view of the line of action. We really had to figure out how to take the old moves and make them work much better in this camera angle”. God of War’s third-person, behind-the-shouder view evidently meant that it was trickier to get a sweeping sense of the sheer power of the Blades, but the phenomenal team overcame those issues to bring gamers everywhere one of the most emotional scenes in the entire game. Excuse me, I’ve got something in my eye…
Want more God of War goodness? Now you can see how God of War was made with Raising Kratos, a feature-length documentary coming from Sony, or look below to see what’s going on this week in the world of TV, movies, and games!
