Articles: Lords of War – 82

Tone speaks with two developers who worked on this year’s most anticipated video game. By Richard Betts

As a job description, you’d have to go a long way to beat Guy Who Makes Sure Playing Video Games Is Fun. It’s not Jonathan Hawkins’s official title of course – that would be ‘final tuning designer’. But as the person who tweaked Sony’s latest mega-title for PlayStation 3, and the designer in charge of its major fight scenes (‘boss battles’ in gaming argot), it would be a fitting description, if one he’d struggle to fit on a business card.

He’s in New Zealand on PR duties for God of War III, the sequel to a game generally regarded as among the best ever – yes, you guessed it, God of War II. Hawkins worked on that, too. And the first one.

He’s joined by Bruno Velazquez, the lead in-game animator, responsible for “anything that moves outside of the cinematics, outside of the story moments”. In case you were wondering, that makes him Big News in the gaming world.

Tone is dazzled. Journalistic objectivity be damned, we’re unabashed fans of the series. We expect to see creativity dripping off them. We hope it’s catching.

But following a 17-hour flight from California, frankly they look like they could use a good nap. Then again, that could just be the overwhelming relief of finally putting to bed a project that has consumed them for three solid, intense years.

Hawkins says the anticlimax of finally getting the game out the door is surreal. “I remember just coming home and sitting there looking around at a blank wall: what the hell do I do now? What do I do with all this extra time?”

If he likes, he can sit and bask in the glory.

As Tone writes, GoWIII has a score of 92 (out of 100) on aggregator site Metacritic, calculated from 80 reviews. The previous games had similar acclaim, but both Velazquez and Hawkins admit that making a sequel to a hit brings extra pressure.

“For God of War one we were like, we don’t know if anyone’s going to like it. We didn’t have that perspective; we didn’t know how it was going to be received,” says Hawkins. “Once it was received so well, there was that added pressure. On God of War II we were wondering how we could make a game using the same technology even better, even more grandiose and epic. On the third one it was like, now we have this new technology, new hardware [PS3], people are going to be expecting the world from this. How can we bring the series to a good close and really complete the story but also satisfy the demands the fans have?”

Designing a game like God of War III is therefore a balancing act. On one hand there are the hardcore fans who know the earlier instalments intimately; on the other are the newcomers who won’t know the backstory. The only way to deal with that, Hawkins says, is to shoot for the middle.

“We make the game for the average player. We try to make it accessible for the n00bs to come in and still get a good experience. The hardcore gamers can play it on hard [difficulty setting], maybe have a great time exploring the depths of the combat. Fans of the series can look back – we plant all these little nuggets and gems for them to discover as they’re going through that have ties back to the other games.”

Such crumbs referring to past iterations reveal that things are well thought out. For all that this is a video game played on an immense scale, even the smallest details have a purpose. For example, one of the new powers main character Kratos wields in God of War III is the ability to call upon a phalanx of ghostly Spartan warriors; when summoned, they use spears to stab everything around them. It’s one of Tone’s favourite additions to the game and, according to Velazquez, it wasn’t thrown in simply because it looks cool.

“At this point in the story Sparta’s been kind of rejected by Olympus,” he says, “so the shields and spears kind of represent the long gone Spartans that are still supporting Kratos.” However, he concedes with a smile that it looks cool too.

Being cool isn’t enough to get an element into the game; it must always serve the end goal: making the best game possible. Many ideas are shed in the pursuit of that goal. Velazquez notes that the power afforded the team by the PlayStation 3′s processor allowed them to let their imaginations run wild. But Hawkins accepts that’s not necessarily always a good thing.

“You know you have all these bells and whistles and things you can do, but do we want to do all that?” he asks. “Is that all going to be fun for the player? The spectacle’s going to be much more grandiose and epic [than the previous games], but are we going to have gameplay behind it to drive that home and make sure that still at the root of it: is it fun? Is it a good experience, something that’s been memorable, enjoyable?”

Their commitment to “memorable” and “enjoyable” – and the subsequent success of their work – has had a ripple effect in the industry.

The pair are surprisingly diplomatic – relaxed, even – about the influence their work has on other developers. Tone asks them for their take on the game Dante’s Inferno, which pays clear homage to God of War.

“It’s cool to see how other people interpret [the action-adventure genre],” says Hawkins, “spinning it and changing it.”

There also seems to be a remarkable lack of competition between game studios. Velazquez recently spoke at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and given the success of his titles you might expect a lot of chest-puffing, my-game’s-bigger-than-yours stuff. Not a bit of it. Disappointingly, Velazquez reveals the atmosphere was more collegial than combative.
“We’re all in this industry, we all want to make it grow, so it’s good to share the experiences and what you’ve done.”

Perhaps that’s unsurprising: Tone’s never met anyone in the video game industry who wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool gamer. Of course, insiders examine games with an eye far more acute than the average player’s.

Velazquez: “When you play other games you kind of look at them and you’re like: what about this game makes it so much fun; why am I enjoying this so much? Not necessarily like, Oh, I’m gonna copy that and put it in my game; it’s more like, Okay, I see what they did here. What’s that key ingredient?”

As both continually reiterate, one of the key ingredients in developing a good game is to always strive to be better, to reach for the stars.

When Tone was a whippersnapper, the ultimate for any young boy was to work on NASA’s space programme, maybe one day taking a trip to the moon. As guys who grew up on gaming, is working for a company like Sony Santa Monica their NASA, is gaming the pair’s final frontier?

For Velazquez, an artist who loves games, it’s certainly a dream come true. “I feel very lucky, for sure.”

Hawkins is even more certain. “When I was a little kid, I vividly remember playing Doom for the first time; I was so blown away that there was this 3D world I was able to interact with and experience all these different emotions: fear, excitement… My goal then was to become a game developer. I’ve always known I wanted to make games, so for me it’s so rewarding to see other people like, Oh, I played [God Of War] all night! That’s the kind of experience I want to make for people, because that’s what someone made for me when I was young. So for me to be able to provide that energy back and see people getting into it, that’s like the end goal.

“But being an astronaut would be cool too.”

This article is from Tone issue 82. Click here to check it out.