*God Of War 3 Thread v2.0 + Interview Stig Asmussen

[Nesh]

Yap. A few times I had to twitch the controller just to make sure I don't have camera control yet. It's hard to tell in some scenes.


If I really want to complain, the only one is Aphrodites. I would have loved a full Hephastus treatment: Make her look and movement life-like and believable, like Madison from Heavy Rain. The other gods and demi-gods are generally more well done than her.

EDIT: When I fired up KZ2 to verify my visual memory against U2 last time, I was a little stunned. My wife saw the game and sat down to watch me play. "Where's the controller ?" was her next question. ^_^ But she got giddy due to the extra movements GG put in that game.

I have noticed that female model designs lack compared to male models in games in general. Women usually look like dolls, or less "life like"

Very few games manage well to maintain the same visual "fidelity" or quality for both male and female models

 

[ultragpu]

Uncharted 2 surely has the best balance in character models of both genders and the fact they have 30k-40k+ poly budget on one character helps a lot too I'd imagine. Still the normalmap or muscle blending on Kratos is down right awesome, watch carefully when his muscle contract, deform and veins popping whenever during a close up, it's literally film quality.
All said, this is SSM's first PS3 title so I'm most confident on a drastic improvement for their next project, hope it's GOW IV at some stage.

 

[2real4tv]

Damn the game is awesome...I am going to play it right now. It's funny how both of the GOW's made me re-buy a ps3 and 360....that GeOW and GOW....lol

 

[nightshade]

Next up is FF13 which should be ok, i suppose!

FF13 is beyond just "ok"
Some places will have so many beautiful pixels filling the screen, ready to blow you away [well it did blow me away lol]

 

[patsu]

FF13 has very refined, Japanese art style. It also has CG cutscenes to help out (like the one in Chapter 12 !). Those elements should set it apart from GoW3.

 

[London Geezer]

Well i started off FF13 and.... i'll post my views on the FF13 thread!

 

[RenegadeRocks]

The most exhilarating/adrenalin pumpimg first level ever ! My earleier favourite was GOW2's first level !

The game just oozes quality. am in the underworld and it is very diffcult to put the controller down !
BTW, lovede bashing up Poseidon ! It was a great touch to bring in that brawl at the end of the boss fight ! Felt awesome !

 

[Rolf N]

I just finished God Of War 1 and 2 back to back, I'm ready now

Speaking of which, the collection is pretty awesome, both games hold up exceptionally well. The number of different environments they crammed into God Of War 1, with that level of polish, still amazes me. Special honors for building underwater sections that do not suck. How many games ever achieved that? Love the game so much now.

 

[2real4tv]

I think another important item that keeps you playing is "no loading" screens. I just started BFBC2, great game so far, but it would I think it would be more fluid with "no loading" screens. When I get a loading screen it makes me want to get up and do something productive around the house..lol.

 

[Arwin]

Well, my wife if I needed anything from the stores and I jokingly said 'God of War', and sure enough when she came back she'd bought the game! She hated the first games (part of the reason why I never got very far into the second) and Kratos in particular, but now, even though she still hates Kratos (slightly mitigated by me spoiling the ending for her), she's been watching for more than half of my playthrough just because it looks so amazing.

It really is an amazingly beautiful game, and I'm enjoying it a rather lot. Playing on easy so that I have enough time to take in the visuals, will see about doing it on a harder difficulty after I've played it through once.

The one thing some people complained about, the double jump, I found is actually surprisingly not an issue. It took me a little while to figure it out, but you just need to double-tap x for a double jump holding that second x for as long as you want to fly. This is admittedly a little confusing because most games want you to press x again at the top of the first jump, but once you've figured it out it's totally consistent and never an issue. From that point on I never died from jumping.

I'm now past the bit of the demo and well on my way

Spoiler

into the mountain

. And yeah, as others have said, the puzzles are pretty fun so far.

Really like this game - in some sense its almost like an old-school platformer.

 

[assurdum]

FF13 is beyond just "ok"
Some places will have so many beautiful pixels filling the screen, ready to blow you away [well it did blow me away lol]

Be carefull. Just ok a game which use HDR+2xMSAA+High Buffer on the ps3 it isn't simply just ok. Some technical achiements are phenomenal for the ps3 hardware.

 

[patsu]

The one thing some people complained about, the double jump, I found is actually surprisingly not an issue. It took me a little while to figure it out, but you just need to double-tap x for a double jump holding that second x for as long as you want to fly. This is admittedly a little confusing because most games want you to press x again at the top of the first jump, but once you've figured it out it's totally consistent and never an issue. From that point on I never died from jumping.

I had some problems with jumping in GoW1. I feel that the GoW3 control is responsive and consistent. Didn't have a problem with double jump.

 

[Arwin]

Wow ... I just finished the game ... I'm amazed! It's much, much better than I expected. (And much longer, too, even on 'easy')

I'm deeply impressed by this game. It's a true work of art. Of all the games I've played this was the one I least expected my wife to encourage me to play because she wanted to see more, and yet this beats Uncharted 2 with a wide margin in that respect (though personally I enjoyed UC2 a lot too of course).

But this is an amazing game ... Glad that it unlocks an arena mode, because the combat deserves some more attention than I've given it on easy mode.

I loved that one battle that was almost like Street Fighter 4 (won't spoil which) and the special part near the end was fabulous too ... It really took the game to sn even higher level.

 

[patsu]

Which battle is like Street Fighter 4 ?

[size=-2]... and what Arena ? [/size]

 

[nightshade]

Which battle is like Street Fighter 4 ?

[size=-2]... and what Arena ? [/size]

Spoiler

First fight with Zeus which was 2D

 

[Arwin]

I'm trying more and more to find justification why this game didn't get more 10/10 scores, but I can't. This is game ranks high in my list of all time favorites. The next-generation transition for this game is very significant - it moved from very good graphics and art for a PS2 game, to very good graphics and art period. This is also what made all the difference for my wife.

And the gameplay is very good also, extremely polished. Perhaps one or two aspects of scene traversal could be slightly improved (if they could borrow some Uncharted tech for that, that would be great ), but in general, it was very sweet. I really enjoyed almost all aspects of it - it was maybe one of the best 3D platformers I've played in some respects, and a worthy modern day successor to one of my old-time favorite 16bit games, Gods. There was just one section that I didn't really like very much

Spoiler

which was the Achilles chase section

.

How ironic that in the end the few cinematics that were in this game didn't look as good IQ wise as the real-time graphics!

 

[BadTB25]

Graphics wise, this game ranks very high in my hack and slash list. I was a little bit let down with the story compared to GOW 1 and 2-those storylines were truly Epic.

Overall though, I enjoyed Bayonetta and the original Ninja Gaiden more and would rank it higher on my list.

I love the GOW games. I'm playing Chains of Olympus on a borrowed PSP and I'm thinking of re-buying GOW collection.

 

[rabidrabbit]

Just finished God of War III yesterday night.
What a ride! I played it in normal difficulty, but lowered to easy after failing the last fight several times (it was already late and I wanted to finish the game), the game was suitably challenging but never frustrating.
It's not often I bother trying to pass a boss several times if I fail, but this game is just so addictive, and everytime I failed it was my fault, not the games.
Even though the controls sometimes failed me during exploration (I just couldn't get the hang of the jump/fly move until late in the game), they never failed me during combat.
Definitely a 10/10 game for me, and one of the best games EVER!!!
Graphically there's just no match. Only complaint is that the the people are ugly in this game. Though they are well modelled, textured and all (especially Kratos ), all the women are remarkably ugly

I even got used to the gore, even if it disgusted me at the beginning

 

[ultragpu]

Epic fail Arwin, it's not

Spoiler

Achilles, it's Hermes!

. But I do agree with the rest. Graphically, some parts of the game could be ranked among the "too good to be true" category. We can only imagine what they could achieve using the remaining 50% of CELL sorcery.

 

[Arwin]

Epic fail Arwin, it's not

Spoiler

Achilles, it's Hermes!

. But I do agree with the rest. Graphically, some parts of the game could be ranked among the "too good to be true" category. We can only imagine what they could achieve using the remaining 50% of CELL sorcery.

Heh, oops. Anyway, let's not forget that this is also very much an art-driven game. There are just really talented tech guys behind it helping to bring that art to even higher levels - the HDR implementation for instance and the lighting tech (both in displaying and shadowing, and in how artists could move them around at will to test) gave the artists a big boost.