God of War Plays the Long Game
The new God of War game had a massive amount of side content that provides a great deal of depth to its richly contextualized world, and none of it ever felt like extra content that wasn’t good enough for the main story. In fact, the side content started many tangential stories that were some of the most interesting in the game, although some were left unfinished.
But according to game director Cory Barlog, these unfinished stories—both big and small—are going to carry forward into future games and affect the series’ narrative as a whole.
“Every one of those things is a part of the whole tapestry, they are critical to propping up the whole story,” he said. “We are putting a lot of pieces in motion, and when going into the second one, all those pieces are leading into the whole.”
“The whole is a very complex story, that I am trying to figure out how to break down into the simplest elements, so you can push through it with a clear understanding of what your goal is,” he continued. “So, using the example of a beginning of a game, of Fallout 3, it’s a complicated game, it’s a vast and crazy labyrinthian story, but begin that game, you find out ‘my dad’s Liam Neeson! My dad is missing!’ Now find your dad. Right? And that’s the pivotal driver. It’s a reverse Taken.”
“And you have a simple way to drive through it, but you have a lot of complicated things happening around. So as we set things into motion in the first game, there’s a lot of pieces now, but it should always be driven by that simple underlying understanding of the pivot. But yeah, everything will continue, there is stuff that is in here that is set up that people will be surprised, that’s not just a part of it, but will be an interesting consequence. Everything in the world has consequences!”
Although no sequels have been announced yet, there are already plans for five more games, so it’s nice to hear that the side content won’t simply be swept under the rug. It also highlights how much depth these kinds of ancillary stories can add to game series’ as a whole.
God of War is available now as a PlayStation 4 exclusive.