Saturday Morning Gaming: God Of War Completed

I finished God of War (2018) and I cannot recommend it highly enough. There was a (minor) kerfuffle when Red Dead Redemption 2 won pretty much all of the top honors at the Video Gaming Awards except for Game of the Year… which was won by God of War.

Looking back on both, I think that we were a bit hypnotized by Red Dead Redemption 2. It was an amazing game with amazing breadth and depth and a storyline that made you feel empathy and despair and nostalgia and gave you a handful of laughs along the way… but it’s a year later and I don’t think I’ll ever play it again. God of War? Well, without getting into too many spoilers, I’ll just say that God of War ended on a note of resolution that made putting the controller down after the game ended feel pretty satisfying but there were also a lot of things that weren’t done that you might think were being hinted at. There were names that were brought up a lot, for example, that we never met… which gives us hints about what’s going to happen in God of War (2018) II and III.

And when God of War (2018) II comes out, I will, without hesitation, play God of War in preparation for it. I’ll bring that game back out and play through it from the opening to the ending and think “OH MY GOSH I CAN’T WAIT TO CONTINUE THIS STORY”.

Like, to the point where I put in God of War III Remastered (the PS4 version of the PS3 game) and I immediately started feeling confused. Is THIS how we used to live?

The controls are different and, more’s the point, the CAMERA is different. In the new God of War, you control the camera and make it move around you to show you the focus you choose. This means that, in a fight, you might have enemies behind you that you then have to move the camera to see in order to properly attack them. In God of War III, nope. The view you get is the view you get. The camera flies up and the screen you’re on will have but one way to look at it until you move to the appropriate edge of the screen at which point the camera flies up and around to give you a new vantage. Which made combat kinda convenient… you could run around a particular area and hit stuff without having to think about the camera but that meant that you played any given combat at arm’s length. In the new game, the camera was about five feet away from Kratos at about waist height and so when you looked up at a 10 foot monstrosity, it felt like, holy cow, this stone monster is fully capable of smashing me. In the old way, there were bigger monsters and smaller monsters but you were sitting in the stands watching your character fight the guy.

The game felt so visceral back in 2010. And now it feels distant.

But it’s prelude for the new game (new trilogy, now, I guess) and the old ways are left behind to be replaced by the new ways and I can’t wait to play the games that will make me go back to this one and think something like “and we thought we were finally learning to make video games…”

Again.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is from the cover of the God of War (2018) video game. Available wherever finer video games are sold.)