00:21I'm Todd Pappy, Game Director at God of War Ascension.
00:24What you're about to see is I'm making a video that we've been shooting over about two plus years.
00:28It gives you a good idea of the inception of an idea all the way through to the final product.
00:33Keep in mind that this is a work in progress. Enjoy.
00:38You look at any other multiplayer experience, how many of them can you say that there's a big world action
00:44thing that is interacting with you?
00:46That's definitely going to be the more rememberable thing.
00:48The main sort of drive of it is the thrill of the competition over the glory of the kill.
00:53It's a custom arena designed to really accentuate the combat, so it's kind of a two-fold thing.
00:58We've been working a lot on trying to figure out what spaces work really well for combat.
01:03Big open spaces don't work. Small compact spaces work, but only if you have a limited number of people.
01:09All of that has taken a lot of work.
01:10This is the test level where I've been working on. As he gets hit, he basically goes into this kind
01:15of retreated state.
01:17So initially his hands are like kind of this on the platform and then you do damage and he kind
01:21of retreats.
01:22And then he's almost like he's kind of hanging on a little bit to sort of sell the fact that
01:25he's a little closer to falling off.
01:28Because the idea is the chains are basically holding him in place, but also trying to pull him all the
01:35time.
01:35They're always trying to pull him away, and that's one of the things that the animations don't sell that well
01:40yet.
01:40So many little things you have to worry about, like when his hands are in the arena here, he has
01:44collision around his hands,
01:45so you can't just run through his hands. But of course, once his hands drop to the edge, that collision
01:49has to turn off and new collision has to turn on.
01:51So many little things like that just to try and make it feel consistent.
01:57It's been definitely a totally different challenge, like I said, than like building single player levels.
02:02Before there used to be actual trap down here, but it was just one of those things like there was
02:06like a trap at one control point,
02:07a trap at another control point. It was like, how about this one control point is just about just fighting.
02:12You know, you got objects that you can do special attacks off and it's just battling, man.
02:16There's an uber power up here that, you know, we can be sitting there fighting. It spawns here.
02:20It's like, am I going to stop fighting you and try to get that?
02:22Am I going to try to just knock you away and stun you up against the wall and then try
02:26to hurry up and run and grab the point?
02:28Things change based off of the other designs.
02:30And it's one of those things, you know, you get this and you see your pitfalls and then you're immediately
02:34like,
02:35oh yeah, you know, let me hurry up and get this stuff clean so I can do the next thing,
02:38because I know all the mistakes that I've learned and to make something even doper.
02:42And then hopefully, once everything's said and done, boys be at home and be like,
02:45long live play, Sony, we love you.
02:50I'm working in conjunction with the other departments and we're trying to figure out gameplay as we're going along.
02:56It's a lot of troubleshooting, like making sure that the rig is functioning correctly,
03:00that his animations are appropriate for what we're trying to do in-game.
03:04You really have to focus on just making sure that he's believably big.
03:09So we have to sell the fact that he's heavy.
03:12There's a lot of delay on his upper body and his arms.
03:16That just gives a sense that he's big and he's very heavy.
03:22The emotional range of this character is frustrated, angry and tired.
03:27We don't want the players to feel sorry for him.
03:29We always want the players to feel that he's just this ginormous threat in the background
03:34and that you don't want to mess with this guy or he's going to freaking kill you.
03:40A huge factor is that we need to have the camera not hiding gameplay from the player.
03:46A lot of the foreground stuff we want to put in, we just can't put it in.
03:48This is one of the areas that was quite challenging for the R team to make it so that
03:52gameplay is still acceptable.
03:55So we wanted to have something kind of in the foreground to break up the levels
03:57and make it feel like rooftop.
03:59So we also need to have the player be visible.
04:01So one of the solutions was had some destruction.
04:05Evolving the camera systems so that they could handle multiplayer gameplay was a very large challenge.
04:15It was a fun challenge too.
04:16Because we knew right off the bat what we needed the camera system to do.
04:21We need to make the cameras much more unified, much more procedural so that everyone has the same fair view.
04:29This allows me to start plotting out where my cameras would go.
04:33So I'll turn on my camera layer here.
04:34This gives you a pretty good idea of how many camera zones are needed.
04:39Every black box is basically an individual camera or a group of cameras.
04:45These basically control what you see as you play through.
04:48What we're seeing here is the basic look of a navigation camera in a multiplayer level.
04:55The player is about 20 years away from the camera, making them kind of small but big enough to get
05:01the details of which team you're on, this guy's on the med team, and give you a good sense of
05:06where you're going in the level.
05:07Here's an example of a trap where you can hold on to the lever until you're waiting for some enemy
05:14to run, and then you basically let go of R1, triggers the trap, and the camera will hold there to
05:21see if you hit anyone.
05:22And one other example of something that our single player camera system has been great for in terms of multiplayer
05:28cameras is shots like this, where I'm no longer using the normal navigation camera because this cyclops is about to
05:36attack.
05:37I don't want to show off full detail of his face, his hand that's about to smash you.
05:41That's an area where we're allowed to make the multiplayer cameras feel more single player.
05:45That's another goal of ours, to make the camera system and the game itself feel like it exists in the
05:51same space.
05:51Keeping the giant cyclops in frame was one of the biggest challenges of that level because people really want to
05:58just fight other players.
06:00I'd be fighting my own cinematographer's instinct too.
06:04I want to show more of this giant epic monster in the background.
06:10It was a custom back and forth of, that's too much of him, that's not enough of him.
06:14I'm sorry.
06:15It's really alive.
06:17I mean stop the.
06:19I mean stop the.
06:22I mean stop the.
06:23I mean stop the tournament.
06:25I mean stop the.
06:25Yeah, you won't.
06:26I mean stop.
06:26You just don't really.
06:26Hey.
06:26Guy.
06:28Hey.
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