WE MADE BETA BITCHES!!!!

Sweeet! God of War 2 is officially beta now. I searched on google images for the word beta and this image came up in the top three…so this is now the god of War 2 Beta mascot…beta the kitten. Don’t be fooled by the innocent exterior this is actually most vicious kitten to ever live. It has already killed 57 people including a local orphan boy that looked at it funny. You don’t mess with beta…ever!

We are burning some discs for everyone to take home over their holiday break and play. So it will be a God of War 2 Christmas for some…hopefully they will all come back with a ton of good notes and we will spend all of January fixing up and polish the game to make is super mint!!! I can’t wait to finish this thing and get more people playing it.

As for the idea that we pushed back so why don’t we add some levels…we pushed back to make sure everything we have now is as tight and clean and fun as it can be. We are using that extra time to make the game solid not to add more stuff to it and release a buggy game. So no luck on that….and for the special edition…I think it would take way more than a few weeks to do that so I don’t see that happening right away.

As for the demo we are still looking to finish that thing up in Jan. as well so I will keep you posted on the status of that and make a big post when the demo’s get shipped out to everyone. It will be friggin’ sweet.

Ok I am out to lunch now.

cory

GOW2...sweet...like Monkey's in Space.

Well here we are on Beta day…things are moving right along but we are still tracking down some progression stoppers on the disc. Hopefully we will be able to iron out these latest bugs and get a disc burned that is super clean. I think we have until Friday to ensure we have a really clean disc, this way we can get a solid playtest over the holidays.

I am really looking forward to the next playtest since we really haven’t had a playthrough that has been bug free enough to have players use the same saves the whole way through. I need to see how players are upgrading and what they are getting at what point in the game to get a good snapshot of the overall item placement and economy. I am feeling pretty good about the pacing right now, but that tends to change from playtest to playtest. But with this one I think we will be much closer to what the “entire” game needs to feel like, then it will just be a matter of polishing and nitpicking several little elements and fights. This is the fun part of the game’s development. The part where everyone on the team gets to playthrough what we have been slaving away on for the last two years and see the fruits of their labor. It is always good to get the notes from the team as well in regards to what they liked, what was too hard or too easy or just plain not fun. January is going to be a tough month, but I know we will pull it together and come out on top with a freaking great game!!!

But right now I know we are all just looking forward to our holiday break. The team is exhausted from this last push. I feel like a freaking zombie most of the time and I definitely need the cool down time to recharge the creative juices…cuz seriously right now I am hanging on by a thread.

Oh the holiday party was really good as well. I drank a little too much and luckily made it home thanks to the super sweet L.A. cab system. It was a rough next day…even though we were able to come in after 1pm.

Got a PS3 recently, but haven’t really been able to check it out much. I hooked it up, but after that I only had the energy to check out the first level of Genji and then go to sleep. The game looks great, but it really doesn’t feel as good as I was hoping. I will have to give it another go over my break…but first I wan to sit and get some time with Gears of War and see what all the hubbub is about.

Well I need to get back to work but first I will try and answer some of the numerous questions you posed in the last post:

Will Icarus wings be in the game?
Hell yeah…that is how we roll…Daedalus style.

Will the Icarus wings be remodeled?
What we now is final and looks freaking sweet. Not sure what you saw but it was most likely older.

When will the full website be up?
No clue on this one. I can find out but things are so busy that I am sure I will forget to ask about that.

Barbarian Hammer…info on the weapon?
This will be a weapon that Kratos will take from the Barbarian King if you can defeat him. I can’t say too much now, but I can tell you it is pretty sweet. Granted I am fairly baised. I can tell you that when you take these weapons from enemies, you keep them for the rest of the game.

Is it true that you are in fact Bionic?
Yes. This si not something I normally talk about but yes I am in fact bionically enhanced to rock the fucking house. While my bionic enhancements were far cheaper than siz million dollars they still cost a pretty penny. I also make that cool nahnahnahnahnah sound when I walk, run, jump, and climb stairs.

Is there going to be a Chimera in the game?
Sadly no…we worked on that one for awhile but in the end we found that we just did not have the time to get many of the characters we originally planned for the game up to the level we wanted them…and when we needed to readdress the scope of the game a while back it really did not seem sensible to have so many enemies.


Ok…so there you have it….a little informal Q&A for y’all to tide you over a few days until the next update when I shout from the mountaintops “WE MADE BETA BITCHES!!!!” I could not answer all the questions since some of the info is still unreleased…so sorry if your question did not get answered.

Aight’…peace out.

GOW2...tightening up the graphics on level 3!

8 days to our beta disk and things are shaping up rather nice. We are still scrambling to get things together and "tightened up" which is causing us to put in some more late nights but the good thing is we have our company Christmas party tonight so the team will get a little break from the grind to toss a few back and eat some good food.

Today Nate and I went through and tuned the last of the fights based on our last playtest noptes and then wnet through and did all the save point names and area announces. That stuff seems simple but man is it hard coming up with short names for locations of the game. I had a handful in mind already but there were a few that threw us. We were doing a lot of the old "shift-F7" in word trying to find clever words for things. But we got it done so I can cross that task off my list. New week I need to go through all hte in game messages and make sure they are all good to go. Not the most exciting part of the job, but it is none the less important.

We had a big breakthrough with our Pegasus stuff this last week as well. Eric and Thomas put some stuff in that really locked the melee combat. I mean it is like a billion times better than it has ever been so I am eternally grateful to them for thier perseverence on that stuff.

Well this is not much of an update but I got to go start getting ready for the party since cocktails start at 6:30 and I am not one to ever be late for cocktails. Though I don't imagine I will be telling anyone to go fuck themselves in the grotto tonight.

I will see what I can do about getting that video up but I can't promise anything as I am sure I will get caught up in so many things and forget to do the legowrk on the video thing...so when I sit down to do my next update I will do so empty handed.

Oh one other thing regarding the whole release date rumor...as far as I know the game releases in North America first and then europe but from what I understand the time in between releases will be REALLY short. Not sure exactly how long but it I don't imagine it being months or anything.

allright...for real this time. I got to get ready because I really don't want to be late for the opening band they have playing tonight...based on my last posts and fascination with swedish rock bands of the 80's sony has gotten the all swedish rock cover band "Fjords!" They play songs from Europe, Ace of Base, Abba, and Hoven Droven! Maybe Dave will get up and bust out a keyboard solo?

word.

cory

It's the fiiiiinal countdowwwn!!!

Ok so today is December 4th and we go beta in 16 days. We still have a lot of work to do, but nothing I don't think we can't complete. It is going to be a rough next few weeks, but there will be a nice mini break for the holidays to recover from the final rush to the "almost" finish line. After the holidays we will be doing the final gameplay tuning and orb/economy balancing as well as finish up any last minute stuff we were unable to get to for beta. We still got a wild ride ahead of us.

But as for now...the game is looking great. We had another full game playthrough last week and the gameplay time was a little higher than last time. In fact the playtesters did not even finish in the alotted time we had for the playtest. The grouping we got this time was more leaning towards the casual players. I thoiught they were going to be a bit more fo the casual hardcore players, but it didn't turn out that way. But there was still a lot I learned from watching them play and work through the various combat scenarios and puzzles. the good thing is we are pretty locked on all the games puzzles...there really isn't much we need to do with them besides finishing up the final implementation and art...which is sweet since there is still many combat scenarious that are in need of some attention to get them to 100%.

Let's see what else is going on...amidst all this chaos of making beta I had to move into a new apartment. I was bidding on a townhouse but the deal just went south and I decided to cancel it and go with the renting for a year or so more. The market out here still sucks anyway so it is for the best. The only problem was I had to find an apartment, pack and move in basically 24 hours. That...freakin....sucked. But in the end it got done and now I don't have to worry about it. Though I am feeling like I rasn myself down so much last wek that I am getting sick this week. I feel the beginings of a cold...that drowsy stuffed up thing. I hate that.

Ok enough about that boring crap...more about God of War 2. Ariel edited together a collection of footage from God of War 2 for the Sony gameshare show in London and we screened it for the team on Friday. She did the thing in a night and it looked freaking great. It really did a lot to fire the team up for this last push. Well at least I hope it fired the team up since it got me psyched. We used a piece of music that was recored over in the chezch republic (or something like that) last month. Very cool live choir and orchestra...really gives a sense of power to the movie.

Saw some more progress ont he GOW Kratos figure last week. They sent the painted version of the sculpt which looks great. We are getting pretty close to finish it up. Hopefully it will be comepletely done by the end of the month so I can show off some pics.

Finally got to play some Gears of War this weekend. Not for long mind you, but at least I got some time with it. Spent about 30 minutes playing and it does look good, but I am not totally sucked in yet. I am sure it will get better, but it feels a bit generic right now. Could just be that I really didn't get to sit and focus on playing it though, or it could be the whole prisoner who has to save the world thing is a bit too Tango and Cash for me. Ok well maybe not Tango and Cash...I was just looking for a way to force a Tango and Cash reference in there because Tango and Cash RULE!!!! I do like the idea that you can choose to skip the tutorial section...that is really sweet. I also really like the one button cover system though...clean and simple. Seems many of the designers hate it because they never know what you are going to do...it made sense to me though. After about 5 minutes I felt fairly comfortable with it. The Grenade throwing thing is a little odd for me though. I keep throwing them short. Anyway...hope to get to play some more. Probably after this game ships. :)

Also...just a reminder for the other who commented...the demos will not be out until the end of January at the very earliest. We are focusing 100% on making the game great right now...so the demo will be the first task when that is done. But I think it will be worth the wait though.

aight...gotta get to work now.

P.S.

Europe rocks...I was in a tribute band before I was in the game biz...this is a recording of one of our more rocking shows. We rocked that county fair like nobodys buisness. Asses were kicked. Thats dave Jaffe on the keyboards kickin the mad solo. hahahahahahaha...