My work here...is done.

Well maybe not "here" here...more like there...my work "there" is done...if the meaning of "there" is "God of War 2"...then that is what I mean. Anyway, today is Sunday January 28 and it is safe to say that all of the primary work for God of War 2 has been completed. There are still bugs to be worked out as the game goes through the final bit of Quality Assurance (QA), but for all intents and purposes I am done with everything I can do on the project. My break between projects begins on Monday, though I will probably go into the office to take care of a few last minute things. If definitely doesn’t feel done to me, most likely because it was so abrupt. I was on a very funky sleep schedule for the last week of the project working through the nights several days in a row…but its all gotten done. I have to give many thanks to the sound guys Phil, Todd, Paul, Mike, Paul for putting in some great work unders ome pretty tough conditions. I also need to thank the cinematics sound guys (Mike and Chris) who drove up on a moments notice from San Diego and stayed up all night working on the movie mixes. The game sounds freaking awesome!!

As far as the billion questions Mr. (or Mrs. Anonymous posted)…you wouldn’t happened to be a journalist would you? I will try to answer some of them, but forgive me if I miss a few I am still trying to recover and get back on a regular sleep cycle.

The weapons switching is a single button (R2) and it is fast and easy. There is no animation delay and you can switch from the Blades of Athena in mid move to The Barbarian Hammer, do a big hit, and then switch to any of the four magic’s to hit the creature some more, and if you like (and the creature is still alive) you can switch back tot he Blades of Athena to do the final kill move…all while keeping your combo going. While everyone on the internet loves to say “Hey that is such a (insert game here) rip-off” or “They stole that from (insert game here)”…what they don’t realize is when someone does something cool in a game…everyone notices it. When I play a game and they do something cool I look at how they did it and file that away to use later. That isn’t to say that everything about the games we make is just found or borrowed from some other game, but when something really works well there is no reason not to use it. Some call it stealing; I call it realizing when something works. I’m not sure how much you can compare our weapon switching to DMC, my guess is all the DMC purists will say that DMC’s is better…whatever. The whole point for us was to give the player the freedom to switch whenever they wanted while still maintaining the easy to use accessible controls. So when the game comes out you will have to let me know if we succeeded.

As for the usage of the original magic’s from God of War 1…we were not able to get the full “everything you had from the first game crosses over to the second” functionality we originally set out to do. There just was not enough memory for that, but we did add some cool stuff for the second play-through of the game in the form of Urns that you find that allow you to assign a power or fiunctionality to whatever model you choose. So if you want to use Poseidon's Rage again you can, you just have to find the Urn that gives you that power hidden somehwere in the world of God of War 2.

This is a nicer shot of that Gamestop post the other day. This is going to be the cover for the Hardcore gamer magazine that comes out at the end of the month. They are gonna be giving some info on Atlas, so check it out!

In regards to the demo, it has been out in QA for a while now and is on target to get finished and pressed in the beginning of February. I have the list of people that will be getting demos and they should be the first to go out! So keep an eye out for a posting about that.

The website should be up soon, I looked at the final comps of that on Friday and it looks sweet. I think it could be up in as little as a week or so.

All right I am going to go relax a little bit and maybe play the rest of Gears of War. I am finally got into it a little and am at the Berserker boss. Man…one hit kill boss…that cliffyb is hard to the core. And I am playing on casual mode too. Yeah I know…but I like to get through a game once before I have it kick my ass on difficulty. Anyway…I am going to take some time and post again tomorrow…maybe with some more pics.


cory