{"id":69242,"date":"2018-12-14T17:58:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-14T17:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/333027"},"modified":"2018-12-14T17:58:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-14T17:58:00","slug":"best-of-2018-boy-was-atreus-tricky-to-implement-says-god-of-war-lead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/12\/14\/best-of-2018-boy-was-atreus-tricky-to-implement-says-god-of-war-lead\/","title":{"rendered":"Best of 2018: ‘BOY’ was Atreus tricky to implement, says God of War lead"},"content":{"rendered":"

In today\u2019s big-money gaming space, it can sometimes seem like there are enough A.I. companions looming on the hilltops to fill a whole army of second bananas, with <\/span>The Last of Us\u2019<\/em>s Ellie rubbing shoulders with the likes of Elizabeth and even a certain two-tailed fox.<\/p>\n

But while a robust companion like God of War<\/em>\u2019s bow-toting boy wonder Atreus can fill out a playspace and engage even the most laconic of players during dips in the action, building out such a scintillating sidekick can take an almighty amount of time, money, and patience.<\/p>\n

Just ask Cory Barlog, the director of Santa Monica Studio\u2019s raucously-acclaimed reboot, who describes Atreus as one of the game\u2019s most controversial features – to the point where his harrowed producers kept pestering him to rethink his ambitious conception of the character, up to and including canning the youngster entirely.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was told multiple times, \u2018scale it back, change it so he\u2019s simpler,\u201d says Barlog.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kicking\u00a0the\u00a0addiction to revenge stories<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

\u201cThey wanted him to hit marks in the world and just talk, to get it done quicker, so we could ship this thing. At one point, I was even told to consider cutting him out of the game, and I laughed and said, \u2018okay.\u2019 But they replied, no, \u2018<\/span>very seriously consider this, we don\u2019t have the production bandwidth for this.\u2019 And I had to entertain what the game would be like without him. I had a very, very passive-aggressive pitch for that one, that, clearly, didn\u2019t go over very well. Subtlety isn\u2019t my thing. It\u2019s like saying, \u2018can we make Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but without Sundance? I managed to convince them that he was necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“I was even told to consider cutting him out of the game, and I laughed and said, \u2018okay.\u2019 But they replied, no, \u2018very seriously consider this, we don\u2019t have the production bandwidth for this.\u2019”<\/span><\/h6>\n

\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Barlog recalls, from the very beginning of <\/span>God of War<\/em>\u2019s sprawling five-year development cycle, he knew that following the slightly muted reception of the 2013 interquel Ascension<\/em>, that Santa Monica Studio couldn\u2019t stitch together another tale of Kratos slicing and dicing his way through another pantheon, fueled by nothing but his searing well of vengeance. He describes the franchise\u2019s habitual overuse of forced betrayals and endless quests for revenge as an \u201caddiction,\u201d one that they planned to use Atreus as a springboard to overcome.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe couldn\u2019t just make another \u2018angry Kratos\u2019 game,\u201d says Barlog. \u201cWe wanted a character who could reject Kratos\u2019s orders, who could prod and provide a foil for Kratos to actually talk and communicate, not just during cinematics, but through gameplay as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early on, some on the design team balked at the concept of granting the famously-misanthropic Kratos another child, knowing full-well the sheer amount of grunt-work that the fresh face would bring to the project, both in terms of narrative and technical execution. <\/span><\/p>\n

The team visited their fellow Sony studio Naughty Dog to talk to their AI programmers, and it was only at that point that Barlog fully understood the morass of issues that Santa Monica would have to trudge their way through to make Atreus a reality – one bugfix at a time. <\/span><\/p>\n

For example, initially, Barlog wanted to allow players to swim through the shimmering waters of the reboot\u2019s Lake of Nine, but his lead gameplay programmer shut down that fancy before it even got off the drawing board. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe said 2D navigation was gonna be hard enough – if we incorporate 3D navigation, it just becomes ridiculous,\u201d Barlog says. \u201cWe could do it, of course, but we\u2019d have to get rid of so much stuff to justify that dev time. And that\u2019s how we ended up with the boat, which was one of the game\u2019s least popular features internally, until we finally implemented the storytime [conversations between Kratos and Atreus] less than nine months from the finish line.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Barlog describes the process of creating a lifelike companion like Atreus as a tremendous amount of legwork, with the boy\u2019s humanity slowly trickling in as features were implemented – he went from not speaking at all to only speaking in combat barks, for example. In Barlog\u2019s words, the process is essentially just endless layering, almost like an ostentatious birthday cake that you have to wait five years to finally wolf down. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s coming up with systems and their conditions,\u201d he says. \u201cIf an enemy is coming to the right, he says this, if the enemy is the last in the grouping of enemies, he says that, if the enemy is approaching from behind – it just becomes massive, and exhaustive. And that\u2019s just combat, never mind the climbing, or exploration. It\u2019s never going to be limited by the space on the disk, or anything like that. It\u2019s all about the time you invest, how many different behaviors and reactions you can put in for him. That was a big part of the \u2018boy button,\u2019 which was first suggested by [designer] Eric Williams. When you have a context-specific button like that, it has to do a lot of work, since you don\u2019t have squad commands. Instead, you press the kid button, and the kid does something. Well, obviously, we have to allow for all that. Just more layering.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“We couldn\u2019t just make another \u2018angry Kratos\u2019 game.”<\/span><\/h6>\n

\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Throughout all this, however, Barlog points to one thing as the lynchpin keeping the wheels on the cart, what he refers to as the project\u2019s \u201csecret sauce\u201d – the simple fact of <\/span>God of War<\/em>\u2019s five-year dev cycle, which he says allowed for a level of handcrafted charm that truly allowed Atreus to shine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think several developers who look at what we\u2019re doing think we\u2019re a little crazy,” says Barlog. “That we could do things an easier way, or just automate, but because we have the incredible amount of support from Sony, we can afford to do something that takes five years to do like this.\u201d<\/p>\n

He describes the development process as \u201can ever-shrinking box\u201d that producers and creatives alike have to maneuver in, even as the calendar on the wall flips away and the walls close in around you. \u201cIt\u2019s the sweat equity of having one person focus on one problem for years,\u201d he says. \u201cFor most people, that\u2019s a luxury you don\u2019t have.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Still, for those who don\u2019t have a deep-pocketed platform holder to fund their impossibly-ambitious mass market dreams, Barlog has some familiar advice: keep it simple. He points to indie darling <\/span>Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons<\/em> as an example of a smaller studio offering a novel solution to a long-held problem – and soaking up a deluge of revenue in the process.<\/p>\n

To those who would emulate Atreus, he gestures to one of his own inspirations, perhaps the most lauded companion of all, the ethereal princess Yorda from Fumito Ueda\u2019s landmark Ico<\/em>, which he describes as \u201cthe perfect fusion of narrative and mechanics.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it\u2019s not an infinite time, infinite money situation – if you\u2019re not Gabe Newell,\u201d he jokes, \u201cI would ask \u2018why do you want it? What are you going to do with it? What do you want to say?\u2019 And then stand on the shoulders of those who came before you.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than anything, Barlog says that creating Atreus was a labor of love, made possible by raw technological prowess and massive, massive amounts of work. And, as he recalls, some had interesting ways of showing their dedication.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHayato Yoshidome, the technical designer who basically handled the son from the beginning, has a tiny little portrait of Atreus at his desk. It\u2019s bedazzled, and it\u2019s always looking at Hayato, and it\u2019s almost like he\u2019s saying, \u2018do me right, Dad,\u2019” Barlog says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“Even late in development, we had to keep that up, because there\u2019d be so many times with Atreus would glitch out. In the most emotionally-tense scene of the entire game, when Atreus is laying down, in a really vulnerable state, all of the sudden his combat banters trigger, and his face twitches, and he says, \u2018sure are a lot of Draugr around here!\u2019 It\u2019s the most arresting thing, because you\u2019re getting into the scene, and it\u2019s really working, and then he starts to talk. And we would laugh, because that\u2019s just the process.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In today\u2019s big-money gaming space, it can sometimes seem like there are enough A.I. companions looming on the hilltops to fill a whole army of second bananas, with The Last of Us\u2019s Ellie rubbing shoulders with the likes of Elizabeth and even a certain two-tailed fox. But while a robust companion like God of War\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}