God of war is undoubtedly one of the best, or rather best game released this generation. Having received critical acclamation from fans and critics alike, it is one of the few games to get so much praise.
God of War director Cory Barlog, recently gave an interview to Gaming Bolt and mentioned that Sony Worldwide Studios engages in a lot of tech and ideas sharing, each studio learning from the others.
“Oh, as much as we have time, we’re always talking to each other,” Barlog said. “For the UI specifically, we looked at tons of games, you know, like Destiny, Battlefield. There are so many different games, and each one of them handles this in a different way. So we can go, “Oh, that’s interesting, we should look at how they work around this”. “Oh, that’s cool, look at how they did that well”. It inspired the things we don’t know very well. We found other games like this where they had things like many layered menus and a crafting system. And this was our first time doing this, so it’s not perfect, there are many improvements we can make on it.”
“I think that’s the best part of working at Sony right now, I have access to all these incredible developers. I am able to talk to people over at Sucker Punch, Guerrilla, Insomniac, Naughty Dog. And we are open because we are all part of this connected family. There’s very few people I am not able to talk to in the Sony first party family, and get inspired by their actual process and detail. And that’s the kind of thing we sort of lost as we became owned by corporations-as developers, we don’t get to share as much, everything is proprietary and involving secrets. GDC is no longer the thing where everyone is like “hey, let me show you that code, that shows you exactly how I solved this rendering issue problem”.”
“We’re starting to see a little bit more of that, but within Sony, we have these things called Creative Share Weeks, with several developers, where we send our developers to their studios for a week, and they send theirs to ours for a week. And they get a desk, they’re working on the game. And then at the end of the week, they give us a sort report card of, “hey, we solve problems like this, you solve them like this. Hey, your way is better” or “our way is better, and let me show you why”. And that kind of sharing is born is amazing, that is something that is truly born out of this creative thing. We are better because we share.”
He also spoke on the Last of Us and Naught Dog comparisons, cited out by various people, and, he appreciated that.
“The thing with The Last of Us, is, for me, I think a lot of people mean it as a dig, which I’ve never really understood,” he said. “Like, “oh, you’re just doing your own Last of Us”, so, o-Kay. One, I am incredibly inspired by Neil and his team, they are absolutely otherworldly with their abilities and how talented they are and how much they bring to and elevate the medium. And I think to me, I would love to be considered as somebody alongside, or even within the proximity of someone who helped elevate the work that we do. Help make people see the work we do in a different light. So I will never ever be bothered by the fact that we are being compared to The Last of Us, because I think it’s truly a watershed moment in our industry. So to be considered in the same vein as that is fantastic. But I think it shortsells any idea when you say there’s a similar part to something else, like “aw man, The Avengers is ripping off Batman. You’ve got people running around in outfits”. Of course, there are outfitted people and there’s superhero stuff, but it’s not just ripping off Batman.”
“I think we’re all inspired by each other. We’re all riffing on each other. At the end of the day, every one of us is ripping off stories from the Greeks and from the Bard, and from everything. There’s nothing new, even “new” is inspired by something. We’re all, either consciously or unconsciously, we’re inspired. I think that’s a good thing.”