14 DAY TRIAL // Developer SuperBot Entertainment encountered a variety of challenges while working on the upcoming PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale fighting game, as the studio found it hard to recreate characters that already appeared in violent games, like God of War’s Kratos, Devil May Cry’s Dante, or Metal Gear’s Raiden.
PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is set to deliver an intense fighting experience this November when it appears for the PS3 and PS Vita, featuring a wide array of characters, from Kratos, to Parappa the Rapper, or from Nathan Drake to the Fat Princess.
While it was quite amusing to come up with attacks for more peaceful characters, like the aforementioned Parappa or the Fat Princess, trying to nail down moves for violent heroes, like Kratos, was a much more difficult experience, at least according to the game’s Director, Omar Kendall, who talked with CVG about the fighting title.
“The hardest characters are the Dantes and the Raidens, the ones that are still being developed, and we take a lot of educated guesses in terms of how players are going to respond to those characters. But even a character like Kratos, who has appeared in half a dozen action games, his problem is that he has so much functionality. He has so many weapons, so many appearances and so many iconic moments,” he said.
According to Kendall, players already expect a certain fighting style from Kratos and that can differ depending on how they played the God of War titles he was previously in.
“The Kratos that appears in the mind of players when they imagine Kratos is really hard to get. Is there a particular weapon, or a particular moment in that character's history that speaks to players as the quintessential Kratos move or moment? It's characters like that which present the greatest challenge, the ones that have the longest lineage. You need to try to capture that essence in a few dozen moves.”
Kendall emphasizes, however, that all characters have been balanced and you won’t see violent fighters having an advantage over less violent ones, so look forward to the game’s launch next month.