14 DAY TRIAL // The team working on God of War: Ascension tries to make sure that the look of the new game in the series will not just impress players, but it will also push the technology powering it to its limit while testing the capacities of the PlayStation 3 home console as well.
Chris Sutton, who is the art director working at Sony Santa Monica, has told Gamasutra in an interview that, “Our engine and everything is all completely made in-house, and we try to cater everything specifically to what we do and what our needs are.”
In order to create the distinctive art style of the series, the art team is constantly asking those who create the elements of the game engine to develop new tools.
Sutton revealed that for God of War: Ascension it had added a technical environment lead to the team in order to make sure that the areas the player visited looked the best they could.
He added, “There's such a robust engine, so many features and things you can do, it's just a lot to take in - for somebody to really understand completely, artistically, from point A to point B, and completely understand it from a technical standpoint.”
The Sony Santa Monica development team needs to pay attention to the expectations of the fan base, which are mainly colored by their experience with the previous titles, while also pushing the boundaries and testing the limits of what’s possible and acceptable.
God of War: Ascension will be a prequel to the other games in the series and will show Kratos with more humanity than before, detailing his previous adventures, then beginning his god-oriented genocide.
The game will introduce multiplayer to the series for the first time, allowing gamers to create their own characters, then either collaborate to take down monsters or will fight each other in specific arenas.