Venturebeat - Interview with Cory Barlog behind the crafting of God of War.

[Nightengale]

Didn't see a thread of this, so I thought I'd make a thread that encompasses the broader details instead of the piece-meal ones that other outlets are following up from: https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/06/...y-behind-the-crafting-of-god-of-war/view-all/

All in all, it doesn't tell a broadly new story from what we already heard from Cory talking about GoW so much, but there's always some extra and interesting new trivia here and there.

Some select quotes. Look at the article for the rest.

GamesBeat: I was a little confused about how much time you had on it. Five years, I've heard that in some interviews, but I think you said seven years on your reaction video.

Cory Barlog: Five years are the total time from when I got back. I think it's just two months shy of five years, when you consider the release date. I came back in June 2013. We released in April. But I was thinking about the game a little bit before that. I wonder if it was—my son is only 6. I don't know. Maybe I was saying that. But five years was the overall process. Yumi Yang, the producer on the game, likes to say four years, because she doesn't count that first year. "You were just thinking in that first year. It doesn't count."

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GamesBeat: Did you bounce it off of anyone like Shannon? Or did you go to Shannon saying, "Here's why you should trust me because I'm going to figure it out"?

Barlog: Shannon, I've worked with her since 2003. Her and Yumi, I have an inherent trust with them. But she'll say, "Barlog, you have to get it together. I need a pitch. I need to know what's going on." There was a moment, when I had realized that we were writing the wrong game in our first draft—the focus went away from the father-son story and went far more into the plotting and all the other stuff. That was seven or eight months and I had to throw it all out. We had an outline and everything and I had to get rid of it. I knew it would make the writers upset.
I went to lunch with Shannon and said, "I know you'll get upset about this, but I've been going down a blind alley. I have to go back out and re-assess. Here's my high level." This was before the action and the mother. This was just Kratos and his son on a journey. It had no heart to it. I realized that we were in the middle of a story, but not in a good way. I said, "I don't have it all figured out yet, but here's the highest level. It's Kratos and Atreus trying to go to the highest mountain to spread his dead mother's ashes." She said, "All right. Do it."

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GamesBeat: You had an open world-ish section of the game. How much of that did you want to have versus telling people where to go to the next part of the story?

Barlog: We kept describing it as "wide linear." I was adamant that we couldn't make an open world game. The cost of entry and the expectation level is so high that we'd never compete. We just don't have the infrastructure and the systems. I don't want to do that.

GamesBeat: You were 300 people or so?
Barlog: At our peak, yeah.

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