God of War Ascension will be the last chapter in God of War series to appear on the PlayStation 3. The game will be release March 12.
With all their effort and focus towards God of War Ascension has come to an end, Sony Santa Monica are now ready to take their journey on the PS4.
During an interview between Eurogamer and lead game designer Mark Simon, they discussed and shared their general thoughts about the PS4 hardware but Mark Simon confirmed that he and his team “haven’t touched it” (PS4) just yet.
“We’re going to be able to show a lot more, right? If you give us enough time and you give us those specs, we will blow you away. Our team’s pretty good. …Well, the hardware itself has 16 times the memory we had on the previous console. The hardware takes a lot of the shackles off in terms of visuals.”
“To me [the PS4] is imagination land. We haven’t touched it. We’re not even concentrating on it. All we’re concentrating on is we know we release in a week. I imagine we’re going to be on our forums talking to players about the stuff they’re experiencing in multiplayer and trying to address that stuff immediately. We’re going to have half of our team ready to go for that stuff. We’re going to continue to tune and balance and create new content. We still get to think about and imagine how cool it would be, but we’re still working on this game on the PS3.”
Simon explaining how he and his team maxed out the PlayStation 3 with God of War Ascension .Sony Santa Monica was able to surpass fans’ expectations.
“When we were done with God of War 3 people were saying, ‘they’ve got everything out of the PS3 in terms of how it can look and they’ve squeezed every little bit out of it they possibly could.’ But then, we get to do another project on PS3, and we gave ourselves all these new challenges we’re going to try to do for this project. So we re-write our renderer to make it a little bit faster. We take our lighting scheme and we change it so we can get more colours out of it. We can make it a little bit faster as well. We change the layering system so the worlds look less polygonal. The artists can actually paint up to three layers in the world. We added an avatar system which, based on the weapon you wield, will change the animations you have. It gives you three different sets of head, upper chest and lower body, and changes the armour pieces out. We had a crazy system to do that. We had IK (inverse kinematic) animation blending. And then on top of all that we re-write our game code underneath so it will work across the network. We never had to worry about that before. God of War 3 didn’t have any of this stuff in it. God of War: Ascension has all this stuff in it. And they said this has tapped out the PS3.”
Eurogamer ask Simon if Sony Santa Monica has managed to max out the PlayStation 3, he replied No. He stated improvements can always be made.
“It’s funny. In my head right now I’m like, oh yeah, we totally had to have tapped it out. But I bet you, if you gave us the same hardware, and you gave us another two or three years we would find more stuff to try to extract out of the PS3. What ends up happening is the hardware is incredible and allows you to do an amazing amount of things, but the team at Sony Santa Monica is so creative and technically gifted that if you give them enough time to do something and just let them go, they will find new things to innovate in and they will find new things to make awesome.”