The game director behind Naughty Dog’s highly acclaimed The Last of Us series and of multiple Uncharted titles, Bruce Straley finds a lot of the modern AAA blockbusters as “boring,” which also include Sony’s God of War Laufey. In a recent Edge Magazine story on the current state of the videogame industry, Straley talks about the modern AAA landscape which he feels are getting stale because of a glaring lack of innovation and particularly low degree of risk involved. And as a fitting example, he pointed to the upcoming God of War Laufey which although stunning in terms of sheer production value, is not nearly as big on innovation and refreshingly new ideas.
“God of War Laufey, I look at that game, and every pixel is mindblowing,” he said. “The amount of work and skill that’s gone into every single frame… I’ve made those kinds of games, and I’m still blown away. But when I actually look at what you’re doing in the game? I’m not excited. And that’s nothing against the God of War team. Just, across the board in triple-A, it feels like there’s no opportunity to inject fresh, innovative ideas.”
He’s right in a lot of ways as due to the exponentially high costs of AAA game development in the current era of gaming, most of the titles tend to take the safe routes instead of trying to inject new ideas into the experiences that can also potentially run them into the risk of alienating a part of their audiences. And it’s precisely why we don’t see much groundbreaking ideas in gaming today, especially in the AAA landscape.
God of War Laufey stars Faye, Kratos’ wife in a spin-off adventure that takes place after her death in Ragnarok and the upcoming title is set to be a lot more action oriented experience in the same vein as the much older entries in the God of War series. And according to the devs themselves, the combat system in the upcoming entry in the series is influenced by the earlier, older games, in more ways than one, which is also clear from the gameplay video that was released during this year’s State of Play.
