Sony Santa Monica I think we can probably all agree that the PS4 exclusive God of War was a fantastic game. A gorgeous looking piece of work, with an engaging story and plenty of thrilling set pieces.
If I had one complaint about the game (and please don’t hurt me for saying this) it’s that there weren’t enough boss fights. Prior to the latest entry, God of War was known for its epic, large scale throw downs with colossal monsters.
While the most recent game did have a few of these – and they were indeed epic – I was kind of left wishing we’d seen a few more. As it turns out, that was originally part of the plan.
Sony Santa Monica God of War director Cory Barlog recently told Noclip that a ton of boss fights ended up being cut, partly because they were just too much work to implement properly.
He explained:
We cut a lot of bosses. A lot. We had so many more. It was a much more ambitious, crazier game. And as you go through development, you start realising, ‘No, it’s too big, we can’t do this.’
Before you judge Barlog though, he does note that a single boss battle took 18 months of work from a team of 30 developers. Obviously they actually wanted to release the game at some point, so they made the wise decision to scale back a bit, especially given that the team working on boss battles had other responsibilities too.
Barlog continued:
One boss takes like 30 developers a year and a half. It’s an absolutely massive scale when you really consider it, and you measure it against other games in which we finished the game in a year and a half.
Even if God of War was somewhat lacking in the boss department, I think we can all agree that the Valkyrie Queen more than makes up for things in terms of challenge. That thing kicked my ass all over Midgard.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.