God of War is a betrayal of the series

That's an excellent parallel to make. Wolverine was always kind of a character who was an asshole and calls people bub. Then we get a really compelling story of him as an old man...it can work.

It's not like Kratos was a complete cartoon character...but he was pretty one dimensional. A new take on him as a wiser old guy is interesting.

To put it in game terms, think of Metal Gear Solid 4.

The new Tomb Raiders are awesome games so, if those are a disservice to their franchise than I hope GoW is as well.

I don't know Final Fantasy or Persona. But I don't find RE4 all that different. It has the tank controls, exploration and survival elements from the original. That series is dead to me, though. I refuse to play it in first person view. It hasn't been good since Mikami left it.

Again, I'm not asking for a game that's exactly the same.

"The old games were far from perfect. But there was plenty they could have changed and improved without turning it into another pretentious walk and talk movie game. Too many games forsake their identities instead of improving on their concepts, all to chase after what's popular at the moment."

I don't really know about the story after playing the third series. But it looks good even though it is changed to be third person. I am really afraid about gameplay.

@ezekiel: RE4 is very different....I don't know how someone can possibly think otherwise. The survival element is not the same. You have a weapons shop in 4. Ammo is plentiful enough to take down hordes, thus making the game more action heavy. You can upgrade weapons. The exploration is not the same at all. 4 is very linear. In the original, you're exploring and backtracking one big mansion. If the series is dead to you because of the first person camera, then you do seem to have a lot of disdain towards different cameras.

You started the topic off by saying this btw "What I liked about God of War was the spectacle, the fast-paced beat 'em up action, the grand environments, the (linear) exploration, the over the top brutality, the epic score, the puzzles. How they all combined to create a mythic adventure. I would have carried those things over to a reboot, set in a different pantheon with a different deity of war as the protagonist."

It just really seems like you wanted the gameplay to be the same as before.

At the end of the day, they're trying something new for the series. It's a new start. Don't bother with it if you don't want to. There are six other games with those aspects you love about them. Other people want something new and mature for the series though. And like a lot of people said, calling people posers for embracing changes like this kind of devalues your entire argument. You like what you like and we like what we like. It's fine.

listen, i don't particularly think that the new game looks very good, but i'm always gonna be here for experimentation and the juxtaposition of different narrative/gameplay styles onto a franchise. that being said, i don't know how well this particular mix is working, but i commend them for at least trying to shake things up.

i know this dude is called kratos and all that, but do you think they could possibly be trying to anthologize this series? like: this is a kratos, but not the one you knew before

I don't really understand how God of War can be betrayed other than like making it a rhythm game or some totally different genre.

It was always an over the top brutal action game with some puzzles and traversal thrown in to switch things up.

Does anyone actually care about the silly story or Kratos as a character?

Does anyone want to go back to Greece AGAIN and use the same weapons AGAIN?

Plus, didn't they already "betray" the series with the multi-player focused Ascension? That seems much more "different" from God of War then this.

Remember when Jak and Daxter went from lighthearted platformer to gritty GTA clone? Was that a betrayal? What about when Mario went 3D?

Game series change and evolve. You wouldn't want the things that worked in the PS2 era to still be dominant today.

Dynasty Warriors started as a one on one fighting game....

I don't. I don't know why I even bothered typing anything out if no one's gonna read it.

Caring might be an overstatement, but I did/do enjoy Kratos and his brutal adventures through mythology. I think I even bought a couple issues of the GOW comic years back. I acknowledge the fact that it's more about flashy aesthetics than deep lore. Throwing a dumb kid into the mix was unexpected, and I look forward to seeing where that goes.

It's crazy to me that people actually care about the tone and story of a series as fucking nonsensical and tone-deaf as God of War. I love God of War 1 & 2, but come on. There's room for them to try new things. The only other direction they could have gone was more in the comic book direction that God of War III went, but I don't feel like anyone would really be able to capitalize on that.

Wait, so you played the first two games of the GoW franchise, and hate the direction of the seventh one? Is this basically what your whole argument boils down to?

You do realise that the formula has been repeated four more times in the series, and that has made the formula stale for the people who have played the other games, right?

Comments like this is why you have been one of my favorite posters on the site ever since I joined.

Yup. How many God of War games were there that were standard fare for the franchise? This keeps the stuff that I am interested in and takes it somewhere else I am probably more interested in personally. The father son story, the tighter feel of both the story and the gameplay suits me better, and it frankly looks pretty cool. I expect spectacle and scale will still be a part of this game.

The last thing we need is another all too familiar sequel right now. In a world filled with 4th+ games being released that still play like the first (Halo, Gears, Forza, Uncharted, Call of Duty, Need For Speed, Assassin's Creed, etc) this is a good thing. I'd rather see them ruin or completely reinvent a franchise than have them make the same old tired shit with a new look over and over again. Sure they could have started a new franchise but then hey are taking a greater risk and it makes sense to capitalize on what they have. And I like the God of War universe, it seems like a great place to make a different sort of game.

The direction they're going in is bland, generic and at odds with the character whose history they're supposedly trying to build off of. Walk and talk sections are unskippable cutscenes that hurt replay value and player agency. There were more interesting directions to go in that would have been more respectful to the series. An over the shoulder view shouldn't have even been under consideration.

I wouldn't go as far as to call it a betrayal, but I will say turning this pretty dang fun character action series I just jumped on into Last of War doesn't do anything for me. I'll play up to 3 and call it a day myself.

Mario 64 is a betrayal of the Super Mario Bros series.

Look, I never would've picked up another regular God of War game, I burned out after 2. I'll probably pick this new one up because despite looking like it's cribbing a lot of its design doc from what's popular right now, it somehow manages to come across as fresh and intriguing. They probably could have just made it a new IP, but then maybe they wouldn't have had any funding or a lower budget without the built-in sales that come from using that IP. It's hard to tell why they're sticking with Kratos, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Either way it's better than Nintendo teasing another Kirby game that looks like it fell off a factory production line for how familiar it looked.

I read what you wrote. The problem is, it's all over the place. You complain that Kratos is a cartoon character who you are now expected to take seriously, but that's more of a problem for the new game than a "betrayal" of the old. If you put Daffy Duck in a serious movie it might not work but it wouldn't be a betrayal of the old material, because he's a cartoon and you can't betray them, you use them for whatever you want.

Also a serious movie exploring the pathos and emotional core of Daffy Duck in a serious way could actually work.

Next you complain about the gameplay and the camera and a bunch of other stuff that you don't know anything about because we've only seen a tiny part of the game. For all we know the game totally changes a few hours in. Maybe it pulls an MGS2 and you end up playing as the kid, not Kratos. Maybe Kratos gets his chain blades back and the camera zooms out further later. Maybe there's an upgrade system that makes him faster and stronger and by the end he's flipping out the way you want.

A lot of your complaints seem to stem from believing that the small bit we've seen is fully representative of what we're doing with the game, but we just don't know.

Complaining about level design in a game you haven't played is just assuming everything won't be to your liking. And there are lots of games that have lots of walking and talking at the beginning for exposition and then focus more on action later on. Maybe the kid dies, reawakening Kratos' rage, and so you only have a companion for the first hour or so. There could be cool interesting mechanics we haven't seen.

Basically, before asserting something is a "betrayal" of a series you should at least give it a chance to actually be released and see how reviews describe it. Heck, this thing isn't out for a year. They might pull the camera out and change the default weapon in that time.

It's too early for the "Not MY God of War!" lament.

They made six of those games (counting PSP). They didn't need to make another one unless it felt completely different. They're doing that, and it's better for it (even if it turns out bad, at least they tried).

He's boring and unlikable. They've already shown him to be a shitty father. At first, he encourages his son to be self-assertive. A few seconds later, he yells, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! ONLY FIRE WHEN I TELL YOU TO FIRE!!" The new pantheon was the best opportunity to create a new character.

It won't change significantly. I know this because the reception so far has been overwhelmingly positive. Look at the YouTube votes. We saw multiple enemies in the newest video and still the camera was really zoomed in. Instead of zooming out to compensate, it looked like the enemies waited and lined themselves up, as seen in the second video I posted.

Yeah, I'm confident you will play as the kid intermittently. The first demo showed the player aiming his bow.

Thank god (one of them) they are willing to change. Three was boring and Ascension was just sad.

I won't debate about your own views that you find the 20 minutes of video for the reboot dull and mechanically limited. But to have such a dramatic stance on the entire game based only on a very small snippet for a game you've never played yet seems extreme, and doesn't really support your further points on the matter. Most of what has been shown in the trailers has no context on what the full game will actually be like. Back to Doom 2016 for example, everyone thought the melee kills would slow down the pacing of the combat in that game. But it did the opposite, it solved the issue of hiding behind cover to regenerate health, or the downtime of having to go hunt for health packs and ammo pick-ups. It actually gave the combat a good sense of cadence that rarely felt slow or stale. But you don't have that context based on the initial trailers you saw. Doom was praised for its combat after everyone got to experience the entire thing. Even Titanfall 2 had a button for a single game mechanic that barely lasted an hour. You can't build a solid case based on such little information.

Wanting to drastically shift your game's tone and mechanics, and what you use for inspiration for that change are two different things. There would still be a God of War reboot right now, even if The Last of Us never existed. Sony would've used some other gameplay tropes instead, because they wanted to steer clear of the familiar God of War games. The Last of Us isn't the impetus of change for the new God of War, people would just be using some other video game to complain about its mimicry.

Not that I agree. But if the platforming is garbage, fix it! Don't regress to realistic level design and a zoomed OTS camera that go against platforming.

I think the bottom line is "God of War is a betrayal of the series" is a statement that would hold more water if the game was already out and people played it already.

Not something you say after two trailers.

I think it's naive and wishful to think they've not shown enough to form an opinion. They've shown plenty. It might improve, but it's not gonna turn out a totally different game than what's been shown.

I'm a sucker who would've played just a new God of War with similiar core gameplay and even better graphics, but I've been into what they've shown of the new direction so far. As long as the new combat system is also good, of course.

After 3, they shouldn't have made another one. GoW3 was a great game and did everything it needed to do and put a nice tidy bow on the series. Then they made Ascension. So the idea of another one of those games is not something I imagine many people want to entertain. You couldn't just release God of War 4 in 2018.

@ezekiel said:

They are also good for lightning-fast shooters like Vanquish. And, more pertinently, for beat 'em ups like God Hand, which is certainly faster than any of the God of War games. Not that I'm expecting the people behind the God of War series to design combat nearly as good as what can be found in either of those games.

You can fire "from the hip" with good accuracy in Vanquish. The camera is far enough that almost the whole body is visible.

I don't know God Hand. But it seems to have smaller numbers of enemies, so a small field of view shouldn't be that big a problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp2uqkJgwuc

Things change. Kratos Changed. and that's ok.

Because nobody wants another one of the old God of Wars anyway.

Change is fine. This looks worse.

I think most people had 0 interest in playing God of War if they made it identical to the old ones. Certainly not enough people wanted it to make it a safe bet for a triple A budget. Glad they shook it up

You mean Steam, the online service and storefront that has more users than Xbox Live and PlayStation Network? Yep, that's the one!

True, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 2, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls 3 were all developed by 1 developer. There's no way those games will be popular enough to create their own sub-genre. And even if they did, any potential indie wannabes like Salt & Sanctuary aren't even triple A and won't be worth it for people who enjoy the genre.

Yeah, Furi has some mixture of bullethell and twinstick shooting like Nier: Automata, so it can't possibly be a character action game. At least not a good one.

Jokes aside, just because a character action game is an indie game, and you don't closely follow those, doesn't make them not character action games. Or mean that they can't be good and successfully contribute to the genre. Even bad character action games are still character action games.

I would actually love to see a character action God of War. I can only stand to hit Circle, Circle, Triangle in, let's say 3 God of War games.

Yeah, no. The series was lagging and something was needed, change had to be made.

They didn't shake it up. They eviscerated it and made it worse.

@ezekiel: Not entirely sure how you get off not playing past the first 2 games but now claiming that Kratos the character can only fit into your defined box. Dude straight up commits suicide or something like that in the last game so there was an attempt at trying to make that character something more than the unimaginably boring one-dimensional character he was for most of the series. I see no reason why they can't try again with a reboot and time skip. I welcome it in fact. Also seems like it's a bit early for this post, considering how little we've seen of the game. That being said, from that same little we've seen I don't know how you arrived at the conclusion that there aren't gonna be "spectacle, grand environments, linear exploration, over the top brutality, an epic score and puzzles" because that looks like exactly what we would get from that kind of game? The change to the combat to be slightly less fast-paced I give you, but all the other things you claim to like about the first 2 games seem entirely likely to show up in full force in this new game from what little we've seen.

I agree completely. I was so excited when I heard a new God of War was coming to the PS4, and then my heart sank when I saw that it was just another Dark Souls clone with the God of War name attached to it. This is a disgraceful bastardization of God of War. We don't need another god damn Dark Souls clone. They're so shamelessly, and obviously, attempting to cash in on the Dark Souls hysteria that's been building over the past several years, and they're simply attaching the God of War name to it to help sell more copies.

Also, to all the people saying that God of War needed to change, I'll admit that there are some games that have drastically changed their formula for the better. Resident Evil 4 is the best example of this. However, RE4 wasn't copying the most popular fad at the time. This is definitely, and blatantly, doing just that. I'll leave you with this. If the next Dark Souls game played like the old God of War games, people would flip their collective shit and be calling for blood.

Nah. More major game franchises need to shake things up more than they do. I never bothered to finish Gears of War 4 because it went from here's a GoW game with new enemy types and an interesting civil war type premise to here's the same old ass GoW with the same old ass locus dudes.

I didn't. My OP didn't say that was all gone.

It looks better than God of War ever did. It used to be a less complex and less deep DMC/Ninja Gaiden, which I didn't need. This looks more interesting.

Yeah, I know they would. I mean, someone here linked my Dark Souls idea thread, which received nothing but negative replies. I agree with you, partly. Change can be good. Eviscerating old series and turning all games into walk and talk, cutscene-filled bullshit with over the shoulder cameras is bad.

I don't necessarily think all change is a good thing. There's something to be said for stability after all. The recent rise of populism in politics some might argue is an example of change that isn't very helpful or productive.

I don't think he should have to "try it first" to form an opinion as that implies that he can't make informed decisions with outside information. Giving a game a chance normally involves buying the game (a hefty financial and time investment in this day and age) at which point it won't matter so much whether it is poorly received or not as...they got your money. FFXIII in my experience is heavily mixed in terms of opinions on it but boasts some mighty impressive financial success in spite of this.

If people always "give games a chance" then it'll only provide financial incentive for developers to continue that games' trend as well as waste the consumers time and money on something they may not enjoy.

You can make your own decision on it Ezekiel, you've made your opinion on the game clear but you might not be able to sway or affect other people's opinions.

Change is neither always good or always bad. You will probably get a wealth more information on this game before it comes out. The first couple of encounters with it may not have swayed you but don't let your loyalty to a franchise buy your support if the franchise starts doing things you don't agree with.

What I think it comes down to in the end is whether you think the studio (owned by Sony) behind God Of War had any integrity to begin with. They will take God Of War in whatever direction is necessary to try and sell the most amount of copies and make the most amount of money. I don't believe it is the willingness to take the series in a new direction for artistic purposes or whatever, but rather to appease to whatever is most popular with mainstream consumers right now, i.e the sort of cinematic narrative story telling we see with a lot of big budget action/adventure games. Just like Hollywood popcorn flicks, it follows the money. I may be totally wrong on this front, but that is my gut reaction to it all. In the end it's all business.

Should have just been called "God of Thunder" where you play as Thor and Odin. Almost as if someone was afraid it wouldn't sell enough if not for the brand recognition. Sigh.

Looks cool.

I sympathize with the people that feel betrayed by this game. Really I do, but I'm glad they didn't just make another God of War. After three games in the main series, 2 game on the PSP, and a prequel on the PS3, i think the God of war series has earned the right to a change.

At this point I would rather there be either a massive change like this one or nothing at all.

And also we don't know the context of the story at this point. For all we know all the gameplay we've seen it's been from the first few hours of the game. Kratos might not even have his son sidekick for very long. I'm be willing to put money down right now that that kid dies and that is what spurs his whole grudge against the Norse gods.

No one is stopping you from replaying the old ones if you liked them so much - personally I look forward to the new direction they are taking the series.

@ezekiel: Wouldn't a real "betrayal" be something like saying "those old games are terrible, and we're never ever doing anything with these characters or franchise again!" as opposed to naybe giving it a shot in the arm? Just my opinion! :D

Odin and Thor are apparently both associated with war, so they wouldn't even need to drop the name. Odin is too powerful and revered to be a main character, though. It could even be about someone ascending through the ranks and taking Thor's place as god or goddess of war.

I am replaying God of War II. I don't like them that much, but I recognize they were good games that could become better and that this is a disservice.