• Posted March 7th, 2013 at 06:35 EDT by Mike Harradence
• 2 Comments

God of War: Ascension is the first entry in Sony Santa Monica’s blood-thirsty series to feature multiplayer, but adapting the game’s mechanics into an online arena wasn’t a walk in the park.

Speaking to O Canada.com, GoW: Ascension’s lead environment artist, John Palamarchuk, admitted that some of the combat mechanics – notably the cinematic finishing moves – had to be rebalanced in order to fit into a multiplayer setting. 

“Yes, definitely. Part of the problem is God of War has a lot of cinematic cut scene moments and finishing kills, so you can imagine, what do you do when you’re fighting another player and you’re going to kill them and you’re doing a finishing move. So what happens? Does someone else run up while you’re doing your finishing move and kill both of you? We tried that and it just doesn’t work because it feels unfair…,” he said.

“Someone else would do something in the game and it would cut the camera for all eight players. In play tests we’d get feed back saying that, “Well, I was in the middle of a move and I was about to kill a guy, and you just took control of the camera,” so we had to figure out a balance between having God of War gameplay and having multiplayer that worked.

“In the end I think we found something that was pretty smooth and was a good compromise.”

God of War: Ascension is due out exclusively on PlayStation 3 on March 12. Stay tuned for our full review here at PSU.com later today.