God of War is set to be one of the most amazing single-player experiences this generation when it drops next month, mainly because it’s the fruit of the work of people who love playing solo video games which are getting rarer and rarer every day.
Also, that’s the vision of the creative director Cory Barlog, who expressed it in a recent interview with PlayStation LifeStyle, where he mentioned his hope that the industry never loses its interest in single-player games in the future.
“I feel like for me it’s the experience of when I bought Half-Life 1. I went to the store, I bought it, took it home, installed it, and played it and everything that Half-Life was on the disc. I got the whole experience that they wanted me to have. That’s the experience to me that I want to deliver to people out there that I’m not like, oh, I held back something. It’s like, no, no, no, no. Everything that we have in us is not left on the field, it’s put into that game,” said Barlog.
“So that when you buy it, you have that feeling of like, I get this entire experience. I can go home, I can save this thing, and I can know that you have given me everything you possibly can. I have literally nothing against, you know, multiplayer or cooperative [games]. Even the concept of, you know, microtransactions when done under in a format of like, “here’s the game for free, pay what you want.”
That’s a great concept, right? It can be misused for certain, but I think for single-player games, for the concept of saying, here’s a narrative experience told from the point of view of a director and an amazing team that is going to transport you into a world and take you on an adventure and really deliver on the promises that they make. There’s nothing like that, man. I hope we never lose that from the game industry.”
That’s quite a different position in comparison with where the industry is going, a place where microtransactions and monetization are always the trending topics, and where the open world and persistent experiences are the means for publishers to sustain their economical efforts.
God of War releases on April 20.
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