"This time you can put elements into your blades, and those elements change your specials and where you put your super-moves," McDonald elaborates. That's now replaced by a set of elements that can be installed into Kratos' blades, and that can have XP piled into them. Oddly enough for a new feature, it feels like something of a severance at first, but it doesn't supplant the XP and upgrading systems of previous God of Wars. No longer will certain tools be doled out later in the game: they're now all available on the battlefield at any point, and as a result of that the combat's more varied, and a little broader to boot. Those weapons, littered around the battle space or plucked from enemies' hands, replace the traditional unlocks of previous games.
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"Allowing him to pick weapons up in the world show that he's still a Spartan warrior, and he can pick up any weapon." "One of the first ideas we had that Kratos was a Spartan warrior - he didn't have the chain blades until he picked them up from Aeres," explains McDonald. Beyond that, there's a broader set of systems that are new to God of War, and they're ones that help freshen up combat that, by the time of 2010's third instalment, was in serious danger of getting stale.Ĭountering the weaker blades is a new rage system, although it's elsewhere that the real changes have taken place. You'll feel it first in the fundamentals, such as the slightly springier blades, their subtly weaker attack attributed to the fact that this is a prequel that stars a less empowered Kratos. "After the first three, we just couldn't do all that again," says combat designer Jason McDonald, a longtime member of the God of War team immortalised by a trophy named in his honour in the HD remakes.
GOD OF WAR ASCENSION INFO SERIES
From this restriction, control's slowly dealt over to the player - first by a handful of QTE-fuelled dodges, and then further out still until the fiery blade swinging combat slowly clicks into place.īy the time that Kratos is fully under the player's command, it's apparent that this Ascension offers perhaps the biggest leap forward in combat mechanics that the series has taken to date. In place of the heady freedom and spectacle of past games, here Kratos is introduced bound in chains, held captive by Megaera, one of the furies. It's there in the combat itself as well, although it's uncharacteristically coy in revealing itself. Regardless, Ascension once again manages to look like a painting, even if it's most definitely the kind of painting you'd expect to find on the wall of a slightly troubled GCSE classics student. It's there in the spectacular visuals, which are now so embedded within the world of God of War it's becoming dangerously easy to be blasé about them (Digital Foundry's recent tech analysis should snap you out of that soon enough, though). First it hits the rewind button, sending Kratos back to his time as a Spartan, but more importantly it's drilled down into all the tiny details that help make up the epic vision. The beginning of Ascension provides an answer of sorts to Sony Santa Monica's perennial problem.
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God of War's only real problem has been with the spectacles it's created itself - how can you trump battles that have consumed the heavens, and where do you go once you've felled Zeus? God of War has never really had a problem with spectacle - this is a series with set-pieces that fling gods together with happy abandon, and one that toys with perspective and scale with dizzying ease and breathless pace.