God of War’s battles tell a story with confused intentions
Contains spoilers of God of War. This story is part of Deorbital’s God of War feature series, part of an effort to raise funds for a new year of publication. Get the details here.
After becoming the the template for a whole generation of brawlers, God of War isn’t sure what it means to bring a new entry into the modern day. So its answer is to become an unholy amalgam of every action game design trend of the last 15 years. But unable to be satisfied with being an imitator it draws attention to itself. It’s design for the age of CinemaSins: determined to answer every logical inconsistency inherent to games with a knowing joke or a long winded explanation that insists the answers are in the lore.
This gambit backfires. Despite the polish given to every element, together they form an incoherent whole. What could have been accepted as a contrivance of the form draws scrutiny to itself, highlighting every other tension. And no tension stood out to me more than the one between the competing aims of its combat.
As part of its desire to tell a more grounded story, God of War switches to an over-the-shoulder 3rd person perspective. Its camera closely hugs Kratos, framing him with more intimacy than he’ll ever show his son. The effect is two fold: it places a more importance on Kratos’ personal perspective, and it obscures the battlefield by limiting your view.
This isn’t inherently a problem, and it has its advantages, as evidenced by the sheer number of games that have adopted it. But most of those games counterbalance its limitations by pulling out the camera during certain situations, metering enemy aggression, or level design.
We can see this best in the third-person cover shooter. The limited perspective is counterbalanced by the ability to attack rapidly from range, which slows the speed of enemy advancement. Level design supports this as well: attacks are generally frontal assaults, with attack vectors ranging from immediately forward, opening to 180° for multiple attackers, and pushing all the way to 270° to create desperate situations. This prevents the nasty surprise of being attacked by something you can’t see, or at least gives you an opportunity to see the enemy before they sneak up on you. You generally won’t be attacked from all sides unless there are few threats, such as during a boss fight.
God of War iterates on the ideas and perspective of these third-person shooters, but its encounters are still designed like a traditional brawler. Combat almost always takes place in arenas. Enemies attack from all sides, attack ruthlessly, make a point to make sure they can surround you, and come in groups that can pester you, often from a distance, while you’re in combat with another enemy. If you’ve been paying attention, you might start to see this would be a problem when dealing with an over-the-shoulder camera. Other games might pull back to give a better overview of the situation, but God of War refuses in order to keep intact its gimmick of taking place in one take, which itself fails to pay off. It’s not unaware of the resulting problems, and offers several solutions, but most of them feel like bandages rather than real fixes.
To combat the reduced situational awareness the game provides markers that indicate the direction of enemies and their attacks, as well as a dedicated quick turn button to spin you 180°. The markers don’t always offer enough information. There’s no real sense of distance, or differentiation between a long range attack or close range one, making it difficult to prioritize threats, and the quick turn takes enough time that’ll you’ll probably get hit in the meantime. This is where Kratos’ son, Atreus comes in.
Atreus acts as both a spotter and long distance attack. His callouts do a better job of warning about incoming attacks and projectiles than the markers, and his arrows can reach enemies you can’t. As Jackson put it, turn off markers and the game becomes about listening to Atreus, a smarter and more aware person. This could have been an opportunity to underscore Kratos’ limited viewpoint, mechanically and thematically.
Instead the story goes out of its way to justify Kratos’ views and actions, and, as Em observes, reflects Atreus’ worth by his utility to Kratos, communicated through the way it deploys the “Son Action” command.
You can see this dynamic in action through the game’s soft ranking system. While it never formally grades you on combat performance, it will periodically have Kratos comment on Atreus’ performance in combat after battle. These comments vary depending on how well you fight, which I found out after reloading a save and performing differently in the same battle. This frames Kratos’ performance as dependent on how Atreus supports him, placing the blame for mistakes in combat on Atreus’ failings.
During one point Atreus becomes sick and Kratos needs to journey home alone. This could have been an opportunity to drive home Kratos’ reliance on Atreus. Atreus provides directions to each objective, and translates the runes that provide puzzle solutions. It could have derailed Kratos’ path, as it does several times elsewhere throughout its runtime, by serving runes he couldn’t interact with, or by leaving you with only the map to navigate, instead of Atreus’ instructions. It’d also be a chance to make combat harsher, removing the callouts for enemy attacks and setting up long range fights.
Instead it undercuts the loss of Atreus’ abilities by providing a different companion character who performs similar functions, greets you with simpler enemy formations, then gives you the Blades of Chaos, which serves to empower you with long range and crowd control attacks. It works well enough that when they later have Atreus briefly stop responding to your commands it doesn’t matter, since you’re more than equipped to take the challenges on yourself.
The Blades of Chaos reveal is also supposed to serve as a character moment for Kratos, a regretful return to the past he is trying to run away from. It’s him coming to terms with his wretched actions, as a sacrifice made for his son. Which is totally undercut by the empowerment it imbues. As Kirk Hamilton described it at Kotaku, his reaction was “definitely more ‘Fuck yeah omg check out these dope blades!’ and less ‘I now understand the burden of Kratos’ sins.’”
A lot of these problems are the result of design which centers the desires of the player above all else. Kratos can’t be inconvenienced by the loss of Atreus because then the player will be. He can’t be physically weighed down by his emotions, because that will get in the way of the player feeling like a badass.
This is also the reasoning behind turning the game into an RPG, which developers explained in interviews as being a part of giving players more choice and strategic options.
Ironically, this creates a new tension within God of War’s structure. It’s rotten with the same set of systems that exist in almost every AAA game, but rarely feels as if it understands why they’re used. Its need to cram a straightforward story into a loot driven RPG fights against both its pacing and the goals of its combat.
The tight framing and movement of the camera communicate a strong focus on physicality during the axe combat. At its best, the axe feels heavy, and each attack is followed with a visible reaction from the enemies. It’s supplemented by a shield and unarmed style that provide loud, booming hits. This is quickly sabotaged by the introduction of stronger fodder enemies that either provide little to no reaction, making it difficult to lock down enemies and control the pace of combat.
It makes a majority of the extended moveset useless. Moves like trip attacks become inconsistent, and at times straight up don’t work on enemies.The inability to stagger enemies means trying the stance switches or longer combos is a good way to make yourself vulnerable. It’s possible to integrate these moves into combat, but the best strategy quickly becomes to do the basic combo while watching for the indicators that tell you when to block or dodge.
On top of that are the stun and elemental damage systems. Each is designed to provide incentive to not get hit while being aggressive. Neither feels useful. Elemental damage is built up by attacking without being hit, but gets so lost in the chaos of battle that I often forgot about it entirely in the chaos of battle. It never felt as if it gave me enough of an edge to focus on building it up.
Stun damage fills up as you hit enemies, and can be laid on faster with arrows or bare handed attacks. Stop attacking a target — which you’ll probably do several times given how many enemies it throws at you — and it’ll quickly decay. Fill the stun gauge and you’ll open up an enemy for a long execution that will severely damage or outright kill them.
Unless you specifically build Kratos’ and Atreus’ skills around it, stunning enemies takes so long you’ll likely be interrupted before you can fill the gauge. There’s no sense that you’re throwing an enemy off balance as you build stun — it’s almost a binary, they’re stunned or they’re not. Even when you can efficiently stun enemies, it’s almost always easier to lean on that basic combo. All of this makes it really difficult to build a sense of momentum.
The combo and stun systems are solid ideas, they just don’t mesh well. Compare this to Nioh or the Batman Arkham series, which have similar systems.
Nioh uses a ki system for both the player and enemies. Attacking or getting attacked depletes ki, and running out causes a character to be put into a vulnerable state where critical attacks, or even executions, can be inflicted. Certain moves also inflict large ki damage, making it possible to perform these executions more frequently.
The Arkham games are deeply combo focused. Combos are built by attacking and countering without error. As combos build Batman’s speed, range, and damage increase. Certain skills will also award bonus damage for well timed strikes and higher combos, and others will allow you to cash in a high combo to perform takedowns that instantly incapacitate or disarm an enemy or group.
Each of these games’ respective systems play to the strengths of the combat, and support its thematic goals. Nioh creates a sense of lethality in both the player and the enemies, and allows you to bait enemies into a vulnerable state. It puts a focus on observing movements and only acting when you can gain an advantage. Batman places importance on building momentum without mistakes, empowering you the closer you play to the untouchable image of the character established in the mythos.
By contrast the stun and combo systems in God of War fail to communicate the same physicality of the core combat. Stunning enemies is more about keeping the gauge from decaying, focusing on a singular enemy and using Atreus to keep the gauge going when you need to dodge. Combos do little more than build up a meter that allows you to inflict extra elemental damage — provided that the enemy isn’t invulnerable to it.
Combined with the focus on gear, the perks which give you a random chance to activate bonus effects, and the runic attacks that operate on a cooldown, combat often feels more in line with playing an MMO. Timing skills, filling up bars, and improvements to stats are more important than understanding the full moveset.
It’s not that God of War has to imitate games like Nioh or Batman Arkham City to be successful. Rather, God of War’s core combat and supplementary systems have competing goals. The core moveset wants to communicate a sense of physicality and control. Meanwhile, the RPG elements want to create a framework for progression and a slow accumulation of power. Instead of starting at a place that sells that strength, and using the RPG elements to give you more options, it makes leveling up a requirement for expression in combat.
In fact, a lot of the game’s problems are dependent on the difference between your level and the enemies. Level up and it becomes easier to use the rest of your moveset, as enemies become more likely to react and be staggered if you have higher stats.
This is how it ends up with a story where Kratos can kill gods and dragons, but can’t budge a unremarkable optional enemy, which in turn kills him in a few hits. It creates inconsistency both within the moment to moment feel of the combat, and within the fiction.
God of War’s combat is flat. It doesn’t know what abilities you have at any moment, so it can’t demand you use any them. The rhythms at the start and end of the game are the same, maybe changing between instruments when needed.
There’s no intent or direction to the battles you fight. It’s packed with system upon system, with none of them meaningfully integrated. Cohesion is replaced with the promise of more. More sidequests, more crafting, more gear. With bigger, more badass numbers to go with it. All to serve you the illusion of progress, no matter what order you decide to complete its checklist.
In that way its combat finally manages to feel coherent with its narrative. They’re both there to fool you into thinking God of War is a lot deeper than it is.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This series of articles have been funded by readers like you. To support Deorbital in creating more space for under-represented voices in games writing, we are currently raising funds for a new year of publication. Please consider supporting us and our work, by donating HERE.
