God of War Guide The God of War Team
Rafael Grassetti
Principal Character Artist
How did you first become interested in pursuing a career in video games?
I started my career creating characters for advertising and products. As I improved my skills the video game industry became a natural transition for me.
How long have you been on the team?
I’ve been with Sony for six years, working on God of War for the past four.
Give the reader an idea of your day-to-day tasks.
During my day, I look at the progress on all the characters that are being developed at the studio, sync with different teams and departments if there are any dependencies or things that are being worked and give feedback on it. If nothing else needs my attention, I go back to my desk and I create some art myself, if it’s for Kratos, a small prop or prototyping something new, it depends on what stage we are in the project.
What was your favorite aspect about the project?
The universe we are working on. The title and the theme are so rich in characters that it makes my work that much more fun.
What was the trickiest task assigned to you and how did you solve it?
Kratos and Atreus, not necessarily in this order. Creating a new version of a well-established character was a very tricky task and took a long time. On the other side, introducing a new hero walking next to this well-established character was very scary, specially being a young character.
What are you most proud of concerning the game?
The way we were able to introduce these characters to the fans and tell a new story.
Art and Design
What fresh approaches have you brought to the design of the principal characters for God of War?
From my experience on working on other triple A PS4 Sony games, I was able to bring another point of view of executing realistic characters but still maintaining the style that God of War always had and find that balance.
Where did you look for inspiration in designing new characters, such as Brok, Sindri, Freya, and the World Serpent?
We looked at a lot of historical references for costumes, story of characters, and how we could mix that with the God of War style we developed. Creating a strong design with a strong base of references from the period, but adding our own twist to those characters, is what kept us inspired to create new unique characters.
Talk about your inspiration for the artistic look and feel of God of War’s transition to a Norse mythological setting.
The past titles of the franchise always had a very strong style and art direction. For this one we wanted to bring the title to the next generation of consoles and the new mythology, but still maintain as much as we could from the past titles. This new mythology allows us to be a lot more realistic on how we treat everything. The characters and environments are a lot more grounded and that way when we introduce the twist of the new setting, the mythological characters, gods and big monuments, it is a lot more impressive than before.
What were the biggest challenges when striving for a no-cut camera? Did this change the way the team approached the game?
In the past titles, camera cuts allowed us to have more resolution on characters during cut scenes, swap meshes around with more polygons, and maintain quality every time the camera was close. For lighting, it was a big hit. If you play any other game you will notice lights shifting around to create a perfect shot for every camera placement. This time around we had to come up with tricks for all of that. Characters need to be 100% during gameplay and cinematics; there is no swapping textures around. Lights had to be kept in the same position for long cinematics and find tricks to move them around without the player noticing. It was painful but worth the effort, you can see the results and feel the immersion when you play the game.