Santa Monica Studio has revealed how God of War's non-interrupted in-game camera brought additional difficulties for the PC port team. To ensure everything worked as intended on ultra-wide displays, the devs had to play through the entire game quite a lot.
God of War asks to be played in the widescreen format with its "huge vistas, the big sweeping moments, and the cinematics that play to that" — just check the new trailer below. Santa Monica Studio and Jetpack Interactive were excited to have players experience 2018's hit action game on 21:9 monitors, yet it quickly became obvious that lots of effort needed to be poured into the port, PC Gamer reported.
Not only do all UI elements have to be reconsidered for a comfortable ultra-wide play, but the major problem was the field of view at that wider aspect ratio:
"If you widen the aspect ratio without increasing FOV, it just doesn't look quite right to our brains," senior technical producer Matt DeWald said. "But once you widen the FOV, you start seeing things that you were never supposed to, like in bad 'HD remasters' of old TV shows."
These kinds of animation issues aren't exclusive to God of War's unique camera design, but it is yet another example of how much more complicated things can get with a PC port. Fixing those issues required playing the PC version moment-to-moment in ultra-wide, pointing out all the reoccurring problems for animators to change, and then playing it again. We're talking about an 80-plus-hours walkthrough here done multiple times.
"It required playing [...] not just cinematics because we're a no-cut camera, it's the one-shot the entire way. So it's really playing through [...] all these controlled camera moments, like when Kratos is trying to kill something and he goes into a locked animation, the camera's controlled to that scene," DeWald explained. "It was literally just hand effort to go back and fix up all those things because it's hard to systematically find these issues."
Judging from the first reviews, it was well worth it, as God of War has ended up becoming one of the highest-rated games this year just as it was back in 2018 on PS4. It launches on Steam on January 14 — the pre-load is already available.