Heavy yet Responsive : The Combat of God of War

COMBAT STYLE

• In general, God of War is a responsive combat system. Yet, Kratos is certainly not a nimble character. His attacks tend to feel heavy.
• This coexistence of heaviness and responsiveness is made possible through short attack sequences. Unlike a game like Batman : Arkham, Kratos rarely strings together rapid attacks. Each individual combo is usually no more than 3 attacks.
• Furthermore, the attack sequences tend to be fairly diversified. Therefore, the element of engagement lies not in stringing combos but instead feeling a sense of autonomy as the player executes diverse moves.
• Overall it seems like the combat style is meant to cater to a mid core audience, who aren't necessarily playing for a deep combat experience.

ATTACK CANCELLATION

• Another key feature in combat is the ability to cancel an attack mid combo.
• The feature creates a much stronger sense of timing as it allows players to simultaneously watch for incoming enemy attacks while in mid attack.
• However, there is an interesting system of triangular, high risk - high reward that emerges from the cancellation feature.
• Certain combos are simply not cancellable while most others remove the ability to cancel just before the last powerful strike in the combo sequence.
  
                                                  (L1 + Square) is not cancellable
  
  
  
  
  (Square, Square, Triangle) is cancellable only before the final triangle.
  
  
   
• This system puts the player in a mindset where he is surveying the battle scene to see whether it is safe to execute non cancellable combos.

ANIMATION AND COMBAT 

• The combat system in God of War is primarily melee - melee. A crux of the engagement of the combat system lies in the player determining windows when he can attack, when he should block and when he should roll away to dodge attacks.
• Given this system animation takes on a role beyond simple visual aesthetics. The animation in the interval between attack initiate and attack hit, serves as feedback for the player to determine and time his course of action.
  
                                             POSEIDON CHARGING HIS TRIDENT
  
  
  
  
• Attack redirection is also a mechanic that is heavily animation dependent. Attack redirection occurs when Kratos blocks an attack during a specific window of time to return the attack.
• In addition, certain attacks and moves render Kratos and enemies vulnerable or stunned for brief periods. These are also primarily indicated through animations.
• The game also uses invincibility frames where Kratos becomes invulnerable after receiving damage for a brief period. These are also primarily indicated through animations.

Decoding Epic Encounters in God of War

A cornerstone of the God of War series, is clearly creating large scale set pieces. I say set pieces because these encounters feel more like self contained mini experiences rather than traditional boss battles.

TECHNOLOGY

• Centering the game around segments that don't necessarily fit within the modelling of moment to moment gameplay means that specialized tools needed to be developed for creation of these segments.
• In GOW3 several boss battles take place on top of moving entities such as titans. During these encounters the characters respond dynamically to movements on the parent entity itself.
• This infers the existence of a system where child objects of a particular joint respond to transform changes of the parent object.
• However, these transform changes couldn't possibly be entirely systemic. A large amount of manual effort must have been involved in aligning attached entities during animation steps.

• In addition, collision on attached entities must have also demanded intricate collision meshes to allow for battles to take place on the parent entity.

PACING

• Each encounter typically has several different stages, with each stage having an epic cinematic payoff.
• Sometimes an encounter can play out over the course of an entire level.
• This affects pacing quite dramatically, as it allows for each stage to be consistently high octane with a tension release in between stages rather than during the battle.
• It also allows for the opportunity to contextualize the encounter over time.
  Eg: Poseidon's encounter progresses from an attack on Kratos to an attack on Gaia placing Kratos' vehicle in jeopardy.

PROGRESS

• Enemies don't have explicit health bars. Instead, what is made evident is how the beast can be defeated. This is also a means for players to gauge their progress in the battle.
  Eg: Kratos defeats Hades by literally cutting away pieces of him.
  
                                  
• In addition most larger bosses also tend to have avatar changes over the different stages also indicating a sense of progress to the player. These avatars also help visualize the characters arcs of the bosses within the battle.
  
                                                   HADES REGULAR AVATAR                            
  
  
  
  
                                           HADES ANGRY AVATAR NEAR DEATH
  
                                      

ENCOUNTER INITIATION

• Clearly a lot of effort goes into making each encounter feel unique.Nevertheless, certain characteristics of a classic God of War encounter are identifiable.
• Encounters tend to begin at surprising moments without announcement.
  
                          HADES ATTEMPT TO RIP KRATOS' SOUL AT INITIATION
  
  
  
  
                                           POSEIDON'S SUDDEN EMERGENCE

PLAYER'S INITIAL REACTION

• A player's initial reaction to boss' at this scale tend to be instant aggression. Therefore, typical first responses tend to be furious hammering of attacks at the boss.
• To accommodate for this player behavior, bosses tend to begin by slowly paced similarly styled attacks.
• These attacks tend to be agnostic of player position, making evasion fairly simple.
• This stage could even be marked by diminished attack damage as the player will undoubtedly be hit a few times.
  
               POSEIDON'S INITIAL UNI-DIMENSIONAL WATER BREATH ATTACK
  
  
   
  
  HADES' INITIAL UNI-DIMENSIONAL STOMP ATTACK
  
  

BUILDING IN NUANCE

• Eventually the player deciphers the animation that maps to the boss's attack preparation and eventually learns to either block or evade the attack depending on blockability of the attack.
• As the battle progresses, boss attacks tend to require more specific player evasive action.
• There is almost a sense of puzzle solving involved in deciphering the required evasive action which could range from flying on impact, continuous rolling, rolling to a specific position etc.
• This phase gets compounded by adding multiple attacks forcing the player to maintain an attack - evasion mapping in his mind.
• This also causes players to attack from positions where they can realistically react in time to avoid impact.
  
                              HADES' EARTHQUAKE - REQUIRES PLAYER TO FLY
  
  
  
  
   POSEIDON'S PINCER ATTACK - REQUIRES PLAYER TO BE AT PLATFORM CENTER
  
  
  

PLAYER CHEATS

• The game provides various means for the player to make himself invulnerable for brief periods. This includes magic attacks, rage of sparta mode, grabbing smaller enemies etc.
• An element of meaningful choice that the player encounters is when he wishes to use these time bound 'cheat' resources.
• However, the game occasionally invalidates these cheat strategies as well. For example, a boss strike could be longer than the invulnerability period of a magic attack.
  
  
   
  
  WHIRLWIND MAGIC - INVULNERABILITY SHORTER THAN POSEIDON TRIDENT
  
  EPIC PAYOFF MOMENTS
  • Boss encounters tend to be check pointed by payoff moments. The player hits circle to trigger a quick time sequence punctuating a visual cut scene.
  • These sequences tend to have the camera scale back to demonstrate the largeness of the encounter.
    
                                       CAMERA SCALE BACK MOMENT

  
  

  

INVALIDATING PLAYER SCHEMA

• As mentioned above, encounters occur over several stages. One technique that the game utilizes is adding subtle variations on individual boss attacks in subsequent stages.
• For example, an attack sequence that had two attacks might now have 4 instead.
• This causes the player to actively resist moves that he has hopefully internalized at this point.
  
  
  HADES CHAIN ATTACK HAS 3 HITS INSTEAD OF 2 IN 2nd STAGE
                               

ENCOUNTER FRAMING

• Memorable GOW encounters don't always involve a boss. Sometimes waves of enemies can be just as engaging.
• Simple things like how these encounters are framed can add pressure on the player.
• For example, stating that 'wandering souls' need to be killed before they are converted into Hades army is so much more effective than simply dropping undead creatures.
  
  
  

FEEDBACK LOOPS

• The game has a variety of types of beasts differentiated on various axes.
• By combining different categories of beasts, the game builds in feedback loops making encounters easier or more difficult.
• For example, a positive feedback loop occurs by adding grabbable characters. This gives the player breathing room to take a break from the action or evade attacks from other monsters.
  
                        
  
• A negative feedback loop occurs when a combination of two monsters can deal greater damage. Eg : Medusa with other quick attacking characters can instantly kill Kratos by turning him into stone and then shattering him.
  
  
   
• Another interesting component is that there exists triangular high risk, high reward built into the negative feedback loops.
• For example, players can use Medusa's stone flash attack to turn into stone other monsters. This however, comes at the risk of Kratos being turned into stone himself.