God of War reboot - now on PC

[ferratilis]

People have been bitching about the lack of exclusive fullscreen mode ever since the game came out. The devs gave an explanation as to why exclusive fullscreen doesn't really make sense with newer versions of Windows and told everyone to kick rocks, basically.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1593500/discussions/0/3182359786939624308/

Exclusive Fullscreen Mode
Hello everyone –

We want to start off by saying thank you for the great response to the launch! Seeing all the reactions, discussions, and feedback from players trying the game for the first time on PC has been incredible.

One of the requests we have seen frequently come up is to add an Exclusive Fullscreen mode. Considering the prevalence of this request, we want to be as transparent as possible regarding what our team is working on and confirm that we have no plans to add an Exclusive Fullscreen mode to God of War.

We made the decision to go with Borderless Fullscreen based on extensive performance testing and research into to the support capabilities of Windows 10 alongside the fullscreen optimizations done by Microsoft in recent years.

Unlike with past versions of DirectX and Windows, the improvements implemented into the DirectX 11 version that God of War runs upon means that Borderless Fullscreen fully supports VSync, NVIDIA G-Sync, etc. Additionally, we concluded that the upscaling we built into the game (TAA, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR) provided higher-quality upscaling than what a monitor could give running at lower resolutions for performance reasons.

We do recognize that there are some ongoing issues with our implementation of Borderless Fullscreen that we are currently working on resolving. For instance, HDR needs to be turned on at the Windows-level to work properly rather than at the application level, and sometimes the mouse doesn't stay constrained to the game window. We will continue to make improvements towards future-proofing our execution moving forward.

There are some other requests that would require additional examination, such as support for supersampling higher resolutions and then downsampling to a lower resolution to get higher quality than your monitor might support. With things like this, we are more than happy to investigate and see if there are solutions!

If you have additional feedback or requests based on our implementation of Borderless Fullscreen, we are happy to hear it. We want to make the game the best it can be and appreciate your thoughts on what improvements will help us get there.

As always, thank you for participating in the God of War community and thank you for playing our game!

Matt DeWald
Sr Manager, Technical Production
Santa Monica Studio

Sometimes people will complain about things just for the sake of complaining. Even Microsoft themselves outlines why borderless is better nowadays in a blog post a few years back.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/demystifying-full-screen-optimizations/

With the release of Windows 10, we added Fullscreen Optimizations – which takes full screen exclusive games and runs them instead in a highly optimized borderless windowed format that takes up the entire screen. You get the visual experience and performance of running your game in FSE, but with the benefits of running in a windowed mode. These benefits include faster PC commands such as alt-tab, multiple monitor set ups and overlays. We have extensive performance data that indicates that almost all users who use Fullscreen Optimizations have equal performance to Full Screen Exclusive. However, if you do find that you are experiencing any issues that may be related to full screen optimizations, please head to the troubleshooting section where we will walk through how to optimize your system and provide feedback to our team.

 

[J1M]

I read somewhere that the director admitted to choosing the third person shooter camera for the "cinematic" feel rather than for gameplay function.

The old GoWs even aped cinema better, by having varied camera angles. He's full of shit and/or doesn't understand film. He just chose it because other popular games use that perspective, I bet.

The funny thing is that they used the same kind of language when discussing the camera in the original trilogy. Now they act like the new camera is cinematic and the old wasn't.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-making-of-god-of-war-iii

The article starts talking about God of War III's camera at the bottom of the first page.

"The camera is not fixed. It is highly scripted to provide a highly cinematic play experience, yes, but in no meaning of the word is the camera fixed," director of technology Christer Ericson explained on the Beyond 3D forum.

"Within the setup cinematic parameters there is a lot of room for the camera to adjust to the action that happens on the screen (where the player is, where the enemies are, etc). Because of the amount of adjustments the camera system can make automatically, there are very few assumptions that can be made about what to render or not render...

"We could easily allow the user full control of the camera during gameplay. The reason we do not is because we feel it breaks the cinematic experience that we have carefully crafted, not because there is some geometry missing if you turn around..."

Ericson likens the implementation to the dolly used in film-making, with the camera on an arm, able to move in, out, pan, zoom and tilt.

Yeah, but since then the new art director watched the Birdman movie and that's why the new game has tightly constrained camera angles.

 

[cvv]

Sometimes people will complain about things just for the sake of complaining.

And the best place for this is Codex

 

[Ezekiel]

Continued my save file after three years of no progress. Stuck again. It was a puzzle that killed what little enthusiasm I had in early 2019. Now it's this:

Spoiler

I don't get it, I don't get it, I don't wanna get it! I hate the throwing puzzles in this game so very, very much. The puzzles in the old games never annoyed me so.

 

[ferratilis]

I always switched to m&kb for those puzzles, and while fighting those ancients when you had to throw the axe in their clitoris. Gamepad for everything else. Pcmasterrace. Tbh I don't remember any puzzles being frustrating, and they provided a nice change of pace after some hectic battles.

 

[Slimu]

You have to freeze the mechanism in place with the axe and then move the orb to the right side.

Continued my save file after three years of no progress. Stuck again. It was a puzzle that killed what little enthusiasm I had in early 2019. Now it's this:

Spoiler

I don't get it, I don't get it, I don't wanna get it! I hate the throwing puzzles in this game so very, very much. The puzzles in the old games never annoyed me so.

 

[toughasnails]

I always switched to m&kb for those puzzles, and while fighting those ancients when you had to throw the axe in their clitoris. Gamepad for everything else. Pcmasterrace. Tbh I don't remember any puzzles being frustrating, and they provided a nice change of pace after some hectic battles.

This reminds me of time playing Nioh. I developed a habit of switching to m&kb when I needed quick and easy headshots (you can even cheese some bosses that way, ranged weaponry is actually p useful in that game) while using gamepad for the rest. It's like "why not both" meme in action...

 

[Ezekiel]

I solved the puzzle like seven times, but the Circle icon over the door was tiny and nobody said anything, so I couldn't tell it was already open.

 

[Modron]

I solved the puzzle like seven times, but the Circle icon over the door was tiny and nobody said anything, so I couldn't tell it was already open.

At least you completed it enough times to be able to comment on it.

 

[Ezekiel]

Again.

Hate, hate, hate the puzzles. Wouldn't bother me quite so much if I didn't have companions who kept blurting out completely unhelpful hints.

"Father, look at this."

 

[Ezekiel]

Wtf... I DID THAT! Trash puzzles, where you give up on the correct strategy because you weren't precise enough. Which is another reason God of War was better before the action buttons were moved to the shoulders and it became about aiming. God of War was conceived when aiming was still seen as secondary in most games, rightfully so. How many of those early 3D action and horror games had auto-aim or fixed camera angles? Damn analog sticks.

 

[Ezekiel]

Why have a companion if you must press Square to make him shoot? I rarely used the arrows in combat, because I found it so unnatural to prompt a basic action that he should have been performing on his own that I simply forgot I had him.

 

[Ezekiel]

The villain, Baldur, seems more like white trash than a character from Norse mythology. The dialogue all too often sounds real world rather than mythical, fitting so poorly in a place so fantastic. Turning God of War of all things into a walk and talk was a terrible idea because of the type of story that it is. You can't treat Clash of the Titans like serious drama and have the characters making these kinds of quips and having this idle everyday talk. It will just come off as pretentious. Which is what this reboot is. Super pretentious. They have gods talking without any kind of grandeur or godliness, acting like regular folk made immortal. Impossible to take seriously.

Edit: Finished.

Hate what this game represents.

Force a camera perspective PURELY because it's the trend. The designers can claim it was for cinematic purposes all they want, but, as pointed out above, they used the same kind of language in God of War III interviews when talking about the camera angles, which were cinematic without being obtrusive or so limiting. There's nothing really impressive about telling a CG story with a single shot. It makes for boring photography. The camera is always so close to the character and can never pull out much to emphasize the scale of the level or setpiece. Having such a limited field of view that doesn't capture the full player character means no jumping, which means fewer ways to evade, which means more simplistic, monotonous combat, not to mention more basic level design. Stop using the interconnected world design to claim the level design is good. Most individual areas have very little going on. The camera also limits the kinds of action setpieces you can have. They're still there, but you have far less control over them than you used to, usually just button prompts on screen as the character you can't control plays out the cutscene. Jesus, the field of view is so bad, I can't emphasize it enough. That you need triangular warning prompts to know what's happening around you really says it all, doesn't it? The dodge button is on the face of the controller, and you're dodging so much that you can't really keep your thumb on the camera stick, so you mostly just push it into the most convenient position you can and then wait as the more pressing danger leaves the screen again. Rapidly back and forth from the Cross button to the stick. Massive downgrade.

The combat becomes more boring and limiting after you get the other weapons, because then it turns into a color match game where the fire weapon is needed for the ice enemies and the other weapon is needed for the fire enemies. There should have been one or two more weapons, because there really isn't enough going on in the combat to carry the game for as long as it goes. Same giant troll type enemies over and over, with the same execution animations again and again. I might be mistaken, but I think there's only three types of bosses: the aforementioned giants, the villain Baldur and the Valkyries. The few others are more like interactive cutscenes.

The old God of War games placed the save points and the health and magic chests intelligently. In the reboot, you always restart from the latest auto-checkpoint with full health, so it doesn't really matter. It feels cheap.

I know people were tired of the old Kratos. Instead of turning him into something he just isn't and could never be, they should have replaced him. Written a new protagonist with their own weapons and mechanics. They should have kept the fixed cinematic camera angles and used cutscenes (that actually cut away) sparingly, but come up with a new combat system. They should have also kept the gore, brutality and titties instead of pretending their game has to be taken seriously by art snobs. They shouldn't have built their game with the kinds of production values and photorealistic graphics whose costs so severely limit the actual game part of it, particularly the enemy variety.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Again.

Hate, hate, hate the puzzles. Wouldn't bother me quite so much if I didn't have companions who kept blurting out completely unhelpful hints.

"Father, look at this."

There's a dark genius at work there that you can't help but appreciate. The game is basically simulating the experience of looking like a tard before your kid.

 

[Duraframe300]

I know its a random complaint, but I honestly don't get how people fellate themselves over Atreus writing. I mean there's some ok scenes and charachter development in theory in there, but everything is about as subtly executed as a brick.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

but everything is about as subtly executed as a brick.

Welcome to the "Last of Us" Sony Exclusives Era, where the only good type of drama is hammy melodrama
Because remember, if it managed to make your pathetic audience cry, then your ''game'' is officially art and therefore very smart and mature

 

[Duraframe300]

but everything is about as subtly executed as a brick.

Welcome to the "Last of Us" Sony Exclusives Era, where the only good type of drama is hammy melodrama
Because remember, if managed to make your pathetic audience cry, then your ''game'' is officially art and therefore very smart and mature

True.

I will say I don't mind a bit of melodrama, doesn't even have to be something *deep*. But if you do it, at least execute it well. But often they just seem to end up with *characters* that have no discernible personality whose current role in the story is based on *mood swings* more than anything. No consistency.

Sony has been particularly bad at this with the likes of Uncharted 4, Last of Us and so on, as you said.

 

[Dexter]

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

Jfc I hate these faggots. They ruin EVERYTHING. They are literally locusts. THE PLAGUE.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

Surprised any company would hire him to write given how hated (and it only seems to grow with time) the writing on Borderlands 2 is.

 

[Ezekiel]

I guess we can finally stop pretending this is a sequel to the original trilogy, since she didn't even mention what happened in this story recap. Was such a sorry excuse by the fans, for how they turned the character into something he just wasn't and could never be. The references were Easter eggs at best.

 

[Ivan]

 

[ADL]

spear moveset is cool but the gameplay still looks incredibly boring. I remain unimpressed by anything in these reboot games.

 

[Matador]

God of Us.

 

[Perkel]

Hilarious that in God of War 2 Kratos was fighting whole giant statue and it looked spectacular and now 3 generations later he fights some hobo and it looks worse than shit.