God of War | Creators talk about the most memorable bugs and mistakes of the development era.
Creating a video game is difficult. Create a stable game that tests the capabilities of the hardware and creates an immersive, epic, uncut camera experience like God of War, it is much more difficult. This gigantic task, with a tendency to break, involving hundreds of people creating and implementing content simultaneously, further increased the challenge.
In all departments of the studio, people heard Kratos’ words: “We have to be better.” The Quality Assurance (QA) team was no exception, and in the midst of the madness that went into building this titanic title, the studio employed and trained a team of about 40 extraordinary people who embodied everything that was important to us as a studio … a team not only responsible for researching and reporting the bugs they found through the game, but also improved their skills and innovated in ways that benefited not only the QA team, but the entire studio.
Unless you’ve worked in the game industry before, when you think about the effort it takes to create an AAA game, QA isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind. As a studio, they have always sought to specialize in the art of creating characters, worlds and stories for you, the player, to live and explore.
A crucial part of this is the ability to be able to dive into these worlds, and such immersion is immediately undone whenever you encounter a bug that spoils the experience, reminding you that you are “just” playing a game. The irony here is that when we don’t do our job, it’s too obvious, but … if we do everything right, you’ll never notice. Instead, you’ll just live the experience that passionate developers intend – an experience that is seamless, engaging, emotional and fun.
As technology advances, games do too. They are getting bigger and more complicated with each generation, and with teams of 200+ people over the years of a production cycle, it is guaranteed that some incredible bugs will be found. So, at the beginning of the development cycle, our team was asked to save any images or videos of any funny bugs they found, with the intention of Tim Ward afterwards editing a “blooper reel” to help pay tribute to the thorough process, and sometimes bizarre and funny, trying to launch a perfect gaming experience.
In the end, the studio did not only get an extremely polished game, but also a collection of hilarious bugs; each one a memory (sometimes painful) of the colossal effort that the studio had to ensure that they could experience our game without distractions. Kratos’ setbacks are not only a small collection of some of the most fun bugs we’ve encountered, but also a testament to each team member’s monumental effort to ensure that God of War was a fun experience for all players.
