God of War PC is coming out tomorrow, packed with features like NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and NVIDIA Reflex in addition to staples like unlocked frame rate and Ultrawide support. The latter proved to be particularly challenging to implement, though, because of the game’s unique one-shot camera.
PC Gamer talked to Matt DeWald, Senior Technical Producer on God of War PC, who explained some of the work that went into adding this specific feature.
It’s not just setting resolution and done. I wish it was that easy. Now there’s all this stuff that was on the edge and cut off on 16:9 that now is in the scene. Like ‘Oh no, Atreus is warping through the scene because he’s getting into position.’
So you had to go back and animate all those things. It required playing through the entire game. And not just cinematics because we’re a no-cut camera, right, it’s the one shot the entire way. So it’s really playing through the entire game… 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, or there’s some gameplay moment where something shows up like the Draugr popping out and Kratos whipping out the axe and it frosting up.
Those aren’t cinematics per se, they’re just gameplay moments. You’ve got to go through all of those and check to see: Was there a Draugr on the side of the screen that popped into visibility because he’s going to be attacking from behind? Is Atreus warping around? Is Kratos’s skirt flipping around because the cloth simulation isn’t working properly? There’s all that kind of stuff that you have to go through and tweak. It was literally just hand effort to go back and fix up all those things.
According to DeWald, that wasn’t an easy task at all, requiring multiple complete playthroughs of the game until every bug was fixed.
As much as I would love to say that we planned appropriately and it took exactly that amount of time, it didn’t. QA would find some new issue that we missed the first time around. Once they opened up the hundreds of bugs ,the amount of work it took to fix all of those, it was quite a bit of effort.
Sony just published a new Ultrawide trailer for God of War PC, by the way. Are you ready to venture to Midgard and the other Realms with Kratos and Atreus?
