I was in Los Angeles last week to attend a Sony Computer Entertainment launch for the upcoming PS3 game God of War III, which hits shelves on March 16.

In introducing the video game to the assembled international media, game director Stig Asmussen said that the cinematics for the third-person action game are rendered with the same graphics engine used to create the interactive experiences in order to “keep the experience as real as possible.”

At the event at Siren Studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, I played the first 30 to 45 minutes of the game, and was struck by not only how visually stunning the game is, but by how much the camera, the view of the player, moves. It swoops into the action from establishing shots, and moves around the action itself, in much the same way as modern action films.

Edmonton’s John Palamarchuk, lead cinematic artist for God of War III, told me that the moving camera was added to give the game more of an emotional punch. The developers at SCEA Santa Monica used a new technique to capture the movement of a real Steadicam operator – in the same way an actor’s movement would be captured – to ensure that the camera motion was authentic.

In an interview, Asmussen said that at times he struggled with his role in the development of the game.

“I’ve always considered myself a good listener,” he said, “and I think to a certain extent on God of War III maybe I listened a bit too much. And it caused me to be a little indecisive sometimes – when I should have just stuck to my gut feeling on things.”

Asmussen has been working on the God of War franchise since the beginning, when he was a lead environment artist. That gave him an opportunity to get very specific and deep with the 30 percent of the game he worked on.

For the second game, Asmussen became art director, which gave him a broader vision of how the game was developed.

As game director for God of War III, Asmussen said he had to understand “how it fits together. Now how do you make the thing fun?”

As development on the game proceeded, Asmussen learned that as director, he needed to make the decisions.

“I want it to be a collection of everybody’s ideas. I want to filter those ideas, and as the quarterback I want to call the plays,” he explained. “I think that sometimes in calling the plays I was taking too many outside opinions in trying to formulate what the plays were. But you get better at that stuff as you go on. It was an important learning step.”

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight