Building a House with Lego Bricks
What God of War taught me about reinvention.
Season 3 of the Artwell podcast is available now! I studied God of War and interviewed its creators to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.
Audiences are fleeting and must be earned over and over again. The tricky part is that what built your audience is not what keeps them around. Eventually, people get bored and if you’re not able to give them something new, will move on to the next thing. Your longevity is determined by your ability to continually surprise and delight your fans.
Following the conclusion of one of the greatest trilogies in gaming history, the developers of God of War knew that it was time to bring something new to the franchise. With their next outing, God of War: Ascension, they upped the scale with bigger levels than ever before and included a multiplayer mode for the first time. While in isolation, this is a great game, within the context of God of War this entry did not live up to the success of its predecessors from both a critical and commercial standpoint. With a disappointing outing, the consensus from fans was that God of War was over and it was time for the studio to move on to something else.
Cory Barlog disagreed. The director of the series’ second game had returned to Santa Monica Studio to chart a new path for PlayStation’s iconic franchise. God of War was not over, but it needed to change.
"I think in [the audience] feedback they feel like Kratos’ story is over – they're not wrong for thinking that but I think at its root what they're saying is sort of the rut that we were stuck in was over. The idea of the vengeance tail and the antihero is cool but we've sort of hit that, let's try something else." – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2018
With Cory back at the helm, the team spent five years completely reinventing the franchise and in 2018 released a God of War game unlike anything anyone expected. Everything fans had come to know was left behind, there was a new setting, new systems, new narrative focus, new characters… new everything The only thing that remained was the main character and his history. But despite these massive changes, God of War (2018) went on to become universally loved by both fans and critics alike.
In order to surprise and delight your fans, you must give them something they don’t even know they want yet. But the challenge is that the line between giving your fans something they don’t want at all and something they don’t know they want yet is incredibly fine. The multi-million dollar question then, is how do you the latter?
“I think everybody recognizes we get one shot. We screw this up, I don't see us making another one. This is a massive bet. No pressure.” – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2019
Don’t Call it a Comeback
Despite having the same name as the original game, Cory refused to call God of War (2018) a reboot, it was a reinvention. While this can be overlooked as semantics, this is actually an incredibly important distinction.
A reboot is defined as shutting something down and restarting it. On the surface it makes sense to take something people love and give them a new version of it but in reality, this creates an environment that easily leads to disappointment. When you do this, you’re taking the story your audience knows, the feelings they’ve developed, the emotions they’ve had and pretending they never existed. You aren’t able to invoke the same emotional response by retelling someone the same story. No one laughs as hard the second time they hear the same joke. Giving someone exactly what they want only leaves them wanting more. People don’t want to relive a past experience, they want a new experience that feels like the old one.
A reinvention is defined as taking something that exists and changing it so much that it appears to be entirely new. But appearances can be deceiving, and when you dig below the surface of a reinvention, the essence of what came before should still be there. You do not want to do away with someone’s past experience, you want to use those feelings and emotions as the foundation that the new experience is built upon. In doing so, you deepen their connection to your art, as opposed to starting from scratch and hoping to get back to where you already were.
Think of your art as Lego. When playing with those little bricks, no matter what you make, it will always feel like Lego. When reinventing, you’re taking the Lego house you’ve built, knocking it down, and using the same bricks to build a new one that looks completely different. But despite a change in appearance, the essence will remain the same because both structures are still Lego houses. To put this as a rule that can be followed, let’s call it “The Lego Brick Principle”: your art can take on infinite permutations as long as the essence remains the same.
To keep the core elements intact one must simply not get rid of them… that’s the easy part. The hard part is identifying what those things are. When it came time to reinvent God of War, the first step was to figure out what “the load bearing walls of the franchise” were. Once those were uncovered, everything else was torn down and discarded so that they could rebuild. Do not conflate the “load bearing walls” with the things you love the most, these are not the same. In this process you are not seeking to understand what the mechanisms are that invoke a feeling but rather what the feeling is itself. The goal of a reinvention is to achieve the same feeling with different mechanics.
Once you’ve identified what the essence of your art is, you do not change it but you change the perspective with which you look at it. The secret to successful reinvention isn't reinvention at all, it’s reinterpretation. Meaning, you take the information you have and look at it in a new way. When making the original God of War the team had created a document called “Kratos Rules” which explained everything from how he looked all the way down to intricacies of how he moved. Ten years later when reimagining the franchise they went through this document line by line and rewrote each rule for the new era. It wasn’t doing away with the rules of the past, it was using them to chart the path forward.
“At the beginning of the game, there was a small group of us. We got together and listed out on a very large whiteboard every aspect of the game, just so that we could understand and go point by point to comprehend why each element is important. What does it offer the game? Is this the load-bearing wall of the franchise? Do we need this for the game to stand? What we found, which I thought was very interesting, was that there wasn't anything that was like, "You must have this, and otherwise, it doesn't hold up." When things were considered necessary to keep, we asked, "How can we flip it on its head?" – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2018
When taking God of War in a new direction, Cory knew he didn’t want to ignore the franchise’s ten year history, he wanted to use it, to take this thing gamers cared so much about and let it be the foundation that the new era was built upon. But in order to get to that foundation, the team had to go through the painful process of tearing down what they’d built so that they could reconstruct it. The root of every decision that was made when making God of War (2018) can be traced back to its predecessors but what ended up blooming was vastly different.
“I've been using a phrase throughout the development of this project called ‘familiarly different’, which is annoying to people but it is very telling of the idea that we are wanting you to look at this on the surface and say this is a strategically, more tactically rich combat system but when I pick it up on the controls, when I start pressing the buttons I feel the DNA of God of War so completely inside of each of these moves.” – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2018
Don’t Stop Me Now
If you have a good thing going, you don’t want to mess with that. Reinventing because you think it’s what you’re supposed to do can kill your momentum. It’s one thing to know how to reinvent, it’s a whole other thing to know when to reinvent. Your audience will always tell you when they’ve had enough but ideally you want to change things up right before they start asking. The secret to knowing when that time is, lies with you.
“There comes a point where you’ve had enough and you want something new. I think it's good business to know just that right time to get off the stage. Stay on long enough and then know when [there’s been] enough encores and it's time to go away for a while” – David Jaffe, Director and Creator, God of War, 2013
The first God of War hit upon a successful formula that the developers did not want to drastically change. The team’s mindset was to take the formula and make it bigger and better with each new entry. This mindset worked, it led both God of War 2 and 3 to becoming some of the greatest video games of their respective generations, but the catch is that this mindset does not work forever. Eventually you hit a point where bigger is no longer better, and trying to one up yourself has diminishing returns. This is a lesson that Santa Monica Studio learned with God of War: Ascension.
Ascension had some truly gigantic levels, bigger than had ever been seen in God of War. But these monumental moments did not impress the audience in the same way they once did. Gamers had grown accustomed to a level of one-upmanship from the franchise and therefore it was no longer impressive, it was the bare minimum. You can’t play the same hand over and over again and not anticipate that it becomes expected.
“There's a lot of inherent pressure that comes from each new award which sounds stupid. It sounds like a dumb flex but the reality is it just puts that pressure of, ‘alright, you gotta keep one upping’ and I think we all get caught up in that concept. I got caught up in that with God of War II.” – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2019
Following the conclusion of God of War 3, there was a sense that nobody really knew where to take the franchise next. That feeling is a signal that it is time to reinvent. If there’s nowhere else that you want to take your art in its current form, take it somewhere new. Your audience will ride with you as long as it feels like you’re going on a journey. You start to lose them when it feels like you’re falling into a routine. God of War 2 and 3 felt like they were getting bigger because the story was building to a crescendo. Ascension on the other hand felt like it made things bigger because that’s what had always been done.
The takeaway here is intentional progression. You always want there to be a feeling that you’re building towards something. Don’t reinvent if you haven’t gotten there yet. But if you feel like you’ve done everything you can, that you have nowhere left to build to, then it is time to knock things down and rebuild towards something new.
When you do make that decision, the vision for how you rebuild needs to come from an individual. You do not reinvent by committee. You make a sequel because someone has a story to tell, you don’t tell a story because someone wants a sequel made. Ascension felt like they put a bunch of people in a room and said figure out what we should do next. God of War (2018) on the other hand felt like it came from the mind of Cory Barlog. He didn’t do it alone, but he set the course for where they were going, and then worked with the committee to figure out how to get there.
It’s not just changing to change. Because sometimes when you just changed stuff it doesn't really necessarily make it better. It's not change for the sake of change, it's much more like, ‘I have a point of view. I have an idea and this would be really interesting’. Some of my favorite games seem to have come from that singular point of view and then are enriched by the fact that you have so many people on a team that just add to that in such a positive way. – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2018
Don’t You Forget About Me
When Cory returned to Santa Monica he realized very quickly that things had changed. People now had pictures of kids on their desks and everyone had gray hair… the studio had grown up. To continue telling the tale of a rage fueled revenge saga was not only something that fans no longer wanted, but it would have been disingenuous. The team had evolved and were now in a different place in life with different stories to tell.
Your art should evolve alongside you. You are not beholden to how things have always been done, but you are beholden to who you are. Art is a way to express how you see the world and therefore, if your worldview changes, that should be reflected in your art.
“Perhaps our games speak to people simply because so much of ourselves go into them. Even in the earlier games we had that sort of need to release. We were in our – I guess we call it our college years of development. So it was thumb your nose at the man and ‘we're totally gonna make the best action game because they say Westerners can't make good action games… screw that man!’ It was just constantly about proving something and being obstinate. Now, I think all of us are a lot older, a lot more tired, but I think it's also more measured. We think about things a little bit more and I'm happy that the audience actually wants games that speak with a little bit more depth.” – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2018
When reinventing, it is important to not lose sight of yourself trying to be someone else. When what has always worked ceases to do so, it becomes very tempting to try and replicate the success of others. This is not to say that you shouldn’t be aware of what’s going on in your industry, but competition should be something that inspires you to do great work, and not something that dictates what it is that you create. Reinvention should not be led by taste of the day. When making changes the one thing that must remain constant is you.
Ascension was trying to be something else. While the franchise had always been a mythological action-adventure game with a family story at its core, it was never a multiplayer combat game. Part of Ascension’s misstep was adding what wasn’t needed and not evolving where it needed to. It continued the tried, true, and tired formula, when fans were looking for something different. God of War (2018) on the other hand gave them something new all while remaining true to what the franchise had always been.
If you do not know where to take your art next, then just leave it… maybe not forever but at least for a little while. Give yourself the time and space to have new experiences, to live your life, to evolve, so that you can come back with new perspectives and ideas to bring to your art. Had Cory not left God of War after directing the second game he never would have been able to lead the reinvention because his only perspective would have been God of War. It is critical that you put in the time and effort to learn and grow as an artist so that your art can do the same.
“I had actually gone from being an animation director on [God of War 1], and immediately went into directing and writing the second game. Finished the second game and immediately went into writing and laying out the third game. That was like 2003 to mid-2007. After those years, I was very exhausted. I needed a vacation or some kind of break. I believe I probably just had a slight mental breakdown. I think at the time, I had some sort of presence of mind to realize I was creatively an infant and I needed to get out there and work with some other people. Otherwise, I would be doomed to repeat the exact same thing over and over and over again.” – Cory Barlog, Director, God of War, 2018
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
People often avoid change out of fear. To give people what they want is far easier than to take the risk of giving them something they don’t even know they want yet. Because as much as you believe in your new idea, you don’t actually know if people will like it. It’s safer to give the audience something familiar that they’ll be indifferent to rather than take the chance to give them something new that they will either love or hate. But indifference is a slow death. The safe path does not prevent your decline, it just delays it. Indifference is brought about when there is no change. People will eventually get bored of the same old thing and stop caring. By sticking with what worked yesterday, you won’t stand out today, and you’ll be forgotten tomorrow.
Change, while inevitable, can be delayed. When staring a risk in the face is when one has the highest propensity for playing it safe. There’s always a “safer” option, but that path always leads to a dead end. That does not mean that accepting change makes it any easier. Change, while necessary, will always bring with it a chance of failure. But it’s better to take that chance than to persist with the past until obscurity.
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” – Dylan Thomas, Poet, 1951
Thanks for reading! If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe to the newsletter for more essays that help you become a more thoughtful artist. If you want to learn more about God of War, you’ll like Season 3 of the Artwell podcast where I studied the making of the games and interviewed its creators to find lessons that are relevant for modern creatives.
