God of War 4 has been announced by Sony exclusively for the Playstation 3. The PS3 exclusive will take place before the events of the first God of War.
Titled God of War: Ascension, the game’s box art that was leaked showing Kratos struggling to break free from chains. Watch the tease trailer below:
God of War: Ascension will be coming exclusively to PlayStation 3. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to check out what the team at Sony Santa Monica Studios has been working on
Evidence of an imminent God of War 4 reveal has been piling up for some time now until the final announcement today.
Update #1:
The official PlayStation product page for God of War: Ascension now uses the tagline “Before he was a God, he was a man” and sets a Spring 2013 release date.
A mysterious teaser site pointing to a March 22 reveal has popped up with a style very similar to Naughty Dog‘s Uncharted series franchise. PlayStation Norway has posted a picture of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen along that site.
Fridtjof Nansen
The image was published on Facebook, Nansen’s face is obscured by the word ‘uutforsket‘, which translates to ‘unexplored‘, or uncharted ??. Traveler Nansen is known for crossing Greenland and also reaching a record northern latitude of 8614′ during his North Pole expedition.
Another tidbits surrounding the teaser site, the font used in writing the date is the same stencil type used in all Uncharted games, the .no Norway domain used for the page and the map used which is a pre-1914 map of Christiania, Former name of Oslo, are obviously in some way the reveal tied to Norway in particular.
Sony Denmark launched in the past a similar teaser campaign led up to Uncharted 3, the teasing site Uutforsket.dk which looked almost identical to the current campaign, but with a map of Copenhagen in the background However the guys at Naughty Dog are currently split into two teams, one still working on The Last of Us and the other is probably working on the next Uncharted game.
The footage you are going to see was created by Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream. It’s not a pre-rendered cutscene but made entirely in real time. CEO and founder David Cage showcased the studio’s new tech at GDC on the PlayStation 3.
Quantic Dream
Kara Demo was created by the the studio’s new engine and according toEurogamer:
Kara‘s not just the product of new tech and a better understanding of the PlayStation 3’s architecture – she’s also the result of a new approach to motion capture at Quantic Dreams, and an investment in the more sophisticated techniques that have become the norm in Hollywood’s CG industry as the studio moves across to using full-performance capture.
David Cage had this to say about Kara and what they are trying to accomplish,
What we call full-performance capture is shooting the body, the voice and face at the same time. Most studios right now in the game industry use what we call split performance, which means you shoot the face and voice on one side and then you use the body, and not in one take
It works okay – there have been some great games made using this process, and Heavy Rain was done this way. But we felt that if we wanted more emotion, and more performance from the actor we needed to have everything from the same take, and we needed to shoot everything at the same time.
So we invested a lot in our motion capture studio. Heavy Rain was shot with 28 cameras, and we’ve upgraded the studio to 65 cameras. Now we can shoot several actors – their body and their face – at the same time. It’s not a small change, but at the same time this is how Avatar and Tintin were shot, and it’s how the CG industry works because they know how much you gain from shooting face, voice and body at the same time.
Kara voice performed by Valorie Curry. Watch the clip, and tell us what you think:
The teaser you are about to see was spotted by the guys at PlayStationGang, and it’s actually grainy and the sound is somewhat distorted. The quality of the voice acting and the God of War IV logo displayed at the end is a little suspicious so we’d take this with a grain of salt.
However, the teaser opens with a voice can then be heard trying to awaken someone. Watch it below:
“Brother, the phoenix has-been drinking your blood, full of your anger, your strength, and during her rebirth she also has let you in life. Now I ask you: what are you going to do? Would you leave me here in hell? wake up, wake up!” says the voice.
The voice suggests the speaker is Deimos, the ill-fated brother of Kratos. Deimos was taken by Ares as a child after hearing a prophecy about the destruction of Olympus at the hands of a ‘Marked Warrior’, believing him to be the child of prophecy the gods confined him to the Domain of Death.
Evidence of God of War 4 being in development is rumored a lot as it appeared in number of CVs, composers profiles, and listed by some retailers.
