God of War on PC: How Santa Monica Studio Made Its Epic More Accessible

ign.com:

God of War is hitting PC on Jan. 14, allowing for players to re-experience IGN’s Game of the Year 2018, while a potentially brand new audience will also be able to jump into Sony Santa Monica’s evolution of the long-running series ahead of God of War Ragnarok’s planned 2022 release.

While it’s the same game feature-wise as what players enjoyed on the PS4 and PS4 Pro (or even backward compatible on the PS5) - there’s no additional DLC campaign being introduced or anything like that - it’s a chance for Santa Monica to take advantage of the increased power of PC’s to allow for better graphical fidelity and variety. And, just as importantly, it allows the developers to expand upon the ways players can actually interact with God of War. Keyboard and mouse controls are a given, more customization options for those inputs, and more tweaks allow God of War to, hopefully, be a more accessible experience on PC.

To find out more about the process of expanding on God of War’s playability on PC, IGN spoke with God of War 2018’s director Cory Barlog and Santa Monica Studio lead UX designer Mila Pavlin.

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As Santa Monica’s first time focusing on a PC release, that means adding something as expected as mouse and keyboard support can have big ramifications for the team.

“One of our primary things, when we were looking at PC, is creating an experience that is accessible to the broadest audience possible,” Pavlin said. “And so when we look at things like adding keyboard and mouse support, which is just absolutely a brand new thing for our studio, this allowed us to go back and look at our pipelines, look at how we are actually creating control inputs and making sure that we have those fundamentals in place so that we