How God of War’s impressive PC port came to life
Lately Sony has been increasingly open to putting previously PlayStation-exclusive games on PC, and today’s release of God of War is the most notable yet. One of Sony’s premier franchises since the original game was released for the PS2 in 2005, all subsequent titles — a 2007 spinoff for mobile phones aside — have been locked to PlayStation hardware. Santa Monica Studio’s 2018 God of War is one of the most acclaimed games for the PS4, and now it’s available to a new audience for the first time.
I’ve spent some time with the PC version and found it to be impressively well-tailored to the platform, which is not always a given. I spoke with Santa Monica’s senior manager of technical production Matt DeWald and lead UX designer and accessibility lead Mila Pavlin to find out more about the process of bringing God of War to PC.
“It was about two years ago that we decided to look into whether it was possible,” DeWald says. “So the idea came down of like, Okay, let’s let’s think about whether we could do a PC [port] — we have a custom engine, we haven’t actually released a PC game, let’s get it up and running and just see what are the issues that we’re going to have and how much work is this going to actually take.” Santa Monica tasked Jetpack Interactive, a studio in Vancouver that had already been working on other internal collaborations, with figuring out the scope of the project, and ultimately it got approved.
“They’re integrated into the team, so they’re not really a typical port house where we offload something and throw it over the fence,” DeWald says of Jetpack. “They’re working out of our code bases, they’re on our Teams channels and they’re communicating with our team, they’re part of our standups.” Four engineers at
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