It’s not very often nowadays that when picking up a game I find myself compulsively playing it day after day with few breaks. Recently I picked up God of War, and honestly, it surprised me. Not because anything about the game was particularly groundbreaking or innovative, but because it did something very simple. Through understanding and valuing my time, it made me remember something special.

 

It made me remember that inescapable feeling when you pick up a good book and just have to read one more chapter; or the late nights watching Netflix until 4am because “one more episode couldn’t hurt”. This feeling of being fully captivated by a game hasn’t struck me in a recent game title for a few years, and I think it was achieved thanks to a simple design choice. The greatest innovation that God of War gave us was something that you think would be so simple when it comes to videogames, but actually incredibly difficult to manage, and that’s the importance of the player’s time.

 

With regards to core gameplay, the game managed time fantastically in its combat. It was very infrequent that I ever felt myself waiting for an enemy to use a certain move or become vulnerable to do damage, and in the harder boss fights managing the amount of time in my skill cooldowns became a tricky challenge when trying to match this to the extremely dangerous attack patterns of the End-game Valkyrie mini-bosses. This was all executed smoothly and I felt a nice pace and flow to the combat that kept me engaged and rarely made it safe for me to stand still or focus entirely on one enemy and not my environment.

 

Even with fantastic time management on core elements, the game somehow managed to do an even better job of managing time for everything else. When playing Mass Effect and Dragon Age, I often found myself running full pelt to try and get myself from point A to B as fast as humanly possible. This was due to me feeling that a lot of the gameplay between core action or dialogue scenes was spent simply travelling from place to place, and this often meant the dregs of gameplay were spent in load screens, or with only the ambient sounds of the environment to keep me company. Squad dialogue was present and entertaining, but not always all that interesting.

 

In comparison, God of War tackled this in a fantastic way through the use of conversational dialogue and a few inventive loading tricks. In God of War there was not a single time that I was faced with a black screen, stocked with arbitrary weapons or armor pieces floating in 3D space; or tooltips that become tiresome after their second appearance. In fact there was not a single instance in which I was faced with a loading screen at all, as their use of interactivity ensured that even when the game was loading a new section of the map I was always in game and active. I could be skirting a ledge, low-crawling through a narrow tunnel or bridging the gap between worlds in tyr’s temple; but the point was I was always engaged and entertained.

 

When travelling from one place to another, the entire game was filled with rich dialogue and interactions between the core characters, with one of the supporting characters almost acting as a “lore encyclopedia”. This character filled in any downtime between core storyline events with the many legends of norse mythology, and told them in an engaging and interesting way.

 

Furthermore, I would sometimes spot something interesting on a nearby island while rowing through the beautiful lakes and rivers of the game, which would require me to come ashore. Without missing a beat, any fables were met with a finished sentence and the line, “and we’ll continue this later”. This is pure genius. The developers understood that no one wants to stop a story right before the “good bit”, and that shines here; as the moment you get back in that boat the story continues right where it left off, with a quick recap just in case your journey on dry land was a long and arduous one.

 

It is also worth mentioning that the fast travel system of the game gives you the option of returning to your previous discoveries later in the game, and this ensures that for those with a thirst for adventure and little time there’s always room to explore a little.

 

God of war doesn’t demand your time, it appreciates it and understands that in the modern day we all get a little carried away with life and forget to stop and smell the roses; and for once I didn’t mind rowing peacefully for an extra minute to hear “just one more story”.  

J