Despite early promises that they “believe in generations,” Sony has been slow to truly embrace next-gen gaming, with most of their major titles still being cross-gen releases. Case in point, two years after the release of the PS5, God of War Ragnarok is still coming to PS4. Of course, there’s been a lot of debate about this – is Sony allowing themselves to be held back by the PS4 or are most of their releases over the past couple years essentially just late-era PS4 games retrofitted to the PS5?
Well, in a new interview with Eurogamer, Sony Santa Monica animation director Bruno Velazquez gave a surprisingly frank answer. According to him, their main goal with God of War Ragnarok was to make the best PS4 game possible, with extra features found on PS5 just being the “icing on the cake.”
“When it comes to Ragnarök, from the very get-go, we knew this was going to be a PS4 game because we wanted to support the fanbase - we had so many people that had enjoyed the game on PS4. So from the very beginning, we knew, this is going to be a PS4 game. We're going to make this the best PS4 game we can make. Our goal was to surpass God of War 2018 in every way possible. Having the PS5 version, that's just icing on the cake.
So our goal is let's make the best PS4 game; push on fidelity, content, bring the story to a close that we started - that was our primary goal. PS5, it's just like haptic feedback, 3D audio, higher frame-rate and better graphics and textures. That's just like the icing on the cake. So of course the PS5 version is going to be the best way to experience it, but the PS4 [version] is going to be one of the games that pushes the PS4 to the max. Taking that philosophy and approach into it helped us to set the goalposts for ourselves, that we want to make a great PS4 experience and an even better PS5 experience.”
Well, there you have it. If you’re still playing games on PS4, you don’t need to feel left out – God of War Ragnarok was made for you. That said, one can’t help but wonder when the flow of actual next-gen games is going to start coming from the PlayStation camp.
God of War Ragnarok launches on PS4 and PS5 on November 9.
