With God of War releasing in just a month’s time, the hype is undoubtedly building for the return of Kratos. To help build this hype, Sony and its Santa Monica Studio recently released a brutal 15 minutes of extended gameplay footage for the game. Moreover, a director has also compared the game’s combat to the highly-popular Dark Souls franchise.

In the below video, Jason McDonald – lead gameplay designer for God of War – began by discussing the power fantasy of Kratos and how maintaining that aspect was important in the upcoming action-adventure game. Then, Cory Barlog, the Creative Director behind the game, mentioned the two earliest decisions for the game: not making God of War an open-world game and not simply mimicking Dark Souls.

In fact, Barlog said, “We don’t want to just mimic Dark Souls, as much as we like that game. There is kind of this interesting loop inside of it that we wanted to capture.” They continued to discuss decision-making in combat, which may be the interesting loop Barlog mentioned, and it even seems that the combat of Dark Souls could be one of the reasons that lead the team away from the previous hack-and-slash installments of the game to its new more comprehensive combat style. Check out the full video here:

Nevertheless, the changes to the graphics and combat of God of War have seemingly paid off, as Digital Foundry recently praised the game’s visuals on the PS4 Pro. With its upcoming release date, players who have yet to upgrade may want to do so to capture the full power of the upcoming game. It helps that there is limited edition PS4 Pro bundle for God of War releasing alongside it.

While it would be interesting to see Kratos face another Pantheon such as the Egyptian Gods, it has also been recently revealed that future sequels are currently in planning, but will be remaining in Norse mythology. For now, players can anticipate the upcoming game’s combat to have some similarities to Dark Souls, which is a comparison often made, but not always lived up to. However, the wait to see if God of War justifies this comparison is dwindling every day.

God of War releases on April 20, 2018 exclusively for the PlayStation 4.

Source: PlayStation – YouTube