God of War is finally upon us and to call it successful might be a bit of an understatement. Mixing lush visuals, engaging gameplay, and a compelling story, the latest adventure in the popular PlayStation franchise has been a hit with fans and critics alike (just read our review). With all this success, Sony Santa Monica and creative director Cory Barlog are giving fans a look at how far the game has come in three years of development.

In an official livestream leading up to the release of God of War, PlayStation, and Sony Santa Monica looked back at early footage and demos from the game's development. Included in the livestream was not only the demo from E3 2016 but a previously unreleased gameplay demo that was used to get the game green-lit back in 2015.

There are plenty of interesting points that shine in the footage. The first is how important the game's first level, where Kratos takes his son Atreus hunting, was to the game's development, becoming the first demo shown to the public. Seeing both the 2016 demo and the 2015 footage side by side shows fans how much time and effort was put into perfecting that first scene.

Ultimately this first short story would come to define the game's visual style and gameplay. "In God of War history we always do the first level last, and in this game we just ended up doing the first level like 56 times throughout the entire duration of the project," Barlog explains. "So you can really see we refined it over and over and over again"

The footage also shows how important the lighting was to the games engrossing cinematic style. In the early engine fans can see that the immersive lighting and color pallet of the impressive final build were still and long way off. "You can see the lighting, the engine, it was all very early, and the models where still taking shape," says Barlog. "Really just getting our sea legs"

The footage shows off another feature that ultimately never made it into the game, a kind of in-game, in-story menu. As fans know the "Single-Shot Effect" being used in the game is important to its immersive style, so being able to alter moves and skills in game, shown in the footage as being done through Kratos' Axe, would have been impressive but it seems to have ultimately proven too difficult.

"Because we where going to do the no cut camera we were looking at having all the menu systems taking place inside the game, so when you would change out different moves you would do that inside the game. It proved to be a little to cumbersome and difficult to figure out while getting everything else done."

The footage also highlights some of the game's early combat, including early humans enemies. While the final build features primarily non-human enemies, some bipedal, some not, it seems Barlog and his team used human enemies as bipedal models and continued from there. It also allowed the team to develop combat early in development, particularly Kratos's new weapon, the Leviathan Axe.

"We kind of worked out our bipedal characters first. So everyone as kind of built on the same bipedal rig that we were animating in the beginning and we would tackle creature after we got all of that stuff done. And this was the early portion of trying to get what did it feel like to make that axe, in hand, stick and feel heavy and weighty and then really start exploring the fantastic axe-throwing..."

It goes to show the amount of work and the attention to detail that went into making the game that we see today. As the footage shows, Barlog and his team worked tirelessly for three years to bring to life and perfect their vision. Of course their worked paid off in the end and seem to have secured the franchise a place on the PlayStation slate for years to come.