I mean the game had a pretty nice way of switching cameras between Atreus and Kratos. I could see the show doing the same things with its hopefully extended cast. Kratos and co come across a new character, camera switch to tell what their deal is.
To each their own, but I would not call trying to dress up Kratos' gamer moment of punching the wall as the camera slowly zooms in just it can get close enough to try and hide that it's transitioning to another bizarrely identical wall where Atreus is at to be a nice way of switching perspectives.
In the first game, GoW2018, I thought the one shot camera experiment they were doing was broadly speaking a benign failure. It didn't hurt the game overly much, and there are isolated ways in which I think it helped out, but by the end of it and my second playthrough, I regarded as it as an extraneous waste of effort. I wondered how much time they spent trying to make something as basic as discussions scenes work because they couldn't do a simple hard cut or how they had to structure level design to accomodate the camera never moving away to give a broader view. And it was all for naught when the game has constant, unending interruptions anyway in the form of going to your menu to try on new gear or check the map (though I will grant that the TV version will atleast not have to worry about that). I think some people pretend otherwise, but it's not only a genuine concession to their own ambition that they had to just accept the constant menu, the loot economy of the game meant that, if anything, players created more cuts to the menu than in most other games, almost certainly more than the OG God of Wars even if you cut it down to the same timeframe as them. I'd wager that if you count menu cuts of an average playthrough, GoW2018 has more of them than the Last of Us 2 did. And for what? Even now, I don't know what seeing the entire journey of Kratos end to end in one "uncut" take is supposed to have done for me that a similar sequence that did have sensible camera cuts or used timelapses where they'd be effective wouldn't have done. Even if I play a sequence where I don't go into the menus for a good length of time, I don't feel I get much out of it for getting a true one-shot experience most of the time, and I've honestly never heard anyone else say they did. So what is this thing even supposed to achieve?
And pointlessness of it is especially egregious when other games have done what GoW2018 was trying to achieve way better, if in smaller projects. Dead Space not only employs a similar uncut camera trick, it also integrates menus into the diegetic game world, meaning going into the menu wasn't an interuption of the gameworld you were in like it is in GoW. Additionally, the uncut camera serves to accentuate the horror element, because due to you very rarely ever not being in control of Isaac, even if there is a story beat happening, it means you are never safe from attacks, so you are constantly on your guard. Alternatively, Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice was about the character's mental state and how she cannot escape the voices in her head. From a player experience, being also unable to cut away from Senua's voices is integral for us to walk in her shoes. And you don't ever need to interupt that camera to check the menu either. Both of these are stories are far smaller in scope than GoW2018 attempted, but I think their constant and perspective actually serves the story in a way that GoW's doesn't.
Personally, I think it's a failure. Not a bad one, exactly. I see no reason to put down Barlog for trying to do something he wanted to artistically achieve, and at the very least I think it was an experiment worth making. I don't think gaming as a whole is worse for him having gone for it. Maybe someday, someone else will take his basic model, but implement it in a far more effective way, which they wouldn't have done if he hadn't taken the first swing at it, and that alone might make make it worth it in the end. However, with regards to how it supplements the experience of playing GoW2018 itself, the best you can say about it is it usually never hurt the game overly much. It's just kind of there, and the team did a decent job of designing the game around it's pitfalls, so while it doesn't bring much to the table and was more trouble than it's worth, it also wasn't
that horrible or anything.
Which is not something I'd say about Ragnarok. There are many differences between GoW2018 and Ragnarok, but among them is that GoW2018 was a leisurely story. There is no actual timelimit or pressure for when Faye's ashes are dispersed. It can happen a day from when they start their journey or a month or a year. That actually causes some pacing issues in a lot of points of the story, but it atleast allows the game to breathe and that works with the camera because it's not in a hurry to go anywhere. But Ragnarok? Ragnarok has urgency. We are all told it's coming, we are told that the mechaniations of the characters are leading to it's activation and that it won't be long now. This is why a factor of time has now been introduced. Arteus's sections, while they take place over a mere handful of hours, are explicitly stated to take place over several hours or even days. But the camera stays with him and even when the pacing drags, you're sense of time is warped as you never know how fast things are going. Furthermore, this game is about perspective hopping. Kratos and Atreus most obviously, but also Kratos where he enters dream states and when Atreus is magically transported. Never do you feel as shackled as you are to the this lumberous, slow moving, restrictive perspective as when these things happen. If you notice the final dream sequence, by the end, the developers had even given up trying to make the perspective transitions invisible to the player and you can just directly see walls and objects floating out of the background to as Kratos goes from the real world to dream world like they are in a theater with props and sets being moved around by stage hands. The story of Ragnarok, with it's sense of urgency, it's switching of perspectives, it's dream sequences, it's environmental transitions, is a story that is exceedingly more suited to a camera that allows hard cuts and cut aways and fades and time lapses, and the story just can't *do* any of that because they just arbitrarily decided that they need to do the one shot the first game did, which never really did that game any real favors in the first place. It's ridiculous.
To bring this back around to the TV show, I think the smart decision would be to do what they should have done from the start - Do the one shots for the sequences that will benefit from it, create cuts and time lapses elsewhere where they are appropriate. There is absolutely potential to creating interesting and effective sequences that would be made powerful by being a oner, sure, but you're not doing that if you just make it an arbitrary rule where every scene of entire story has to follow whether they benefit from it or not. If you need to transition to a different character or a dream, you have a lot more freedom to be investive and interesting in that if you can just make the cuts and jumps where you need to. This idea was at best an ambitious but failed experiment in the first game, it was an active hindrance to the second, and I think the show should be smart enough to employ it where appropriate and not shackle itself to this arbitrary gimmick for the sake of continuing the gimmick.
TLDR: I do not think highly of either GoW's gimmick camera. TV will probably benefit from a lack of Kratos going into the menu every 10 minutes, but I think it would amount self sabotage to commit to it over the course of an entire show unless they make drastic changes to the story such that it benefits from it, as the games did not.
deadline.com
