Why God of War 2018's Achievements In Gaming Are Truly Meaningful

KRATOS SMASH!

On the rare occasion, a game is released like a blast from a cannon.
It does everything right, usually breathing new life into a format, a genre, or an old I.P., and the critical response from both professionals and YouTubers is so overwhelming and positive that it's all you see for a while.
The last time we really saw this kind of cannon blast was back at the beginning of 2017 when Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild were released within a week of each other, and performed a 1-2 knockout combo to the jaws of game critics everywhere.
This time...it's God of War.
This entry won't be a review of the game, there are soooo many of those at this point that every non-spoiler aspect of the game has been covered. No, what I'd like to talk about is the phenomenon of reviewing itself, and why the ratings that God of War 2018 has received might mean more than you think.

As of the publication of this blog, this is what the game looks like on Metacritic, but here's a link to get the up-to-date info. Universal Acclaim on both the critics and users categories isn't a phenomenon you see much.

Nothing is immune to the community of internet trolls who make it their lives' work to shit all over joy in any fashion, flaunting their equally-weighted ability to rate something by hitting the "0/10" button as fast as they can.
No self-respecting gamer can play this game and actually believe it deserves the lowest possible rating. it is objectively NOT a 0/10. Yet most of the negative reviews listed in the "user score" section of Metacritic look like this:

But...if you know God of War's protagonist Kratos, then you know what he does to trolls.
Look at that noise, then realize that even with this kind of blatant abuse abuse of the "zero button", this game has managed to achieve a 9.2/10 score.
Yep. Even with the weight of internet trolldom cheating the system as hard as they can, God of War 2018's reaction is this:

"So the game got good ratings. So big deal, other games have gotten good ratings before." You may naturally say. "What makes this one that much more special than other highly-rated games?"
It's a good question, and to me, the answer is that God of War set itself on a much higher difficulty mode for critical analysis, yet still crushed it.
It's like if you watch someone roll through a level of a Super Mario game untouched, versus watching someone roll through a segment of a Dark Souls game untouched. One is just simply harder to do.

 Usually, professional critics are sent their evaluation copy of the game mere days before the release date. Often, the "review embargo date" that they are given - the earliest date they can begin releasing reviews - is the day of release.
Bethesda (Skyrim, Fallout, Dishonored) is famous for its policy of sending out its media review copies to critics the day before release.
Think about that. Let's give our hypothetical game critic some ideal conditions. After a good night of sleep, they wake up, get a shower, get coffee, and just as they're mentally prepared, the doorbell rings and it's their copy of Skyrim or Fallout 4. They sit down and begin to play, and they stop playing five hours before the review embargo ends, so that they can compose a thoughtful review, edit together a video, and get it up on YouTube. That can be done in five hours, right?  Sure it can.

How many hours did they get to play the game? It can't be more than 19, remember, because of Bethesda's policy. But let's call it 19.
Think about how much of Skyrim or Fallout can be experienced in 19 hours. For the uninitiated, this is a drop in the bucket of these huge games. People clock hundreds of hours in them. 60-70 hours for completing a sprawling open-world game or an RPG is fairly common.
So...they release their review a few days later, right? Nope. The fact of the industry is that reviewers are in a race to be the first to publish. When the embargo lifts, people have already been searching for reviews, and the first reviews to be published get more hits, more watches, and therefore more money.

What part of Skyrim or Fallout deserves to be cut so that you can review it quickly? It's about exploration, about dwelling in the world. It's about going your own direction and having your own adventure. You can probably blitz the story in a few hours, but does that really mean you've played the version of the game that deserved to be reviewed?

Critics are not able to complete the games they're reviewing.

How To Hard Mode

1. God of War's review embargo date was April 12th. The game was released on April 20th. That's eight days for gamers to read, study, and soak in critics' opinions before being able to decide to buy the game. Brass Damn Balls. This was Sony saying "We're so confidant in this product, that we feel that critical opinions can only help us sell the game."

2. Sony sent out its media review copies to critics weeks in advance of the game's launch. Reviewers had time to thoroughly explore the game world and thoughtfully consider what they'd seen. They had time to sleep on it, and that can mean everything when you're trying to organize your thoughts. Initial impressions of something are fine, but that's all they can ever be. Giving your critics time to analyze the work also opens up your work to the observation of its flaws and weaknesses much more readily, and again, Sony just said "bring it."

3. God of War 2018 is a complete re-imagining of what the franchise is. It's so far from its roots that the game itself becomes a reflection of this new Kratos. A stranger in a strange land.
- The combat camera is far closer in, and it makes you feel as if enemies are catching up to Kratos in his old age. Before, the Greek Cuisinart buzz-sawed his way through fields of baddies at range. Now, the combat is fist-and-axe work, and the gnashing teeth of a thousand foes are close enough to bother giving them a high-rez texture.
- The moments of calm and reflection between fights are extensive compared to previous entries. This Kratos is wiser with age, and he tries to not only teach his son how to survive, but also the meaning behind the bloodshed. The weight of it. He isn't the unfeeling machine of vengeance and rage that we've always known,
- The change of scene from Greece to the Norse-lands is also a huge departure. Greece saw Kratos running between large and established structures and temples - elements of a cemented civilization with imperious gods above it who demand worship and adoration. Now, he fights in forests and on mountains. Civilization is something you happen upon between bouts of wilderness survival, and the Norse gods who rule it are painted more like demons or natural disasters, to be fearfully avoided whenever possible, or else desperately placated.

All of these changes cast the game in a completely different light from its predecessors, and this is usually where the fan-base of an I.P. will turn upon the new entry and disown it as a fallen son.
But again, Sony said "Go nuts, Santa Monica Studios, you got this."

What It Means

A lot of reviewers have taken God of War 2018 as their platform from which to shout "Single-player gaming isn't dead!" right in the face of big companies like EA (who act like they wish they could get the whole games industry to stop making games which can't be continually monetized through micro-transactions, fed by an online multiplayer competition base.)

If there's a ribbon or something for this movement, I want to wear one.

It's not a bad idea. The gaming community needs a flag to wave when they champion change (see Star Wars Battlefront 2 scandal, also involving EA), and if God of War is that flag, then hand it here so I can wave it a little.

But the fact remains that when games like this DO come out, if we want to see more of them, we have to actually buy them. If you want to support a game, the best way to do so is to buy a digital copy during the first week of sales. Pre-ordering is also nice. The games industry bases lots of metrics on early sales numbers, and digital copies add more to those numbers.

Back in January, this article caught my attention, in which the writer/creative director of the Uncharted series Amy Hennig spoke about the industry and its relationship with narrative-driven single player games. The takeaway was that despite the loud public demand for single-player narratives, the corresponding sales for said games are fairly low compared to the costs of development.

So now is the time to strike. No buyer's remorse here. Grab this game, and enjoy the experience, and tell the industry that you support this kind of huge project.

As a special thank you for reading to the end of this one, I've included four minutes of my adventure. Some ice ogres think they've got me trapped, and I disagree.

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TL;DR - Gimme that old time religion. It's good enough for me.

PS - Playstation Exclusives are doing pretty well right now. I'm not one of those "Die, Xbox, die!" people, but did think that this picture was pretty damn funny.