I recently got the chance to talk to God of War director Cory Barlog, and got his thoughts on a number of topics. One of the interesting tidbits Barlog shared with me was his thoughts on the ideal single-player games. He told me that he wants a “whole experience” from titles, and that he likens it to when he bought the original Half-Life over a decade ago. He closed his thoughts by saying there was nothing quite like a well-crafted narrative game, and that he hopes “we never lose that from the game industry.”
Here’s the full quote from Barlog (read more of his thoughts in my interview) concerning the state of single-player games:
I feel like for me it?s the experience of when I bought Half-Life 1. I went to the store, I bought it, took it home, installed it, and played it and everything that Half-Life was on the disc. I got the whole experience that they wanted me to have. That?s the experience to me that I want to deliver to people out there that I?m not like, oh, I held back something. It?s like, no, no, no, no. Everything that we have in us is not left on the field, it?s put into that game. So that when you buy it, you have that feeling of like, I get this entire experience. I can go home, I can save this thing, and I can know that you have given me everything you possibly can. I have literally nothing against, you know, multiplayer or cooperative [games]. Even the concept of, you know, microtransactions when done under in a format of lik...