Mark Simon, lead director on God of War: Ascension, has told Polygon that the next Kratos gamers will encounter is still somewhat pure prior to the events of the core trilogy. His morals still in tact, Kratos will avoid harming civilians in Ascension.
"But the civilians in this case, he doesn't kill any civilian, here," Simon explained. "The ones that are killing the civilians are the beasts that he's fighting against, and we want to get back to that. Because it's important to know that, like, these guys are terrorizing the workers on this statue. Kratos is going to go in and fight those guys, so in a way he's more heroic for doing things like this. When the Juggernaut shows up, he kills three guys just like that, and Kratos runs in and fights this guy. That's the monster, in this game, not Kratos."
Simon expanded his point with the idea that by not harming civilians, it makes the game feel much more alive.
"We also want the worlds to feel a little bit richer, because when you take the people who live here and work here and you add them into the worlds, then it starts to feel a little bit more believable.
"One of my favorite parts in God of War was the town square in Athens, where you had all the guys running from the monsters in the center of the square, and Kratos was running straight towards the square in order to go fight against them — that's the thing that we want to be able to do here."
The whole point of God of War has been to bring down a fiery rain of death on any-and-everyone. Putting morality, hesitation or thoughtfulness into the hack-and-slash runs the risk of seeming tacked on. Also, I'm not sure how sound of a plan it is to take Kratos from a broken man who lost his family and holds morals in high regard to a guy who uses a whore to hold a door open by shoving her body into the gears. Plot-wise it isn't the best way to get everyone to like the protagonist – but maybe that isn't the point.
"I think you're going to see more of a human side to him," Simon ruminated. "The way that Kratos tells a story in terms of a main character, though, is different. He doesn't say a lot, but he does a lot, and it's all through action. It's one of the things we try to emphasize with how he moves through the world, to the story that we're going to tell about him is: this is Kratos as a man, or a Spartan general. At this point in his life, he's not the uber-angry-godkiller. Something got him to that state. This is kind of the story of how somebody loses his humanity."
Via Polygon
