Shuhei Yoshida Personally Pushed Back ‘God of War’ Another Six Months: “I was horrified.”

Released back in 2018, God of War was an enormous hit for Sony and the PlayStation console. Not only did the game successfully revive one of the console’s best franchises, it was a standalone hit that launched a new part of Kratos’ saga.

And while the game was praised for… well… everything, including the visual, acting, and narrative aspects, it turns out that the production and development process wasn’t as smooth as the final product.

In a recent interview, former PlayStation director Shuhei Yoshida revealed that he personally gave the developers an additional six months to work on the game, as he was “horrified” by what he saw.

The development process for a game of such a scale is always complex and if you’re a perfectionist, it takes time to develop a perfectly smooth product. God of War definitely managed to deliver such a product, but it took some time before everyone was satisfied with the game.

Shuhei Yoshida, former PlayStation head, recalls how he was “horrified” when he was first called in to see the game, although he does add that he did not say that the game itself was horrible; it just needed additional work.

“Thinking about the time left for the team and all the expectations from the company and maybe even the players, I was like, ‘This is a problem,'” he said. “But, because Cory is such a creative guy and a very nice person and very passionate, I couldn’t tell him. Even though my facial expression was communicating something.” This was an issue for him, as you might have expected.

“After the meeting, I went back to [executive producer] Shannon Studstill’s office and said to Shannon, ‘We have a problem.’ And eventually we were able to push the game back,” Yoshida said. “The game was planned for [an] October release of that year. We pushed it to April in the next year. So an additional six months. That really helped the team to polish.” And luckily, they did.

“That was one of the biggest games in development. The company had huge expectations and had an amazing reveal announcement. But it was, like, six months before the planned [2017] launch. I visited the studio and Cory [Barlog] presented and let me play,” he began explaining the reasons for his decision. “The game was maybe 80% complete. But I had really struggled to play that one level that Cory wanted me to play. The enemy was shooting at me from behind the camera. I felt really cheated. And there were some frame rate issues and multiple things were not working.”

Ultimately, we got a masterpiece of a game and that is all that matters, but it is interesting to get such a straightforward view from inside the development process.

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