God of War Ragnarök's New Character Designs!

Hey everybody, it's Norm from Tested and we are on location today with Raph Grissetti. Raph, we've done interviews before at places like Monsterpalooza, but now we're in your domain, your place of work. Where are we right now? We're at the studio, Santa Monica Studio, yeah. Work, Santa Monica Studio. Because your day job, you are the art director of God of War, Ragnarok. You're finally here. All the interviews we did at Monsterpalooza was so we could get here and chat with you about this. And obviously it's a massive game coming out with Kratos, Treyas, these characters returning from the fan-favorite franchise, new characters as well. Today I want to talk about character design because that's what you do, right? The process of character design, how do you take these iconic characters that, you know, for a new generation of console, for a new story that you're telling, have it be familiar, bring something new to it, and then have them work well with the new characters? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a lot of work from a lot of people to get these characters ready. You know, it's a prime time, but bringing them from 2018, there was a lot of work done to get them to where they are. Kratos being so iconic to the franchise, we did a lot of work to get his new costume, his new look, the beard, everything. So going into Ragnarok, like we knew it was a continuation from the story, so we wanted to really show kind of, you know, he has been through the years in between the games. And then same thing for Atreus, I mean, he's kind of growing up, so a lot of work went into developing his new costume, his new look. And then when we talk about characters, I mean, the game has so many different characters, like so many enemies, bosses, new heroes, and all that stuff. So there's a lot of work that goes into developing the universe, expanding the races, building the weapons, environments, just everything, right? There's a massive effort from the team. Yeah, early in the game, we do a lot of exploration on things that we wanted to be in the game. So we're looking at a lot of, like, this is very early, like trying to get a feel of, like, you know, environments and kind of the scenario and kind of the, you know, kind of the look and the vibe for the game. And then we start going into, like, moments, like when we're trying to pitch the story, there's a lot of little cool moments that we want the team to, like, have, you know, experience it before we make it. So we do a lot of, like, key moments that, you know, may or may not make the final game, but we like to explore. And then we start to explore our personalities. Like, this is Thor, you know, his personality. He got some type of beer and a drink. He's just casually flicking the hammer around. Yeah, we knew he was, you know, be like a drunk character. So kind of get the feeling of, like, what the character is. Same thing for here. Like, this is a very cool moment of him and Kratos. And, like, we want to get that tense feel in the image. And then hopefully we can recreate that in the game. When you work on familiar characters, let's start with Kratos, Atreus, right? You guys did so much work, like you said, for 2018 to define this new series of the story. What's the goal going into this game in terms of the character designs? Is it new for newest sake? Is it story? Is it for combat? Is it tied to gameplay? Well, towards the end of the last game, we knew that Ragnarok was coming, right? We kind of see the effect that it had on the environment. So we, you know, when we talk about these characters, we know they're kind of surviving. They're trying to makeshift armors from what they had. So they're kind of, like, isolated, really trying to train for what's to come. So starting the game, you can kind of tell that from their costumes. There's a lot of work that went into, you know, the fabrication. Like, they're making the armor themselves. And then we go into specifics. So, like, each character has his own style. Atreus has a lot of, you know, kind of a little more style than Kratos. Like, Kratos is, like, very rustic. Like, he just wants the practical stuff. So a lot of, like, all the medals are very specific to what he puts them for protection. Where Atreus is a little more, you know, kind of, like, the design is a little more fun for the artist to kind of play with his style. And as he's growing up as well, he can kind of find his own little things that he can put on his armor, on his costume, to make it, you know, make it his own. And you're working alongside the creative team, the writing team, directors, and they've world-built what these characters are going through. Yeah. You want to present that visually. Yeah, there's a lot of back and forth with the narrative design and design team of kind of where these characters are in the story right now and how we want to push them visually. And then for gameplay as well, there's a lot of, like, limitations of what things that we can do. They both upgrade their armor. Same thing as last game. So as we're thinking through all that progression as well, it's like how we want this to tell that story from the progression. There's a lot of little things that happens in the game that you can kind of tell from their armors. You know, where they get them from, you know, they kill a certain number of enemies to get a certain armor. We can kind of do that storytelling as we develop their costumes. For not just these characters, but for everything. Like, we're building factions of characters. We're building colors for these factions. And we really want the player to feel like everything came from somewhere in the game. If they're getting this medal, it's because it came from this realm. Or same thing for, you know, they have this creature leather that came from this dragon. Like, things like that to build the universe. Yeah, so that's not only where they are at the beginning of the game, but by the end of the game, where their characters have gone, where the players have taken them. And those will all bring out the emotion, the memories of playing the game. Exactly. If you're wearing that armor, we want the player to feel like, you know, he kind of worked for it. And he kind of saw, like, what kind of where it came from. And being, you know, be a part of that storytelling. Not every player is going to have the same armor towards the end of the game. So we can really tell the players. When we're watching streams and watching people play the game, we can tell, like, where they kind of... Wow, that's amazing. Things that they did to get that armor. Yeah. All right, new characters. And kind of a character that was alluded to in 2018, is, of course, it's Thor. Thor, a character that's been represented many, many times in popular media. You guys had a rough, nebulous form for Thor. Was that... At that point, you knew what kind of the shape that Thor was going to be in? And how did that then change over time to what Thor is in this game? That's a good question. I think Cory Barlog, the creative director of the game, he knew exactly kind of the feeling that he wanted Thor to be from last game. So we only saw him briefly brief towards the end of the project. And then when we went into this game, we had to take a step back and really flesh out what the character was going to be. We had a kind of overall silhouette from last game, but we didn't know exactly how it was going to look or the armor. And really his story throughout the game, right? There's a lot that goes into the inspiration for the armor, the Aesir, how they're building their costumes. It's more about all the gods, not just him. So when we get to him, there's meaning and there's reason for why he's wearing certain pieces of gold or the motifs of the costume. There's a lot of Odin influence from being his father. As we're working through the cast, there's a lot of little things that we try to put on the costume. Yeah. You mentioned silhouette and just having recognizable forms. So they're distinct and they tell a story in just the shape of themselves relative to the protagonist. And we've got to talk about these right in front of us because I see this is a 3D print. And that's a sculpture? That's a clay sculpture from 2018. And so talk about how these help the design process. And you did this print, you did this sculpture. At what point do these come in to the collaboration with other part members of the team? Yeah. I mean, you know, the feeling of having something physical always has a huge impact on the buy-in for what the characters are. So I love to do it even for myself to try to understand the shapes, understand the weight of these characters. And it's something that's hard to get in 3D when you're starting to just sculpt on like a T-pose or something like that. Yeah. So even just a little pose or trying to get the personality through some of the sculpt and bringing these to meetings, like you can get people behind the idea. And we like start to pick things that are working and things are not working. So then when we go into 3D, we can have a lot more back and forth and just finalizing these characters. And then this is from when we go into this game and working on Ragnarok. This is a 3D print of kind of the final design for him. I went through a lot of early explorations of what his costume could be. And kind of like what you mentioned like this, when we reduce it to simple shapes, something that works not just for narrative moments, but for gameplay as well. Something you can look at from afar and really see, you know, who the character is. Like when we're doing kind of a key frame for a character, it would looking at the costuming, but everything that goes into like presenting the character is like very important. So like, where is he, you know, standing behind it or kind of the vibe of like, you can see ravens and things like that, the environment that's behind them. So we treat these kind of final kind of key art for the characters as like a cover. So you could put these anywhere. But these are, you know, some of the enemies that we have in the game. Some of the heroes and companions and things like that. But, you know, you can kind of see the level of detail that we take some of the, even the enemies, right? They kind of, we're trying to kind of tell a little bit of the story, the fabrication of the armor. We try to pull from a lot of historical elements to make it believable. So there's a lot of thought that goes into like making them feel like a part of the universe. Yeah, and it's not just the shape and the scale, but the armor and the weapons. The weapons are such a big part, right? Thor with his, you guys, Duraguy's version of his Mjolnir hammer, which you also have in a kind of a one-to-one representation. So this is the product now, right? This is what's going to be in the collector's edition. Yeah, you guys were involved in that as well. Is this derived from like that model? Yeah, yeah. This is one-to-one to what we actually made it for the game, to sculpt them by Arda. And yeah, from design, a lot of early designs for the hammer. And the hammer is actually what we had in 2018, because we didn't see the characters specifically, but there was a very close up on the hammer. So we had to go in and really design this as it was going to be for 2018 and for Ragnarok. But this is one-to-one to what we actually have in the game. So what the fans are getting is exactly what Thor is holding. And it has the familiar iconography, which is like Kratos' Leviathan axe, and it's all part of that story. And as an artist, I guess with today's technology, you can put as much fidelity and detail in the ZBrush model. Yeah, and there's no real limitations on things that we could do. It's just more time constraints and really the design, because sometimes we tend to put a lot of the details everywhere. So you kind of also have to push it back a little bit so it's readable from Thor. But you can see, even this is like an earlier prototype, but you can really see all the details from the sculpt. It is what's in the game with normal maps, and everything is kind of... And to your point, a lot of the design and the motif of this is the goats. So you can kind of see all the antlers from the goats and kind of the goat heads, the two being so important for Thor. From the mythology, there's a lot of things that we wanted to pull from that and then do our own take. Like if you look at his costume, there's a lot of the same designs that are on the hammer, that are on his costume. Even here on the forearm, it's kind of like they have Raven's designs on the forearm. Kind of think back on what Odin has as well. So there's all these little details that we put in that it's there for fans to notice, and it's really what's in the game. It's just a lot of little things that sometimes you don't get to see just because of the crazy of fighting him. Well, they have to serve a purpose of being a character, right? A boss or a playable character in the game and all the requirements of it being on a big screen because no one's going to play it on. You were telling me earlier that even with scale, you're designing it so the hammer's a certain size relative to Thor when it's on his belt. That was the ideal scale. Exactly, yeah. What you see here is what I wanted it to be and what feels right on his body. But obviously when you're talking about gameplay, he needs to be bigger so it's readable, so when he throws, the player can see what's happening. So it's actually different scales for when he's holding it and what's on his belt and when he's throwing. So we do little tricks like that to change how the player perceives the weapon. I can imagine for a film, someone in the post-production facility enlarging props for readability. But you guys have to do it dynamically and have to do it because players can control it and walk around and that's not easy, but it is. These are like the little tricks and things that make it so memorable. Yeah. I mean so much detail and you ask who's going to notice and of course the people are going to notice are the prop makers and the cosplayers because we've seen so many people build Leviathan axes, so many people do their versions of Kratos, whether it's like really building up to it or doing a gender-bent version. And something you guys have put out is a cosplay costume guy. Can you talk about the process of that? And as a designer, do you like talk about materials now also? Yeah, I mean I love to see what cosplay, you guys did an amazing job with the Leviathan axe as well. And we love to see the cosplayers like going out and just building amazing things. I know how complex these things are, so when I see what people are actually making it is like props to them, right? So this time we wanted to really put a lot of effort to give them as much as possible, give a lot of information because we know it's really hard to find everything and then going in and just really trying to make it all yourself. And there's a lot of storytelling that goes behind it, like we're just talking about some of these details and we want for people to know where we're coming from, what we're trying to do, for them to actually put that on their cosplay as well. It is really hard to find these things and really hard to manufacture, so the people who are making it want to make sure that they have everything they need to kind of really go crazy and make these things as real as possible. It's in that translation from 2D concept art to 3D, high textured 3D model to the physical world, that last translation is super difficult because then you're talking about like real physics and real materials and most people are, you know, they're sculpting or using foam or a cloth, but like they do amazing jobs making it look like leather and wood. Yep, and metal, right? Yeah, metal, absolutely. We can bend metals. Right, these are the cheats that you can do in a game, really, for characters. And to your point, like the materials are such a big thing for the franchise just because we're always trying to build something that feels real, but it also has a huge fantasy element to it. So we look a lot into like real references from like historical props or like real leather, like in how people manufactured things back then. So when we started to look at these costumes, like we put a lot of thought into how someone would manufacture it. Of course, when you go into like dragon skin and like kind of crazy fantasy things, there's some liberty there, but we try to put a lot of thought into how stitching works and how things are actually made. Hopefully people can appreciate that when they're trying to build and it's just not like nonsense. Oh, I think they love the challenge. I mean, maybe they'll love it, but they definitely take on the challenge. Like the more detail, yeah, they'll put it in the costume. And then just like you watching streamers recognizing the armor, you can go to a convention, look at someone in cosplay and say, wow, they pointed out, they love that detail from the cosplay guide and they put it in the costume and they capture the performance too. Exactly. Yeah, that's a huge part because if people really like these characters, so when they take the time of their life to really spend like months building a costume to like cosplay these characters, this is the rewarding part of our job to see people actually caring for these characters and appreciate the amount of work that we put on them because we put the same, if not more time into making these things look the way they do. Yeah, and it's something that's hopefully an ongoing thing, more characters. I know they're probably fan favorites you have in mind when you're working on the game and creating these guides for those as well. Yeah, yeah. Can't wait to see what the fans think is the coolest character so that they want to cosplay because that also kind of influences our kind of thought process for the future to know like we can double down into the fan favorites. Congratulations on a long journey getting the game made and having another iteration of the God of War franchise out there. Thank you. I hope you can have time to play it and tell me what you think. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Oh my god. You know, I look at this and the first thing I want to do is I want to put a light. I want to go, what does he look like? Right, with different lighting. And that's like the most immediate tactile thing is like, oh, where the shadows cast on him. And we can get a sense of like, yeah, things are feeling right. The weight's right. Yeah. I feel like the buy-in is like the most important thing. Like when people are happy with the design and they're kind of excited to work on it, like things move, you know, really fast and everybody puts their effort. And at some point it goes into the world and there are products and things that are other translations of the characters and becomes its own creature. I mean, you know me. Like we're always trying to fight for products and like make these things collectibles. Yeah. And this is a little bit of us trying to sell, like we can, people want these characters, let's make them, right? 100%. It's so cool. Yeah. Hopefully we can, you know, there's a lot coming. So hopefully we can have people have these at their home as well.