GDC09: God of War III footage conveys massive battles, dynamic camera

We've seen the expertly edited trailer, but today we got our first look at some raw gameplay from Sony's Titan-ic sequel, God of War III. Sony Santa Monica programmers JIm Tilander and Vassily Filippov ended their highly technical discussion of optimizing code for PS3's multiple cores, a.k.a. its SPUs, with a brief 20-second clip.

In it, Kratos squared off against dozens of enemies in a smaller area than was seen in the trailer. These guys, with their tall, blue coffin-shaped shields looked nothing like we've seen in the series to date. In order to dispatch them all, Kratos weakened a cyclops who'd arrived on the scene, triggering a familiar "kill" minigame. Here's where we got to see the creature-riding aspect of the game in an actual gameplay setting. Kratos pearched on the monster's neck while it struggled to throw him off, swinging wildly at anything and everything in its path.

And that was it. The level wasn't paticularly noteworthy, but the sheer amount of enemies on-screen was. The new camera system also came into play, starting off up close to the amazingly detailed Kratos and pulling back as more enemies flooded onscreen. The action itself was fast and smooth. Filippov noted that, when the scene complexity allows it, God of War III will run at 60 frames per second, but it's not locked there. More complex scenes will run slower, but never below 30FPS. So, when's E3 again? Right -- not soon enough.