God of War 3’s Lead Cinematic Artist, John Palamarchuk was kind enough to spare a few moments to chat about his latest action-adventure masterpiece.

HUDisplay: What was it like working on God of War 3 and the God of War series in general?

John Palamarchuk: It’s fun. From an art standpoint, it’s a really interesting world to work in. Greek mythology is really fun – we put our own spin on it. When you play through the game you’ll see the variety of the worlds; it’s pretty phenomenal. You’re going to these different places.  Building all those worlds was really exciting with the artists.

You started working on God of War 2.What were the biggest challenges coming from God of War 2 to God of War 3?

Living up to God of War 3 and hopefully surpassing it. We were really happy with what we were able to pull off on the PS2. And now we were jumping on this new hardware and the technology was completely different. This is our first game on PS3, so how do we tackle that and from a design standpoint how do we design something that is new and innovative e that you’ve never seen before. So we have those titan levels that were pretty unique. We were trying to build off of the G0W franchise but also make improvements across the board. A ton of new camera features, graphics, all this new code tech. it’s a blast as far as working on PS3. We loved it.

Kratos’ kills have gotten way more gruesome. Was there anything that the designers had to leave out?

From a technical standpoint we were able to put in everything we wanted for the entire game. In the end, for the ratings, we had to pull some things or tone them down. There are some parts in the story that are pretty serious emotional, so if the gore got too crazy or the kills got too crazy then we would pull them out of that emotional experience, so we would retune that to keep it serious. But yeah, we kicked up the blood and gore. It’s HD now, so you’ll see a lot of stuff.

The centaur kills it.

The centaur is cool from the E3 demo, but we take it much farther than that in the full game. The centaur isn’t even on my radar (laughs)

Is there anything you’re particularly proud of?

One of my favourite things is the lighting set-up we have. We call it “unlimited dynamic lights” in our games. We can have up to 50 dynamic lights per object in the game, so that meaning that you could have thousands of dynamic lights in the scene. But when would you ever have more than 50 dynamic lights on a column, for example? It’s basically unlimited – I don’t know of any other games that are doing that. When we realized that we could incorporate that into the engine without any performance hit thanks to the [PS3 cell processor], which is amazing, that’s really exciting to us.

They’ve said that this is the last of the God of War series. Is this actually going to be the end of the series, or do you foresee more in the God of War [franchise]?

I don’t think we’re calling it the end and two weeks later we’ll go, “Just kidding!” I think we’re going to put it aside for a little while. We’ve been working on God of War for a long time. Our studio is known as the God of War studio. We’ve worked on God of War for seven years. We need a break as artists to recharge and take it in another creative direction. We’re open to anything at this point.

I checked out your website and saw that you’re a fan of first-person shooters. Could we expect anything like that?

Sony really has a lot of great  first person shooters. I don’t think they don’t really need anymore. We could come out with an FPS I think we want Sony’s game library to be more diverse.

If you were given a blank slate, what would work on?

Personally, I am a huge fan of God of War and would love to work on another God of War, but I don’t think we are.

Action-adventure games are really fun and I don’t think there’s many in the industry right now. I think it’s a genre you could do a lot with and there’s a lot you of room for growth. Usually it’s been pretty cut and dry. We’ve explored some new things with god of war 3 but if maybe we had some new action-adventure branches we could try something new.

You were born in Edmonton. How many other Canadians are on the team?

5 Canadians out of 120 people on the team, so Canada is definitely representing on the God of War team. Hopefully Canadian fans are proud of that. There are two programmers, Senior FX artist, one of the Camera designers, so we’re spread out on a lot of different disciplines.

So, DLC. We know there are the Gamestop pre-order bonuses, but is there any DLC planned for God of War 3 at this point?

I don’t know if we’ve really announced anything. But personally things I’d like to see are maybe more fun costumes, maybe some more of those bonus challenges that you’ve seen in the past: arena challenges, things you can have fun with. Our game is really tightly story-based so it would be pretty hard to add anything in the middle there. Hopefully something to keep the fans excited.

What are your thoughts on DLC?

Personally, I almost never buy DLC, because I want to try a lot of games so I’ll try the individual game and move on. I know its been really popular. I think it’s great, just as long as the development studio doesn’t take away from the original game. Definitely, we never hold anything back as far as, “Oh we’re going to save that for the DLC.” We’ve packed in 40 gigs on the Blu-Ray disk. Our game is just exploding with content. There’s tons of behind-the-scenes content, way more than ever before. We’re excited for DLC, but honestly we haven’t even started working on anything like that. Hopefully we’ll see something in the future.

Thanks to John Palamarchuk for the interview!