Cory Barlog, the director of PS4 exclusive God of War, is gearing up to develop for PS5. Barlog was a guest in the most recent episode of Animal Talking, Gary Whitta’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons-hosted talk show, and Whitta asked him about the PS5. After some joking around, Barlog jumped into some insight into what we should expect from the system.
“The SSD is just amazing,” Barlog says, saying that developers will no longer need to go to great lengths to hide loading screens. “There’s some really cool stuff I think we’re gonna be able to do,” he teases. He says that there’s always something sad about a new generation starting, but he thinks this one might be different.
“With every generation, it always feels like we master the generation, right, then it’s like ‘oh, there’s a new one coming up,’ and you’re like ‘but I just finally got this one,'” Barlog goes on to say. “But I think this is going to be a little bit different.
“It feels like we’ve got a really good foundation of understanding, so transitioning between generations is going to be a little bit less of a massive leap of faith,” he elaborates, citing the PS2 to PS3 jump as a difficult console transition to navigate.
“I’m always a little sad in the(…)change of a generation, because I feel like all the cool tricks that we learn, now we have to learn all these new tricks,” he added. “Which is great, that’s fun, but, you know, you feel a little bit less in control of things.” However, unlike in previous generations, he doesn’t think it will feel like having to “go back to square one” to figure out all the technology, as it has in the past.
Barlog discusses the PS5 just past the one hour mark in the video below–but the whole interview, and everything before and after, is also worth a watch. In this same episode, Selena Gomez appeared and performed an acoustic version of her latest song, Past Life. It sounded good.
Asked for the thing he’s most excited about for next-gen, Barlog says that it’s all the “new, clever concepts” he expects to see. “I think we’re going to have a lot of interesting surprises from different studios,” he says.
As the system nears the end of its life, God of War still stands as one of the PS4’s very best games.
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