David Jaffe: Time for a change.

(Image courtesy of GamePro.com)

It seems David Jaffe, the director of the mega hit and critically acclaimed God of War, may be retiring from the action/adventure genre.

"Since God Of War, I have lost interest in the genre of single player action/adventure games. In fact, I've really lost interest in making any kind of game that does not fully and only embrace interactivity in the most purest sense."

You can read all of Jaffe's thoughts on his blog here. He discusses about how much hard work must be put into an epic game like GOW and how he doesn't feel the same excitement a gamer feels when playing the game.



"I just can't play God Of War. It holds not joy or surprise for me because it's all planned out; because I already enjoyed all of the elements of God Of War on the day me or the team thought them up, way before they were executed."

I understand where Jaffe is coming from. It's hard work to design any game, but games that have storylines and character developmentent and etc, add more to the table. In his blog post, he talks about when adding one idea, you have to another of equal or greater proportion. GOW 2 is getting a lot buzz, so expectations are high. This makes the job more difficult because gamers are expecting more mayhem and Kratos beat downs than the first game. It is a daunting task and much more time consuming than releasing the next Madden game (No offense to any Madden fans.)

But another part me asks the question "Isn't being a game designer hard work in the first place?" I understand how he feels but I believe no matter what game project you work on, some tough roads are up ahead. Honestly, Mr. Jaffe can continue on with doing many GOW games that'll sell millions of copies (If they don't suck) for the rest of his career and have nothing to worry about. But, will he be happy making that decision? Only he himself knows that answer.

"So is this a permanent change? I don't know. It feels like it is but I'm just going to have to see. I mean, I certainly want to keep making commercial games and keep doing things that game players love. As much as I respect game gurus like Chris Crawford, it's not like I think the biz is dead and don't care about commercial success within the current field. I do not want to just work on dinky little mechanic based games that have no thematic resonance. But now I just want to do it in a way that celebrates what makes video games great, versus taking elements from other media and trying to squish those elements into a product that- if you do everything right- MIGHT just have one tenth the emotional impact as what you can get from more traditional media (like film, tv, or books)."

With GOW on his track record (And the Twisted Metal Series), Mr. Jaffe has some great credentials to try other genres. Who knows what he'll decide to do next but one thing is for certain, it'll be somethingthing game related.

P.S. Game journalists ARE part of the gaming biz Mr. Jaffe. I see them more of as advisors telling us if a product is worth our money or not than as critics. Just wanted to shout that out.