God of War fans, we just discovered a secret that was too good not to share, thanks to a new PlayStation Blog post. Let’s see if you can solve this riddle: There’s something that you use a lot in God of War, something that the game considers to be a weapon. You’ve probably spent hours with it in your hands, but you’ve never swung it at an enemy, and you never will. Can you guess what it is? According to the developers, the unlikely answer is: The boat oar.
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The PlayStation Blog post is all about God of War‘s complex boat travel mechanics, and all of the tricks and man-hours that went into making it such an important and seamless part of the gameplay. You would not believe how much time, effort, animation, and dialog went into boat travel in this game, and how many weird game engine tweaks were required as a result. Toward the end of the post, it’s revealed that the oars you use in the boat are considered by the game engine as weapon pickups.
Why this was required we’re not sure — presumably because it’s an interactive object that passes into and out of Kratos’ hands, and in order to empower him to hold and use this item in a variety of unique ways, it was required to classify it as a weapon.
Here’s the quick rundown of fun facts that revealed the oar as a weapon, and if you’ll pay attention, the last fact makes this even more interesting:
There are over 600 unique animations for the boat
There are more than 750 lines of dialogue on the boat
Alfheim has a unique boat, oar and light
Every enter and exit animation is different when you acquire Mimir
On docks the boat knows if it’s on the left or right side and the enter/exit animations adjust accordingly
The DualShock 4 LED changes to an “aqua blue” while you are in the boat
Even though it stays in the boat, the oar is considered a weapon pickup in the game engine
At one point, there was a bug where Kratos would be able to exit the boat holding the paddle
See what we mean? We know that the game registers the oar as a weapon, and we know that there was a glitch that let Kratos get out of the boat still holding the oar. Surely that means that somewhere in a hard drive in Santa Monica, there has to be footage of Kratos whooping with this thing, right?! If you’re a developer who knows how the items was classified and you manage to make it out of the boat still holding that thing, you would definitely go try to kill a few monsters with it, wouldn’t you?
We can dream. While we love the weapons we do get to use in God of War, we can’t help but imagine how the skill tree would look for the boat oar. Maybe we’ll get to find out in an aquatic expansion some day.
