Former PlayStation Lead Said God of War Was Delayed to Be Polished

Former PlayStation head Shuhei Yoshida shared that six months before releasing God of War, the game wasn't ready to see the light. He was "horrified" and ultimately decided to delay the launch by half a year.

In a recent interview, Yoshida recalled: "I was horrified." He clarified: "I didn't say the game was horrible." According to Yoshida, it was the state of the game at that point that made it clear to him that it wasn’t ready for release.

"That was one of the biggest games in development," he said. "The company had huge expectations and had an amazing reveal announcement. But it was, like, six months before the planned launch. I visited the studio and Cory [Barlog] presented and let me play."

Yoshida described several issues that disrupted the gameplay experience, including enemy behavior and performance instability: "The game was maybe 80% complete. But I had really struggled to play that one level that Cory wanted me to play. The enemy was shooting at me from behind the camera. I felt really cheated. And there were some frame rate issues and multiple things were not working."

These issues led Yoshida to push for a delay. He reached out to executive producer Shannon Studstill to discuss the situation. The six-month delay, Yoshida explained, was what allowed the team to fully polish the game: "And eventually we were able to push the game back. The game was planned for [an] October release of that year. We pushed it to April in the next year. So an additional six months. That really helped the team to polish."

Shuhei Yoshida worked at Sony for over 30 years and resigned this January. Later, he announced his first video game voice role in an upcoming open-world crime game.

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