The Great Lodge

Third Person Action Adventure
Playable in Singleplayer
Created as a Tech Narrative Designer for Santa Monica Studio
Available on Steam, PC, PS5, PS4
Developed over 1+ Year
Proprietary Engine
Large Sized Team
Many hours of content over multiple visits

The Great Lodge is a recurring location in the story of GOW: Ragnarok. The player visits it as they return from quests while Atreus is allied with Odin. It functions primarily to show off narrative moments, provide lore, and kick start the larger battles with the Aesir.

Level Flow

Over Multiple Visits

(0a) Arriving at The Great Lodge

(1a) Meeting Thrud

(2a) Introducing the Mask

(3a) Loki’s Return

(0b) Odin leading you through his Halls

(1b) Thrud’s Tour

(2b) Loki’s Mission

(3b) Muspelheim Quest

(0c) Being shown your room

(1c) Intro to Odin’s Study

(2c) Back to Kratos

(3c) Doubt

Production

I handled the Subsequent visits to The Great Lodge after Atreus first encounters Heimdall, Odin, and Sif for the first time.

Working on The Great Lodge was some of the most challenging work I’ve done in my career. I had to work with a very large multidisciplinary team in order to make things happen. The Engine we were using and how to get it to do certain things required hunting down tribal knowledge that existed amongst the team. Constant coordination with the schedules of different feature holders and making sure that I prioritized the level design and narrative content of the level while taking on tasks for other disciplines made for some creative solutions. Lots of meetings with animation and our cinematography team to make sure scenes were properly blocked out the first time. Some very interesting level work to make things happen when resources were strapped for other teams.

This level involved managing a lot of states, as the player visited various times and required handling of many edge cases.

Very challenging, but also incredibly rewarding.

> God of War: Ragnarok

Narrative Scenes

Players can observe scenes playing out before their eyes or talk to important NPCs as part of these “Narrative Scenes” that were put together. Part of the implementation for this involved a fair bit of work with Camera Designers to make sure we were properly taking the space, distance from the player, and bounds of the conversation properly to build a proper script and trigger setup for how the player would have their camera pulled smoothly into and out of conversation.

Walk and Talks

In my opinion, the bread and butter of God of War (outside of the combat). Multiple moving parts are at play and many edge cases are handled to be able to have NPCs lead the player through spaces. Special attention is given to pacing and distance for the purposes of making sure dialogue plays smoothly. NPCs have to handle players going off their spline paths and we need to provide callouts for players so they don’t lose track of where we’re trying to guide them.

Eavesdrops

A mechanic that I wholly designed just for The Great Lodge. Players would be able to take on additional narrative content while in the narrative hub space. The content must attract players towards it and overall contribute to the steadily rising tensions between Loki and Odin’s Household. Overall, I think this mechanic really served as a cool way of players playing into the fantasy of Loki being a “spy” but also feeling sorry for the Asgardians.

Cinematics

Not too much to say here. I had a lot of fun implementing cinematics using our tools. There’s a certain amount of setup needed: work inside the editor, outside the editor in 3D tools, in data tables, and in custom scripts that we’d write to stitch everything together. We had a great pipeline for implementing cinematics but it was definitely a lot to get a handle on. One of my favorite aspects of implementing cinematics was going to the mocap stage to help direct the placement and angles in play.