Bruce Straley Says Sorry to the God of War Laufey Team - and I Think Both Halves of This Story Matter

Have you ever said something half-joking at a dinner table and watched it land on exactly the wrong person? That's roughly what happened to Bruce Straley this week, just with a much bigger table.

Straley, the former Naughty Dog developer who directed The Last of Us, spoke to Edge magazine about the state of big-budget games. With a laugh, he said the verbs and experiences the triple-A space is delivering are, in his words, "I wanna say boring." Then he reached for an example, and the example was God of War Laufey. To be fair to him, what he actually said about it started as a compliment: "every pixel is mindblowing," he told Edge, before talking about the sheer amount of work and skill poured into it.

You can guess how the internet handled the nuance. It didn't. The takeaway became "The Last of Us director calls God of War boring," and the people who ended up carrying that were not executives or trend-setters, but the developers who made the thing.

So Straley apologized to the God of War Laufey team, saying his comments brought them "uninvited and unnecessary negative attention." Honestly, that got me. It's not a defensive non-apology and it's not a full retreat either. He's sorry about who got hit, not necessarily about the point he was reaching for.

And I think the point deserves a fair hearing. When a game looks that astonishing and a veteran director still shrugs at what you actually *do* in it, that's a conversation worth having. I love a lavish PlayStation blockbuster as much as anyone - they're often the games I hand to friends who don't play much, because they're so readable and so polished. But "walk, climb, fight, watch a cutscene" has been the house style for a long time now, and it's okay to want new verbs.

What's not okay is making one team the face of an industry-wide habit. Those folks spent years on their game. They didn't choose the budgets, the risk-aversion or the trends. Criticize the pattern, name the pattern, and leave the people polishing every one of those pixels out of the crossfire.

Straley seems to have understood that faster than most of the people quoting him. Good on him. I'd still love to hear the rest of his argument someday - just pointed at the right target.

Image: Dean Takahashi / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Game_Awards_2018_-_God_of_War_development_team.jpg