{"id":378362,"date":"2026-09-18T11:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T18:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/?p=378362"},"modified":"2026-09-30T09:30:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T16:30:20","slug":"god-of-war-bruce-straley-apologizes-after-boring-laufey-comment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/god-of-war-bruce-straley-apologizes-after-boring-laufey-comment\/","title":{"rendered":"God of War: Bruce Straley apologizes after \u2018boring\u2019 Laufey comment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former Naughty Dog director Bruce Straley has apologized after taking heat for invoking Laufey, a character from God of War<\/a>, while criticizing modern AAA design. His complaint was that a lot of big-budget games now look unbelievable and still end up feeling boring<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

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After people pushed back, Straley said the remark was meant as a broader critique of blockbuster development, not a shot at Santa Monica Studio, and he apologized to the team there. The point he was trying to make is that once AAA budgets rise from around $80 million to over $300 million<\/strong>, with marketing often doubling that and production dragging on for three to seven years, publishers get cautious. They fall back on sequels and familiar systems because unproven ideas start to look too expensive to gamble on.<\/p>\n\n

That argument lands in the middle of a much bigger fight over whether the whole model still holds up. You can see it in the layoffs hitting studios, in Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney warning about the pressure across AAA<\/strong>, and in the way publishers keep leaning harder on established franchises, open-world checklist design, and live-service features. AA and indie games are where more of the experimentation is happening.<\/p>\n\n

And Straley isn’t some random voice weighing in. He spent 18 years<\/strong> at Naughty Dog, directed The Last of Us<\/a>, Uncharted 2, and Uncharted 4<\/a>, left in 2017 after talking openly about burnout, and now runs Wildflower Interactive, where he’s making the more stylized Coven of the Chicken Foot.<\/p>\n

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Former Naughty Dog director Bruce Straley has apologized after taking heat for invoking Laufey, a character from God of War, while criticizing modern AAA design. His complaint was that a lot of big-budget games now look unbelievable and still end up feeling boring. After people pushed back, Straley said the remark was meant as a … Continue reading “God of War: Bruce Straley apologizes after \u2018boring\u2019 Laufey comment”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9351,"featured_media":378361,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","wpcf-pageviews":0},"categories":[1015],"tags":[],"usertag":[],"vertical":[],"content-category":[6823],"class_list":["post-378362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","content-category-games"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9351"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378362"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378362\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":378363,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378362\/revisions\/378363"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378362"},{"taxonomy":"usertag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/usertag?post=378362"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=378362"},{"taxonomy":"content-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cms-articles.softonic.io\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content-category?post=378362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}