God of War Character Concept Art: Kratos Before And After

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While skulking around the corners of the ‘net this week, we came across the blog of a concept artist, Charlie Wen, who worked on the first God of War game, and went on to become the visual development director for God of War 2.

 

A lot of the concept art we came across on Charlie’s blog was work we’d never seen before…especially some of the designs for Kratos and Ares. Kratos, as God of War fans probably know, went through several redesigns until original creative director, David Jaffe, settled upon a look.

 

There are entire separate “Making of” series for all three God of War games that you can find on YouTube to supplement the concept images below with, so we’d recommend seeking them out if you want to learn more about the look of the games and its characters.

 

Onto the concepts. Keep in mind, the last image represents the final look of each character in the game:

 

Kratos:

Kratos conceptKratos concept 2

Kratos concept 3 Kratos final

                                                             Final design

 

Medusa:

Medusa concept Medusa final

                                                                                                         Final design 

 

Ares:

Ares conceptAres concept 2Ares concept 3 Ares concept 4Ares final 

                                                                                     Final design

 

Fat Medusa (God of War 2):

Fat Medusa concept 

And here’s a Kratos painting by Charlie with the different detailing stages recorded:

You can find more art work for both games at Charlie’s blog. Look at the top-right corner, and you’ll see links to concept galleries for both God of War and God of War 2.


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Author
Image of Ishaan Sahdev
Ishaan Sahdev
Ishaan specializes in game design/sales analysis. He's the former managing editor of Siliconera and wrote the book "The Legend of Zelda - A Complete Development History". He also used to moonlight as a professional manga editor. These days, his day job has nothing to do with games, but the two inform each other nonetheless.