They did motion capture on a cube
During last night’s State of Play showcase, Sony revealed God of War Laufey, a spinoff revealing that while Kratos and Atreus believed their beloved wife and mother was at peace in the beyond, she was in fact being forced to endure dishing out sick air combos in a god-heaven slugfest. While Sony’s recent strategic shifts strongly suggest that the wifequel won’t be heading to PC in the foreseeable future, I’m still considering it within our purview thanks to Sony Santa Monica’s latest groundbreaking advancement in videogame performance technology:
They did motion capture on a cube.
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During the gameplay reveal’s 20 minutes of Faye entering the afterlife of the divine to discover it’s mostly a place where you get punched, we were introduced to Phranque, a sentient cube who’ll accompany Fey on her journey. Depending on which online reactions you’ve seen in the ensuing hours, Phranque’s inclusion is either a delightful curiosity or peak millennial quirk chungus cringe.
In a Meet the Cast video published after GoW: Laufey’s announcement, Sony confirmed that the role of Phranque is being played by screen actor Jack Quaid. Best known for his role as Hughie Campbell in Amazon Prime’s adaptation of The Boys, Quaid debuted as an actor in 2012’s The Hunger Games, and was later cast in the 2022 Scream reboot and 2023’s Oppenheimer.
And for his performance for God of War: Laufey, he physically embodied a geometric shape.
Included in the GoW: Laufey cast video is motion capture session footage recorded during the game’s development, in which Quaid—acting alongside costars Deborah Ann Woll as Faye and Perlina Lau as sentient sword-ribbon Rue—had evidently been strapped into a cubic armature of PVC pipe in order to grant his performance an appropriate verisimilitude.
“Phranque will stop at nothing to protect all the living creatures that inhabit this world,” Quaid says in the video, his hexahedral mocap exoskeleton resting casually in the background of his interview shot.
As absurd as the image is, performances in a production like God of War—one in which facial, vocal, and motion acting are being captured simultaneously—benefit from the in-scene chemistry of actors sharing the same physical space. I’m just thrilled to know that someone, somewhere, decided that to believably portray a sentient cube in-game, an actor must—for a time—become one.
Somewhere, Benedict Cumberbatch is weeping.
God of War: Laufey doesn’t have a release date, and even when it does, it probably won’t be for PC. We’ll just have to admire the artistry from a distance.
