God of War Details its Difficulty Settings and HUD-Free “Immersion Mode”

The new God of War arrives next week, and new information about the game is coming fast and furious. Recently we’ve learned about the God of War’s PS4 Pro enhancements, modes, and character customization, and now Sony has released new information about the game’s difficulty settings and HUD options.

We’ve known for a while that God of War will let players choose their difficulty, but now we have a more detailed breakdown of the settings:

Give Me A Story: Lets you experience the story without too much of a difficult gameplay challenge. You won’t be taking a gondola to the top of the highest peaks in all the Norse Realms, but you will have a far greater margin for error in enemy encounters.

Give Me A Balanced Experience: The mode we’d recommend most players start with. The name says it all. We’ve tuned it to deliver a balanced, challenging playthrough.

Give Me A Challenge: Is harder and less forgiving. It is recommended for players who find action games extremely intuitive, and for confident long-time God of War series veterans who’ve beat past games on harder difficulties.

Give Me God of War: Is the sort of thing reserved for people who wrestle polar bears in their undies. We haven’t just made you weaker or enemies stronger — we’ve looked at enemy behaviors and placements in encounters as well, tweaking everything to make it as threatening as possible. Best of all, you cannot change difficulties once you start a game on this mode, so if you suddenly realize you’re in way over your head, you’ll have to start a new game. Don’t be sorry, be better?

God of War will also give you full control over your HUD, and include an “Immersion Mode,” that strips almost all distracting info off the screen.

Immersion Mode

This will cut things down to just the minimal absolute necessary HUD elements. To enable Immersive UI, it’s as easy as going to the Settings menu, clicking HUD and switching HUD Mode to Immersive. Yes, that means you can toggle it on and off while you play!

In addition to this, we’ve added an extra mode that allows you to customize which of these HUD elements you want on, off, or enabled via the touch pad which brings up that element for a short duration. This will enable players to truly customize their experience by adjusting visibility to HUD elements like enemy health bars, compass and enemy off screen indicators.

I definitely dig the “bring up a HUD element temporarily with the touch pad” option. I tend to obsess over details, but I also like a clean screen, so it will be nice to be able to bring up info and maps only when I need them. More games should include the feature.

God of War rampages onto PS4 on April 20.