God of War: Ascension – glitches and observations pt. 8

Some miscellaneous finds from a few weeks back.

0:00 – new tech: “Item break-out”. It’s possible to break out of most generic prompts using only the aim-pose. This tactic seems functionally similar to the sheathe break-out, so it doesn’t seem to have any unique use besides allowing doing break-outs past Chapter 13 in situations where Kratos doesn’t have a sub-weapon with a sheathe animation… which is almost never.

The explanation is that the short cooldown after letting go of aim works a bit strangely, and Kratos is able to buffer actions and seemingly even prompt use during this time. To do this break-out: very soon after letting go of aim near a generic prompt, press L3 to sprint, quickly buffer R1 and then press X to jump right as Kratos starts using the prompt – with proper timing, this causes a break-out.

0:19 – if you break-out of opening an Eye/Feather chest and quickly enter a cutscene, the chest’s Eye/Feather-message will not appear and you never receive its contents. The message also disappears if you overlap it with another message.

0:54 – rarely when breaking out of a weapon pick-up prompt, the weapon will visually hover in air and the R1-prompt does not disappear. Using it makes Kratos pick up the world weapon as usual. I’m not certain, but it seems this result only happens at certain world weapon-prompts, and it doesn’t happen 100% consistently either.

(Not on the video: doing this is the only way to access a world weapon prompt through a stale reference-bug. It doesn’t seem to be useful, though.)

1:13 – regarding world weapon break-outs. Previously glitchers have only paid attention to airborne break-outs such as Shield or Sling Discard jump. However, if a weapon’s ground discard is fast enough and world weapon data is not loaded in the background, you can jump in air afterwards and quickly do an unloaded air attack. Best weapon to do this with is Sling, but it seems you can get some minor results with automatic Javelin discard (i.e. after last shot) as well.

Most of the time, your unloaded air attack will just look like Kratos entering t-pose and floating for a moment. However, at some frame precise moment Kratos can instead do an aerial Unarmed O, which has immense levitation properties, the same way as “sky jump” or any other tech that gets a huge boost from the unusual aerial properties of the Shield air attack. I’ve only seen this happen after Sling ground discard, so this might be a trick that’s unique to Sling. Sadly, it’s too unreliable to really use in runs.

If you could do a similar levitation with Javelin or another earlier world weapon, then the dream of skipping all elements in a New Game-run might become reality.

1:44 – you can do an unloaded air Unarmed L1+O after some weapon discards as well. This makes Kratos do a near-immediate downsmash as the wind-up period of the attack is skipped.

1:53 – the “air run” tech with Shield is immensely useful for long jumping. This trick can in fact be done with any world weapon, but only the Shield gives Kratos a significant speed and height boost (again, because of the unusual aerial properties of Shield air attack). Regardless, here’s a compilation of air run with all other world weapons in the game.

Also, as seen briefly in the Javelin air run clip, you can overlap sprint and air run, but the effect seems to be mostly cosmetic.

2:27 – if you break out of Javelin or Club roll attacks with upgrading, their point of impact will be Kratos’ former location instead of current location. Quite curious…

2:46 – it probably wasn’t shown on video before, so here is a consistent way of going out of bounds right before the Chapter 20 boss fight. Just do an angled Shield Jump over the background wall. If your angle is too straight, you’ll probably hit death collision.

There isn’t much you can do in this out of bounds-zone, though, besides begin the boss fight or cause a few minor glitchy shenanigans.

3:08 – I tried out the “boss QTE zip” glitch in Chapter 20. It does have an effect, but nowhere as huge as it had in the early chapters. I believe the reason for this glitch is that a moment after the QTE ends, Kratos’ location is tied to the bosses origin. In Hecatonchire’s case, the moving level and large boss size caused the origin to be far away, thus causing a larger zip. But against human-sized bosses it just causes a tiny zip.

4:04 – I re-visited the Tisiphone QTE bug and got this strange result where Megaera did an out-of-phase attack, grabbing Kratos all of a sudden. (I believe she should only be able to do this while fighting against her solo?) After the grab ended, a glitched cutscene signalling the start of the Tisiphone phase 2 began. Why did this random grab move restart phase 2? This game is full of mysteries… I think the fight worked normally after this point.

4:27 – after messing around too much with Tisiphone QTE bug, both bosses were stuck in an endless loop and the fight was softlocked.

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