God of War director on the game's length and magnitude: "What have we done?"

How long does it take to play God of War? With how little of the game Sony has publicly demonstrated (we finally got an extended hands-on with it just a few weeks ago), it's a natural question to ask - even moreso because Kratos' original adventures in mythical Greece were more on the "short and sanguine" end of the spectrum. According to what game director Cory Barlog told  Kinda Funny Games, you'll likely spend a lot more time with this older, wiser god killer.

"One of the systems designers just did his full playthrough to get 100 percent. So that's literally doing every single thing in the entire game, and he played 43 hours. 43 hours and he knows what to do," Barlog said. "He [worked on] a lot of the exploration content and the engagement outside of the core story. So he had not seen a lot of the core story stuff, that part was new to him, so that took a little bit. But everything else, that's pretty impressive considering he knew what to do."

Back at PlayStation Experience in December, Barlog had teased that a typical God of War player could anticipate spending anywhere between 25 to 35 hours with the game. So you may want to revise that upward a bit? It's tough to say, since most players won't try to do every little thing in the game, but most of them won't have worked on the game and already know most of its secrets, either. Let's just agree that it ain't small - despite Barlog's early fears to the contrary.

"It's definitely larger than I intimated in the beginning of the game. I was like, 'Oh, it's not that big, don't worry about it.' We spent that entire time at the beginning, 'Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry!' [...] I think I just deflected for several years and just pretended. And then I would deflect it in the way of saying, 'I'm so worried, I don't think the game's gonna be that long.' And then we did our first sort of full gameplay test and it took five days, and we were like, 'Oh, man. Alright, what have we done?'"

Need more stuff to play while you're waiting for God of War to arrive? Take a look through our list of the best PS4 games and see which ones you haven't checked off yet.