A truly epic multiplayer game is in the works at the Sony Santa Monica studio.

With God of War: Ascension, no release date yet for the PlayStation 3, the third-person action franchise is expanding into multiplayer gaming. Game director Todd Papy unveiled the new mode last week in Hollywood.

Playable by up to eight players, the game's multiplayer version lets two teams compete, domination style, against each other, but then must ultimately defeat a large God of War-worthy boss for victory.

In the level shown, a gigantic one-cyclops Polythemus pounded and railed over the multileveled map. The camera zoomed in on individual visceral battles. In one, two warriors who look like cousins of Kratos disembowel an enemy and his innards flow out. Later, one combatant cleaves an opponent in half from head to thorax.

Eventually, the dominating team turns their attention to the Cyclops, attach some chains to restrain it and one leaps to put out its eye. "The whole idea behind it is that we want to bring the big moments to multiplayer," Papy said after the demonstration.

Throughout the maps, "there's traps, chests and all sorts of different things you can do if you are not extremely good at melee combat," Papy says. "We wanted to make sure that people had other things to do to help out the team."

During the fighting, you can team up on enemies 2-on-1 or 3-on-1, "it depends on how your teamwork is," he said. "We are trying to make sure if it is 2-on-1, if you are that person you still have outs. That is one of the things we are working on. If you are talented and you know how to use basically your magics or other specials that you can get out of those situations and basically turn the tide."

Papys, who has been with the God of War development team for all three previous console releases, talked with Game Hunters at the event.

When did the idea for God of War multiplayer arise?

In God of War III, there's actually a challenge area where you can actually fight Kratos. One of our guys got it running so you can fight against each other and it worked very well. That sparked the idea of this. And it is also something that we haven't seen done before. To me, there hasn't been a great melee combat game except for maybe something like Super Smash Bros. So, for us, we wanted to put our spin on it or our stamp on it.

What are the biggest challenges in doing this?

I think the main challenge is we are cutting our teeth we've never done a multiplayer game before. Especially to make it feel like God of War. We can't really look at any other game out there. If I was a first-person shooter we'd be able to look at Call of Duty or Uncharted and say, yeah, we can do something like that. But here isn't anything like us. It's basically just trial and error and we go through that every single day. We play it ever day and go, 'Did that work?' No. Let's try something new and take it in a new direction. And we've been doing that for a very long time.

More than a year?

Yes. We've been trying to build all the systems. It's taken a long time to take our code from a single-player game into a multiplayer space. We've had to rewrite a whole bunch of stuff and create a lot of new stuff so that when I attack you and I see it hit on my screen that it doesn't feel cheap on your screen. That is the biggest issue we have run into and right now I think we've conquered it.

So will this be playable on split screen?

No. It just doesn't look as good. What we are doing is we have got smaller arenas that we can still do from our fixed cameras and then it can be a 2-to-4 player match and you can play it online or at home with your buddy.

How do players choose their character?

Just like Kratos did in God of War I, you saw him sell his soul. That is the same exact idea behind this that in the beginning you will be forced to sell your soul and, from there, you choose which god. He chose Ares. (You can choose from Ares, Zeus, Hades and Poseidon.) We have different allegiance trees and you can choose which path you want to take.

Is there a chance there will be a co-op mode?

If we do a Horde mode or something like that, it is something we are exploring. It really comes down to time. For us, we don't want to create a whole bunch of game modes and really splinter our audience.