Sony Santa Monica Studio’s Cory Barlog, who directed the 2018 God of War Reboot, stated earlier this week that God of War: Ragnarok will end the greek god’s stint in Norse Mythology. As the new director, Eric Williams pointed out at the time “You can’t call the game God of War: Ragnarok and not have Ragnarok happen in the game. We’re gonna cap off the Norse series with it.”
Cory Barlog recently sat down with Youtuber Captain Kuba for another interview where the topic of ending the Norse Saga here instead of doing a trilogy, such as with the greek set games. He stated the biggest reason for this decision was time:
I think one of the most important reasons is the first game took five years. The second game, I don’t know how long it’s going to take but I’m just going to throw out that it’s going to take a close to a similar time.
Then if you think a third one in that same [timeframe], we’re talking a span of close to fifteen years of a single story and I feel like that’s just too stretched out. I feel like we’re asking too much to say the actual completion of that story taking that long… it just feels too long. Given where the team was at and where Eric was at with what he wanted to do, I was like ‘Look I think we can actually do this in the second story because most of what we were trying to do from the beginning was to tell something about Kratos and Atreus that the core of the story’s engine is really the relationship between these two characters’.
He liked the experience of playing both games together as a complete story to himself purchasing the Lord of The Rings boxset:
I was able to say, ‘Wow, I can sit down and have 13 and a half hours of this experience, playing them one after another, back to back’ and I just thought that was fantastic and amazing. So to be able to say, ‘Hey man, you could probably start God of War 2018 and then play God of War: Ragnarok and feel like you’re getting the entirety of the story’. I kind of want that to happen before my kid is in college.
While this is a refreshing stance to see a studio take, allowing a story to not overstay its welcome, this does not necessarily mean the end for everybody’s favorite God of War. Obviously, since the character has jumped between mythos once that could always happen again.
Sony Santa Monica has spent a lot of years on the franchise so it could also be time to move on. While the future is unknown, what we do know is God of War: Ragnarok is slated to release at some point in 2022 for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
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