God of War Ragnarok continues the tale of the 2018 original to a great deal of excitement and favorable reviews.
Without giving anything away, Ragnarok presents a powerful, uplifting tale of forgiveness and redemption, but it seems that this was not always the game’s intended course.
The narrative director of God of War Ragnarok, Matt Sophos, stated in a recent interview that the Kratos tale was initially intended to be significantly darker.
In an early version of the game, Kratos was supposed to die in the first Thor combat and be resurrected two decades later by Atreus who would pluck him from Helheim.
Sophos revealed that “There was the earliest draft of an outline we came up with, that we took to Eric. We had Kratos die in the Thor confrontation at the beginning of the game. It was not a permanent death: what was going to happen was, he would get pulled out of Hel, essentially, by Atreus, but 20 years have passed. It didn’t ultimately feel right. Eric was like, ‘I don’t want to do that. Kratos dies and comes back too many times […] The hook, the emotion is not really there.’ And he was right; that is why [that concept] did not last very long.”
He went on to reveal the reason why Kratos got a happy ending after all and it turns out that it’s quite heartwarming.
“As we were developing the story, we just knew we wanted it to be about letting go and changing. Norse mythology is usually about fate and prophecy, and we wanted to say that that is bulls***t. Nothing is written that cannot be unwritten. As long as you are willing to change, make changes in your life, you are not bound to fate. When we landed on that, we knew that Kratos could not die. Because then it’d be like, ‘Woah, are we going to just say that Kratos could not change?’ And then that would suck. It became clear to us early on that [Kratos] cannot die if we want to tell the story that we want to tell.”
Thus, in God of War Ragnarok, the adored father-son team of Kratos and Atreus set off on a challenging but ultimately fruitful adventure.
Would you have preferred the other version of the story or is the game’s positive ending perfect as it is?