God of War's Norse Story Won't Be a Trilogy Because the Games Take Too Long to Make

I don't think it really matters since God Of War IV on it's own was longer than 1,2 and 3 combined so it's not like Ragnarok will be short and half baked

Good for them. Dont draw it out if they want to go in a different direction creatively. Will be interesting to see how they evolve the franchise going forward

I think it really depends on how they do it. As long as it doesn’t feel rushed, then I don’t mind at all. It just feels like an AWFUL lot to get through in one game.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of GOW 18, and I think the Norse mythology was my main issue with it. The gameplay was fun and I loved the father-son aspects with Kratos and Atreus. But I never got invested in the world they were in. I’ve never cared for Norse mythology; I find Greek and Roman to be far more appealing.

Great interview. I was waiting on Push Square to cover this - I'd recommend any God of War fan to watch the whole thing!
Kaptain Kuba has some amazing GoW content, it's so cool that these two blokes came and had a chat.

I feel like the first game teases and sets up so many incredible stories that it's almost impossible to wrap them up satisfactorily in just one more game... But they've earned my trust. And I'm not a writer.

On the other hand the Final Fantasy 7 remake series will end after I retire...

Agree with this. Don't like waiting say 12-15 years to get to the end lol.

If they can tell the story in 2 parts then I'm good with that. Wouldn't want to see the same thing happening with GoW as happened with The Hobbit. Man that was hard work.

I honestly respect the move. So many companies are chasing franchises that at the end of it feels drawn out. So I salute Barlog and the writing team for making this decision

As long as all the plot points are all tied up in a satisfactory manner then i don't care how many games it takes them.

I don't think a trilogy makes sense now for most games. Tbh, I've always felt franchises like Final Fantasy do sequels best. New story, new characters but the DNA of the series remains and now that action games are getting as long as some rpgs, it's just hard to keep up with that much story across several games.

As much as I love God of war I just want the series to end, I am really looking forward to see what this studio creates after God of war is fully done with

Cool i can respect that.god of war 2018 is the best games ever 👑 g.o.a.t.so its all good.word up son

If it’s good, I don’t care how many entries there are honestly.

But let’s be honest... if the next one sells bucket loads, they’ll suddenly (as if by magic) find a way to make it into a trilogy 😏

I don’t get his ‘five years to make’ comment for the sequel either. The first game, sure - they have to start from the ground up. But a sequel? When they have all the assets ready to go? It doesn’t have to take five years.

Is it just me or do a lot of people in the gaming industry like to complain about stuff? 😆 How long it takes to make games... How much more it costs to make games...

I feel like they want us all to believe that making games is some huge hardship or something. As opposed to something awesome that they’re lucky to be able to do. Like they’ve been tasked with rebuilding the great pyramid in Egypt, in a week, in the baking sun, without being paid and living on rations.

Come on now lol.

You don’t hear James Cameron moaning that it’s taken him 105 years to make the Avatar sequels 🤣

@fR_eeBritney They don't need to do that to make more God Of War they've already set up Egypt and Japan so the don't need to drag out the Norse story. I think Kratos in Egypt or Japan will get people mega excited

No problem with just two games. If that's as far as you want take it then that's that. I imagine they also didn't want to fall into the same situation they did with the Greek games. They were definitely scrapping the bottom of the barrel in terms of places to go by the time Ascension came around.

@fR_eeBritney Treating devs like they’re lucky to even be in the games industry is literally how things like the ActiBlizz abuse and crunch culture happen. They take advantage of workers’ passion and use it against them. There are so many different roles in the industry that lumping them together is just plain silly and many of those roles are incredibly gruelling and have terrible work life balance. I just don’t get what you have to gain from demeaning hard-working devs.

I'd definitely rather this than they spend 10 years making a game and chop the story into smaller sessions to sell more games. This approach shows integrity and that they're in it to make great games rather than just to satisfy the investors.

Seems fair enough. Don’t like trilogies generally anyway as the middle one is often poor. Not that I liked the original GoW reboot anyway, so I guess that may have something to do with my ambivalence.

The real question is what to do with the story after all the Greek and Norse gods are gone. They could ressurrect the Greek gods, I suppose. Have Atreus as the main character, maybe?

I like the logic, but it makes me all the sadder that this is a held-back PS4 game. It really has no business being on the PS4 over a year after the PS5 came out. It's sad to see so much work be forced to not have the proper ambition, because GoW was a huge offender for glaringly showing the PS4's limitations. It was written over the games entire design, and to keep those design restrictions in to attempt to sell a couple more copies at the risk of not supporting the PS5 enough, is just a tragedy.

I hope they will also get back to more cinematic cams in gameplay like the previous old games.

Seeing the environment and all enemies etc.
Feels like a lotr movie, and nicer for fun platforming , puzzles and multi enemies encounters.

I only wish they had told us it would be in 2 parts when the first 1 released, I was expecting it to end with the first one. 😝 Sure, I'm glad I played it, it was great, but the ending left a lot to be desired, like this game in fact.

Really looking forward to this one now. And if it takes another year to come out, who knows, may even be able to get a PS5 by then. 😂

That sounds good to me. After the Iki expansion, I'm hoping sucker punch goes onto something else aswell.

@nessisonett Oh I know, you’re so right. Serious issues like this should not be made light of. I realise that now and I repent my evil ways.

But I assure you, it was very much a light-hearted dig, not a serious attack/condemnation of the hardworking devs or the gaming industry as a whole.

I hope you’ll all join me in a prayer as I reflect on my behaviour.

Our developer,
who art in crunch.
Hallowed be thy game.
Thy release date come,
thy game be done.
In stores as it is on psn.
Give us this day,
without delay.
And forgive us our impatience,
as we forgive those who miss their deadlines.
And lead us not into heated debates online,
but deliver us from ‘haters’.
Amen

Hallelujah!

🥳

The previous game was around 25 hours and it felt super repetitive after 15 hours. This game is going to be 40 hours which kinda scares me because if they repeat the previous mistakes, the game will be boring as hell. We need at least 4 weapons, many different enemies and boss battles, harder and better puzzles, better customizations of armor and weapons, the ability to jump, a level design without fake doors or fake paths, and more meaningful side quests. I don't care if they don't make a trilogy, but if they want to make a long game, they need to improve and fix many things .

That's a good point, I have no problem if next god of war is duology too. I hope it's in egypt since egypt gods are cool

@fR_eeBritney Are you a game Dev and do you work AAA games? No? Well maybe do you're research and stop acting like you think you know more then the guy what helped make one of the biggest games of 2018 and on PS4 what won a ton of awards. Its like some internet dweller trying to tell Christopher Nolan or David Fincher or your case James Cameron how to make films. If you know better then do better.

I figured this was the reasoning and I agree with his sentiment. I trust these guys implicitly after all they’ve done 👍

@WallyWest Well if you must know, I am the publisher of several highly polished and well-received games*. One of which had over 200 plays and 86 hearts, thank you very much.

*in LBP2 create mode 🤪

Uhm So...

Sony: Ragnarok: 2022.

Barlog: " first game took five years," Barlog says. "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. "

"I don't know how many years it's going to take" to make the game doesn't sound a whole lot like "2022!" to me....

That aside, that's good to hear. The Norse thing gets old kind of fast. It's not the most engaging of mythologies, and after 2 games of staring at gray-everything, I doubt I'll ever want to see anything Norse again. Add in AC Valhalla, and there we go.

I do wonder if they're just moving on from GoW and into new IPs for good, or if they just mean they're bringing GoW to a new land. I can't really imagine them abandoning a cash cow IP that Santa Monica has never worked on anything else with, but....

I wonder if the studio will continue with god of war after the norse saga or do something entirely different. I'm not sure what other mythology Kratos would fit in organically without coming off as Assasin's Creed-ish. If Kratos returned to greek/roman mythology with the new style of gameplay that would be AWESOME.

@RenanKJ I would love it if they figured out a way to go back to greek mythology

@TheRedComet Yeah Norse is rough. Romans and Greeks made exciting heroes and stories for them all. Norse mythology is like the Ikea manual of mythologies.... And it doesn't help the whole series is put through a desaturation filter to make it as flat as possible. TLOU is all brown, GoW is all gray. Did we ever leave the 7th generation?

Maybe they could just do a reboot of the greek mythology ark.

Hot take: Every game should be a complete product. Both in terms of story and content.

The idea of a planned trilogy is great, especially when they promise to carry over character progression, like in Mass Effect and Too Human, but this can easily backfire, like in Mass Effect and Too Human.

Normally a trilogy has worn thin or gets ruined by the third entry anyway (Hello Dead Space), and the ones that are actually good usually aren't planned as trilogies and just end that way by chance (Hello Halo). Meanwhile, soft sequels/reboots allow far more freedom in both story telling and gameplay advancement anyway, or at least allow new players to dive in without feeling like they've missed some crucial set up to that experience.

@AdamNovice Every piece of rubble you crawled under and each elevator was to hide loading screens and the area were obviously designed with the PS4’s limits in mind. Mark Cenry’d tech presentation screams GoW when he talked how the PS4’s limits work.
And why on earth were they designing it for the PS4? They knew well enough in advance when the PS5 was coming out. It makes no sense that they started making it for the PS4 from the start. “We believe in generations” and withholding that it was on PS4 for so long. They lead us on to believe they made the decision early on that it should be a PS5 exclusive. GoW came out two years before the PS5. The idea that the sequel could be designed for the PS5 was obvious to everyone there.

Honestly it would be nicer to have stories begin and end in the same game. Like he pointed out it just takes too long otherwise to finish the story. It seems we all want our favorite things to drag on till we no longer like them.

@Jaz007 remember E3 2018 when they didn't have much and said it was a transition time while they shifted internally to put all their focus on PS5? Yeah...

@Jaz007 Saddest thing is we won't see an actual next gen GOW game, just a big ass expansion. Exactly what they did with God of war 2 back in 2007, except there's no 3rd part which wouldn't be a tragedy if it was a next gen game.

Much better than what SquareEnix tried to do with FFXV. Play the game, watch the anime series, go to the cinema and watch the movie and the story MIGHT make sense.

@talocaca That's hyperbole there. The story could never make sense.

Will we see kratos continue to kill "gods"? Will his next stop be egypt or china? Maybe face the old gods, cthulu. Will atreus take over as a more nimble GoW?

thats hilarious

@WallyWest... Movie making is as complex as a Michael Bay film or a Quinton Tarantino film........ So nothing James Cameron has ever done is even remotely complex.......... So make it seem complex so they can gate keep the industry...........................

Same with gaming, we have way too many overpriced developers, hence making development cost rise up, yet the games output is not even half of the ps1 games output.

The problem with the industry is way too many expensive tools (e..g your speed trees and all such tools).

For example God 2018 is filled with stupid and useless puzzles that SSM spent a lot of time on but are completely not necessary to the game to the point that u can skip and not miss anything, which part of the 5 years was wasted on useless puzzle parts of the games. If they cut that probably the game would have taken at least 3years to make. It's the paddling parts of most games that waste development time.

So looking at the new game trailer it actually looks more like dlc or expansion than a sequel, which means they could have easily told the entire story in the first game but chose to break up the story into a duology and making it seem that they don't want to stretch out the story over 3 games when in truth it was supposed to be only 1 game.........

15 years for the devs, but for users the clock starts ticking at the fist game release. 10 years is not that crazy of a number, IMO, especially post MCU.

But I can understand the devs themselves not wanting to spend 15 years working on the same IP.

Edit to add:
I got to say I was very disappointed with the last GOW. The story was great, but the gameplay was way too repetitive. Previous game in the series had amazing, unique, boss battles left and right. The last GOW was full of samey looking enemies with minor mechanical differences. All I can remember is Baldur and what felt like tons of reskined big brute enemies.

@GREGORIAN Yeah you lost me with your first paragraph as it shows you clearly know nothing on these subjects

@WallyWest........ Let me put it in layman terms for your noob brain to understand

Movie making is about nothing more than shotting a lot of multiple angle shots or films or videos and then putting them all in sequence via editing and calling it a motion picture .........

Game making nowadays especially at AAA studio's is mostly about having the correct tools (i.e. game engines, graphics tools, texture tools, etc). This leads to the majority of time spent making a game being devoted to graphics alone with everything else coming after the graphics, a simple case of this example is CP2077. The team spent so much time try to get the graphics correct that the rest of the game got neglected hence the mess that was released.

In the case of GOW2018 your can see from the graphics, gameplay, level and mission design that SSM spent a majority of the 5 years they claim the game took on the graphics which results in the game being split into 2 parts and the SSM feeling burnt out when thinking of making a third game.

Which is also puzzling why the second game has to take another 5 years when the game assets have already been built.

For example it took Insomianic 2 years to make Miles Morales from the assets of Spiderman and in the 5 years period that SSM will take to make GOW Ragnarok, Insomniac would have made and released two games from the same assets and 1 game from scratch in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart.

@Tharsman...... Yep you are 100 correct...... The game play was crap from the samenes of small time enemies, to the not so well implemented Axe which was saved by the blades of chaos, to the corridors level design as it made the world bland. The detailed graphics and Atreus storyline are what saved the game

@GREGORIAN Again you lost me and you just wasted a bunch of time on writing something i'm never going to read. You clearly know nothing about any of this and are either a dumb troll or just plain dumb.

@WallyWest I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and say he's a troll. I know Dunning-Kruger is a thing, but this seems willful.

@WallyWest.... Well aren't you a sweet one......and a hypocrite claiming you didn't read it when you clearly read it.

Also how would you know if I don't know what I'm talking about if you didn't read it...... Are you a lovely hypocrite.

If you got lost it means you read and felt stupid that's why u didn't understand .......

@theheadofabroom..... It takes a troll to know a troll...

And trolls always move in packs to protect each exactly like you are doing attacking me when I have said nothing at all to you.........

Thank you @theheadofabroom for absolutely going at me for absolutely no reason at all and totally unprovoked by me......

@GREGORIAN I read part of your first paragraph to see if you humbled but when i see you don't i write a reply and then forget you exist until you reply again.

@GREGORIAN Sure mate, anyone who spots your trolling must be a troll /s

Having hung around on the internet for a few decades it's hard not to recognise what a troll looks like. You posted a load of uninformed drivel designed to get an emotional response, and then when confronted with your lack of knowledge upon which to base your suppositions, doubled down. On the other hand, I (checks notes) encouraged someone to stop wasting their time on you by agreeing that your behaviour lined up with that of a troll.

Don't worry, I won't be replying to any further bait you post on this article.