Note: Story spoilers for God of War Ragnarok can be found in this article.
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God of War Ragnarok developer Santa Monica Studio almost went in a completely different direction with the storyline for the latest entry in the long-running PlayStation series. At the conclusion of 2018’s God of War, Santa Monica Studio teased that it was potentially planning to kill off Kratos in a future installment. This story thread ended up being a huge part of Ragnarok’s narrative, although Kratos himself never ended up dying. Despite this, Santa Monica Studio did at one point have a different plan for Kratos and his fate that would have drastically changed the events of Ragnarok.
In a conversation with MinnMax, God of War Ragnarok’s narrative director Matt Sophos revealed that it was initially planned for Kratos to die in the opening hours of the game. In short, Sophos said that Kratos would have died in his battle with Thor which would then lead to players taking over as Atreus. Eventually, Atreus would rescue Kratos from the depths of Hel, but this would happen roughly 20 years into the future when Atreus would’ve been much older.
“There was the earliest, earliest draft of an outline that we had come up with, that we took to [director Eric Williams]. Kratos died in the Thor fight at the very beginning of the game,” Sophos explained. “And so, he was gonna die, and then it wasn’t a permanent death. What was going to happen – and I don’t care, we can tell this, because it doesn’t happen anymore so this is all fan fiction at this point – he would get pulled out of Hel, essentially, by Atreus. […] But it’s now been, like, 20 years have passed – it was going to be a big time jump-type thing. So that was a version of it.”
At the end of the day, the reason that God of War Ragnarok didn’t go down this route is because director Eric Williams thought it was too similar to previous God of War titles. For those that haven’t played the entire God of War saga, Kratos has actually “died” in the past only to then come back in different ways later on. Sophos said that Williams ultimately made the right call, which is why this potential story outline for Ragnarok didn’t last very long.
What do you think about this proposed story for God of War Ragnarok? Would you have liked to see Kratos die, or are you happy with the version of the game that we got? Let me know either down in the comments or hit me up on Twitter at @MooreMan12.
[H/T VGC]
