Caution: The below article contains major story spoilers for God of War Ragnarök. If you’re yet to play the game and don’t want it spoiled, stop reading.
God of War Ragnarök’s first fight between Kratos and Thor is one of the more memorable encounters in the game for a number of reasons. It’s big, brutal and does a great job at setting up Thor’s character and motivations early on. It also nearly went very differently for Kratos, if developer comments in a recent interview are to be believed.
Speaking to MinnMax, Santa Monica Studio’s Narrative Director Matt Sophos was asked by host Ben Hanson about the allusions to Kratos’ death in both God of War and Ragnarök and how the team ultimately landed on not killing the character off at all. The Narrative Director reveals that, in the earliest draft of the sequel’s script, Kratos nearly perished in that initial battle with Thor:
“There was, the earliest, earliest draft of an outline that we had come up with that we took to Eric (Director, Eric Williams),” Sophos explains.
“Kratos died in the Thor fight at the very beginning of the game. And so, you know, he was gonna die and then it wasn’t a permanent death. He would get pulled out of Hell, essentially, by Atreus, but it’s now been like, 20 years have passed, big time jump type thing. So that was a version of it.
“And it didn’t ultimately feel, right? Eric was like ‘I don’t want to do that. Kratos has died and come back from from it too many times and it’ll feel a little bit too – oh, you said he was gonna die and oh, you just killed him but he came right back. The hook, the emotion isn’t really there.’ And and he was absolutely right. And so that’s why it didn’t last very long.”
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“Other than that, as we were developing the story, you know, we knew that we wanted the story to be one about letting go and changing. Knowing that Norse mythology is all about fate and prophecy and everything. And we wanted to say that, you know, that’s bullshit. Nothing is written that can’t be unwritten as long as you’re willing to make changes in your life. Then you’re not bound to fate.
“And so when we landed on that, when we knew that was the story we wanted to tell, we knew that Kratos couldn’t die because then it would be like, well, are we going to just say that Kratos couldn’t change? That would suck, you know? It became pretty clear to us early that, now he can’t die, if we want to tell the story we want to tell.”
