Kratos is a changed man in the upcoming God of War. Not only does the newest game in the action-adventure series promise to reinvigorate and reinvent the franchise as a whole, it also promises to reinvent the character of Kratos as well. We remember him as an angry, murderous freak, but Kratos is going to be a father now, and it looks like he’s trying to put his rage-fuelled days behind us (though not entirely, we hope).
In an interview, the game’s director Cory Barlog spoke about the character and how the team at Sony Santa Monica dealt with making sure that the character’s changes make sense. “There is so much history, so much life with this character,” Barlog said. “This is a character at a different time in his life. A character that has changed so dramatically. So when trying to stay true to who he his, but also give him give the breathing room to change… in the early portions of the game, we were trying to find what he sounds like. ‘What does Kratos sound like as a dad?’ And we failed so much, man.”
“Talk about the team being a harsh critic,” Barlog said. “People were giving notes like, ‘this game is so hard to play, it’s like playing a child abuse simulator. I hate Kratos, he’s terrible’. And we were like, ‘alright, cool, that was too far this way’. And then we do another round, and they’d be like, ‘oh man, he sounds like Ben Kenobi now, it’s ridiculous, this is not Kratos’. And we were like, ‘cool, now we go this [other] way’. So [it was about] finding that middle road, that keeps him in sort of the pocket of what we want to do but stays true to who he is.”
God of War launches next year for the PS4. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more updates on the game.