Several gameplay and story details on God of War: Ragnarok have emerged in the days since Sony finally formally unveiled it, and one aspect of the game that we’ve learned plenty of interesting things about is the combat. Director Eric Williams has spoken plenty about how Ragnarok will put a much greater emphasis on player expressiveness and choice through more options in both combat and progression, and something else that that will trickle down into is specific kinds of gear.
Speaking in a recent interview with Jon Ford (which you can view below), when asked about the different kinds of shields we saw Kratos using in the trailer, Williams confirmed that there will indeed be various shields in God of War: Ragnarok, each with their own defensive attributes and properties, before adding that enemies and combat encounters will be designed in a way where players will be encouraged to experiment with different kinds of gear and abilities in certain situations.
“I don’t want to go too deep on it, but yes, there are different shields, and they have different defensive options and abilities,” Williams said. “The reason we’re doing this is we really want to open up expressive choice to the way that you build your Kratos, like the equipment and loadout and things like that. So all the way down to the defense, you can kind of play a little differently. And then the enemies know how to respond to that, or force you into these different situations where you need to use different things. So I think it will be fun for players to explore that. But also, we wanted it to be more expressive, where your choices matter when you set them up.”
In another recent interview, Williams also confirmed that the combat in God of War: Ragnarok will bring back several mechanics and combos from the series’ Greek era games that Santa Monica Studio wasn’t able to implement in the 2018 title. Read more on that through here.
God of War: Ragnarok is out in 2022 for PS5 and PS4.
