This is certainly different.

There’s an inherent challenge in any long-running series (21 years now since the first God of War) that has wholly been defined by a single character. A character that has been generally consistently portrayed too! Think about it – what other gaming series is so defined by one person? Halo maybe? None of the Nintendo games fit the bill, the characters have all gone through a ton of iterations.

I like the God of War series, but I also know what I’m getting. I am getting a fish our of water experience, with a brute as a protagonist, and some absolutely jaw dropping battles along the way. Kratos is God of War and God of War is Kratos.

That said, I am interested in Laufey as a character. Anyone who can ‘tame the beast’ and act as a peer is certainly full of mystery and potential. The question of how has some value here, but the real story question is why. The beauty of art is that the why is often the one question that isn’t fully answered, and requires the audience to fill in the blank. You embody the art and come up with your own reasons, making the experience unique to yourself as it would be to others.

Which makes the announcement of God of War Laufey all the more confusing. I like the mystery of Laufey. I think that character is best developed in drips rather than gulps, at least in the context of God of War. If this was an act within a larger storyline, like a flashback, then I can see how this would integrate well. Enough little additions to the context without fully pulling back the curtain.

This same argument applies to Atreus, Mimir, and Odin by the way. They are context to the larger storyline, they are not distinct storylines in and of themselves.

Counterpoint here is that the systems the Norse-series God of War have brought certainly have the flexibility to tell another storyline. The game engine and narrative structures can certainly be transposed to something else. That system is portable. The bridge to the next story has a generally logical one, and that is Laufey. In that I mean, if you were to pick any NPC, across the last 20 years, the one most worth exploring is her.

Sum, this is an odd gamble. The floor to entry is relatively low given the systems already exist. It also existed with Ragnarok, but that ended up costing twice as much as the first one. Not sure the market is going to give a return that justifies that type of investment. It’s an interesting pitch, and all interesting pitches come with a ton of attention and opinions. This certainly is one. The net effect is that people are talking about it though, which is generally a good thing.

The only true downside I see here, given current decisions, is that I’ll never have a chance to play it as I have no intention of buying a PlayStation console and Sony has stopped all efforts to port to PC. Likely won’t stop the dev and this will likely still sell like fire. I sure hope so, first-party games here have generally been amazing.