In an interview given merely a week after the release of 2018’s highly successful reboot of the God of War franchise, the game’s creative director Cory Barlog revealed that many of the ideas for the game’s sequel had already been explored.
At the start of the game’s development process, the God of War team was still trying to zero in on which elements of the extensive Norse mythology to use and which to leave out. When beginning to brainstorm on a massive project like God of War, there is so much to explore that it’s hard to know where to begin and the instinct is to just include everything.
The creative director explained that the first draft of the game script delved so deeply into the mythology that it overshadowed the father and son tale that Barlog wanted to be the game’s focus. Realizing that the team was essentially writing the second God of War game, the original rough draft had to be discarded almost entirely. The creative director went on to clarify that a lot of very interesting ideas had been scrapped as a result, saying notably that they were “ideas that I hope to use in the future.”
Barlog then goes on to discuss the intricacies of Atreus discovering his true identity later in the game and how he must decide if that is truly who he is or if it’s merely a name. Of course the revelation at the end of the game about Atreus’ origins was for many players a major jaw-dropping moment and the God of War sequel is expected to explore this aspect of his story further.
This will likely mean diving deeper into the vast body of stories and folklore that is Norse mythology. Luckily, much of the research was already done in the early days of God of War’s development and hopefully that rough draft script was still lying around somewhere when the team began brainstorming for the sequel, which they are already hard at work on.
Later in the interview, Barlog also talks about how he originally considered a number of mythologies from around the world for the setting of God of War. What stands out is when Barlog says, “As I kept circling around to the different mythologies, I was like there is an order in which we’re probably going to go to each one of these…. And the first one out is Norse myth.” This statement confirms that the creative director is thinking not only about a God of War sequel but a series of future games.