God of War Ragnarok delayed until 2022

God of War Ragnarok is the highly anticipated sequel to the critically acclaimed God of War (2018), a franchise reboot developed by a Sony Santa Monica team led by Cory Barlog. The story of the game recast series main character Kratos into the role of a struggling single father that regretted the brutal violence of his own past. Gameplay wise it borrowed several core gameplay concepts from both Dark Souls and The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, which paid off nicely in a game with satisfying combat, interesting world traversal and simple but entertaining puzzles.

God of War Ragnarok was teased with no gameplay footage, and was basically just a logo shown alongside the announcements of the first wave of software for the then upcoming PlayStation 5 console.

In June 2021 PlayStation Studios head Hermen Hulst finally gave fans a status update on the project, revealing that the game had been delayed, by stating that “…we have, currently, two very big, very narrative-driven games in development: Horizon Forbidden West and the next God of War —and for both of those, they’re frankly affected by access to performance capture and talent. For Horizon, we think we are on track to release this holiday season. But that isn’t quite certain yet, and we’re working as hard as we can to confirm that to you as soon as we can —and for God of War, the project started a little later. So we’ve made the decision to push that game out to next year, to ensure that Santa Monica Studio can deliver the amazing God of War game that we all want to play.”

With the word from Gamescom 2021 that Horizon Forbidden West has also been delayed, that leaves a massive gap between the most recent Sony release Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart —which came out on June 11, 2021— and whichever first party game comes out next. It’s now likely that a lot of pressure will be put on Microsoft-owned studio Arkane’s Deathloop to carry the last quarter of the year for the console. Deathloop is a PlayStation exclusive and will not release on Xbox for at least 6-12 months due to a holdover contract from before Microsoft purchased Bethesda Softworks and it’s subsidiary studios.

With how little gameplay we’ve seen from God of War Ragnarok, we can only assume that we won’t be playing it any time soon. When it does come out, it’s a piece of PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 exclusive software, so you’ll make sure you already own one of those, the latter of which can still be really hard to get.

While you wait for the Norse mythological adventure God of War Ragnarok, why not check out Chinese mythological adventure Black Myth: Wukong? They recently showed off their first Unreal Engine 5 gameplay. Here’s a story on it on our sister site Gaming Verdict.