In an early version of the game, things turned out a little differently. <\/p>
It\u2019s always interesting to hear about an earlier version of a now-established story. Writers often kill off characters in early drafts, only to have a change of heart later on (or maybe the reverse if they\u2019re having a bad day). J R R Tolkien was going to kill off \u00c9owyn, for example, but thankfully let her live happily ever after.<\/p>\n
The same often happens in video games. Such information has been revealed in an interview with Matt Sophos and Richard Gaubert, narrative director and story lead respectively, for last year\u2019s God of War Ragnar\u00f6k. As well as a lot of things, the interview revealed that a certain fight in the game was<\/em> going to end very differently.<\/p>\n In an interview with MinnMax<\/a>, they discussed their involvement with the game, as well as offering a few details on how the plot and themes of the game changed over time. Their reasons for making such changes are pretty interesting, and give an insight into how such narrative jobs work.<\/p>\n Sophos said: \u201c[In] the earliest, earliest draft of an outline that we had come up with\u2026 Kratos died in the Thor fight at the very beginning of the game\u2026 he would get pulled out of Hel essentially, by Atreus, but now 20 years have passed. There was going to be a big time jump.\u201d<\/p> The idea of killing off your leading man is always a bold one, even though the rules of this universe stipulate that you could always bring him back. Just the suggestion of killing Kratos, at the start of this much-anticipated sequel, draws to mind a very\u00a0<\/em>controversial opening to another big PlayStation game, which we won\u2019t get into here, of course.<\/p>\n While this Kratos-killing could have been pretty cool, Sophos explained in the interview why that idea didn\u2019t stick. Not only had games already explored the idea of Kratos escaping from the underworld in previous titles (the Greek underworld), but they wanted our badass protagonist to escape his fate and beat the prophecy that says he would die<\/a>.<\/p>\n We think that the end result was a better idea, and we\u2019re glad that\u2019s what they went with. Still, it\u2019s always cool to hear about the writing process, and how discussions and edits lead to the final product. You can check out the whole interview in the video below:<\/p>\n