Kratos, the God of War, has defeated the Gods of Olympus and has started his life anew, in one of the Nine Realms of Norse Mythology: Midgard; he now has a son named Atreus, whom he had with his late wife Faye. Together, Kratos and Atreus travel across The Realms to scatter Faye's ashes from the highest peak in all the land
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Let the credits roll, go back home, and choose to sleep, and you'll get one extra scene: Thor shows up on the doorstep in the middle of a violent thunderstorm. It's a quiet little tease for the sequel that plenty of players never bother sticking around to see.
Inside Odin's Hidden Chamber, Mimir points out symbols that don't belong to Norse tradition at all, he specifically flags ones linked to Egyptian, Celtic, and Japanese culture. It's a small line, but it quietly suggests this universe has a lot more pantheons than just Greek and Norse.
The physical world map that shipped with the Collector's Edition wasn't just a nice extra. Follow the instructions printed on it while standing at the Muspelheim tower and you unlock the Grip of the Ages, an axe pommel that Brok and Sindri apparently tossed into the void before Kratos went looking for it.
When you first meet Jörmungandr, he speaks, but not in any language players could actually make out. It took a leaked copy of the game's WGA Awards script for fans to finally learn what he was saying, which turns out to be him walking Kratos through what's needed to properly honour Faye's death.
Terrence 'T.C.' Carson had voiced Kratos since 2005, but he wasn't tall enough for the full-body motion capture this game needed. That's the reason Christopher Judge, best known as Teal'c from Stargate SG-1, ended up taking over the role.
Christopher Judge had the build the role needed, but that's not what actually got him the part. The deciding factor was how well he clicked with young actor Sunny Suljic during a chemistry test, since the whole game hinges on the father-son dynamic between Kratos and Atreus.
Sunny Suljic wasn't just lending his voice to Atreus, he performed full motion capture for the character as well, working directly opposite Christopher Judge on set rather than recording his lines separately.
God of War gets a lot of credit as the game that popularised the single-shot camera, but it wasn't technically first. That honour reportedly goes to Splinter Cell: Conviction back in 2010, God of War is just the one that made the technique famous at a massive scale.
At The Game Awards 2018, God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2 walked in tied with eight nominations each, the most anyone had ever had at the show up to that point. Red Dead ended up winning more individual trophies overall, but it was God of War that took home the night's biggest prize, Game of the Year.
God of War shifted 3.1 million copies in its first three days on sale, which stood as the biggest opening in the franchise's history for years. It only got beaten when God of War Ragnarök came along and blew past 5 million copies in its opening week.
