It’s wild to think that it’s already been almost two years since God of War Ragnarok first came out. This past year, Sony has found their biggest successes from games that break out of their traditional narrative third-person adventure format – titles like Helldivers 2 and Astro Bot, specifically. It’s not easy to forget the kind of Hollywood-level, big budget games that Sony has traditionally been focusing on for much of the past decade. This PC re-release of God of War Ragnarok is a great reminder of just how visually jaw-dropping Sony games can be, and that magic comes across on a new platform with hardly any issues.
On a PlayStation 5, the amount of accessibility and experience-customizing settings available in God of War Ragnarok are exhaustive and detailed. All of those settings carry over to this PC release, allowing you to fine-tune gameplay features, audio settings, camera controls, input options and so much more. For a lot of these options, they’re equally useful as either accessibility tools for gamers who need them or for simply making certain aspects of the game experience more convenient for you.
There’s even been a subtle tweak for the hints system, with a new setting for the PC version of the game letting you reduce the frequency of puzzle hints coming from your companions – this setting is also being rolled back to console with an update. Given that one of the main frustrations keen gamers had with Ragnarok was just how chatty and revealing these were, it’s good to have this option added.
Alongside all of that, though, is a massive amount of graphics settings tailored specifically to the PC – and Steam Deck – experience. Options for upscaling tech like DLSS and FSR and XeSS are available on day one, alongside an additional frame generation option. They’re the icing on the cake of all the specific granular graphics options you’d want to be able to tweak on PC, and with added support for ultra-wide screens. It’s shockingly easy to get God of War Ragnarok running on a variety of hardware at a solid frame rate and impressive visual quality – then again, it was designed with the base PS4 in mind.
The graphically rich, 4K world of God of War Ragnarok comes at the price of storage space, though. While the original PS5 release of the game took around 85GB up on your console, this PC release requires a staggering 176GB to be installed, and on an SSD, no less. There’s a reason people make memes about western game devs and the astronomical sizes of their games, and this release isn’t doing anything to help beat those allegations. I’m someone who enjoys having a variety of games installed and sitting around, just in case I decide to get to playing one of them when I’m in a certain mood. With God of War Ragnarok, you and your PC’s SSD need to be prepared and locked in to play nothing but this game, and that’s especially true on Steam Deck.
You’ll also need your PSN account prepared, which has already been a massive mark of controversy for Sony this year. After announcing that Helldivers 2 would suddenly require PSN-account linking months after release, players boycotted the game in hordes and eventually forced Sony’s hand into reversing that decision. It has not been reversed for God of War Ragnarok though, and if you don’t have or sign up for a PSN account, you can’t play. If you live in one of the 100+ regions Sony has blocked from being able to purchase this game because PSN accounts aren’t available there, you also cannot play.
It’s a disappointing decision Sony has taken an incredibly firm stance on, and it’s a decision that seems so baffling in how little it benefits anyone involved – Sony included. There’s a certain justification for an online multiplayer game to require a PSN account to be connected, but it’s thinly-justified for a single-player story game to have that same requirement. Is it just stat padding for their next investor call?
For anyone comfortable with tackling the hurdles outlined above, God of War Ragnarok will be a flawless experience for you on PC. I was impressed by how gorgeous it looked and sounded on my desktop, and blown away by how similar the experience was when I brought it over to my Steam Deck. In many ways, the PC releases that Sony puts out of their games feel like the optimal way to experience them. God of War Ragnarok continues that trend.
