Sadly the lead-up to the launch of God Of War Ragnarok was plagued by a number of leaks, from within the game journalist and influencer crowd, as well as retail store street breaks that led to the game being available early and the proliferation of spoilers to be possible before the vast majority of players were able to get their hands on the game themselves. Australian publication Press-Start was able to talk to God Of War Ragnarok‘s Narrative Director, Matt Sophos about those leaks, and how they impacted both him and the team in the immediate lead-up to launch, as well as how they designed the game’s marketing to minimise the number of key details that were available for players.
When asked about the leaks and how Santa Monica Studio planned for an adjusted to the presence of the spoilers, Sophos said,
Thankfully when it comes to the marketing side of things, Sony has been really respectful of what the team wants and what we want to show. We had some things where we would look at like, meeting Tyr is a big reveal, you know? The fact that he’s alive is a big reveal. But it’s early in the game so we can say that’s a kind of moment that we can build a trailer around and it won’t really harm things for players to know that. They did respect our wishes for the most part, when we would say, “Hey, we’re not going to show this, we’re not going to talk about this. We don’t even want people to see what Odin looks like so we’ll bring him into the trailer, but we’re going to render the scene where it’s dark in the front, as opposed to what you end up seeing in the game.” And so that didn’t get much pushback.
When it comes to the leaks, that’s just a bummer in general, because we want to make sure that reviewers and journalists have the time because we know it’s a big game to really sink in and be able to really fully experience it before everybody writes reviews. So leaks that came from that is a real bummer. The leaks that come from stores breaking street date, that one really sucks because this person has spent their money, they bought the game, they can kind of do with it what they want at that point. So that’s a bummer. But you know, for us we’ve spent a lot of time making it and we want people to be surprised, but we know what the story is. That part doesn’t hurt us it just bums us out. And we see people who are just really excited about the game have it turned against them in a combative way where people jump into their texts and tweets and things and start spoiling things just to be jerks.
While the leaks, as was indicated by Sophos, were certainly disappointing, it must be a luxury to feel so confident in your work that when the game actually leaks, players will still be surprised.
God Of War Ragnarok is available now on PS4 and PS5
