God of War Ragnarök is finally available on PC today, and the developers at Santa Monica Studio and Jetpack Interactive have taken this chance to pack two new quality-of-life and accessibility features into the game.
The excitement around the release comes mixed in with disappointment about system and network requirements.
The PC port of the 2022 blockbuster comes out on Steam and the Epic Games Store today for $59.99. For another $10, the Digital Deluxe Edition throws in a set of Darkdale cosmetics, the Dark Horse digital art book, and the game’s soundtrack.
The standard and deluxe versions come with the Valhalla DLC, which turns God of War Ragnarök into a roguelike.
Gameplay options now let companions be less annoying during puzzle sequences thanks to an option to reduce hints. This will hopefully reduce the amount of airborne controllers after the tenth hint in two minutes.
The other major feature of the PC version is the Cinematic Audio Description option, tucked under the Audio Accessibility settings. This will add sound cues during cutscenes that help contextualise things for those with poor vision.
These features are currently only available on the PC port, but Santa Monica has plans to change that later.
Debuting in the PC version of the game and soon to be added to the console version are two new settings to help you customize the way you play.
As a ‘thank you’ to the God of War Ragnarök PC audience, Santa Monica has added a set of God of War-themed streamer alerts on its site. Players can also download a fan kit with social media banners and 16:9 wallpapers.
GoW’s PSN and Storage Woes
It appears not everyone at Sony has gotten the memo about the causes of the Helldivers 2 crisis, as the God of War Ragnarök PC version requires a PlayStation Network account.
Besides the annoyance of adding another login on top of your Steam, the PSN requirement locks out players from hundreds of countries, such as Armenia, Estonia, Morocco, and Pakistan.
Things are not always smooth, even if you live somewhere with PSN access. If Ghost of Tsushima is any indication, linking to a PlayStation Network account on launch day is a minor nightmare of connection issues.
The God of War Ragnarök Steam forum already has posts from a few hours ago complaining of connection issues as Sony’s servers crumble under the demand.
Another major gripe gamers have with this port is the storage requirement.God of War Ragnarök requires 175.72GB, which sounds insane, considering the PlayStation 5 version is only 84GB.
This is especially disappointing since Santa Monica optimized the game to look that beautiful and run at 60 FPS on relatively modest hardware (RTX 2060S GPU, Intel i5 8600 CPU, and 16GB of RAM).
Despite the annoyances, there is little indication that the God of War Ragnarök port will be anything other than another success in Sony’s recent PC drive.
