Over the last few years, Sony has been trying to get lift-off on its big live service plans, with ambitions to release 12 live service games by 2025. But after the twin bombs of Concord and Marathon (which,to be fair, is still in development) , it’s now been spending the last year or so going ‘crapcrapcrapcrap, pull up, pull up!’, admitting that the strategy wasn’t going “entirely smoothly” and quietly shuffling eight out of 12 said games into the bin.
We knew one of those was a God of War game, but now there are screenshots! So sayeth MP1st, who has shared a pantheon of images purportedly from the cancelled project. You can see the full gallery by clicking the link, but here are a couple for your perusal courtesy of the site:
Image 1 of 4
Now, obviously due skepticism is required here—but none of these appear AI-generated in any way (the geometry and patterning’s too consistent for that). And given there’s over 23 of the suckers, it’d be a lot of professional-grade effort just to hoodwink the public. Still, dash your pinches of salt where you will.
The main interest here is that these screenshots feature a lot of decidedly Greek architecture, meaning that whatever this game could’ve been, it would have sent Kratos, his boy, and probably a few other gods all the way back to Greece for a homecoming.
MP1st says it was told that some of these screenshots are showing off “the armoury of Hades”—which I suppose makes sense, given some of them are clearly underground, potentially in the underworld.
Which feels a little like ol’ Hades muscling in on Hephaestus’ territory, but also, Kratos did canonically impale the guy on a big spike. Maybe Hades (who is also supposed to be dead) has his ghost churning out armaments, somewhere.
As the site notes, there are also some alternate versions of said armoury with a red filter hucked over them—potentially some kind of corruption or storm mechanic, as has become common in battle royales (or even PvE co-op games, hello Nightreign).
All in all, though, I’m kinda glad this went the way of Icarus. Given the God of War’s modern reboot canon, going back to Greece is a huge deal for Kratos—and I’d rather that story play out in one of its single player games, instead of a live service grindfest.
The pathos of Kratos reliving his past probably ought to not be undercut by the desire to get five hundred Hermes Gems for a daily kill quest or whatever. I feel for the devs but, otherwise, we’re better off.
Read the full article here
