The new God Of War duology has my favourite snow in gaming. I can take or leave about 60% of everything else in them, but lawdy, that snow! In God Of War Ragnarok, the action kicks off a during the apocalyptic fimbulwinter, which is probably bad for some characters I don’t care about, but it is good for me personally, because there’s a lot of snow to play with.
How much snow, you ask? 190 flippin’ gigs worth, apparently, according to Sony’s system requirements.
To be fair, this does include the roguelike Valhalla DLC, which comes as part of the package when Ragnarok releases on Steam and Epic on the 19th of September. Still, it’s a demanding beast. Happily, the rest of the requirements don’t look so taxing, at least not at the recommended level.
If you want a professional opinion, James’s take was as follows: “The CPU/GPU/RAM is all fairly typical of contemporary AAA stuff but holy shit that’s a lot of storage space.” I concur. That’s a good 50GB on Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, or 40GB more than Horizon Forbidden West with all the extras. If you’d care for more stupid maths, it’s also 13 copies of Sekiro, or 950 Mini Motorwayses.
I might try and wrangle a review of Ragnarok once it’s out, because I’ve got a lot to say about it. What I’ll say for now is that I fully support the trend of first party Sony games including some sort of additional challenge mode. The Last Of Us Part 2, Days Gone, and now Ragnarok all include an extra mode where you can play with the combat decoupled from lengthy story interludes.
This is great for a few reasons. Designers work very hard on these things, but the priorities and ambitions of cinematic games often dictate that the gameplay gets dolled in tailored chunks that are difficult to replay in isolation if, for example, you really enjoyed a specific sequence. Also, it reminds me of a time where these modes were much more common. My absolute favourite was in Shadow Of Rome – an ultra-gory Capcom gladiator game that actually led to the Dead Rising series. Anyway, it does mean Ragnarok ends up as a generous package overall, even if you will need a very generous chunk of SSD space to actually install it. Oh, and a PSN account too.
