God of War: Ragnarok is delayed until 2022

Originally scheduled for release in 2021, God of War: Ragnarok, the ninth installment in the God of War series and the direct sequel to the 2018 reimagining of the franchise, God of War, has been delayed to 2022.

“Since the release of the next God of War teaser last year, we’ve been humbled by the amount of love our community has shown us,” developer Sony Santa Monica said in a statement on Wednesday morning.

“We’re incredibly grateful to see so many people excited to experience the next chapter of Kratos and Artreus’ journey.

“We remain focused on delivering a top-quality game while maintaining the safety and wellbeing of our team, creative partners and families. With this in mind, we’ve made the decision to shift our release window to 2022.

“Thank you all for your continued support, we’ve got some exciting things in the works that we can’t wait to show you!”

Sony also confirmed that God of War: Ragnarok would be available for both Playstation 5 and last-generation console Playstation 4. Head of Playstation Studios Hermen Hulst explained the rationale behind still releasing high-caliber games for last-generation consoles in an official Sony blog post.

“You can’t build a community of over 110 million PS4 owners and then just walk away from it, right? I think that’d be bad news for fans of PS4, and frankly not very good business,” Hermen explained in the Q&A blog post.

“Where it makes sense to develop a title for both PS4 and PS5 — for Horizon Forbidden West, the next God of War, GT7 — we’ll continue looking at that. And if PS4 owners want to play that game, then they can. If they want to go on and play the PS5 version, that game will be there for them.”

Hermen also alluded to the idea that another highly anticipated sequel, Horizon Forbidden West could be delayed to 2022 as well.

Santa Monica Studio

“So we have, currently, two very big, very narrative-driven games in development: Horizon Forbidden West and the next God of War,” Hermen said. “And for both of those, they’re frankly affected by access to performance capture and talent,” he said. “For Horizon, we think we are on track to release this holiday season. But that isn’t quite certain yet, and we’re working as hard as we can to confirm that to you as soon as we can. And for God of War, the project started a little later. So we’ve made the decision to push that game out to next year, to ensure that Santa Monica Studio can deliver the amazing God of War game that we all want to play.

What do you think of the fact that God of War: Ragnarok is delayed until 2022? Sound off in the comments.