What's it like for the team to be led by someone with a math and engineering background, rather than a more creative background? The designers actually got it worse, probably, than anybody. Because I was like, I could call BS on anything. Whereas other ones I'm like, I don't know. I also had to learn how to back off, because you're not doing it every day.

Once the Angrboda sequence ends, the game's pacing ramps up considerably, all while opening up the playing fields across the nine realms. Side content starts to flood in, and the true epic scope of the game reveals itself. It's then that you realize the game's other great achievement: cultivating a sense of belonging across the nine realms. The game reuses areas and digital assets from the 2018 game, but much like Sega's Yakuza series' reuse of the same several city blocks throughout seven games, "Ragnarok" does this to establish a sense of familiarity. This extends to the postgame, where revisiting certain areas causes the characters to reflect on the journey and their history in these spaces.

Loading times are another story. On PlayStation 4, loading into a save took about 50 seconds, as opposed to the mere handful of seconds on PlayStation 5. Fortunately for PS4 users -- and unfortunately for people hoping to tap into the PS5′s full feature set -- "Ragnarok" is optimized for the PlayStation 4 first. This means the game barely has any visible loading screens once you boot up your save file, but it also means, as I mention in my first impressions on PS5, that "Ragnarok" is a game designed with several invisible loading screens. Within the first half-hour, players will encounter cracks in walls to slowly slide through, a common tactic developers have used to hide the loading of the next section of the game.

"God of War Ragnarok," the mythological mega-sequel to 2018′s soft series reboot "God of War," arrives Nov. 9, 2022, to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Sony announced in a blog published Wednesday. But the road to the long-awaited release date has been anything but straightforward. The month of June saw expectant fans rumormonger themselves into a frenzy, ultimately unleashing their pent-up fury on developers who have spent the past several years working tirelessly to create the game.