If you’ve played through the entirety of 2018’s God of War, you certainly know the importance of the role of Atreus in both the story and the gameplay.
In an interview with VentureBeat, creative director Cory Barlog revealed a piece of information he had never shared before about him.
Basically, Atreus wasn’t supposed to be Kratos’ son at the beginning of the work on the project, Barlog revealed.
He was just a kid who was there for a reason you’d find out more about at a later stage of the story, more like Ellie in The Last of Us.
Having played the game, I can clearly say I’m happy about how the team at Santa Monica Studio decided to go through the idea of Atreus as Kratos’ son.
“The father-son came first and then the Norse myths came second. When I first started talking to Shannon, I think in maybe February 2013, the idea was germinating. I didn’t verbalize it very eloquently,” Barlog recalled.
“But when I got to the studio in June, I started talking to everybody about, all right—the first idea wasn’t that he was his biological son. We were going to have this kid there and you were never going to understand why he was even there.”
Their relationship would’ve been different and we might’ve lost some of the best moments in the story of God of War if they weren’t father and son.
On top of that, their relationship would’ve been too similar to Ellie and Joel’s from the Last of Us, too, a game that’s already inspired GoW enough.
So, kudos to the studio – they took the best choice possible for the title, in my opinion.
Source: VentureBeat
