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The upcoming God of War will not be sold with a season pass, according to Cory Barlog, creative director Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Santa Monica studio. The creative lead on the project made this clear via Twitter late last week.
That means the game will likely follow in the footsteps of Horizon Zero Dawn when it comes to the retail and post-release strategy. Namely that additional content will be released as significant add-ons, as with Horizon Dawn’s Frozen Wilds and subsequent Complete Edition launches. It looks to be the standard strategy now for narrative-driven, single-player titles from the platfom holder.
The apparent success of that strategy comes off the back of Uncharted: Lost Legacy – where the expanded content grew to such a size that Sony decided it was essentially its own game – one that sold well at £30 RRP but was also given away to season pass holders who largely paid just £20 for that and other multiplayer-related content.
Whether an expansion for God of War would require the original game, as with Frozen Wilds, or be an expandalone, as with Lost Legacy, is harder to predict – it may well depend on the success of the original game. But either way we’d expect to see a single large additional content pack, which will only be announced at a later date, and will then be rolled into a Complete Edition later.
Speaking of dates, no release has been announced for God of War, despite significant marketing appearing around the title since before Christmas. And that means it hasn’t yet appeared in any form on the PlayStation Store.
It continues to confuse us why Sony allows partners such as Amazon the ability to price and take pre-orders on ‘undated’ titles such as this, but doesn’t offer the same capability on its own digital sales platform.
When the date rolls out, which should be very soon. we’ll likely see various Deluxe editions and of course one with a character figure or just a bloody great axe – literally bloody that is.
The title is currently delayed to ‘Early 2018’ which should mean it comes before Red Dead Redemption 2, which is currently using an equally vague pencil to write ‘Spring 2018’. The market will certainly be a lot happier when these two goliaths pin down their dates, ipartly because neither definitely sits in any particular reporting quarter, while other releases will certainly want to avoid these dates.
