Santa Monica and Sony almost did not include both two main characters of God of War 2018 - Kratos and Atreus – in this game before it was released in 2018. Sounds pretty impossible right? How can a game be released without both two main characters?
Yet, director of this game Cory Barlog has just revealed some hilarious experience while creating God Of War in a public interview at Gamelab in Barcelona. There was some skepticism whether the fans would still love Kratos after all those years. At that moment, there were some developers who wanted the game to be more focusing on Greek mythology, so they wanted to remove Kratos and have a totally new main character for the game.
Cory Barlog insisted on keeping Kratos because he believed that a Kratos on the road to redemption would attract the fans. This new Kratos would leave behind the old him, and adopt a totally new version of himself. That was why we have Atreus in the game, as this character represents the conscience of Kratos.
But senior directors at Santa Monica wanted more from the son of Kratos. They did not want a useless and helpless NPC following the player around the game. Investing more into this character was actually more costly than Santa Monica had imagined in the first place, thus resulting in some struggles in the process of bringing this character into the game.
Thankfully, both main characters stayed with God of War, and the game was a big success.