God Of War Ragnarök – it wouldn’t make sense to region lock a demo for one of Sony’s biggest exclusives (pic: Sony)

As Santa Monica shares some behind the scenes stories for God Of War Ragnarök, Sony has quietly released a free trial for PS Plus users.

Unlike Microsoft, Sony isn’t fond of the idea of adding its first party titles to the PlayStation Plus service the same day they launch. An approach that’s since been justified, since Microsoft admits that having games one Xbox Game Pass cannibalises their sales.

However, Sony isn’t against the idea of offering demos for its bigger titles, and a three hour trial for God Of War Ragnarök has been discovered on the PlayStation Store.

Aside from the obvious caveat that you need to be subscribed to PS Plus Premium (the most expensive tier), it’s currently only available on the US PlayStation Store, for some reason.

It’s very unlikely that Sony will keep it region locked and we fully expect it to be made available in the UK sooner or later.

Some transparency from the company would be greatly appreciated, though, since Sony hasn’t mentioned the trial’s addition on its social media or the PlayStation Blog.

We shouldn’t be surprised, considering Sony’s advertising for PS Plus in general has been peculiarly muted. In the run-up to the service’s reinvention last year, most information about its retro games library came from early adopters in other countries rather than Sony itself.

Regardless, this could point to future first party releases receiving timed demos too. It was once reported that Sony would require all PlayStation games priced at $34 or more to come with such a demo, although that’s never been confirmed.

While some may prefer traditional demos, gating ones for high profile games like God Of War Ragnarök is a smart way of tempting people into subscribing to PS Plus Premium.

God Of War Ragnarök – would you get a PS Plus subscription just to try out God Of War Ragnarök? (pic: Sony)

In related news, God Of War Ragnarök’s narrative director Matt Sophos and story lead Richard Gaubert have shared some neat behind the scenes info about the game’s development, including an admission that even they think the characters talk too much when trying to solve puzzles.

Speaking with YouTube channel MinnMax, the pair address complaints of the characters spoiling the solution to puzzles too quickly, explaining that it was just a simple oversight and they were never told it was an issue during playtests.

‘We just didn’t get it tuned well enough,’ says Sophos, ‘It didn’t get exposed to us until… really until the game came out. Even when we had playtests, we never saw feedback about the characters talking too much.’

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They also discussed an early draft for the story that would’ve involved Kratos dying at the very beginning of the game, during his first conflict with Thor, followed by him being resurrected after a 20-year time skip.

This was soon scrapped when they realised it conflicted with the themes of the story (which we won’t touch upon to avoid spoilers) and would’ve felt repetitive. After all, Kratos had already died and been brought back to life twice before in the original trilogy.

You can watch the full interview below but, obviously, be aware of spoilers.

God Of War Ragnarok is available for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.

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As Santa Monica shares some behind-the-scenes stories for God Of War: Ragnarök, Sony has quietly released a free trial for PS Plus users.