The long-awaited PC release for God of War Ragnarok ended up being a whole catastrophe by itself as Sony has been enforcing its controversial PSN account requirements for playing the game once again, even though they’ve already faced some troubles with it earlier this year with other popular titles.
After months eager to play the latest tale of Kratos for the first time, Steam users were met with another major letdown as the same thing that almost killed off Helldivers 2 earlier this year is once again blocking their path: the need to create a PSN account for playing Ragnarok.
Despite not being a Sony device (nor an exclusive anymore), this seemingly insignificant inconvenience scales up to a whole new level once you realize how distressing the whole process can be, especially if you’re not a native US resident.
For starters, there are over 100 countries that have no PSN access at all. These can be considered effectively banned from playing Ragnarok altogether without resorting to external methods. It gets even worse when you remember that this is a single-player game we’re talking about. One could argue there was some room for debate with Helldivers 2 back in the day, but there’s no parallel to be made here.
To make matters even worse, Steam ended up completely delisting all games with PSN requirements during the Helldivers situation. This includes Ragnarok, which is still unavailable in various regions.
God of War Ragnarok currently has mixed reviews on Steam, with most negative complaints being precisely about the controversial PSN requirements. In their review, Steam user Runakai mentioned how it’s “incredibly frustrating to see the enforcement of a PSN account for a SINGLE PLAYER game. No matter how good the game is, you shouldn’t be forced to do that.”
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Another negative review mentions how troublesome things can get even if you have legal access to the PSN. “For UK residents at least, it requires submitting a mobile phone number to verify your age just to start with, and if that fails (which it did, no texts were ever received) your only recourse is to submit a photograph of your face or a government-issued ID to a third party website.”, added the user Astro, who ended up refunding the product.
Performance Almost As Disastrous As The Launch Itself
Ironically, many positive reviews claim that a PSN account is optional, as they’ve been playing without it. Many still claim they cannot play without setting up their account. It seems like the account enforcement is being given out at random, as much as it sounds like nonsense. But even if players can bypass the requirements, the game stays delisted for many countries, which is still a valid reason for people to be angry. Not to mention that, yeah, this is Steam we’re talking about and not a PlayStation platform.
If the issues mentioned above weren’t enough, it’s not uncommon to see users with considerable game times complaining about performance issues. The game is known for being one of the best-looking titles in the PS5 library, but everyone expected it to be playable at minimum system requirements, at the very least.
Another user added their own negative experience with the game itself. “Wait for the performance updates before buying, currently the starting area is fine but beyond that there is extreme stuttering making the game almost unplayable.”. They had over four hours played at the time of the review, with almost nine hours fully played at the time of this writing.
And despite its huge popularity, the game has certainly taken a hit with this whole avalanche storming up on it at once. The game is currently sitting at a peak of 25,524 players according to SteamDB. This is almost a third of what the first God of War had achieved during its release, as it holds a record of 73,529 players at launch.
As much as we cannot expect every sequel to do as well as the first successful title, it’s still a huge step-down, and it’s hard to deny that these issues weren’t part of the reason for the bad reception.
Sony eventually patched out the controversial requirements for Helldivers 2, so it’s not impossible to see it happening again on God of War Ragnarok. Any possible performance issues are also not hard to address, so even if it goes through a rough launch, the game can still find some success in its new platform. However, the initial damage is already done, so we can’t be sure if there’s anything to salvage from it. All that’s left is to wait for the best.
God of War Ragnarok is available for PS5 and PC.