God of War Ragnarok has finally made its way to public release, managing to squeeze in before the end of the year and enter into the GOTY conversation with stellar review scores. We’ll see how many sales Sony racks up in short order here, but for now, everyone is just leaping in to play.
As someone who has already put 40 hours into my review copy of God of War, I do have some advice for you as you start. No spoilers ahead, just some gameplay tips that will help you have a better time.
Here are ten things I wish I knew when I started God of War Ragnarok:
1. You Will Have More XP And Money Than You Know What To Do With Eventually
I think it’s important to know how the economy of this game works up front. In short, you really do not need to stress about what to spend XP or money on in the early parts of the game. Rewards scale, so you might be getting 1,000 XP or Hacksilver in early phases, but you will be getting 10-20,000 when completing missions and challenges toward the end of the game. So spend freely, as you should be able to purchase every major upgrade for you, Atreus and gear for you both by the end of the game. There is no real bottleneck.
God of War Ragnarok
Sony
2. Diversify Your Combat To Upgrade Your Skills
One new addition to God of War Ragnarok is that the more you use a skill, you can eventually upgrade it to boost its damage, defense, element or other stats. As such, the more diverse you can make your combat across the axe and blades, the most overall upgrades you will unlock as opposed to just…parrying and doing little easy combos. Use all the skills often!
3. Come Back Later For These Puzzle Obstacles
This is not exactly a new mechanic in video games, but let me be clear about some confusing things you may encounter on some early maps. There are two things, what looks like a little wind gust coming out of a wall, and what looks like a yellow glowing patch, that you cannot interact with early on. You will get a tool that overcomes these obstacles later in the story. Second, there are weird, floaty, broken rune things around you will see. You will need to progress the story to a certain point to learn how to use those. No amount of experimentation will get you past any of that stuff. It will be clear when you get to the point where you can interact with them.
4. You Can Overlevel For Harder Minibosses
There are new minibosses that replace Valkyries that you will eventually unlock fights with around the map. I won’t say what they are, but many can be quite difficult. I found that for some of them, ignoring them and then circling back around when Kratos and his gear were at a higher level was the play, as you can overlevel them, they won’t scale with you. The same is true for things like combat challenges, most of which will not scale to your level.
God of War Ragnarok
Sony
5. Side Quests Are Essentially Not Optional
As my friend Gene Park noted in his review, the side quests here are almost on the level of The Witcher 3, if not past them. As such, I really would not consider most of the larger sidequests optional here. Some clearly are, like hacking through all of Odin’s spy ravens, which are merely collectibles. But things that are actual sidequests are often hugely important story beats for specific characters in the game, and should not be ignored. I would complete all major sidequests before the finale to really flesh out the full cast as much as you can.
6. Endgame Currency For Maxing Armor Sets
By the end of the game, you will probably complete enough activities to max out a handful of full armor sets at their highest power. For the final piece of the puzzle, you will need to perform well in a final series of combat challenges that will take you to true max for your chestplates. Side quests and challenges are also how you will get to the final few damage tiers of your weapons.
7. You Can And Will Return To Almost All Areas
You may be wondering if you need to do everything in a given area or else you will be missing out on content that you can’t complete later. With very, very few exceptions (one lush realm that’s like a “break” I would recommend doing all sidequests in), you will return to all the realms you unlock and be able to fully explore their mysteries. There is also no “point of no return” before the ending in the game, another common question. You will be able to keep exploring, albeit in a bit of an altered way. You’ll see.
God of War Ragnarok
Sony
8. My Favorite Armor Set Of Them All
There are a lot of great armor sets you’ll unlock but my favorite was one made by a dwarven smith that was able to be crafted pretty early into the game. It gives your fists poison damage when you are attacking enemies unarmed, and then a huge 40% melee damage bonus against poisoned enemies. So I’d often throw my axe, let it stick in an enemy, then mash them down with my fists for enormous damage. I used this for probably 80% of the game and it was my main set.
9. Don’t Forget To Upgrade Your Rage Skills
In Ragnarok, Rage is now a bit different in that you will have three different skills that bloom from it. One is pure healing, one is damage and healing, one is pure damage. Each of these have three tiers that you will upgrade through XP alone to increase their potency, and since they’re not in the skill tree and not pieces of gear, it’s something that might be easy to overlook. But they are very important upgrades.
10. Swap Weapons In Combat Often
There are a lot more combat rewards for diversifying your weapon choice in this sequel. At baseline, both the axe and blades will get a skill where the blades do more damage to frozen enemies and the axe does more damage to burning enemies, so you want to swap often. Later, I unlocked armor sets that rewarded you for using special action skills quickly across different weapons. There’s a lot of synergy like that, so look out for it, in addition to certain enemies that are weak to different types of weapons, similar to last game.
