God of War Sequel Delayed To 2022, Coming To PS4 & PS5

The sequel to 2018’s God of War has been officially delayed to 2022. Head of PlayStation Studios, Herman Hulst, confirmed the delay today in a Q&A session with the PlayStation Blog.

Speaking about the challenges that PlayStation’s first-party studios have faced in regards to the global pandemic and how it’s affected game development, Hulst admitted that the teams have been challenged, namely when it comes to performance capture. Combined with the desire to put out a high quality game, it’s caused the planned 2021 release of Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Forbidden West to be potentially delayed (though Hulst says the game is still on track for release this year), and the new God of War title to pushed into next year.

“So we have, currently, two very big, very narrative-driven games in development: Horizon Forbidden West and the next God of War. And for both of those, they’re frankly affected by access to performance capture and talent. For Horizon, we think we are on track to release this holiday season. But that isn’t quite certain yet, and we’re working as hard as we can to confirm that to you as soon as we can. 

And for God of War, the project started a little later. So we’ve made the decision to push that game out to next year, to ensure that Santa Monica Studio can deliver the amazing God of War game that we all want to play.

With these things, something’s gotta give. It cannot be the quality of our titles, and it surely won’t be the health or the wellbeing of our amazing team.”

When the game finally releases, Hulst also confirmed that it’ll be coming to both PS4 and PS5, alongside Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo 7, citing the PS4’s large install base as the reason why.

“You can’t build a community of over 110 million PS4 owners and then just walk away from it, right? I think that’d be bad news for fans of PS4, and frankly not very good business.”

It’s a perspective that we’ve seen Sony have already with games like Sackboy: A Big Adventure and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales releasing on both PS4 and PS5 last year. Many expected Gran Turismo 7 and especially the new God of War to be exclusive to Sony’s new console, so this is sure to be disappointing news for those who were hoping the games would take full advantage of the more powerful hardware. Regardless, it’s a decision that makes plenty of sense and one that’s hard to find fault with.