The next God Of War is less than a year away and Sony is already talking about what comes after that, confirming that it will once again star Kratos.
There’s not much of a reliable pattern with how Sony announces new video games nowadays, beyond the fact that they always try to say as little as possible. Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was announced in 2024 and we still know next to nothing about it, including what year it’ll be released.
By comparison, God Of War Laufey was officially announced in June this year and will be out on… February 16, 2027. In keeping with Sony’s new policy on PC games, it’ll be released only on PlayStation 5, and no other formats.
That release date was announced over the weekend, at the San Diego Comic-Con, and was accompanied by a promise that while this game stars Kratos’ wife, the next one will once again focus on the man himself.
Developer Santa Monica Studio has already made it clear that Kratos will appear in cameo multiple times in the game, but the main playable character is his second wife, Faye (aka Laufey).
Although many have already described Laufey as a spin-off, Santa Monica Studio is keen to describe it as a mainline entry, as the story follows on directly from Ragnarök and takes place in the ‘afterlife of the gods’, which was hinted at in the previous game.
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Laufey appears to be a more openly fantastical game than many of the previous titles, with gods and monsters from multiple different mythologies, including Faye’s allies of a talking sword and a gelatinous cube voiced by Jack Quaid.
Despite the release date news, there wasn’t much more in terms of substantial information about Laufey, with no new trailer beyond a brief logo animation (the comments section of which is now, as has become expected, filled with fans complaining about Sony going digital-only).
Sony will only stop releasing games on disc after next year, so Laufey will get a physical version. Although it will be one of the last first party games to receive that treatment. If Intergalactic is a Christmas release then it may be the last ever – if it’s out in 2028 or later it’ll be digital-only.
In terms of whatever the next game will be, series overseer Cory Barlog said only that it will star Kratos and continue directly from the events of Laufey.
That makes it largely impossible to predict what it’ll be about, as while Kratos taking on a new pantheon of gods, such as those from Egyptian mythology, seems the obvious route, that’s been talked about so much by fans it almost seems too obvious at this point.
What’s easier to predict is when the next game will be out. There was a little over four years between the 2018 reboot and Ragnarök, and between Ragnarök and Laufey, so it seems a good bet that the next game will be out sometime in mid to late 2031 (which in turn suggests it’ll be a PlayStation 6 game).
By modern standards that’s pretty quick for a triple-A game, but of course there’s no guarantee until Sony confirms it. Barlog has clearly got the broad strokes of the story planned out already, so it could conceivably arrive a year or so earlier.
Importantly, Barlog is not the director on Laufey, so it’s also possible he could be working on the next game in parallel, with a different team. Santa Monca Studio has never done that before, and with around 250 staff it’s not clear they have quite enough people, but it is a possibility.
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