God Of War Ragnarok Took So Long That Atreus’ Voice Dropped, Leading To Some Challenging Editing

God of War Ragnarok’s recording sessions took so long that Atreus’ actor’s voice dropped, requiring some sound wizardry to balance out the actor’s performance.

Sony shared a video this week giving fans a behind the scenes look at the highly anticipated God of War Ragnarok. It’s been a good few years since the last game was released, so it isn’t surprising that Atreus’ voice actor, Sunny Suljic, has gone through some vocal changes. But as a result the team made some changes.

“Our actor for Atreus, Sunny, is a teenage boy, and his voice changed dramatically throughout several years on this title,” explained Jodie Kupsco, Ragnarok’s supervising dialogue designer, in a section discussing the motion capture in the game. “We had to go in and even out that performance so it sounds like it took place over a short period of time. That was a unique challenge on this one.”

According to senior producer Ariel Angelotti, the team wanted to avoid “compromising the story we were trying to tell as a result of the pandemic and these limitations we had to deal with,” in reference to the difficulties they faced with recording for the game during the pandemic. Angelotti explained that no cinematics needed to be changed, but they “had to get a bit creative with how we shot the content.”

To try and mitigate any risks, some actors would “stand in” for other characters in some scenes, so that, “a situation where too many people were on-set on any given day,” could be avoided.

God of War Ragnarok is set to launch November 9, less than a month away, and Sony recently announced a PS5 bundle that comes with a copy of the game. It also went gold earlier this month, meaning it’s ready to start printing. It was also confirmed that eight other studios contributed to its development.