Santa Monica Studio and Jetpack Interactive worked together on the PC port of God of War: Ragnarok, and it’s safe to say that it’s not off to a good start. We’re not just talking about the low player count, which Sony expected. Rather, it’s the backlash it’s facing for two things: performance issues and the PSN requirement.
Earlier this year, Sony started requiring PC gamers to have a PlayStation Network account to play the PC ports of its best-selling PlayStation exclusives. Unfortunately, this meant banning the games from more than a hundred countries, much to the chagrin of gamers who finally thought that they could get their hands on first-party Sony exclusives on their PC, especially with the PlayStation 5 having grown more expensive since its launch four years ago.
To make matters worse, Jetpack Interactive appears to have done a so-so job with the port’s optimization. Thankfully, modders are coming to the rescue.
Two God of War: Ragnarok mods, in particular, stand out for their utility. One of the mods lets you bypass the PSN sign-in requirement. IArtoriasUA’s NoPSSDK mod is a workaround to this potential dealbreaker, adding a .dll to the God of War: Ragnarok game folder that disables the PSN overlay, letting you fully enjoy it online. If you lived through the earlier days of PC games when all you had to do to install and enjoy the same copy of a game across multiple PCs was to download a similarly simple file that prevents the game from connecting to the internet when you boot it up, it works the exact same way.
Of course, anyone who’s also old enough to remember those days will tell you that these fixes come with their first share of risks. So while it may work for some—it lets you say “No” to the prompt when it asks you to link your PSN account to stop— it’s still best to exercise caution.
According to the mod author iArtorias, those who are still having trouble even with the bypass mod may have to block “GoWR.exe” in Windows firewall settings.
Another recommended mod for God of War: Ragnarok is the “Anti-Stutter – High CPU and Disk Priority – GoW Ragnarok” mod,” which, as per the creator, “can help with performance on weaker CPUs and slower disks.” However, the creator warns that “a performance improvement is not guaranteed” and that the best “this mod can provide is a reduction in stuttering, even if FPS stays the same.”
Both mods do one thing that Sony should’ve done in the first place: fix God of War: Ragnarok.
You’d think a game that came out on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 wouldn’t need as much optimization since it’s built to run on slower and much older hardware. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case, and it’s becoming pretty clear by now where PC ports lie in Sony’s list of priorities.
So far, the PSN bypass mod is one of the first of its kind. Unless things change, and it probably won’t, we’ll likely see similar mods for future first-party Sony titles when they inevitably come to the PC.
The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 are expected to get PC ports someday. If we’re lucky, Bloodborne will get a PC port, but something tells us Sony would refer to remaster it for the PS5 first, like what it’s doing with Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone.
