God of War Ragnarok recording went so long that Atreus had to be edited after his teenage actor's voice dropped

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Some actors also ended up playing multiple roles to avoid production lag

God of War Ragnarok
(Image credit: Sony)

The voice of Sunny Suljic, the teenage actor reprising his role as Atreus in God of War: Ragnarok, changed so much during the game's long recording period that the developers had to go back in and edit his performance to better match the character and the framing of the game's story.

Ragnarok's motion capture recording comes up repeatedly in a new behind-the-scenes video chronicling the game's story and how it evolved. The onset of the coronavirus pandemic disrupted and extended Ragnarok's recording schedule, and as a rather unique consequence of this, Suljic's voice basically had more time to develop as he, not unlike Atreus, matured.

"Our actor for Atreus, Sunny, is a teenage boy, and his voice changed dramatically throughout several years on this title," supervising dialogue designer Jodie Kupsco explains. "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." 

"We avoided compromising the story we were trying to tell as a result of the pandemic and these limitations we had to deal with," senior producer Ariel Angelotti says. "There were no cinematics that we changed; we still have the same characters in them in the final game. We just had to get a bit creative with how we shot the content."

To avoid additional production delays while following pandemic guidelines, for example, Angelotti says actors would occasionally "stand in" for other characters in some scenes. The actor for a main character might also play a background character that day, for example, "to be able to avoid a situation where too many people were on-set on any given day." 

Today's video is the first of nine behind-the-scenes shorts which will be released every Tuesday for the next two months. Episode two will take us to Alfheim for a deep-dive on combat on October 25. 

God of War Ragnarok has gone gold, which means its production delays are behind it. 

Austin Wood
Austin Wood
Senior writer

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.