The new God Of War duology features my favorite snow in gaming. I can take or leave about 60% of everything in them, but oh my, that snow! The action in God Of War Ragnarok begins during a post-apocalyptic fimbulwinter, which is probably bad for some characters I don't care about, but good for me personally, because there's so much snow to play with.
You'll ask how much snow there is. According to Sony's system requirements, there is 190 gigabytes of snow.
To be fair, this does include the roguelike Valhalla DLC, which comes as part of the bundle when Ragnarok launches on Steam and Epic on September 19. Still, it's a tough beast. Thankfully, the rest of the requirements don't seem to be all that challenging, at least not at the recommended level.
If you want a professional opinion, James's take was this: “The CPU/GPU/RAM are typical of contemporary AAA products, but my God, that's a lot of storage.” I agree. In Baldur's Gate 3, for example, that's a good 50GB, or 40GB more than Horizon Forbidden West with all the extras. If you want more silly math, that's also 13 copies of Sekiro or 950 Mini Motorwayses.
I may try to write a review of Ragnarok when it comes out, because I have a lot to say about it. For now, all I'll say is that I fully support the trend of first-party Sony games including some sort of additional challenge mode. The Last Of Us Part 2, Days Gone, and now Ragnarok all include an additional mode where you can play combat separately from the longer story sections.
This is great for a few reasons. The designers work hard on these things, but the priorities and ambitions of cinematic games often require the game to be broken up into dedicated chunks that are hard to replay on their own, for example if you really liked a particular sequence. It also reminds me of a time when these mods were much more common. My absolute favorite was Shadow Of Rome — the ultra-gory Capcom gladiator game that essentially led to the Dead Rising series. Anyway, this means Ragnarok is a generous package overall, with a A lot a generous chunk of SSD space to actually install it in. Oh, and a PSN account too.