God of War Ragnarok recently arrived on PC after getting rave reviews on PS4 and PS5 back in 2022. But controversially, you need to log in to the PlayStation Network with a free account to play the single-player-only action game on Steam. Well, unless you use a recently released mod to get around this requirement.
Updated: 09/27/2024, 10:55 4.m. ET: On September 25, the person who created this God of War mod pulled it from Nexus Mods. The site admins contacted the user behind the PSN removal mod and confirmed that they didn’t get threatened by Sony’s legal team, but they were still nervous after how popular the mod became online.
Here’s the message they sent to Nexus Mod admins.
Hello, that was my personal decision because the mod has got too much attention (even IGN and PC Gamer) wrote an article about it, thus I thought that it would be better to remove it from public to avoid any potential threats from the Sony side (even though the project never modified anything in memory related to Sony products, but better be safe than sorry).
I am sorry that it happened, but I cannot really put myself into risk since it was unclear. Hopefully you understand. Peace!
Some online users have already reuploaded the mod to Nexus and other places, but it remains to be seen if Sony will intervene.
Original story continues below.
God of War Ragnarok, the big-budget sequel to 2018’s God of War reboot, once again sees Kratos and his son getting involved in Norse mythology hijinks while killing lots of enemies and solving plenty of puzzles. It launched on PC via a Steam release on September 19, and as we reported last week, players aren’t happy about how the single-player-only sequel requires a PSN login, something you might not have (or want) if you are a PC-only player. So someone went and removed that requirement via a simple and free mod.
As spotted by PC Gamer, a new mod on NexusMods called “NoPSSDK” adds two .dll files to your God of War Ragnarok folder that essentially tricks the game into thinking you are offline. It also disables the account linking requirement and PSN overlay, too. Some players who have tried the mod reported that it didn’t work until they blocked Ragnarok using their firewall, but the mod has since been updated and shouldn’t require that step anymore.
“NoPSSDK” is a fairly basic mod, but it’s popular. Over 1,800 downloads prove that many people out there don’t want to mess with Sony’s absurd PSN login requirements just to play a single-player action game. And it is absurd.
This isn’t like Helldivers 2, where the game is online only and ties into PSN via crossplay. Requiring the PSN login for that game was annoying, but understandable. The same is true with Ghost of Tsushima’s PC port, which only required a PSN login when playing the samurai sim’s multiplayer mode. Annoying, but makes sense. However, in this case, Sony is asking PC players who already have a Steam account to create a separate account on a different video game service just so they can play by themselves. That’s silly. And I expect players will continue to mod these odd single-player PSN requirements out of any future PS5 and PS4 ports that arrive on Steam.
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