How Long Is God of War (2018)? Story, Favors And Full Completion

God of War is a twenty hour game with a fifty hour version hidden inside it, and which one you end up playing is decided almost entirely by whether you take the boat trips. Here are the numbers, what each tier of them actually contains, and the few things that genuinely change them.

The Numbers

The two sources we checked put the story at 20 and 21 hours and full completion at 50 and 51, which is as close to agreement as this kind of figure gets. Treat the spread as noise and the shape as real: the optional content is worth more than the story again, and most of that second half is in two realms and one set of fights.

What The Extra Thirty Hours Are

The nine Valkyries are one of the two biggest blocks, and not because the fights themselves are long. They are behind doors in five realms, several of which are gated behind late game tools, and their queen stays asleep on her council island until the other eight are dead, so the full set is effectively an endgame campaign of its own. Our Valkyrie locations guide lays out the route.

Muspelheim and Niflheim are the next block. Muspelheim is a ladder of combat trials that ends at Gondul; Niflheim is a shifting maze you enter on a timer, with the mist steadily killing you, and its currency, Mist Echoes, is what the sixth Leviathan Axe upgrade costs 5,000 of, with another 2,500 owed for the realm's Legendary chest. Both realms exist to be repeated, so how long they take is genuinely up to you. After that come the collectibles our other pages keep running into: the Nornir chests, whose Idunn Apples and Horns of Blood Mead raise maximum health and rage for good, the treasure map digs, the hidden chambers, and the Yggdrasil's Dews.

What Changes The Number

Difficulty changes it more than in most action games, because of how this one measures a fight. Our enemies and upgrades guide is blunt about the Power Level the game prints beside every enemy and about not fighting above it, so a harder setting is not only a longer health bar, it is more time spent getting your own number up. A run where you are consistently under level is a run spent farming the materials in our enchantments and materials guide.

Cutscenes are the other factor, and this game handles them unusually. Because the whole thing is presented as one unbroken camera shot, there is no cutscene to skip, which our archive noted at the time as a specific complaint from speedrunners. Even on a repeat run you watch what you watched before.

New Game Plus adds a fourth tier on top of the three above, and it is where four of the ten sets on our armor ranking live, including the Valkyrie gear and Cod of War. A second run is faster than the first in play and slower in practice, because the gear that makes it worth doing is at the end of it.

A Footnote From 2018

When the game was still unreleased, Sony Santa Monica said the three hour demo the press had played covered roughly five percent of it. Our news piece at the time made the comparison that a three hour demo of an earlier God of War would have been closer to a third of the whole game, and the finished article bore the implication out. The three stories our God of War hub keeps from that period are the rest of that context.

Length Questions

How many chapters does God of War have?

Seventeen. They begin at The Marked Trees and end with The Journey Home, and our God of War walkthrough pairs each one with the upgrade it opens.

Is God of War worth finishing completely?

The completion content is where the combat system is actually tested, since the Valkyries and the Muspelheim trials ask for the tool matching our enemies guide describes and the story rarely does. If you enjoyed the fights, the second thirty hours are the better thirty.

How long does the platinum trophy take?

Plan for the 50 to 55 hour band, because the long poles are the same ones full completion asks for: every Valkyrie including Sigrun, both challenge realms, and the collectible sets spread across the Lake of Nine.