God of War Ragnarok Mod Removes Controversial PSN Requirement — and Its Creator Has Vowed to Maintain It

ign.com:

Just days after PlayStation game God of War Ragnarok launched on PC to a ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating over its forced PlayStation Network account linking, a mod has been released that bypasses the requirement entirely.

Sony had made it clear on the God of War Ragnarok Steam page that a PlayStation Network account would be required to play Sony Santa Monica’s purely single-player adventure, but that failed to prevent a number of negative reviews singling out the policy.

While God of War Ragnarok’s Steam user review rating is now up to ‘mostly positive,’ one modder has decided to take matters into their own hands by stripping out the PSN requirement.

iArtorias’ NoPSSDK mod, which has been downloaded 1,764 times from Nexus Mods at the time of this article’s publication, “fully strips the PlayStation PC SDK runtime requirement for God of War Ragnarok.” But because the mod removes the PSN overlay from the game and mimicks an offline mode in the process, it's being used to bypass the PSN / Steam account linking requirement. IGN has verified the mod does indeed work.

In a post on Nexus Mods, iArtorias vowed to maintain their mod even if Sony updates God of War Ragnarok to combat it. “I will try to maintain the tool even if something changes, but hopefully nothing crucial happens,” they said.

Sony will no doubt take a dim view of iArtorias’ mod, which is picking up Steam as more and more players download it. There are also calls for a similar mod for Sony’s other recently released PC games, such as Ghost of Tsushima. Ghost of Tsushima requires a PSN account for the Legends online multiplayer mode and to use PlayStation overlay, but it is not required to play the single-player game, which makes Sony’s decision to enforce a PSN requirement on the purely single-player God of War Ragnarok all the more baffling.

Sony’s PSN account requirement for its PC games was thrust into the limelight with the release of Arrowhead’s explosive PC and PS5 co-op shooter Helldivers 2 earlier this