God of War Ragnarök finally landed on PC last week, bringing the latest adventure that moves forward the story of Kratos and Atreus from PlayStation platforms. However, the Sony title did not receive the same fanfare it got when the original God of War landed on PC. The Steam release was quickly hit with droves of negative reviews as players found that the single-player experience requires a PlayStation Network login.
Now, a modder has taken the task into their own hands. iArtorias’ NoPSSDK mod is currently live on the Nexus Mods platform, and it “fully strips the PlayStation PC SDK runtime requirement for God of War Ragnarok.”
Installation requires putting two .dll files onto the installation folder of God of War Ragnarök, which makes the game think it"s in offline mode, letting PC players skip the account linking process and also disables the PSN overlay.
The mod is slowly rising in popularity, with it already touting over almost 2,000 downloads at the time of writing, according to Nexusmods" own tracking on unique downloads, with views sitting at almost 22,000.
This is not the first time that Sony has opted to make the PlayStation Network account a requirement for playing their games on PC. Helldiver 2"s PSN controversy on Steam is the biggest one that comes to mind, though that is a solely multiplayer game. Meanwhile, God Of War Ragnarök’s insistence on a PSN account has angered many for having the requirement despite being a fully single-player game.
Sony and Sucker Punch Productions" Ghost of Tsushima is another title that has a PSN Network requirement attached to it, but this is for use in the Legends online multiplayer mode only.
We will have to wait and see if Sony updates the game to change how it implements the PlayStation Network requirement, perhaps to block this new method of bypassing it. But mod creator iArtorias is up for combating this, saying, "I will try to maintain the tool even if something changes, but hopefully nothing crucial happens"