If you’re one of the many folks that disliked the way God of War Ragnarok handles offering up helpful hints when it thinks you need them, and the PC port’s efforts to provide an option to reduce the amount it dishes out, you’re seemigly in luck. There’s now a mod that provides a bit of an anti-hint nuclear option, by getting rid of over 1,000 lines of companion chatter.
You might remember Ragnarok’s plentiful hint-offering as having caused a bit of a discourse – you know the kind – around the game’s release, with some players arguing that it got a bit too heavy handed too quickly when it came to puzzles. Much like all that debate around yellow paint being used to indicate climbable stuctures and ledges, it was a bit of a case of immersion versus accessibility, and certainly never just descended into people shouting at each other about video games on the internet.
Well, modder Mophead01 was clearly in the ‘stop helping me do a thing’ camp, having now created a mod called ‘Please Shut Up‘, which “removes over 1500+ pointless/patronising voice lines” from Ragnarok.
“A lot of this handholdy dialogue comes across as incredibly annoying, so I’ve created this mod in an effort to completely remove most of this dialogue bloat and let players think for themselves,” the modder wrote, “Please bear in mind this mod is a work-in-progress, it takes a long time to identify these voice lines so more dialogue will be filtered out in future patches.
“So far I’ve removed 1500+ voice lines from the game, but there’s still more to come. For this current version I’ve mainly focused on the combat dialogues as they are very prominent in the game and easy to identify. Unfortunately, the puzzle-related dialogue is often intertwined with story/cutscene dialogue so identifying them is a lot more challenging and will be my focus in future versions if this mod proves popular enough.”
Mophead01 does acknowledge Santa Monica Studio’s efforts to provide players with an option that tones down the puzzle hints – via an option in the Gameplay Settings tab of the PC port that the developer also revealed it plans to bring to console “soon”. However, they claim that “from my observations this has done little to resolve the problem”.
As of right now, the mod – which already gets rid of more dialogue lines than ‘Shut Up Aloy‘, a Horizon Forbidden West mod which “silences over 900 lines” of chatter and puzzle hinting that the Nora machine hunter dishes out – can rid you of instances like “companions telling you to shield strike”, “Mimir reacting to you getting hit by fire, frost or bifrost”, and “Atreus giving away the solution to the Svartalfheim geyser puzzles during the boat sections.”
How do you feel about God of War Ragnarok’s helpful companion hints? Do you think SMS’ own option to limit it goes far enough? Let us know below!
