Deborah Ann Woll is starring in God of War Laufey, the parallel story following the journey of Kratos’ late wife Faye through the “Everywhen,” the afterlife for the gods. Though the game doesn’t have an official release date yet, Woll has been chatting a bit about it in interviews, including one with CGMagazine that has fans scouring old interviews with the God of War team searching for confirmation that Laufey has been part of Santa Monica Studio’s plan for years.
Woll and the Santa Monica team have spoken about how they’d been in talks about Laufey for several years now, with Woll saying she had to keep the whole game a secret for “nearly 10 years.”
“[Director Cory Barlog] pitched [Laufey] to me in 2018, and they had known about it before then,” Woll tells CGMagazine. “It’s wild. Like when Cory brought me in to talk about doing Ragnarök and show me the 2018 game, he already had a poster for the Laufey game with me and a cube. A cube that’s been there since the beginning. It’s deeply a part of the lore.”
It’s a pretty remarkable story on its own, as it often feels like the biggest companies are making up the most successful franchises as they go along. It’s rare that a AAA studio gets to outline a story and see it to completion across multiple games. Laufey has been getting some incredibly bad-faith criticism from some who argue that it’s “replacing” Kratos (despite Santa Monica Studios saying otherwise) because of the woke agenda or some such nonsense, so while some might be skeptical of the assertion that Laufey was always part of the plan, others have gone back to look at old interviews with Barlog that seem to imply this was, in fact, always the roadmap the studio was following.
One particularly revealing interview is an IGN spoilercast that Barlog appeared on in 2018 breaking down the journey of Kratos and his son Atreus to spread Faye’s ashes in Jötunheim. In it, he talks about how the game deliberately left threads for future games to tie up after reflecting on reveals from previous games that he felt were “too abrupt.”
I kind of messed up on [God of War II] a lot with the reveal of Gaia being the narrator, right? Did it set it up clear enough? Did it have enough indicators prior to her sort of reaching out to Kratos […] It was a little too abrupt, and it has always bugged me. For years this bugged me because it was something easily fixed. So I thought, “All right, if I’m gonna do anything now I’m gonna make sure that there is always a valid sort of indicator for anything so that you could go back and you could look at it so much so that if we do a second game or a third game you’re gonna go back to the first one and [say], ‘Oh, my god, that was there.’” I have so many things in there that are just setups for much later and much, much later and really far later, so I’m a lunatic.
Cory Barlog on the importance of planning stories in advanced. He had already worked out the stories for future games well beyond Ragnarok when he was working on GoW 2018, including GoW Laufey and beyond! pic.twitter.com/dmIHDwIsLr
— cory barlog fan account (@squarednation_) June 23, 2026
The idea that Laufey has been part of the plan for years fits neatly with other speculation that fans have been doing since Laufey’s announcement earlier this month, such as that the game may answer some long-standing questions dating back to the 2018 God of War, perhaps revealing who blew a horn to call the World Serpent while Kratos was busy trying to save Atreus. Folks have also been wondering if some of the scenes we saw in Laufey’s 20-minute debut trailer have ties to moments from Kratos’ games, and if this really has been the plan from the beginning, that speculation is more than just the God of War fandom “cornplating”’ they could be excavating the entire narrative foundation of Laufey.