As has been made clear throughout the marketing for God of War Ragnarok, both Atreus and Kratos have been aged forward several years, which is most notable by how much older Atreus sounds. As it turns out, Sunny Suljic's voice changed so much during recording for Ragnarok that his lines had to be edited to make sure the character sounded consistent.
It's no secret that God of War Ragnarok has been in development for quite some time, seemingly starting production pretty much as soon as the last game was released in 2018. Sunny Suljic was 13 when God of War released and is now 17 years old for Ragnarok's launch, something that provided a bit of a challenge for Sony Santa Monica.
In a recent video highlighting the work that has gone into making Ragnarok's story, the developers talk about some of the obstacles they had to overcome when making the game, including how Coronavirus impacted recording, and even just how the passage of time affected the actors and their performances, most notably with Sunny Suljic.
During the video, supervising dialogue designer Jodie Kupsco said, "Our actor for Atreus, Sunny, is a teenage boy, and his voice changed dramatically throughout several years on this title. We had to go in and even out that performance so it sounds like it took place over a short period of time. That was a unique challenge on this one."
Thankfully, it seems that Suljic's voice changing wasn't too much of an issue for Ragnarok, as the story canonically takes place three years after the events of the last game, which is almost the same amount of time that has passed in the real world. It'd certainly be a bigger challenge if Atreus hadn't gotten older between games.
Although the video makes it clear that the pandemic did impact the development of Ragnarok, senior producer Ariel Angelotti confirmed that it didn't change the story or game at all, just that it made recording a little bit more challenging. Angelotti said, "There were no cinematics that we changed; we still have the same characters in them in the final game. We just had to get a bit creative with how we shot the content".