Sony Santa Monica devs have confirmed the studio wasn't aware of how chatty God of War Ragnarok's puzzle-spoiling companions were until launch, although it now admits they weren't "tuned well enough".
Although God of War Ragnarok launched to nearly universal praise, there was one flaw that almost everyone agreed on - the companions had a nasty habit of spoiling puzzles for you mere seconds into starting them, couldn't stop themselves from talking about side missions at every turn, and were just a bit too chatty overall. There was even an option to tone down their chatter, but it didn't seem to help all that much.
As it turns out, Sony Santa Monica wasn't even aware that the companions spoiling puzzles was a problem. During an interview with Minmax, Ragnarok's narrative director Matt Sophos and story lead Richard Gaubert are asked about why the game's companions are so notoriously chatty and why it wasn't fixed for launch. Sophos responds by admitting the team didn't have time to tune it because they didn't get enough feedback suggesting it was a problem.
Sophos said, "Inside baseball for game development. You try and get everything in and you try and get it tuned. Towards the end of a project, contractors start leaving and we just didn't get it tuned well enough. It didn't get exposed to us really until the game came out. Even when we had playtests, we never saw feedback about the characters talking too much."
The issue seems to lie with the countdown for the first hint being too "aggressive" and triggering before it was supposed to. Fans have suggested a patch adding a longer countdown or turning the hints off completely, but Sophos said that, as much as he'd like the feature included, he doesn't want to promise anything as it might be a lot of difficult coding work for the developers, which makes it seem unlikely to be added in the upcoming New Game Plus patch.