If you haven't played God Of War or Ragnarok and you don't want their endings and key plot points spoiled, you might want to stop reading here. The end of the 2018 game includes Kratos discovering a prophecy that foretells his death. Turns out one of the original plans for Ragnarok was to kick off the sequel with that prophecy immediately coming true.
Santa Monica's Matt Sophos revealed to MinnMax (thanks, VGC) that in one of the very first drafts for Ragnarok, the team approached director Eric Williams with a script that killed off Kratos right at the start of the game. “Kratos died in the Thor fight at the very beginning of the game,” Sophos revealed when discussing the initial plan for the game.
For those who haven't played that didn't duck out early through fear of spoilers, Thor and Odin pay Kratos and Atreus a visit near the beginning of Ragnarok. That leads to a battle between the gods of war and thunder on the same scale as Kratos's opening bout with Baldur in the previous game. Neither Kratos nor Thor dies at that point as the latter returns to Asgard after giving enough to let the man who killed his sons know how formidable he can be.
In this alternate universe where Kratos is killed to kick off Ragnarok, Sophos explains he wouldn't have been gone for good. “What was going to happen – and I don’t care, we can tell this because it doesn’t happen anymore so this is all fan fiction at this point – he would get pulled out of Hell,” Sophos reveals. There would have been a 20-year time jump between Kratos's death and Atreus rescuing him, though.
Williams shot down that idea, telling the team that came up with it “Kratos has died and come back from it too many times.” It's also unclear how exactly the game would have unfolded had Kratos died and there been a massive time jump. It would have presumably meant casting someone else to play an older Atreus, and also may have meant Loki facing Ragnarok without his dad. Needless to say, it would have been an incredibly different, perhaps not quite as impactful, game.