God of War Ragnarok

At first glances, God of War Ragnarok's shockingly low sentiment score in the media seems like it must be some sort of mistake, as if some articles may have been misinterpreted or their was an error with the data interpretation. However, upon closer review of the individual articles, the reasoning behind this unexpectedly low score begins to become clear. Much of the negative press surrounding this title comes from four main revalations: delay to the games release and subsequent DLCs, lack of cross platform support for the IP, gripes about plotholes and story twits, and dismay with the death of characters within the game. Unfortunately, negative press about the game apart from its actual gameplay and graphics drowned out any articles surrounding the aclaimed title. However, as these problems are forgotten God of War's sentiment is expected to continue to rise as is already seen in the above chart.

Despite the games short history, its average article count per month sits at a modest 21, which is largely skewed by its release month in Novemeber 2022 which saw a total of 301 articles published. Following this release its article count quickly sank except for the month of December in 2023, when a free DLC titled Valhalla was released as an epilogue to the game. Coverage is expected to decline as time goes on as the lack of mod support and replability bars any reason for the player base and news outlets to continue interest.

God of War Ragnarok has 73.9% of its articles, or 849 of the 1,149 articles, published by Game Rant. The second largest source is IGN with 14.4% of the articles or 165 in total. The remaining three sources all comprise less than 6% of the articles each, with PCGamer publishing only 16 in total which is not surpising given their focus on desktop compatible games only, and given that this is a playstation exclusive release it would not make sense to extensively cover God of War Ragnarok.

Journalistic diveristy was marginally more even, with Game Rant making up only 62% of the journalist, or 131 of 212 total journalist covering God of War. The greatest difference in article count and journalist count is IGN which saw more than 20% of the total journalists inspite of its lower article count.

Game Rant's opinion on the title is evident in the source rankings, as it records an astounding low sentiment of 0.27, which in combination with its high article count drags the games average sentiment down considerably. By contrast, gaming news outlets PCGamer and IGN show moderately positive scores of 0.81 and 0.72 respectively. If evenly weighting the game sentiment across the board, the sentiment rises to 0.58, which is marginally positive as opposed to the significantly negative score of 0.38.

God of War Ragnarok has been the only title covered on Game Sentiment* where a journalist posted a perfectly negative socre, Charlie Stewart (22 articles) from Game Rant. However, this is not to say that there is no positive coverage. All three of the highest sentiment journalists are all from IGN, although one is observably IGN staff which have published 16 articles for a score of 0.88. Adam Bankhurst was the only journalist with more than 10 articles that the data reported as having a sentiment score of 0.90 or more.