Atreus may have matured by God of War Ragnarok, but so did his voice actor. During a new behind-the-scenes video, supervising dialogue designer Jodie Kupsco explained how puberty caused trouble for the God of War sequel.

“Our actor for Atreus, Sunny [Suljic], is a teenage boy, and his voice changed dramatically throughout several years on this title,” she explained. “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.”

An extended production period due to the pandemic meant that the God of War Ragnarok team not only had to think creatively to get around Suljic’s rapidly changing voice, but also how to film cinematics on a motion capture soundstage that was limited by pandemic rules.

“We avoided compromising the story we were trying to tell as a result of the pandemic and these limitations we had to deal with,” said senior producer, Ariel Angelotti. “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.”

The developers needed to avoid having too many voice actors on set at any one time, so they resorted to voice actors doubling up to play additional background characters.

This allowed them “to be able to avoid a situation where too many people were on-set on any given day.” They also had some actors “stand in” for others on the day. However, even with his rapidly deepening voice, I can’t help thinking it’s unlikely that Atreus’ voice actor took over as Kratos at any point.

Want to read more about God of War Ragnarok? Check out all the latest God of War Ragnarok reveals as well as the Norse mythology behind its latest trailer.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.