Sony's latest heavy hitter to reach the PC, God of War Ragnarök, is experiencing minor turbulence. The word on the port itself is mostly good so far—some folks are having technical issues and others cite a possible memory leak—though easily the loudest piece of negative feedback on Ragnarök's Steam page is that pesky PSN sign-in requirement, contributing to a "Mixed" rating.
Forcing PlayStation-uninitiated PC gamers to make an account for a solely singleplayer game is uncool. If a PSN login is your dealbreaker for getting into this genuinely great game, then you might be interested in the NoPSSDK mod by iArtoriasUA. The mod adds a .dll to the Ragnarök game folder that disables the PSN overlay and seemingly mimicks a fully offline mode.
I tested the mod and can confirm it worked for me, but you should still only try this at your own risk. After installing the mod, the game prompted me to optionally link my PSN account to Steam. I selected "No", and Ragnarök stopped bothering me about it. The "Sign into PlayStation" button on the main menu no longer does anything, and I'm able to load my save as usual.
Some users have reported issues with the mod—several noted the bypass didn't take and they were still receiving popups to sign-in, to which mod author iArtorias suggested they block "GoWR.exe" in Windows firewall settings to correct. The process was smoother for me, but it's worth noting that the PlayStation overlay already recognized my login from Concord (RIP) when I first launched Ragnarök, so that could explain it.
This is the first PSN bypass mod that I'm aware of. If Sony plans to make the requirement a regular thing in games that shouldn't need PSN hooks (The Last of Us Part 2 and Spider-Man 2 are presumably coming to PC someday), it won't be the last.
