Ex-God of War star Ryan Hurst, who departed the Amazon production after an injury, has shown off a fresh look at his Kratos – and it's way better than the show's first official look.

As posted on his Instagram Stories (and preserved on social media below), Hurst shared a picture of his depiction of the ashen Ghost of Sparta.

All told, this is a vast improvement on God of War's debut image released this past February. There, Hurst's Kratos and Callum Vinson's Atreus better resembled professional cosplayers on a photoshoot than anything close to a TV-level adaptation of the beloved PlayStation series.

Original God of War creator and director David Jaffe wasn't a fan, to put it mildly – nor was an expectant audience.

Before Hurst and company could claw back goodwill, disaster struck. An injury to Hurst forced Amazon to recast the role of Kratos and reshoot multiple episodes with a new actor.

Dave Bautista is in talks to replace Hurst as Kratos, with there also being – slightly more unsubstantiated – reports that Atreus would be recast after the first season.

Over on the games side of things, there's a lot less drama. God of War: Laufey, a new title starring Deborah Ann Woll's Giant, is set to release on February 16, 2027. At SDCC, it was confirmed that a new Kratos-led game is also in development and "directly connects to the events of the Laufey game."

The God of War TV show also stars Mandy Patinkin, Teresa Palmer, Max Parker, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, and Ed Skrein.

For more, check out the other new TV shows currently in the works.

It's hard to believe, travelers, but No Man's Sky has turned 10 years old. As part of the sprawling space sandbox's double-digit anniversary, Sean Murray took some time to talk to PC Gamer about No Man's Sky's decade of development, as well as the future of earth-sized multiplayer fantasy game Light No Fire. It was announced in December of 2023, but we haven't heard much about it since.

Looking back over the sheer number of free features that have been added to No Man's Sky over the years since it launched, I asked Murray if he anticipates that Light No Fire will be similar to No Man's Sky—in terms of how it was released as a sandbox with a core experience but had lots of major features added post-launch, many of them based on player requests.

"I think about this a lot," Murray said. "When we had been working on No Man's Sky and it had come out, and we were talking about what we were going to do next, one thing that rang true across the team was that they were saying 'What I really enjoy about No Man's Sky is that I can think of ideas, and they generally fit.' Especially if they are sci-fi related. So many sci-fi things can fit in the No Man's Sky universe, and it's this really broad canvas, and you can bring your imagination to it."

The team wanted the same sort of canvas, though based in fantasy instead of science-fiction, for their next game. "Something that is ambitious enough and broad enough that lots of ideas make sense there."

Murray mentioned a post-launch update, 2025's Voyagers, which added large multi-crew spaceships to No Man's Sky.

"That started as something on Light No Fire, where we were making ships that you could have as a crew and [use in] multiplayer, but they are their own physics world, and they can travel across oceans because we've got these huge oceans on Light No Fire," Murray said.

"And so we were like, 'Oh, well, that could work with No Man's Sky actually, and so we started working on the sort of spaceships that were buildable and that multiple crew could get inside of."

"So to answer your question, yeah absolutely," he said. "We feel that [Light No Fire is] a game that will fit with that way of making games, where you can think of a lot of ideas, and they would make sense, and we can feed off the community.

"Whether we'll be lucky enough to get to work on it for 10 years after launch, I don't know, but I'd like to," Murray said. "I've worked on it for seven years now, and I'm still really enjoying it."