Recording a 100% Completion Playthrough Is Different Than You Think
Most people assume getting 4K 60fps gameplay of a fully completed God of War Ragnarok run is just a matter of pressing record and finishing the game. It is not. The problem starts well before you even boot the console. A true 100% completion requires clearing the main campaign, all side quests, all three Valkyrie fights, both extra boss rushes, every relic and artifact collectible, and multiple full runs through Valhalla with each weapon and armor set. That is easily 120 to 180 hours depending on how thorough you are with map exploration and optional combat challenges. When I set out to record my own complete playthrough, I ran into a specific issue during the final Odin encounter. The PS5's built-in capture system would silently drop frames during that fight and output a corrupted .mp4 file that looked fine at first glance but had about six seconds of audio desync and visual stutter near the end. I discovered this only after spending twenty minutes trying to fix the timeline in editing software. The workaround was straightforward: I disabled the console's automatic background recording feature before starting the fight, let the boss play out without any capture active, then immediately switched to an external capture card running at native 4K 60 with no compression overhead. Files came back clean every time. That experience taught me something most beginners miss about this particular title. The game's internal engine aggressively reallocates texture streaming resources during certain cinematic sequences, especially toward the end of the final act. If you leave the standard console recording enabled during those scenes, you will notice frame pacing stutter even if the average FPS counter says 60. It is not a rendering problem. It is the recording subsystem competing for the same memory bus as the game's streaming pipeline.
For the recording method, I used an Elgato 4K60 Pro Mk.2 capture card connected to a Windows PC with an RTX 4070 Ti running OBS Studio. The settings were simple: NVENC HEVC encoder, bitrate locked at 60 megabits per second, keyframe interval at 2 seconds, and the preset set to quality rather than performance. You want quality here. The difference in visual fidelity between the two presets at 4K is noticeable on anything larger than a 27-inch monitor, and file sizes are manageable even for a long playthrough. A full 180-hour run at these settings produces roughly 400 gigabytes of raw footage. The PS5 itself can achieve 60fps in gameplay, but not consistently in every scene. The game targets 60fps in performance mode, but heavy sequences involving multiple Fenrir wolves, Blight Drenched areas with dense particle effects, or fights against multiple Hrimthurs simultaneously will dip into the 48 to 54fps range. There is no way around this at the hardware level on the console. If your goal is strictly 60fps throughout, the capture card approach on PC gives you more control over the final output since you can re-encode or use frame interpolation tools afterward if needed. One thing nobody mentions when talking about 100% completion runs is the save file management. The game creates multiple autosaves throughout a playthrough, and by the time you finish Valhalla for the third time, you may have over twenty large save files occupying a significant portion of the console's internal storage. I had to free up nearly 80 gigabytes of space just to keep the system from throttling performance during later recording sessions. Deleting old playthrough saves and relying on a single fresh completion save kept things stable.
Here is the counter-intuitive part that matters for quality. You do not need to record everything from start to finish in one sitting. In fact, recording in structured sessions is significantly better. I broke the playthrough into four separate recording blocks: the main campaign (roughly 40 hours), the side content and collectibles (about 50 hours split across three sessions), the Valkyrie encounters (two sessions), and Valhalla runs (three sessions). Each session started with a manual save, and I always recorded a ten-second black screen intro and outro so I could easily identify where each segment began and ended during editing. The total edit time for combining everything into a single coherent video was approximately eight hours, which is far less than trying to manage a continuous 180-hour raw recording. Storage is the real bottleneck. Even with efficient encoding, you are looking at significant disk requirements. I used a 2-terabyte Samsung 990 Pro NVMe drive dedicated solely to this project, and it filled up twice before I was done. External USB 3.2 drives work fine for archiving finished segments, but do not record directly to them. The write speed is inconsistent and can cause dropped frames during recording. If you are doing this for YouTube or a similar platform, consider whether 4K 60fps is actually necessary for every segment. Cutscenes and story progression moments look fine at 1080p 30fps, which reduces total file size dramatically. Reserve the full 4K 60fps for combat sequences and Valhalla challenges where the higher resolution and frame rate actually matter. This approach cut my final upload size by roughly forty percent without any noticeable quality loss in the parts where it counts.
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Audio deserves its own consideration. The game's soundtrack is dense, and microphones or capture settings that compress audio too aggressively will make the mix sound thin during boss encounters. I ran the audio through a separate input channel in OBS at 320 kbps AAC and kept the game audio at 48kHz sample rate. Mixing both channels together during editing produced a much cleaner result than routing everything through a single track from the start. The biggest limitation of this entire process is simply the time investment. A genuine 100% completion does not happen fast. There are shortcuts, sure, but missing a single artifact or failing to clear every Nornir chest will disqualify the completion metric. The game tracks progress through a post-game summary screen, and it is unforgiving about partial completions. You either have everything checked off or you do not. For anyone attempting this, the most practical advice is to plan the recording infrastructure before you begin the actual playthrough. Setting up OBS profiles, testing capture cards, verifying storage speeds, and establishing a session structure ahead of time will save you from the kind of issues I ran into during the Odin fight. Starting the recording process mid-game with untested settings is a reliable way to lose hours of footage to technical problems.
