Ghost of Yotei isn’t only the best-looking game developer Sucker Punch has ever made, but also the biggest game the studio has ever made. Alongside being a gorgeous game all around, the team worked hard to make sure the game offered “more freedom” than any of the studio’s prior games.
Speaking in a recent interview, creative director Jason Connell explained that they don’t care how players choose to experience the world of Ghost of Yotei simply due to the fact that there’s so much to do. Some players will beeline the plot, others will spend hours in side missions, others will simply bum around, but that’s all intentional.
While every game developer likely has their own take on how players should approach their games, Connell explained they simply “don’t care” if players enjoy the game’s side content or ignore it all together, as long as they’re having fun.
“If they don’t want to do it, we’re just like, ‘OK, that’s your choice,” Connell told GamesRadar. “As long as you’re having fun, we don’t care too much”.
Despite this, there is a lot of clever game design put into Ghost of Yotei that will subtly guide players back onto the main story if they spend too long doing literally everything else the game has to offer.
“[There’s] a bunch of hooks in there to try to keep you in the spirit of the main story,” Connell explained. “[Such as] getting an appropriate amount of weapons at a decent rate… Our philosophical sort of thing about this game was to let you have more freedom than any game we’ve ever had”.
“It’s very complex,” he continued. “Narrative pacing is a bit easier to understand, and so that one’s a bit more straightforward, but that open-world pacing one is quite challenging. We do all these little tricks to make it kind of work out for us.”
Balancing side content versus the main campaign is something that a lot of open world games have to manage, and not all of them get that balance right. (For example, as someone who’s just finished Borderlands 4, that game really doesn’t balance it all well.) However, Yotei seems to have nailed that balance, even more so than Tsushima before it.
Ghost of Yotei is available right now exclusivity on Sony’s PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro systems. A PC version is expected to release in the future, but there’s been no official confirmation on that at the time of writing.
