Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Yotei is a fantastic successor to Ghost of Tsushima. While the core gameplay is quite similar to its predecessor, the game features a unique time-travel mechanic that offers additional story for fans to explore.
In the game, players can press and hold the DualSense controller’s touchpad in specific areas to go back in time and enjoy the game’s protagonist, Atsu, as a child. However, Sucker Punch originally planned for the feature to be spread across the entire game.
Speaking to Breaking Bad and Plurbius creator Vance Gilligan in an episode of Sony’s Creator to Creator series, creative director Jason Connell explained that the feature was set to span across the entirety of the game world, similar to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Connell explained that his version of the game was worked on for years with players able to take the angry, revenge-filled Atsu and immediately revert to the “warmth of her past”. Unfortunately, creating two times for the majority of major locations was very intensive with artists needing to create two versions of almost everything, so it got cut.
“It started off as let’s do that in as many places as we can, maybe everywhere. Can we do this as a stake in the ground game feature?” Connell said. “What we found after maybe, say, like a year of working on it and testing it and trying to understand how it could be a game mechanic and be a worthwhile feature, you are doubling your art.”
“It saddened me the day I had to cut it,” Connell continued. “To say, ‘Okay, it can’t be the whole thing anymore. We have to narrow it down’. But in the end, it was the right choice.”
Deciding to cut the feature wasn’t just due to the intensity of creating every location twice, but also making sure players had enough to do in those locations. It’s all well and good having a place to explore, but having nothing to do there would simply make it a pretty walking simulator.
At the end of the day, the intention still shines through within Ghost of Yotei in the time-travel section that remain. If the feature shipped as it was before, Connell worries if it would’ve just felt like a “gimmick” instead of the interesting narrative tool that exists in the game now.
