Sucker Punch Creative Director Jason Connell shared an interesting insight onto what the studio is thinking about in improving what they did in Ghost of Tsushima onto Ghost of Yotei.
As reported by WCCFTech, Connell shared this revelation in a recent interview with the New York Times:
“One challenge that comes with making an open-world game is the repetitive nature of doing the same thing over again. We wanted to balance against that and find unique experiences.”
We certainly wonder if those of you who did play Ghost of Tsushima felt that it was particularly repetitive. Perhaps Connell isn’t talking about Ghost of Tsushima in particular, but making an observation about the open-world game genre in general.
And on that end, we can see how opinions may vary on games being repetitive. On a more abstract level, repetition is a core tenet of game design. If a player can see that certain challenges can get more and more difficult, but can be beaten with more familiarity, that engenders a sense of achievement when you do meet that challenge.
On the flip side, it’s also true that variety can help make a game be more interesting for the player. That is, unless you have loaded them with too many things to think about that it becomes overwhelming. FromSoftware fans who enjoyed the harsh but simple game loops of a Bloodborne, may not be as willing to meet the challenge of learning the complex piloting and upgrade systems of an Armored Core 6.
And repetition and variety can both appear on the same game. But what Connell may be referring to here is developing emergent gameplay for Ghost of Yotei. These are ideas that sound fun and great on paper, but are not as easy to pull off when you’re deep in the roots of game development.
We know you know of a lot of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild players who were not as eager to engage in the building mechanics of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The players who liked them seemed to really like them, so this system seems divisive. But it’s also the natural next step to the sandbox that Nintendo conceived of.
It may be that the divisiveness of this idea alone is why many critics and peers chose to pass The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom over for GOTY awards for the harsh tabletop game ruleset of Baldur’s Gate 3. So that’s how important it is to nail these game design decisions when developers choose to commit to them.
But that’s just speculation on our part, and maybe Atsu will be up to something else. Maybe Sucker Punch genuinely has something cooking that will make Atsu even more beloved than Jin Sakai. If you think about how many fans spoke out about wanting to return to playing as Jin, then you can see just how ambitious Sucker Punch is in wanting to ‘defeat’ those sentiments with an even better game.
