Sucker Punch Productions promises that Ghost of Yōtei won’t have the same issue of being repetitive that Ghost of Tsushima had.
What Did Sucker Punch Say?
Ghost of Yōtei director Nate Fox said this in an interview with Automaton:
Ghost of Tsushima has various minigames, but sadly some of them – especially the one where you follow a fox to a hidden shrine – don’t have much variety and end up feeling like a chore. We felt this from the player feedback as well.
…Ghost of Yōtei improves segments in a sense that we won’t be making players go through the same thing all over again whenever their curiosity leads them to encountering new secrets during exploration.
We’ve prepared different kinds of outcomes that could go beyond the player’s expectations. We believe that the beauty of open-world games is in the exploration, so we were determined to offer players a diverse experience.
What This Says About Sucker Punch Themselves
Sucker Punch leveled up as a game studio financially and creatively with the success of Ghost of Tsushima. While there will always be fans who fondly remember Sly Cooper and Infamous, it was Ghost of Tsushima that raised them to the level of a AAA studio that Sony could justify investing millions on. The success that Ghost of Tsushima had wasn’t even possible when they were still making Sly Cooper games.
Sucker Punch Might Have A Strange Solution To This Problem
Sucker Punch put a lot of real effort in immersing themselves in Hokkaido, the real life setting of their game. One odd anecdote recounted how they became obsessed with how the indigenous peoples of the island, the Ainu, foraged the land. Could this seemingly random interest in foraging make the difference in breaking up Ghost of Yōtei’s pace and routine so it won’t be as repetitive as Ghost of Tsushima?
Can Sucker Punch Live Up To Their Promises?
Sucker Punch also revealed how much they refined the combat and exploration systems of Ghost of Yōtei in this month’s highly anticipated State Of Play Deep Dive, dedicated just for this game. Maybe it’s unfair and unrealistic to expect that Sucker Punch’s newest title ‘save’ or ‘redeem’ the PlayStation 5 in terms of first party Sony games for 2025.
But Sucker Punch absolutely has a lot of high expectations to live up to, now that we all see that they have ascended in the rankings of PlayStation game studios. Let’s hope they prove their fans right and deliver above and beyond what they have made before, all over again.
