The weight of expectation that Sucker Punch Production is carrying is rather heavy. As one of the few first-party PlayStation games of 2025, many players will be looking to it to scratch the story-driven AAA blockbuster itch that has been out of reach for a lot of the year. But, beyond that, it has the unenviable task of following up the beloved Ghost of Tsushima.
Ghost of Yotei has been kept behind the curtain throughout most of its development, but recently, it had a big showing as the focal point of a State of Play broadcast. Depending on who you ask, they'll either say it looks stunning and has some potentially exciting gameplay evolutions or it looks good... but also very familiar.
That split in perspective isn't surprising to directors Jason Connell and Nate Fox. In fact, that very much is the intent. The challenge, however, is in finding a good balance between the two, which is easier said than done. Following the State of Play, GameSpot spoke to Connell and Fox about the success of Ghost of Tsushima and how Sucker Punch approached its sequel, as well as what players can expect when the game launches in October.
GameSpot: Ghost of Tsushima was a spectacular game and I think it's fair to say that it elevated awareness around the studio significantly. What was that like afterward? How did you feel after that and did you start to feel the pressure of having to meet that high bar now?
Jason Connell: Making Tsushima, there's certainly a lot of passion that goes into that project. Nate and I love samurai cinema, so getting to make a game in that sort of way was exciting, but I think it's certainly very thrilling to see it land with a bunch of people--way more people than maybe we anticipated. And that's a very positive feeling; kind of an overwhelming feeling too.
The amount of people that were posting photo mode [shots] on Twitter and reaching out and making comments--whenever you have something that many people play, there's going to be things they hate about it, there's going to be things that they love about it. And you just hear it all. It's certainly a new feeling.
But I know for me, and Nate might feel different, it certainly makes it feel daunting to go make whatever comes next, because inevitably people are going to be like, "Oh, is this as good as your last thing?" That's just a normal part of the creation process, though, so I think it's a gift. We have great [intellectual properties]. We're part of a great studio. Sony, in general, lets us be really creative. It feels like we're sitting in a really awesome spot where we can build off the shoulders of an awesome game that we created, but then add all these extra new features in and fresh elements that maybe we didn't have time for in the last game because we were just trying to get the basics moving. It feels both exhilarating, overwhelming; really a lot of gratitude, but also at the same time really creatively fulfilling to be able to make Yotei the way we want to make it.
Nate Fox: I found it really inspiring, actually, to see people play the game on YouTube or Twitch and talk about what they liked, they didn't like. It fuels all of us here in the studio when we're making the sequel to see where people get so much enjoyment out of the game. And it's a new experience. When we were making Sly Cooper and Infamous, people didn't do live playthroughs of Sly, so I didn't know what level hit. It's really exciting to have this level of transparency into how people are enjoying the video game, you hope and you dream they're going to like this part or react in this way to that part.
Now we get to see it and see where we're right and where we're wrong, and it affects how you choose to work on the next game. But overall, it's a really incredible change in how video game creation works because before, you made a thing that you threw over a fence and you hoped people liked it, unlike a movie, where you could go into a movie theater and sit amongst people watching it and see if they laughed or didn't laugh. It is new now. We get to see how people really enjoy it or how they react.
With that in mind, has the process of coming up with or creating a sequel changed at all? Because I imagine so soon after you go, "Oh, we've done Tsushima, let's go to the next one now," you presumably have to sit there and start poking holes in the game that you just made and love to figure out where you can go next. Is that made any easier by being able to flip on a YouTube channel and have people just break down everything that they don't like? Or what's that process like for you both?
Fox: [Laugs] Sorry. I started laughing because you're like, "Oh, you have to go through the process of pointing out the things you don't like" but at Sucker Punch, we are relentlessly critical of our work.
Connell: Every week.
Fox: That is our love language. We just do criticism in a constructive way. We definitely are hard on ourselves, but it's because we want [our games] to be really great and we have a lot of passion to manifest this thing. So, when we get done with Ghost of Tsushima, we kind of know, "Oh, here are the parts we think are lovely. Here are the parts that we don't like as much. How can we invest more in the parts that seem very alive?" But it's such a long process of making the game. Of course, you're looking at online articles, photo mode posts, or YouTube, and it changes some of the ways that you consider the game because you can see [those things].
Connell: For sure. I know that, for Nate and me, all those things are true. And then before we even really started on the next thing, we sort of [said], "Here are the core pillars." Because when we're making Ghosts of Tsushima, it's just coming out of us and we're changing stuff daily. Now it's like, "Oh, we have this whole thing we built, now we want to turn it into a franchise, so what are the things you have to carry forward?" So, we created a whole pillar sheet: lethal precision and combat; samurai cinema film-inspired, stunning art direction and beautiful depiction of the world; not just photorealism but a style that kind of matches; surrounding ourselves with advisers. Whatever those pillars were, and there's a whole host of them, we're like, "Okay, these can't change. We have to do all of these. Now where's our sandbox? Where are we going to play? What do we want to push on?" And that was a kind of fun experiment.
How do you strike a balance between making progress in design and ideas without compromising those pillars, knowing that a lot of people might come to it looking for something drastically different?
Connell: This sounds stupid, but it actually really helps and it really works: we actually use this term, "Fresh but familiar." There's versions of this game which could have been hyper familiar and there's obviously versions of the game that could be hyper fresh and you lose the identity of Ghost. But again, part of that is, what are you going to carry over? And for example, the art style, we could have taken a route where we're like, "Let's go for photorealism on the next one." But the art style is part of the identity to Ghost, so why would we move away from that? In my opinion, and I think our team's opinion, it is a longer-lasting, impressionable feeling to have a style that resonates with people, that resonates with the game.
Now, some people might be like, "Oh, it kind of looks like the last one." I'm like, "Yeah, we love the art style of the last one. I think it's integral." And so what we said is, "Okay, now how do we expand upon that?" We have way longer sight lines. There's better visual rendering quality all over the place. Performance is better. There are all kinds of things that we improve and we could talk about that forever.
But the point is, that is familiar, but adding a little bit of freshness on it. And some things [are] purely fresh, like our memory mechanic [where you can relive Atsu's younger days] that we have that's inside the home. So, that's purely a narrative tool that you can do at any point in time. That is totally just a completely fresh thing. There's nothing like that in any of our previous games. And to be able to just bop back and forth instantaneously; totally new. Or sure, there's a relationship with animals in our games, like foxes and birds in the last one, and the sense of nature, wind, whatever. And this one, you have a wolf. The wolf is a much deeper experience than anything we've ever done before. So, it's a nice mix. It's the familiarity part of it, because wolf, animals, etc., but [it's going] way deeper that makes it a bit more fresh.
For us, Yotei is obviously an opportunity to stand on the familiar because we have a lot of fans that love that, but really think hard about the core aspects of the game we wanted to bring the freshness to. Exploration is a big one. Combat. I'm sure Nate will want to talk about combat. Those two are probably the biggest areas where we spent some time on.
Fox: I do want to talk about combat. I think it's a great example of that fresh but familiar strategy that Jason was talking about. In Tsushima, we had this feeling of lethal precision that was born of classic samurai movies, and we loved it. So, we wanted to not change [that], but of course, we want to bring something fresh. A great example of this is, in Tsushima, we had four stances you could use, and for Yotei, we increased that. Now, you have five stances, but they're not just stances in how you hold your weapon. We said, "Okay, we're going to change those to actually be different melee weapons," even though, as a system, it's the same thing. It's just a radical visualization difference.
Oh, but wait, it's not, because if you switch over to, say, a kusarigama, which is the right weapon against an enemy holding a shield, it also has benefits because of the nature of what the weapon is. In that case, if you get surrounded by a bunch of enemies, you can swing the weighted chain above your head and do an area effect attack to hit a lot of enemies at once. Or if you're holding the spear and you're fighting near a cliff, you can use it to knock an enemy backward off the cliff to kill them. So it's a much broader application of tools than we had in Tsushima, but the foundation is the same style of lethal precision that was in that game. We wanted to give players more freedom, more options, but not leave or walk away from the core feeling that was established in that previous game.
You mentioned previously the identity of Ghost. For me, one of the key factors in the identity was the character Jin, and the mythology that you built around him--the samurai code being corrupted and becoming something new. Is that a major element of Yotei and its identity? Because it seems like Atsu is a little more formed in her identity and is slowly becoming more deadly over time. Is there that same sense of mythology building around Atsu and the Onryo?
Fox: So Ghost of Tsushima, as you point out, was absolutely about a samurai who sacrifices his codes to become a stealth fighter, and that was his arc. Ghost of Yotei is a spiritual sequel. It's not the same story at all.
Atsu starts the game, she's a sellsword. She doesn't live by some code of the samurai. She'll do whatever it takes to win. And she is so relentless in her hunt for the Yotei Six, and she overcomes a lot of odds that should kill [most] people, so the folks around Ezo start to believe that she is a folk tale kind of monster, an Onryo, a vengeance ghost. Early in the game, people believe that about her. She has that identity because of her relentlessness.
And even though she has that quality that people think of her as larger than life, her transformation in the game isn't necessarily, how does she become more and more the Onryo? It's a question of how her identity as Onryo changes her. We get to see her transform from a broken lone wolf warrior who doesn't really care if she lives or dies to [someone that grows] to surround herself with a wolf pack that helps take care of her, and she changes in that journey. It's a unique story. It's a different take on a different facet of what it is to be a ghost in feudal Japan, and we're happy that people soon get to experience it.
It sounds like one of those "what does Batman do to Bruce Wayne, as opposed to how does Bruce Wayne become Batman" stories. One of the things that really stuck out to me was the reliving memories stuff that you discussed. It feels like a kind of John Wick "You killed my dog" effect, where it's like you need something to humanize the main character in a game where the primary goal is to inflict brutal violence. What was the approach for that mechanic and the idea behind that, and what are the limitations of it? Is it that you can do it anywhere, or just specific areas?
Connell: Yeah, there are specific areas in the game that Atsu will visit that are very rich with memories for her, and we wanted to let people experience those memories through an interactive way where you can hit a button, go back and actually play as young Atsu to really experience her life. But that freedom is really important to us because as gamers, as you know, when you're in control, you really feel like you're that character. You identify with them. Being able to go back and forth from memories to the present lets you do a before-and-after shot [showing] the warmth of her youth, juxtaposed with the cold loneliness of her adult life. And because you're in control, I think you feel it more.
Just as you say, we wanted to establish that feeling of what it used to be so that you could understand Atsu's loss, and I think everybody has had this experience where you maybe go home to your parents' house and you see the bedroom that you grew up in and whether you like it or not, you remember who you were at that time. These memories come back and it's a very human experience. And to make it interactive just helps drive home the universality of it.
One of the other things that you really emphasize is the freedom and the idea that Ghost is never going to rush you to do anything before you want to do it. How do you approach that freedom when it could disrupt the pacing, if your character is suddenly running around doing something else for 25 hours when you've got this objective that is very timely? And, secondly, how do you account for FOMO? I'm one of those people who is constantly like, "What else am I missing?" It's that two-pathway gamer thing where we're like, "I'm going to go halfway down this one and halfway down this one and see what's up."
Connell: We might be tapping into some anxiety for you.
Absolutely. Massively.
Connell: [Laughs] We really want to reward different play styles. If there are people who just want to rabbit run the golden path--we don't think that's the best way to play the game, but it's a good story if you want to do that--go ahead, you can do that, and we don't want to obscure that from people. We don't want to make it hard for people who buy our game and that's what they want to do because they are invested in your story and they like it. We don't want to force them to go out to do a bunch of stuff they don't like to do in the open world and say, "You got to do these six things before you can go do their golden path." That doesn't seem like a great experience.
But at the same time, we also don't want to shove that in your face and put all the progression there and all the cool stuff that you can get on the golden path. We want to celebrate the people that like to play wide, and there's a lot of them. People like to play the game for 70, 80, 90 hours and use photo mode at every corner of the map, uncover the beauty, and find the little things, the medium things, the big things. That's why we create things like weapon sensei. To get weapons in the game, you have to hunt down the weapon sensei, you've got to find them in the world, build relationships with them, and then engage with them in sub-missions, and you'll get to get these new weapons and they'll train you how to use these cool new things.
That's one of the reasons why we put that stuff on the side path and out in the open world--such a huge part of the play experience. If you want to spend all your time in the open world, you should be able to do that. We're not going to force you to go over here and do this thing. It's really a simple philosophy that does manifest into some actual game mechanics in the way that we present the game. But really and truly, it's just trying to express to people that you can play it the way you want to play it. The best way to play it is, pull out the spyglass and explore around. We really do believe that, but at the same time, if you really are interested in that golden path story, we're going to make it easy for you to engage in it because there is a lot of emotion and a lot of heart and a lot of structure that does come from that. We don't want to obscure that from people. We're trying to celebrate both.
It's one of those things that I know is tricky to design for. I'm one of those people who loves the freedom, but I also want the game to be gravitating around me to tell me where to go a little. I think I'm just an annoying person when it comes to open-world gaming.
Connell: But I think [the] clue cards are that, a little bit. We got rid of this exhaustive journal that's just pages and pages and texts and texts and just what you've done, what you can do, what you're doing right now. It's exhaustive when people spend way more time on the map, visual, and pictorial references.
Getting these clues, you might get a little bit of a clue because you haven't gotten a weapon in a while or something like that. We might give you a little bit of a clue where a weapon might be and maybe we tell you where it is for this one and maybe we give you a general location. If weapons are your thing, cool, go do it. Or maybe we'll tell you about armor over here. If armor is your thing and that's what you want, great. We try to give you some of these opportunities so you're not completely aimless, and you'll never be aimless if you're on the golden path, but we try to feed you enough cool things to whet your appetite for what you possibly could do in the game.
One of the things that caught my eye was the segment where you were buying a map from a cartographer and it looked like you were placing the map piece. Can you tell me more about that?
Connell: We think maps are cool and we actually spent a lot of time figuring out ways we might be able to interact with the map a little bit more when somebody sells you a map or if you discover one. In this time period, cartographers were mapping out these areas, so it's a nice connection point there. But you can purchase these maps that can take you to a variety of things that you'll learn about and you'll want to get some of them, so there's a little mini-game where you have to figure out, based off the map that he gives you, where it goes, and when you figure out where it goes, it rewards you. It's a little bit of a mini-game inside of the map experience.
I'm a person who plays primarily in stealth and when you were presenting Atsu she very much seems to be engaging head-on in combat. Will stealth players still be able to scratch their itch?
Connell: You can absolutely sneak up on enemies and assassinate them when they're unaware. I think this is a really important part of the fantasy. Atsu is not burdened down with the sense of how you're supposed to honorably attack enemies. She'll do whatever it takes. We showed in the State of Play how you can use a kusarigama. There are more tools and different behaviors we've developed for Yotei to make that a richer experience, but I like to think that the stealth, even though you can just engage vis-a-vis stealth if you'd like with most enemies, it's about a dance between stealth using ranged attacks and melee combat. The player is not locked into any one of these things. You can move between them when you're up against a group of enemies, and it just offers a lot of freedom of play style to users.
I'm a ranged player, the rare weirdo who likes to shoot at things with a bow, and the game works for ranged attack folk. Again, I was talking about earlier, where offering the player a lot of options means that they get to play and approach the game in the way that best suits them. It's more than just combat or stealth. It's also whether or not you like to go after the main story or do a lot of exploration. That is a big component of how we want to make the game be what it is to you, so that it meets you where and how you want to play.
Working with two consoles now, PS5 and PS5 Pro, is there anything distinguishing between them? Are there any advantages to one over the other? What was it like to work with that extra horsepower?
Connell: The broader answer to your question is that we're going to actually do a bit more of a deeper dive on all the specifics of the Pro features and have all those details ready. Unfortunately, we don't have those here today.
I will say I can speak less specifically about that and more general about PlayStation and making the game. There are a whole host of things that, and some of it on the Pro too, that has really helped us visualize the world in a new way, and advance that artistic, beautiful style in an appropriate way that still celebrates that. It doesn't just go into photorealism, but it really props up our creative and artistic goals.
For example, way longer sightlines than we had in the last game. We've been able to vastly improve our far terrain rendering and I think people that see Tsushima and compare it will be like, "Whoa," because it's crazy. I was a bit shocked when those features came in. Or things like native 4K rendering or improved hair and skin. Snow deformation--we didn't have that in the last game. If you have a fight in the snow, your weapons make slices in the snow, your feet trample all over the place. The characters get all snowy, there's blood going everywhere. It's a messy, cool experience because of the deformation. We even extended the deformation into things like chunky mud, so if you're in really thick and deep mud. These are just things we didn't have before and that we do have in this game. We're really excited about that, but specifically for the Pro and the difference between the base and the Pro, we'll have a nice breakdown in the future regarding that.
What was it like getting Shinichiro Watanabe for the game? It must've been a wild journey to get him involved.
Connell: Each one of [the directors] have their own unique journey to try to bring forward the idea with them, and each one has their own way to approach it. Shinichiro Watanabe was also doing Lazarus at the time, and I think they were just launching it. It was in its first episode. It was a really exciting time, and I watched it and I was like, "Oh, man, I love this. This is good." It really just reminded me how much I loved Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop.
See, these Samurai video games, it doesn't matter what they are. People do playthroughs of them and they throw lo-fi beats over the top of it, just for their stream or whatever. I'm like, "Man, we should do a mode where we celebrate that genesis point, really." Even though it's anime, it's not classical Samurai cinema, but there's a huge overlap with our fans like yourself or anyone, myself, that really is attracted to that and recognizes that. I was like, "We should celebrate that."
We reached out, had a meeting with them. They were super psyched on the idea, really excited.
Really, almost immediately [Watanabe-san] went into like, "Oh, I'm going to get these artists. I think these people might be really great fits." And within a very short amount of time, we were already getting music. We have several original tracks he's created. We've got some remixes of our actual score. It was a really positive and very exciting journey for us, and really, really, really honored that he was willing to and was excited about it. Our fans get to hear that when it comes out.
Source
Ghost of Yotei has been kept behind the curtain throughout most of its development, but recently, it had a big showing as the focal point of a State of Play broadcast. Depending on who you ask, they'll either say it looks stunning and has some potentially exciting gameplay evolutions or it looks good... but also very familiar.
That split in perspective isn't surprising to directors Jason Connell and Nate Fox. In fact, that very much is the intent. The challenge, however, is in finding a good balance between the two, which is easier said than done. Following the State of Play, GameSpot spoke to Connell and Fox about the success of Ghost of Tsushima and how Sucker Punch approached its sequel, as well as what players can expect when the game launches in October.
GameSpot: Ghost of Tsushima was a spectacular game and I think it's fair to say that it elevated awareness around the studio significantly. What was that like afterward? How did you feel after that and did you start to feel the pressure of having to meet that high bar now?
Jason Connell: Making Tsushima, there's certainly a lot of passion that goes into that project. Nate and I love samurai cinema, so getting to make a game in that sort of way was exciting, but I think it's certainly very thrilling to see it land with a bunch of people--way more people than maybe we anticipated. And that's a very positive feeling; kind of an overwhelming feeling too.
The amount of people that were posting photo mode [shots] on Twitter and reaching out and making comments--whenever you have something that many people play, there's going to be things they hate about it, there's going to be things that they love about it. And you just hear it all. It's certainly a new feeling.
But I know for me, and Nate might feel different, it certainly makes it feel daunting to go make whatever comes next, because inevitably people are going to be like, "Oh, is this as good as your last thing?" That's just a normal part of the creation process, though, so I think it's a gift. We have great [intellectual properties]. We're part of a great studio. Sony, in general, lets us be really creative. It feels like we're sitting in a really awesome spot where we can build off the shoulders of an awesome game that we created, but then add all these extra new features in and fresh elements that maybe we didn't have time for in the last game because we were just trying to get the basics moving. It feels both exhilarating, overwhelming; really a lot of gratitude, but also at the same time really creatively fulfilling to be able to make Yotei the way we want to make it.
Nate Fox: I found it really inspiring, actually, to see people play the game on YouTube or Twitch and talk about what they liked, they didn't like. It fuels all of us here in the studio when we're making the sequel to see where people get so much enjoyment out of the game. And it's a new experience. When we were making Sly Cooper and Infamous, people didn't do live playthroughs of Sly, so I didn't know what level hit. It's really exciting to have this level of transparency into how people are enjoying the video game, you hope and you dream they're going to like this part or react in this way to that part.
Now we get to see it and see where we're right and where we're wrong, and it affects how you choose to work on the next game. But overall, it's a really incredible change in how video game creation works because before, you made a thing that you threw over a fence and you hoped people liked it, unlike a movie, where you could go into a movie theater and sit amongst people watching it and see if they laughed or didn't laugh. It is new now. We get to see how people really enjoy it or how they react.
With that in mind, has the process of coming up with or creating a sequel changed at all? Because I imagine so soon after you go, "Oh, we've done Tsushima, let's go to the next one now," you presumably have to sit there and start poking holes in the game that you just made and love to figure out where you can go next. Is that made any easier by being able to flip on a YouTube channel and have people just break down everything that they don't like? Or what's that process like for you both?
Fox: [Laugs] Sorry. I started laughing because you're like, "Oh, you have to go through the process of pointing out the things you don't like" but at Sucker Punch, we are relentlessly critical of our work.
Connell: Every week.
Fox: That is our love language. We just do criticism in a constructive way. We definitely are hard on ourselves, but it's because we want [our games] to be really great and we have a lot of passion to manifest this thing. So, when we get done with Ghost of Tsushima, we kind of know, "Oh, here are the parts we think are lovely. Here are the parts that we don't like as much. How can we invest more in the parts that seem very alive?" But it's such a long process of making the game. Of course, you're looking at online articles, photo mode posts, or YouTube, and it changes some of the ways that you consider the game because you can see [those things].
Connell: For sure. I know that, for Nate and me, all those things are true. And then before we even really started on the next thing, we sort of [said], "Here are the core pillars." Because when we're making Ghosts of Tsushima, it's just coming out of us and we're changing stuff daily. Now it's like, "Oh, we have this whole thing we built, now we want to turn it into a franchise, so what are the things you have to carry forward?" So, we created a whole pillar sheet: lethal precision and combat; samurai cinema film-inspired, stunning art direction and beautiful depiction of the world; not just photorealism but a style that kind of matches; surrounding ourselves with advisers. Whatever those pillars were, and there's a whole host of them, we're like, "Okay, these can't change. We have to do all of these. Now where's our sandbox? Where are we going to play? What do we want to push on?" And that was a kind of fun experiment.
How do you strike a balance between making progress in design and ideas without compromising those pillars, knowing that a lot of people might come to it looking for something drastically different?
Connell: This sounds stupid, but it actually really helps and it really works: we actually use this term, "Fresh but familiar." There's versions of this game which could have been hyper familiar and there's obviously versions of the game that could be hyper fresh and you lose the identity of Ghost. But again, part of that is, what are you going to carry over? And for example, the art style, we could have taken a route where we're like, "Let's go for photorealism on the next one." But the art style is part of the identity to Ghost, so why would we move away from that? In my opinion, and I think our team's opinion, it is a longer-lasting, impressionable feeling to have a style that resonates with people, that resonates with the game.
Now, some people might be like, "Oh, it kind of looks like the last one." I'm like, "Yeah, we love the art style of the last one. I think it's integral." And so what we said is, "Okay, now how do we expand upon that?" We have way longer sight lines. There's better visual rendering quality all over the place. Performance is better. There are all kinds of things that we improve and we could talk about that forever.
But the point is, that is familiar, but adding a little bit of freshness on it. And some things [are] purely fresh, like our memory mechanic [where you can relive Atsu's younger days] that we have that's inside the home. So, that's purely a narrative tool that you can do at any point in time. That is totally just a completely fresh thing. There's nothing like that in any of our previous games. And to be able to just bop back and forth instantaneously; totally new. Or sure, there's a relationship with animals in our games, like foxes and birds in the last one, and the sense of nature, wind, whatever. And this one, you have a wolf. The wolf is a much deeper experience than anything we've ever done before. So, it's a nice mix. It's the familiarity part of it, because wolf, animals, etc., but [it's going] way deeper that makes it a bit more fresh.
For us, Yotei is obviously an opportunity to stand on the familiar because we have a lot of fans that love that, but really think hard about the core aspects of the game we wanted to bring the freshness to. Exploration is a big one. Combat. I'm sure Nate will want to talk about combat. Those two are probably the biggest areas where we spent some time on.
Fox: I do want to talk about combat. I think it's a great example of that fresh but familiar strategy that Jason was talking about. In Tsushima, we had this feeling of lethal precision that was born of classic samurai movies, and we loved it. So, we wanted to not change [that], but of course, we want to bring something fresh. A great example of this is, in Tsushima, we had four stances you could use, and for Yotei, we increased that. Now, you have five stances, but they're not just stances in how you hold your weapon. We said, "Okay, we're going to change those to actually be different melee weapons," even though, as a system, it's the same thing. It's just a radical visualization difference.
Oh, but wait, it's not, because if you switch over to, say, a kusarigama, which is the right weapon against an enemy holding a shield, it also has benefits because of the nature of what the weapon is. In that case, if you get surrounded by a bunch of enemies, you can swing the weighted chain above your head and do an area effect attack to hit a lot of enemies at once. Or if you're holding the spear and you're fighting near a cliff, you can use it to knock an enemy backward off the cliff to kill them. So it's a much broader application of tools than we had in Tsushima, but the foundation is the same style of lethal precision that was in that game. We wanted to give players more freedom, more options, but not leave or walk away from the core feeling that was established in that previous game.
You mentioned previously the identity of Ghost. For me, one of the key factors in the identity was the character Jin, and the mythology that you built around him--the samurai code being corrupted and becoming something new. Is that a major element of Yotei and its identity? Because it seems like Atsu is a little more formed in her identity and is slowly becoming more deadly over time. Is there that same sense of mythology building around Atsu and the Onryo?
Fox: So Ghost of Tsushima, as you point out, was absolutely about a samurai who sacrifices his codes to become a stealth fighter, and that was his arc. Ghost of Yotei is a spiritual sequel. It's not the same story at all.
Atsu starts the game, she's a sellsword. She doesn't live by some code of the samurai. She'll do whatever it takes to win. And she is so relentless in her hunt for the Yotei Six, and she overcomes a lot of odds that should kill [most] people, so the folks around Ezo start to believe that she is a folk tale kind of monster, an Onryo, a vengeance ghost. Early in the game, people believe that about her. She has that identity because of her relentlessness.
And even though she has that quality that people think of her as larger than life, her transformation in the game isn't necessarily, how does she become more and more the Onryo? It's a question of how her identity as Onryo changes her. We get to see her transform from a broken lone wolf warrior who doesn't really care if she lives or dies to [someone that grows] to surround herself with a wolf pack that helps take care of her, and she changes in that journey. It's a unique story. It's a different take on a different facet of what it is to be a ghost in feudal Japan, and we're happy that people soon get to experience it.
It sounds like one of those "what does Batman do to Bruce Wayne, as opposed to how does Bruce Wayne become Batman" stories. One of the things that really stuck out to me was the reliving memories stuff that you discussed. It feels like a kind of John Wick "You killed my dog" effect, where it's like you need something to humanize the main character in a game where the primary goal is to inflict brutal violence. What was the approach for that mechanic and the idea behind that, and what are the limitations of it? Is it that you can do it anywhere, or just specific areas?
Connell: Yeah, there are specific areas in the game that Atsu will visit that are very rich with memories for her, and we wanted to let people experience those memories through an interactive way where you can hit a button, go back and actually play as young Atsu to really experience her life. But that freedom is really important to us because as gamers, as you know, when you're in control, you really feel like you're that character. You identify with them. Being able to go back and forth from memories to the present lets you do a before-and-after shot [showing] the warmth of her youth, juxtaposed with the cold loneliness of her adult life. And because you're in control, I think you feel it more.
Just as you say, we wanted to establish that feeling of what it used to be so that you could understand Atsu's loss, and I think everybody has had this experience where you maybe go home to your parents' house and you see the bedroom that you grew up in and whether you like it or not, you remember who you were at that time. These memories come back and it's a very human experience. And to make it interactive just helps drive home the universality of it.
One of the other things that you really emphasize is the freedom and the idea that Ghost is never going to rush you to do anything before you want to do it. How do you approach that freedom when it could disrupt the pacing, if your character is suddenly running around doing something else for 25 hours when you've got this objective that is very timely? And, secondly, how do you account for FOMO? I'm one of those people who is constantly like, "What else am I missing?" It's that two-pathway gamer thing where we're like, "I'm going to go halfway down this one and halfway down this one and see what's up."
Connell: We might be tapping into some anxiety for you.
Absolutely. Massively.
Connell: [Laughs] We really want to reward different play styles. If there are people who just want to rabbit run the golden path--we don't think that's the best way to play the game, but it's a good story if you want to do that--go ahead, you can do that, and we don't want to obscure that from people. We don't want to make it hard for people who buy our game and that's what they want to do because they are invested in your story and they like it. We don't want to force them to go out to do a bunch of stuff they don't like to do in the open world and say, "You got to do these six things before you can go do their golden path." That doesn't seem like a great experience.
But at the same time, we also don't want to shove that in your face and put all the progression there and all the cool stuff that you can get on the golden path. We want to celebrate the people that like to play wide, and there's a lot of them. People like to play the game for 70, 80, 90 hours and use photo mode at every corner of the map, uncover the beauty, and find the little things, the medium things, the big things. That's why we create things like weapon sensei. To get weapons in the game, you have to hunt down the weapon sensei, you've got to find them in the world, build relationships with them, and then engage with them in sub-missions, and you'll get to get these new weapons and they'll train you how to use these cool new things.
That's one of the reasons why we put that stuff on the side path and out in the open world--such a huge part of the play experience. If you want to spend all your time in the open world, you should be able to do that. We're not going to force you to go over here and do this thing. It's really a simple philosophy that does manifest into some actual game mechanics in the way that we present the game. But really and truly, it's just trying to express to people that you can play it the way you want to play it. The best way to play it is, pull out the spyglass and explore around. We really do believe that, but at the same time, if you really are interested in that golden path story, we're going to make it easy for you to engage in it because there is a lot of emotion and a lot of heart and a lot of structure that does come from that. We don't want to obscure that from people. We're trying to celebrate both.
It's one of those things that I know is tricky to design for. I'm one of those people who loves the freedom, but I also want the game to be gravitating around me to tell me where to go a little. I think I'm just an annoying person when it comes to open-world gaming.
Connell: But I think [the] clue cards are that, a little bit. We got rid of this exhaustive journal that's just pages and pages and texts and texts and just what you've done, what you can do, what you're doing right now. It's exhaustive when people spend way more time on the map, visual, and pictorial references.
Getting these clues, you might get a little bit of a clue because you haven't gotten a weapon in a while or something like that. We might give you a little bit of a clue where a weapon might be and maybe we tell you where it is for this one and maybe we give you a general location. If weapons are your thing, cool, go do it. Or maybe we'll tell you about armor over here. If armor is your thing and that's what you want, great. We try to give you some of these opportunities so you're not completely aimless, and you'll never be aimless if you're on the golden path, but we try to feed you enough cool things to whet your appetite for what you possibly could do in the game.
One of the things that caught my eye was the segment where you were buying a map from a cartographer and it looked like you were placing the map piece. Can you tell me more about that?
Connell: We think maps are cool and we actually spent a lot of time figuring out ways we might be able to interact with the map a little bit more when somebody sells you a map or if you discover one. In this time period, cartographers were mapping out these areas, so it's a nice connection point there. But you can purchase these maps that can take you to a variety of things that you'll learn about and you'll want to get some of them, so there's a little mini-game where you have to figure out, based off the map that he gives you, where it goes, and when you figure out where it goes, it rewards you. It's a little bit of a mini-game inside of the map experience.
I'm a person who plays primarily in stealth and when you were presenting Atsu she very much seems to be engaging head-on in combat. Will stealth players still be able to scratch their itch?
Connell: You can absolutely sneak up on enemies and assassinate them when they're unaware. I think this is a really important part of the fantasy. Atsu is not burdened down with the sense of how you're supposed to honorably attack enemies. She'll do whatever it takes. We showed in the State of Play how you can use a kusarigama. There are more tools and different behaviors we've developed for Yotei to make that a richer experience, but I like to think that the stealth, even though you can just engage vis-a-vis stealth if you'd like with most enemies, it's about a dance between stealth using ranged attacks and melee combat. The player is not locked into any one of these things. You can move between them when you're up against a group of enemies, and it just offers a lot of freedom of play style to users.
I'm a ranged player, the rare weirdo who likes to shoot at things with a bow, and the game works for ranged attack folk. Again, I was talking about earlier, where offering the player a lot of options means that they get to play and approach the game in the way that best suits them. It's more than just combat or stealth. It's also whether or not you like to go after the main story or do a lot of exploration. That is a big component of how we want to make the game be what it is to you, so that it meets you where and how you want to play.
Working with two consoles now, PS5 and PS5 Pro, is there anything distinguishing between them? Are there any advantages to one over the other? What was it like to work with that extra horsepower?
Connell: The broader answer to your question is that we're going to actually do a bit more of a deeper dive on all the specifics of the Pro features and have all those details ready. Unfortunately, we don't have those here today.
I will say I can speak less specifically about that and more general about PlayStation and making the game. There are a whole host of things that, and some of it on the Pro too, that has really helped us visualize the world in a new way, and advance that artistic, beautiful style in an appropriate way that still celebrates that. It doesn't just go into photorealism, but it really props up our creative and artistic goals.
For example, way longer sightlines than we had in the last game. We've been able to vastly improve our far terrain rendering and I think people that see Tsushima and compare it will be like, "Whoa," because it's crazy. I was a bit shocked when those features came in. Or things like native 4K rendering or improved hair and skin. Snow deformation--we didn't have that in the last game. If you have a fight in the snow, your weapons make slices in the snow, your feet trample all over the place. The characters get all snowy, there's blood going everywhere. It's a messy, cool experience because of the deformation. We even extended the deformation into things like chunky mud, so if you're in really thick and deep mud. These are just things we didn't have before and that we do have in this game. We're really excited about that, but specifically for the Pro and the difference between the base and the Pro, we'll have a nice breakdown in the future regarding that.
What was it like getting Shinichiro Watanabe for the game? It must've been a wild journey to get him involved.
Connell: Each one of [the directors] have their own unique journey to try to bring forward the idea with them, and each one has their own way to approach it. Shinichiro Watanabe was also doing Lazarus at the time, and I think they were just launching it. It was in its first episode. It was a really exciting time, and I watched it and I was like, "Oh, man, I love this. This is good." It really just reminded me how much I loved Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop.
See, these Samurai video games, it doesn't matter what they are. People do playthroughs of them and they throw lo-fi beats over the top of it, just for their stream or whatever. I'm like, "Man, we should do a mode where we celebrate that genesis point, really." Even though it's anime, it's not classical Samurai cinema, but there's a huge overlap with our fans like yourself or anyone, myself, that really is attracted to that and recognizes that. I was like, "We should celebrate that."
We reached out, had a meeting with them. They were super psyched on the idea, really excited.
Really, almost immediately [Watanabe-san] went into like, "Oh, I'm going to get these artists. I think these people might be really great fits." And within a very short amount of time, we were already getting music. We have several original tracks he's created. We've got some remixes of our actual score. It was a really positive and very exciting journey for us, and really, really, really honored that he was willing to and was excited about it. Our fans get to hear that when it comes out.
Source