- REVIEW: Live by the sword once more
Any sequel to a beloved game is going to be more of the same to a certain degree, because that’s what we want. But in coming to create Ghost of Yotei, how did you think about building on and differentiating it from the previous game?
Yeah, it was a whole exercise. Me and the other creative director, Nate Fox, we’ve been working together for a long time. It’s a gift to be able to make a game that resonates with people. But also when you decide to make another one, there is this insane amount of pressure of what are you going to do next? Everyone asks you this. You push all that out and go, "OK. As a creator, that’s noise". You’ve got to think about what are the core aspects of the thing that you just made that are truly the centre.
So we build a list [of] things like lethal precision in combat, that’s samurai-film-inspired. A stunningly beautiful art-directed world that’s open and free. But not just anywhere. It’s got to be in Japan, right? Cultural advisers are a strategy to get you there. Then we go from there and say, "OK, now where do we want to go next? Where do we want to take players?" Tsushima is this pretty rural place that not a lot of people have ever heard of, and certainly probably not had travelled there. Hokkaido [Ghost of Yotei’s setting] was more well-known. But it’s not really a place that’s been in modern and contemporary games.
Then we started crafting a classical tale of vengeance inside that landscape. That was a very exciting mash-up. Those two flavours really went well together for in our initial storytelling prototypes.
The games are very successful at evoking a sense of time and place. Can you tell us a bit about the research that goes into that?
Oh my gosh. Yeah. It becomes this extension of your team. You have all these animators and designers and engineers and artists and producers and whatever. It is also advisers on religion and mannerisms and props, script reviews and combat. Like, how do you hold a sword?
In this case with Yotei, it added a pretty significant one with the Ainu people [the indigenous people of northern Japan]. We didn’t [initially] have any consultants or advisers in that capacity at all.
So we had to take on whole new learnings and be much more educated to make thoughtful and respectful decisions. It is a huge part of the process that frankly, before we made these games, it’s not something that was in our wheelhouse. We had to really open up and be accepting of the fact that people are going to tell us like, "that’s kind of not good. Maybe you shouldn’t do it that way".
I was thinking while playing that this may be the first time a lot of gamers in the West come across the Ainu people and culture. Do you feel a weight of responsibility to get these things right?
Yeah. I think for me, I feel that weight of responsibility on the whole IP, [for] the Japanese people and gamers and people that love the game, but certainly for the Ainu too. Because they are very connected to this region. Going to Hokkaido and getting to meet them [personally] brings it to a new level. They took us foraging for food and taught us which plants to look for, all of us together for an hour. Then we went back and made lunch together. They run a museum there, so they walked us through [it].
The takeaway from that is not just to mention all of the education you get, and cool stories they tell you, but you go home wanting to do a better job. You go home saying, "I met these people now. They’re not just an adviser, they invited us into their home". You want to do a thoughtful, respectful rendition of their culture in the game.
So tell me about geography. As a player, I ran around the crater of Mount Yotei, and it made me think about how there was no mission-critical goal up there - I just went exploring. It was just a scenic moment to enjoy. Is creating peaceful, spectacular moments like this one of those core design principles you talked about?
Oh yeah. When we talked about core principles, that actually was one of them. I think perhaps one of them was tone. And the tone was mature. But we want a balance between the violent nature of samurai warfare and beauty. I think we highlighted "taking the time to breathe". Those were successful parts of Ghost of Tsushima, like haikus, the wind guiding you. These are not traditional sort of normal game experiences you might find in a samurai game.
Nature, and taking the time to just be in the place and not pressure people, really took on a life of its own in Yotei. That is a fundamental design goal for the studio. You want [main character] Atsu’s story, which is high intensity and lots of drama, but you don’t have to [charge through it]. You can also just go off and explore for 10 hours that way. That is the type of game we truly intended to make. That came from just embracing the beauty. Like the sumi-e paintings. It adds a little dimensionality to Atsu, but certainly gives you a downbeat moment.
We try to find enough elements in the game that take strong inspiration from real moments, people, geographical landmarks like Yotei itself. We’ve wrapped the whole game around that. It’s like an anchor in a lot of ways.
Take Matsumae Castle, which we got to visit. I think we were all like, "wow, this is amazing". Cherry blossoms everywhere. In fact, I didn’t see a single cherry blossom almost anywhere inside of Hokkaido when I visited, but then we got there and there was a whole castle grounds full of them. We’re like, "OK, when we make Matsumae Castle, we need to make sure that this is where we use cherry blossoms". Not just because cherry blossoms are in Japan, but because they’re around the castle.
So there’s moments where we really lean on these elements. Then there are moments where it’s pure fiction. [Instead] we lean on the plausibility of the space. Would it dream up a character like this? We use our advisers quite often in making sure that we’re riding that line fairly.
There’s an incredible level of detail in the game. Is that something that the success of the first game afforded you, that you could spend the time and resources to add?
I think it’s a couple of things. I think it’s certainly that. Like we get to stand on the shoulders of this awesome game that we made previously. So we know what works and we don’t have to build everything from scratch. We just get to build some new exciting things from scratch and then add those. So we’ve doubled our side content in terms of the variety.
That’s an important lesson that we learned: making an open-world game as big as Tsushima, I don’t think we truly understood how many people would just go spend 80 or 90 hours in the world and collect every single flower they could find.
So we’re like, "OK, we’re gonna go for a world with a lot more freedom and a little bit more push into the open world and let people take their time. We gotta add some variety. We gotta add some curveballs".
I think we’re better game-makers, five years later we know the power of changing up the repetition. It’s just a nice touch, even if it doesn’t have substantial impact on any mechanical value. I think people who really play wide tend to appreciate those moments a bit more.
Yeah, I got one word: Astrobot. I’ve got a 6-year-old who loves that game.
I played [it] and I was like, "wow, they did a really cool variety of uses of the controller". It was really inspiring.
I was like, "this is cool, what a great showcase of what you can do". So, "hey, where can we do that?" Again, especially on the side content where people are [hunting] it on purpose. That’s the kind of player they are. They seek that type of stuff out. They’re a bit more welcoming for experimentation in that way.
It’s cool to see people play with it and engage with it.
What’s your favourite thing to do in the game?
I think it has to be riding through the big open spaces in the fields of flowers with the music playing. I know it’s not big action — I love that stuff too. But to me, you do this a lot. So if you can’t make that enjoyable, then I feel like we’ve missed something.
I feel like the team did an awesome job creating a cinematic sort of camera feel that’s really wide. You’re going through this field of flowers, the music is going on and it’s guiding you to something, that is all the soft systems working really well together.
Those missions when the wolf takes off and you have to follow, that’s basically just a chance to have a cool horse ride.
When it comes to my favourite feature that we added to the game, I think it is the wolf, for sure. I love the wolf. I love the partnership.
I love the parallel between it’s a lone wolf that has lost its wolf pack, you’re a lone wolf that’s lost its wolf pack. It’s a spirit animal in a lot of ways.
Thanks for making a horse that won’t crash into trees.
There’s some clever physics-based steering so you don’t come to an abrupt stop. Sucker Punch takes traversal very seriously. In the Infamous games, there was a lot of cool traversal, and in this game, the horses are traversal. It’s not like a rocket ship, so you have to be very thoughtful with it. You don’t want it to break the reality of the world, but you want it to be really fun. So this time we added that you can jump and there’s a little bit of steering when you’re in the air, and there’s a little bit more choice to make about getting some speed boosts along the way.
I can only take it the way I feel it, maybe everybody’s a little bit different. For me, it is a gift to be able to make a game that resonates — [Ghost of Tsushima protagonist] Jin Sakai and his journey, that resonates with people so much that they might feel upset that you change it in any capacity — whether it’s female or male, just changing it at all. You’ve made something that people enjoy, love, got tattoos of, whatever. That is a true gift.
But at the same time, in order to make that gift a reality, we also had to be given another gift, which is the trust and the creative freedom to be able to explore creating stories and worlds. To me, because I’ve been along the way for all of Tsushima and all of this game, I know that the decisions that we make are so steeped in creating an authentically bad-ass game, with interesting characters and complex emotions.
Our agenda has been truly in the spirit of references like the onryō [avenging female spirit of Japanese folklore]. This is such a rad folktale that we get to bring to life in such a human way. So you don’t let it get to you because it is a part of the creative exchange.
All you can do is show your fans and people that play your game, all of your hard work and your team’s hard work in bringing these awesome new characters to life and hope they give it a chance.
The game features themes of revenge and the cost of revenge, the punishment of the guilty versus the toll of vengeance. So let me ask you, now you’ve been through the journey making this game: taking revenge, yes or no?
Oh, great question. I think I would say, if you’re hell-bent on revenge in such a stunningly beautiful landscape as Hokkaido, you might change. You might change a little. It’s too beautiful not to.
It constantly presents you with new opportunities in life. And so, I don’t know. I think the healing would be the opportunity that I would take.
• Ghost of Yotei is out now for Playstation 5.
- The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
