Ghost of Yotei will seek to bring exploration and weapons to players: “We treat the world as a character”
Revenge will take a new form in the new Sucker Punch.
Last week, PlayStation surprised us with a Deep Dive of Ghost of Yotei, one of its strong titles for this year. Sucker Punch’s title will take us to the island of Hokkaido in Japan, 300 years after the events that took place in Ghost of Tsushima, in a story of revenge and an open world so big that players will get lost and explore.
To dig much deeper, we had the opportunity to interview Jason Connell and Nate Fox, co-creative directors of Ghost of Yotei, who gave us even more details of what was presented.
A place to explore
One of the details that Sucker Punch is most proud of is the power they now have to give players greater freedom and exploration. “The area where we have strived the most is the firepower we’ve put behind expanding on exploration and really embrace players’ freedom in the open world,” commented Jason Connell. “That is something that we saw with Ghost of Tsushima players, they really loved playing in the open world, some people that just want to go through the story and then some people just want to spend 100 hours in photo mode in every corner of our game.”
“We’ve also expanded the tools at players’ disposal for exploration, whether it’s simple things like a spyglass, for letting people look around the environment, find something interesting and ride to it, or something that aids traversal,” continued Connell. “We’ve expanded that feeling of just being lost in this vast landscape because we treat the world as a character.”
And in this world, exploration will have its surprises. During the State of Play we were told that through interrogations we could obtain clues for places, sanctuaries and enemies. However, it will not be necessary to be doing these actions, since we can simply get lost and find it. “The clue system is there to help sort of give you sort of an inclination and an idea of what you might might go find,” comentó Connell. “Let’s take a bounty, for example. It’s a different type of clue card for bounties, and it tells you the last known position. Now, you can go do that if you want, and then when you get there, you’ll have to look for them. But say you never got that bounty and you’re just exploring that landscape and you come across where that bounty is and you’ll end up finding him.”
Weapons, lots of weapons
Another detail that improves for this installment are the weapons. While Ghost of Tsushima was not characterized by having a large choice of weapons, Ghost of Yotei comes with more elements that will help in the story of Atsu’s revenge, although it will not be so simple. “So Atsu is not a master of all of these weapons at the beginning of her story nor is he the player,” Nate Fox made it very clear. “We’ve got all these great new weapons, but they’re not just hanging out in the world. You have to go find and meet these senseis and develop relationships with them, then they will in turn help you, teaching you how to use these new weapons making Atsu stronger,” commented Connell.
In addition to featuring a plethora of weapons, the Ghost of Tsushima stance system will be back. “We’ve taken the stance system from Ghost of Tsushima and we’ve improved it. Instead of four stances, there are five. Instead of just being kind of stance with the katana, it’s now different melee weapons, even though the system’s the same,” Fox commented.
Ghost of Yotei will arrive on October 2, 2025, and a collector’s edition will come with the game.
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