A few weeks removed from the release of Ghost of Yōtei, I’m still finding myself reflecting on the story of Atsu. Yes, hers is another tale of revenge, but the catalyst for her vengeance came so early in life that we get to see a grown woman who’s still dealing with emotions and feelings that never had the opportunity to mature. It’s a complex narrative to get right, and it’s made even more complicated when the canvas for such a story is an open world filled with distractions and diversions at every juncture. Despite these hurdles, Ghost of Yōtei manages to tell a genuine and quite affecting tale, something that’s only accomplished thanks to a clear vision and a determination to do right by the audience.
Thanks to PlayStation, I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Ghost of Yōtei Campaign Director Rob Davis, who explained the storytelling mantra that Sucker Punch Productions lives by, the team’s trust in its players, and the unlikely inspiration that Untitled Goose Game had on this open-world samurai action title.
WellPlayed: First off, Rob, congratulations on the release of Ghost of Yotei. I’m about 50 hours in now, still having a great time. Have you looked at the critical reception that it’s had and the player sentiment?
Rob Davis: We’re very happy. And now I am watching far too much TikTok. [Watching players fight] Takezo the Unrivalled over and over again. Yeah, entirely too online right now.
WP: Do you trawl through all the photo mode snaps as well?
RD: Yeah, those are good too. With the photo mode, everyone always does things you would never expect with their shots, and everyone is so creative.
WP: I get my photos just how I want them, and then I find the new slider. So there goes another 10 minutes.
RD: It’s nice to be creative.
WP: Jumping into my questions. Jin Sakai, the protagonist of Ghost of Tsushima, has been cemented as a PlayStation icon, but the team has decided to move away from his story and start a new story with Atsu. What went into that decision to leave Jin’s story where it was and pick up with a new character?
RD: I mean, we love origin stories because as a player, you get to go on the journey of learning a new character, exploring a new world. And very early on, Nate Fox, who’s our creative director, comes from a very theatrical background. He did all the writing for Sly [Cooper], and he’s terrific with all the narrative and story. He always wants to tell a tale of vengeance. And Jason Connell, who was the former art director of a lot of our games and also the creative director on Tsushima, loves all the worlds. And so you put this peanut butter and chocolate together, what if we could tell a tale of vengeance in this lawless area of Hokkaido? And the tale of Atsu was born.
WP: Atsu’s story is almost diametrically opposed to Jin’s. The catalyst for his revenge story came very late in life, whereas hers was obviously very, very early. So, what inspirations did the team draw from when it came to Atsu’s character?
RD: We are super big on samurai cinema. So, Yojimbo is an iconic film, and when I joined the studio, I hadn’t worked on Tsushima before. So, I made a commitment to myself: watch a different samurai movie every night. So Yojimbo was this really strong starting point. But then there are all these other terrific stories about wandering mercenaries and wandering sellswords, like the Lone Wolf and Cub series, which is really fantastic.
And then even within manga or within anime, you have characters like Rurouni Kenshin, who is a surprisingly heartfelt character. But Yojimbo was really the moment of, “What if we could bring that to life?”
WP: You mentioned wandering mercenaries, and that moves neatly into my next question. I mentioned in my review that exploring feels like wandering without ever feeling lost. Why is that specific approach so important to the team?
RD: We definitely made a commitment to try and make the freest and most open game Sucker Punch has ever made. And it’s because those tales of mercenaries [are about] sellswords moving from town to town, and they’re often broke. Picking up a bounty or having to adapt on the fly themselves.
There’s a terrific book by Travis Heermann called Heart of the Ronin, which I would listen to every time I flew up to Seattle. And in those stories, the characters don’t have tons of gear. Often, they just have a dog with them or their garb and maybe a single sword. These types of emotions and feelings that you see in the classic tales are great opportunities for us to make you feel like you’re really exploring the world. And one of the things that came up through the development was the idea of taking what you traditionally see in a shop, all the different gear and different items, spreading them around the world as much as possible so that you really were rewarded and inspired to wander.
Also, from a narrative perspective, Atsu is back after 16 years. A lot has changed, and the player has not been to Ezo as Artsu before. So, you get this really nice moment of “I am really playing as Atsu,” because she needs to explore to get intel and to find out information about the Yotei Six, or even to see how things have changed in the world. And you, as a player, are also going through that too. So you get to really role-play as genuinely as possible.
WP: The guiding wind has come back from Tsushima, which I was a big fan of. It made me swear off waypoints from games, and I even wrote an article on the back of Ghosts Tsushima. This time, it’s met with a card-based mission system that adds to the feeling of wandering without being lost. How do you make those activities that you find throughout the open world feel both organic and worthwhile?
RD: It’s interesting, isn’t it? You probably noticed that this is probably one of the few games without a journal. And that really came from a place of how cinematic and diatetic we can make the game feel. But at a more functional level, I’m so thrilled with how the card system and map work together because you don’t have to page back and forth anymore.
It kind of proves that if you believe in the goal, you might even stumble across some improvements and some convenience as well. Generally speaking, we had this overarching goal of “we’re going to try and make the whole open world feel like everything’s handcrafted, everything’s hand-touched, and it all has a place in the world. No empty calories”
So it has to contribute to Atsu or to one of the villains and their role in the world. Or it has to contribute to Japanese culture or tone. And if we do those, then rewarding exploration is easy because the content itself and the stories that you find are exciting within themselves. And then, as we start to layer in the curiosity of different elements in the world and interesting sites that you might see on the horizon, you’ll hopefully trust that the game values your time as a player.
So there were a lot of opportunities along the way to say, “Should we put more markers on this? Should we make it obvious?” But in the end, we took a huge step back and said, “No, we trust that players are intelligent. We trust that players are curious and that our stories are strong. We trust that players will love Atsu” We just said, “We’re going to trust that we’re going to trust the players.”
So we went for a much more organic and much freer open world. It’s really cool to see how much people are enjoying it.
WP: With the open world being more free-flowing, so too is the mission structure. It’s more player-driven and more choice-oriented. What are some of the difficulties and benefits that come with that approach to storytelling?
RD: The clear benefit is that it makes you feel like a real wandering mercenary. We had a few discussions across the course of the project where we wondered, “Okay, what if we did lock the different tales of the Oni and the tale of the Kitsune more linearly?”.
And we were really allergic to that idea because it cheapened the feeling of being a wandering merc; and, as a player, you get to choose your vengeance target, which is a huge amount of freedom. It’s quite novel as well. And then we had the idea of, “Well, we could lock out certain missions if the characters are arguing with each other or having different spats or emotional turmoils,” which is so important. I mean, humans do not just go on adventures together. They have real issues and differences on how they want to tackle the problems in front of them—no spoilers, of course.
And then the third idea was, “If we make each tale of the Oni, the tale of the Kitsune, dedicated to one of the key characters, we can kind of have it all.”
We can let players explore different areas at their own will. They may even go back and forth between these chapters, which is a new concept for us. And better still, each one will feel like its own self-contained, almost season of a TV show, which tells a different part of Atsu’s vengeance quest, her struggles, and her adventure with the characters.
And that was the commitment we ended up making. We’re gonna let you choose them in any order. We’re not gonna let you play them out of order if you want. We’re gonna let you bounce between them if you want. And to do that, we’ll make each one feel like it’s a meaningful story.
WP: With those quests in mind, Atsu changes quite dramatically from where she starts and where she ends. How difficult is it to tailor open-world interactions with that kind of storytelling, where she has these dramatic changes in ideology, but then if she talks to a vendor, it might flip back to a more passive tone of speaking?
RD: The game is architected like a diamond. It has a strong starting point, with Atsu as the onryo. And then it goes extremely wide in the middle, before coming together for a satisfying conclusion. So all through that middle chapter, we have to honour the tale of Atsu.
We have to honour the player, and we have to honour the state of the world. So we end up writing conditional dialogue that still feels like Atsu in the moment. But if there’s a key thing that’s happened or a key choice that you’ve made as a player, we’ve actually subbed some different lines, or added different alternates, because we never want you to feel like the choices that you or Atsu made were genuine and unrecognised by the world.
It’s more work, but we value the player’s narrative experience and Atsu’s journey so highly that it’s absolutely worth it for us.
WP: Talking about side content. During my playthrough, it didn’t feel like a diversion; it felt more like a part of the main narrative, but just on the periphery. How difficult is it to strike a balance between making side content feel worthwhile and not punishing those who just want to focus on the main story content?
RD: If we do the job really well, it shouldn’t feel like side content at all; it should feel like world content. It should all feel like it’s part of the greater contextual journey.
WP: The senseis, for instance, feel like a part of the main narrative, but they’re optional. Striking that balance must be difficult, right?
RD: You know, we’ve gone back and forth on this so much over the last few years, and in the end, it really comes down to trusting the player. We know players like our characters and find our weapons exciting. And rather than railroading players through certain experiences, we’re just gonna try and inspire them. We’re going to try to make sure that things look curious, interesting, and hopefully majestic in some cases.
And because Atsu is a wanderer, and because the player is also new to the world, our goal is to inspire you to investigate the world and to learn more by doing. And one nice side effect of this is that it really takes out the number of tutorials you need. So when you’re with a sensei character, it’s much more fun to make it an adventure with a character than it is to make it a pop-up.
WP: A lot of the side activities, like the hot springs and the bamboo stacks, came back from Tsushima. But we did see some new ones in the Wolf Den, as well as Atzu’s painting. Were there any activities that you left on the cutting room floor that you thought were particularly interesting?
RD: No, I think we really try to make sure that if something’s going in the game, it honours Atsu and honours the fantasy of being a wandering merc. I will shout out though, when you’re with the wolf, especially since we’re at PAX Melbourne, whenever the wolf distracts people running by, we call that Untitled Goose Game. And so we were a little inspired by Untitled Goose Game, causing trouble as it runs.
WP: Amazing. You would never in a million years think that Goose Game would inspire a game like Yotei, but here we are.
RD: I mean, everyone is inspired by creativity, and Goose Game is super creative.
No, I’m super happy with the mini games that we added to this game. And they bridge the gap between narrative and gameplay. And you’d probably notice some of them even feature little moments of Atsu’s parents. It’s really nice to be able to include those.
And it’s amazing to me how much the voice performances, when you play the mini games, can make it feel like an overall experience. So there’s a few online I’ve seen people talking about where they’ve hit even harder than expected. And that’s super satisfying. So I’m really happy with the ones we ended [putting] up in the game, not just from a functional perspective, but also how much you get a tiny little nugget of Atsu information in some of them.
WP: The last question I have for you is in relation to the moments when Atsu returns home, and you can switch between the present day and the past when she was a child. The player is given the freedom to return to her home whenever they like, but you’re never forced to. Was there ever any consideration to make these sequences a requirement?
RD: Never.
Players are interested in all kinds of things in this game. I genuinely hope players are interested in Atsu and her personal revenge quest, and also Atsu as a human. So, about a year and a half from the end of the project, we really got to see how Erika’s performance was shaping Atsu.
I mean, I’ve been watching Atsu grow up live in front of me for years now, and there was a key moment where we realised, “Okay, this homestead and the surrounding areas, this is not just the Yotei grasslands, this is her home. This is where she’s returning after 16 years.” And so we actually added some of those memories after that.
And we only get so many opportunities to do this in a game, where we put our thumb on the scale and say, “No, this is a big opportunity.” But Erika’s performance had so much warmth and human compassion behind Atsu. We always wanted her to be very confident, very charming, very out for vengeance. And of course, you know, somewhat heartwarming as well, but there’s a layer to her performance that was very inspiring
And so we saw the opportunity to let players engage through non-linear content and understand Atsu more as a human. Not just as an onryo out for revenge, but also as someone who used to live here. Who knew characters in the past, who has family memories here. I think we’ve all gone back to our high school or hometown, and it’s a very human emotion.
So Erika really brought that to the performance, and it inspired us to say, “Okay, there’s something very personal here about coming home. How can we invest in it? And how can we make sure that players have the opportunity to explore it?” And I think if we force it, it just wouldn’t feel quite as special. Maybe even a little artificial. We trust that players will be interested in understanding Atsu not just as an onryo, but as a human being.
WP: Thank you so much for your time, Rob. Again, congratulations on the game.
RD: Thanks for playing. Super appreciate it. Untitled Goose Ga…I mean, Ghost of Yotei, out October 2nd.
Thank you again to Rob and to PlayStation for the interview opportunity. Ghost of Yotei is available now on PS5, and you can read our full review here.
