Ghost of Yōtei Has Lots of Climbing Because Emphasis on Player Freedom and Hokkaido Being Vertical

Sucker Punch Productions’ Jason Connell – who served as the creative director on open-world action adventure game Ghost of Yōtei – has revealed why the recently-released game involves so much climbing. In an interview with GamesRadar, Connell spoke about the game’s emphasis on player freedom, as well as the fact that the real-world area that the title’s world is based on – Hokkaido – in reality has “steepness and epic vertical-ness”.

“There’s this idea of freedom, right?” said Connell, referring to the fact that players have plenty of options of where and what they can climb. “That’s one of the main reasons that we spend a lot of time in making sure that you can climb.” He went on to explain that, since Ghost of Yōtei is “grounded in reality”, the developers couldn’t simply give players a “magical teleportation thing” to get around. “That would break the reality bubble of what we’re trying to create,” he explained. “You try to create non-combat verbs that fit with the world.”

This, along with the fact that Hokkaido is also generally a mountainous place in real life, presented a unique challenge for Sucker Punch Productions. As Connell noted, “suddenly you have to deal with those mountains, and you can choose them to be problems or opportunities.” Ultimately, the studio decided to rewarding its players for exploration.

“But we found it to be a bit challenging to imagine a game like this with as much freedom as we want without having some aspect of climbing,” Connell continued. “Now, we did invest in some quicker ways to get down, like, whether they’re expressive, simple ways, like the quick repels from the top of shrine climbs because they’re really high up, or they’re actually sort of interactive ways, like slides, which were some my actual favorite features that we had in the game… And that’s just trying to make the steepness and the epic vertical-ness of Hokkaido an opportunity, instead of a giant hurdle.”

Connell had previously spoken about Ghost of Yōtei offering players more freedom than any other title developed by Sucker Punch Productions, from its stealth platforming PS2 series Sly Cooper, to its PS3-era superhero franchise Infamous, and even PS4’s Ghost of Tsushima. In an interview, Connell spoke about how, as long as players have fun, the studio doesn’t really care much about what players might choose to do with their in-game freedom.

“Our philosophical sort of thing about this game was to let you have more freedom than any game we’ve ever had,” he said.

“It’s very complex, and the pacing is sort of a slightly different model for each one,” Connell continued. “Narrative pacing is a bit easier to understand, and so that one’s a bit more straightforward, but that open-world pacing one is quite challenging. We do all these little tricks to make it kind of work out for us.”

Ghost of Yōtei was released exclusively on PS5 earlier this month. For more details, check out our review. Also check out analyst estimates of the title having sold more than 1.6 million copies in its launch week.