Ghost of Yotei highlights the biggest challenges of making open world video games
Another month, another high profile game with a gigantic open world to explore. But the biggest problem with these games is not actually their size.
Note: This story contains very light spoilers for Ghost of Yotei, mostly involving the structure of the game’s story, rather than specific plot points.
Another month, another high profile open world video game.
The format is clearly going nowhere, and presumably because the demand for it remains strong. But is it evolving, or becoming stagnant?
You have likely heard the main, recurring critiques of open world games before: that they feature too many repetitive tasks which stray into becoming boring; that they have ballooned to such an overwhelming scale that it is difficult for time poor or worn out players to even complete them; that they kneecap a developer’s ability to tell a coherent story.
Ghost of Tsushima, the 2020 game whose sequel Ghost of Yotei released this month, was a fine example of the quandary. It was well reviewed, and featured a uniquely gorgeous world set in feudal Japan, complemented by a compelling story and fun combat.
But those elements of flair existed atop a quite generic example of the open world formula. You had a bunch of markers on a map, and a handful of repeating activities to which they’d guide you. Like most games with this format, it often felt as though you were ticking off a checklist of busywork, rather than discovering actual points of interest.
As an example: there were about 50 fox dens. You would discover a den and follow the fox as it led you to a nearby shrine, where you’d get a minor reward. Rarely was the experience any more engaging than that makes it sound.
Sucker Punch, the developer behind both Tsushima and Yotei, made a conscious effort to refine its open world formula for the sequel (our review of it is here), having learned, it says, from the original game’s reception.
‘We learned a lot’: Building on the original
That was actually the first thing Sucker Punch’s creative director, Jason Connell, mentioned when news.com.au asked what had been at the top of his team’s mind while designing Yotei’s game world. It’s set on Japan’s large northern island, Ezo, an old name for what is now known as Hokkaido.
“I think the first and foremost thing was to, you know – it’s very Sucker Punch of us is to learn off of the game that we just previously made,” Mr Connell said.
“We’d just built this whole game (Tsushima) based off our intuition and experience in making open world games for a while, but that was definitely a step into the great unknown, in terms of the scale and the size and how open it was. And I think we learned a lot.
“We put it out there, and you get the biggest user test ever, which is the release of a game, and you can follow people’s opinions and feelings, and people do reviews, and all these kinds of things. You learn. You learn a bunch.”
One persistent piece of criticism, he acknowledged, was that Tsushima got too repetitive.
“Repetitive is something that I think is very common in open world games,” he said.
“I read pretty much everything I could about people’s impressions of Tsushima. And my takeaway was like, hey, people love the freedom. Can we make it even freer with a little bit less handholding? And have creative curveballs?”
He said the team strove to continue one element of Tsushima that was pretty much universally loved: the striking visuals.
“There’s an evocative feeling to being inside this world, which we feel like we tapped into, and we wanted to carry that forward,” he said.
“But also ... we really needed to make sure that, if we’re going to make an open world, we spend some more energy and time figuring out how to make it a more free experience.”
As an example, Mr Connell cited Yotei’s revamped map, which largely ditches the system of placing “question marks” everywhere and telling the player “go right here”.
Instead, points of interest can be discovered in slightly more organic ways. You might spot a landmark while surveying the landscape from the crest of a hill, and mark it on the map. You might chat to a local villager who tips you off about a nearby hot spring.
The bounty missions are a highlight. In one case, you’re told of a killer who’s been luring weary travellers to camp sites in a particular region and murdering them at night. It’s not as simple as going to a map marker; you have to find the inviting camp site and wait to be approached as a potential victim.
None of it’s what you would call revolutionary. But you can sense Sucker Punch’s efforts to sprinkle more agency and intrigue into its world.
“Changing some of the game’s formula to really embrace players that play very wide, that want a very open and free experience, but also spending time making sure that whatever they do find there has some freshness along the way,” is how Mr Connell described the task.
“How do we make them fresh and interesting and different? And have some curveball that’s thrown in so those explorers, they’re not just rinsing and repeating the same thing.”
Mr Connell brought up another example. Throughout the game, Atsu can acquire several different weapons, which help in combat. There’s a sort of rock-paper-scissors system. So if you get all the weapons, and know which one to use against which type of enemy, the gameplay becomes easier and more satisfying.
The developers sought to “softly push” the player in that direction, rather than shoving them.
“If you’ve if you’ve spent too long in the game and you haven’t got a new weapon, we try to suggest that hey, there might be one over here,” he said.
“You can still choose not to, because maybe you’re having fun just going up and down the entire coast of the map, finding literally anything and everything, and that’s awesome. But we might try our best to say, ‘Hey, you might be missing a few things,’ without throwing a big, giant question mark on the map and saying, ‘You have to go over here.’”
The core open world dilemma
The near-irreconcilable tension at the heart of Yotei is common to most open world games. Certainly to those that try to tell a cinematic story.
How do you cater to two audiences at once? How do you tell a compelling, coherent, well-paced tale when you can’t control the pace or even, in some cases, the order in which people will experience it?
Some players will approach a game like this by mainlining the story and ignoring most of the optional side content. You can absolutely do that in Yotei, particularly on the easier difficulties, without making it impossible to complete. Others are happy to spend the 50+ hours it takes to finish everything on the map.
“Probably one of the most challenging parts of making these types of games is we want to tell an evocative story, and we want to have a player-led, free open world,” Mr Connell said.
“I don’t know if you could take two statements in modern video games and mash them together to make a harder problem. It’s very, very complex.
“I think a lot of it is, you have to be a little bit Zen about it. If you can make a really good story that’s easy to follow, for those players, that’s what they’re going to do. For the players that play exploration, and tend to go really wide. How can you make the best experience for those players?
“The fact that they spend 15 hours over here without going back to the story at all, which is something people do, you kind of have to be OK with that.”
That’s the pacing issue. What about order?
Yotei’s story sees the protagonist, Atsu, hunting down the Yotei Six, a group of bandits who murdered her family. Some of them have to be pursued at a certain point in the story, but at one stage the player gets to choose whom to go after.
Mr Connell said it could easily have been constructed in a stricter, more linear way.
“We want you to feel like you’re going out as Atsu hunting down these people. If we just say: here, then here, then here, then here, that’s fine. And we could have done that,” he explained.
“And we certainly could have said you can go get them in any order, but that starts to feel like it impedes (the storytelling) too much. There’s not quite enough linearity there; you need a good beginning, you need a good middle, you need a good ending.”
They settled on giving the player freedom during the bulkiest, middle section of the game, while making the beginning and ending linear.
“So there’s some flexibility in the middle area,” he said.
“But we don’t just structure it with narrative, we structure it with – you know, if you go after the Kitsune (one of the Yotei Six), then maybe it’s because you like snowy stuff, and there are ninjas up there, and it’s a different type of biome, and it’s more mysterious. And if that’s your vibe, and you want to go there first, cool.
“It’s very hard (to get the balance right), but we believe in it, in a little bit of freedom there, but there’s still a very strong beginning, very strong middle, very strong end.”
Ghost of Yotei is available on PS5
