Ghost of Yotei is a pretty great game, as proven by its numerous TGA nominations, and while it's not too different from its predecessor — Ghost of Tsushima — it has one or two interesting mechanics that have been added to spice up the game world and story. One of those mechanics was a pretty neat time travel system that allowed players to go back to when the main character, Atsu, was a kid.
Unfortunately, this could only be done at certain times and in predetermined areas, but a recent Creator to Creator episode featuring Ghost of Yotei Creative Director Jason Connell (thanks to MP1st) revealed that this wasn't always the case. In reality, the original and requested implementation of this mechanic was much more ambitious.
Ghost Of Yotei's time travel system was scaled back during development
In the video, Connell explains that the whole reason for the time travel mechanic was to act as a narrative tool, allowing players to quickly return to Atsu's past to remind them of what they're fighting for in the present. Finally, he reveals that Sucker Punch originally envisioned this mechanic to work virtually anywhere in the game world, allowing the player to switch between time periods with the press of a single button. Unfortunately, the work was a bit too much.
Ghost of Yotei is on track to be as big if not bigger than Tsushima despite boycott attempts
Yotei sold 3.3 million units in its first month.
“It started with doing it in as many places as we can, maybe everywhere. Can we do it as a bet on the ground game feature?” says Connell. “What we found after a year of working on it and testing it and trying to understand how it could be a game mechanic and be a useful element, you double your art… Even though it's this amazing feature, it saddened me the day I had to kill it.”
However, Connell isn't all that upset about having to narrow down the mechanics, eventually explaining that he still thinks it was the “right choice” to scale things back, as he still believes that Sucker Punch was able to make it a powerful narrative tool, even if it was limited to certain areas in the game. It's an interesting insight into game development that gives us a good idea of the sacrifices developers sometimes have to make to get their games out the door.
- Released
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October 2, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and gore, drug references, intense violence, language, partial nudity, alcohol use
- Publishers
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Sony Interactive Entertainment
