Ghost of Yotei is a pretty cool game, as its many TGA nominations have proved, and while it doesn’t do all that much to differentiate itself from its predecessor — Ghost of Tsushima — it does have one or two interesting mechanics that were added to spice up the game’s world and story. One of those mechanics was a pretty neat time travel system, which would allow players to travel back to when main character Atsu was still a child.
Unfortunately, this could only be done during certain moments and in predetermined areas, but a recent episode of Creator to Creator that featured Ghost of Yotei creative director Jason Connell (thanks MP1st) has revealed that this wasn’t always the case. In fact, the original and desired implementation of this mechanic was a lot more ambitious.
Ghost Of Yotei’s Time Travel System Was Scaled Back During Development
In the video, Connell explains that the whole reason behind the time travel mechanic was for it to act as a narrative tool, allowing players to quickly go back to Atsu’s past to remind them of what they’re fighting for in the present. He eventually goes on to reveal that Sucker Punch had originally envisioned this mechanic to work pretty much anywhere in the game’s world, allowing the player to switch between time periods with the touch 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 has sold 3.3 million units in its first month.
“It started off as let’s do that in as many places as we can, maybe everywhere. Can we do this as a stake in the ground game feature?” says Connell. “What we found after maybe say like a year of working on it and testing it and trying to understand how it could be a game mechanic and be a worthwhile feature, you are doubling your art… While it’s this amazing feature, it saddened me the day that I had to kill that.”
Connell isn’t that upset about having to narrow down the mechanic though, eventually explaining that he still thinks it was “the right choice” to scale things back, as he still believes that Sucker Punch managed to make it a powerful narrative tool even though it was constricted to certain areas within the game. It’s an interesting insight into game development, giving us a good idea of how developers sometimes have to make sacrifices to get their games out of the door.
- Released
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October 2, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Language, Partial Nudity, Use of Alcohol
- Publisher(s)
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Sony Interactive Entertainment
