Jason Connell explains Atsu's adaptive combat and the freedom it brings to Ghost of Yotei

The latest game from Sucker Punch Productions gets fantastic reviews and seems to match (and often even surpass) the outstanding Ghost of Tsushima from 2020. A while ago, I had the opportunity to talk to Jason Connell, Creative Director of Ghost of Yotei. For almost half an hour, we chatted about why Sucker Punch decided on a new protagonist and setting, among other things. Enjoy!

1. Ghost of Yotei review: Majesty among vengeance

Maciej Bogusz: Why did you choose Hokkaido - or Ezo, as it is called in-game - as the setting of the game? And why exactly does the story happen 300 years after Jin Sakai’s adventures?

Jason Connell: When creating a new game, especially a follow-up to a world as stunning and immersive as Tsushima, you have to find a location that is not only breathtakingly beautiful with a rich array of biomes and historical landmarks to bring to life, but also presents an exciting new landscape for players to explore. While searching for our next destination in Japan, we found Hokkaido to be quite stunning. It boasts a diverse range of biomes, from massive snowy mountains such as Mount Yotei to the beaches of its southern coast. It also features castles and other remarkable historical landmarks. Its sheer vastness makes it difficult to turn away from. And then there are some movies that give us great inspiration, like Unforgiven from 2013 [Japanese remake of the 1992 film starring Clint Eastwood], shot inside of Hokkaido, and it really presented in this like wild and dangerous landscape. And that's exactly the kind of landscape we want. Also, it's not been done very often in modern video games; I can't think of a title that's gone into an open-world Hokkaido, so that was pretty amazing.

About the time period, we already knew because we like making origin stories. We knew that we were going to try to craft a new character and a new story, and we wanted to match the world and the landscape that it comes from in an evocative way. So we came up with the time period right after the Battle of Sekigahara, as there's a pretty significant change that happens during the Edo period in Hokkaido, which influences the way it's perceived and even named. So Hokkaido - Ezo, it's gonna present itself as a quite lonely place, very nature-filled. Some movies portray it as a little bit more dangerous. We liked the idea of taking that dangerous, wild landscape that we can make as beautiful and stunning as Tsushima and crafting a vengeance tale inside of it, where you are hunting people surrounded by all that rugged beauty. And that to us was a really good matchup.

MB: Yeah, it gives me that feel of the Wild East. But let’s get back to your previous game for a moment, because its conclusion left several open doors for continuing Jin Sakai's story. But ultimately, it was decided to focus on a completely new era and protagonist. And why is that? Has Jin's potential been exhausted?

JC: I wouldn't say that. I would say that we are, especially as creators, very fond of telling origin stories. They're really fun to create, and they're fun for players to get to see who this person is and then break them or change them or grow them or maybe all three.

And because it's a ghost game, the question “what does ghost mean” has to come up. And we stumbled upon this folk tale of the Onryo – about people, often women, who have been wronged in life, and they've now come back to seek vengeance. We found this tale very inspiring, especially set in this lonely, wild landscape; that legend could be kind of haunting to bring to life. And so with Atsu, we went for a classical vengeance tale up front, and chose for her arc to be more about how one goes from something that's so traumatic to having to heal over time. We talked about it as a tale of a lone wolf that has to find their own wolf pack.

MB: Right from the start, you can tell that a lot of research has been put into the game. What did this process look like?

JC: We learned a lot from Ghost of Tsushima. When we were making Infamous, we were just animators and artists and designers. That’s the team you're building a game with. You might have some specialists here and there, but mostly just tech people. But for making Ghost of Tsushima, we learned that you have to expand your idea of team because now you have a mannerisms advisor who's on stage, making sure you're not pointing to each other and that there's enough spacing between the two actors. Or how do you depict religion, differences between Buddhism and Shinto, and cultural differences in different times - these are things we just don't know, so you have to surround yourself with various different advisers. We worked with some of them on making the second game, but we also had to expand. For instance, the Ainu people are not part of our Tsushima experience as much, but in Hokkaido, it’s important to depict their lives and their impact on the culture as a whole. So we went to Hokkaido and got to meet with the Ainu community; we got a great consultant there. We expanded in terms of how we make this game in a thoughtful and meaningful way, while still being a piece of entertainment for people.

MB: Ghost of Yotei totally gives up the question marks on the map and gives you that feel of freedom. And I think that's amazing. And it's also a big change compared to Ghost of Tsushima. What are the reasons for it?

JC: I love playing open-world games that don't lead you by hand, but let you have the choice to figure out where you want to go. In Tsushima, I think we didn't. We've created a game for open-world players as well as story players, and that is a very complex balance to get right. The story and the freedom of the open world collide sometimes, sometimes really hard.

So in Ghost of Yotei, we decided we're going to remove anything that stops you from immersing yourself into this world, things like a giant journal (not that Tsushima had a particularly huge journal, but it was still full of stuff that you can do and you have to read a bunch; it was awesome for that game, but maybe we don't need that this time). We wanted to make it a little bit more immersive on the map and to catalog your adventures in a much more artistic way with these little cards that she [Atsu] draws. Instead of question marks or the journal telling you there's some curiosity there, maybe you just have the curiosity and go yourself. And it's up to you if you want to go and do them; you have to read the card a little bit to figure out which direction to go and what you might be looking for. But it really lets you have that open-world experience.

But if you're a golden path player - we don't ever try to hide it from you. We try to make it very easy to track main quests down because some people are those types of players. So the question marks and the journal and the topic cards and the campfires - we built it all to create a more immersive, open, free experience for those who especially like to play that way.

MB: You mentioned that Atsu paints these cards and clues on the map. And I imagine that it was a lot of work for the artists. Can you tell me something about it?

JC: Well, the map in Ghost of Tsushima looks amazing. I think the team did an awesome job just bringing it to life. But it's not meant to be a hand touch thing. It's just a really nice thematic presentation of a map. In this game, we decided that Atsu draws – that these are her drawings and her renditions of the map, her expression, the way she sees the world. And the cards are all, I think, wonderful artistic opportunities to suggest to you a little bit about what is on her mind. And we liked the idea that they're all handmade - I mean, they're all hand-made from somebody on our art team – as we found in the last game that when you make icons more interesting, people remember them a little bit more, they pay a bit more attention to them. So we decided, let's make it not just that you can remember them, but like it's the expression of Atsu. The map is her map.

MB: Compared to Jin's fighting style, Atsu's style is a bit different. She isn't a samurai. Did you have any specific idea behind that?

JC: We wanted the fighting style to match the character without changing the fighting style completely because we love the one in Tsushima. But Atsu is highly adaptive - she's had to be adaptive her whole life. Her childhood was taken from her. So she had to learn to use what she can, and it extends into the combat experience. She might go in with one sword, but if there's somebody in her life that teaches her how to use Yari, a spear, then suddenly, if that's helpful in her environment, she's gonna use it. If there's a weapon on the ground that she could pick up and throw, she goes for that. If she gets her weapon taken off her, there's a moment of panic, but she'll run around, figure out where it is. She is far more adaptive in that way, not really bound by a certain way of fighting exactly, like maybe Jin was (I mean, Jin is very bound by a code and his whole story is wrapped around that). The story allows Atsu to fight the way she wants, even using fear as a weapon, too, or use a gun, for example. That is her doing whatever she can to get back at the people who took her family from her.

The game was also a joy to make; each one of these things is like a little bit of a love letter to video games and samurai. Films and anime, too, so it was a really fun game to make.

MB: There are two new [audio-visual] modes in the game, Watanabe and Miike. How were they created? And did you meet with these creators?

JC: We've created the Kurosawa mode, which is mostly visual and a little bit of an audio mode, that gives you the feeling of one of Kurosawa's older classic black and white samurai films, as homage to a great creator that have inspired us for a long time. In this game, we had a little bit of room to do something really fun. And we couldn't do it without Miike. In 13 Assassins, the combat was so inspirational to Ghost of Tsushima and Ghost of Yotei. Quick, fast, bloody, picking up weapons, the mud and blood at the very end of that movie is just incredibly good. With Watanabe, it's different; I really love those old classic animes, Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop. Amazing era for anime. But we found that the choice of using that type of music inside of Samurai Champloo was very inspirational and set off a generation of people who marry those two subjects together. So we reached out to both those directors. I met with Miike-san, I met with Watanabe-san. I presented the ideas to them and maybe showed a little bit of a mockup for each one of how it could go and where it would go in the settings, and they were so kind and so excited and gave all sorts of feedback. Miike actually wanted to name a sword (we have sword kits in the game) and shared a fun story about his very strong love for a very specific moment inside of 13 Assassins when the guy dies at the end, and a fly lands on his nose. So he named one of the swords in the game and wrote the description for the sword kit. Hopefully, our fans who love movies can share their love for our game and those directors at the same time. I actually was testing the Watanabe mode and it's it's amazing. It's really fun for exploring and going on after you finish the plot.

MB: I want to go back to the Ainu people for a moment because the game features a really great representation of them, and one of the Polish most prominent ethnologists, Bronislaw Pilsudski, was researching the Ainu people. Did you, by any chance, use his research in the game? And if not, how did you research them?

JC: If you look up the history of Hokkaido, it's really hard to just not to suddenly find yourself reading about the Ainu people. And that got us to a point where everyone in the studio was probably reading various parts of the Internet about their history and how they exist today. I'm positive that at some point that we probably benefited from that Polish researcher. Besides, one of the greatest aspects of research that we were able to secure was actually having a member of the Ainu community and her family become our advisers. And they invited us to Japan, we went to Hokkaido to all different sorts of places. A day and a half we spent in this community meeting the advisers in person, five or six of us. It was wonderful. We went foraging with them, we spent like an hour picking plants to take home, and then cleaned them and washed them, and made food with them. They were very proud of their community and very proud of their heritage, and were so gracious with their time to share. They lived right next to a cool museum that they helped manage. So it was an incredible learning experience. And the most important thing is when you do something like that, you come back and you have this renewed interest to just do a really good job, you want to because you've met them, you've spent time with them, and they're kind and they're nice and you made jokes with them and they were really wonderful people. And from there, for months, for years even, they were giving us feedback on scripts and how missions would play out and just making sure that our depiction of the Ainu people was thoughtful and respectful, but also really engaging.

MB: Do you plan to add the New Game Plus mode? I can definitely feel that hardcore fans would love it. I would love it, for sure.

JC: The only thing we've really announced, so far is our dedication to another Legends mode. So we have that coming. We've put that out there in a cool trailer. I think our fans are really excited. Right now, though, we're actually still doing last-minute changes and fixes to make sure that the full final Yotei experience is the best game we've ever made [the interview was conducted right before the release]. And we'll have more to share in the future.

1. Our guide can help you explore Ezo on your own