Ghost of Yotei is a reasonably cool game, as its many TGA nominations have proved, and while it doesn’t do all that much to distinguish itself from its predecessor — Ghost of Tsushima — it does have one or two interesting mechanics that were added to boost the sport’s world and story. Considered one of those mechanics was a reasonably neat time travel system, which might allow players to travel back to when fundamental character Atsu was still a toddler.
Unfortunately, this might 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 at all times the case. In truth, the unique and desired implementation of this mechanic was quite a bit more ambitious.
Ghost Of Yotei’s Time Travel System Was Scaled Back During Development
Within the video, Connell explains that the entire reason behind the time travel mechanic was for it 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 current. He eventually goes on to disclose that Sucker Punch had originally envisioned this mechanic to work just about anywhere in the sport’s world, allowing the player to change between time periods with the touch of a single button. Unfortunately, the work was a bit an excessive amount of.
“It began off as let’s do this in as many places as we are able to, perhaps in every single place. Can we do that as a stake in the bottom game feature?” says Connell. “What we found after perhaps say like a 12 months of working on it and testing it and trying to grasp the way it may very well be a game mechanic and be a worthwhile feature, you might be doubling your art… While it’s this amazing feature, it saddened me the day that I needed to kill that.”
Connell is not that upset about having to narrow down the mechanic though, eventually explaining that he still thinks it was “the proper selection” to scale things back, as he still believes that Sucker Punch managed to make it a strong narrative tool though it was constricted to certain areas inside the game. It’s an interesting insight into game development, giving us a great idea of how developers sometimes need to make sacrifices to get their games out of the door.