Open worlds are difficult to craft. Make them huge and fill them with enough content to justify the space, and the result can become repetitive or tedious to explore. Lean too heavily on guiding the player toward carefully handcrafted moments, and the world stops feeling open in the first place. It’s a balancing act between freedom and structure that defines the genre, and one Sucker Punch has been iterating on from Ghost of Tsushima to Ghost of Yotei.
At GDC, developers from the studio described how Yotei pushes further into that tension with a more system-driven philosophy. Instead of relying solely on authored encounters sprinkled across the map, the team built what they describe as a dungeon master layer beneath the world–a system designed to react to player behavior and shape the experience moment to moment.
“Our dungeon master is called the event deck. It’s an invisible hand that guides your exploration,” said Sucker Punch Productions lead gameplay engineer Samuel Holley. “Like a good dungeon master, it has a linear plan that it adapts to each player’s nonlinear journey, empowering player freedom while making sure you still have a good time.”
At its simplest, the system can be thought of as a hidden structure sitting beneath the open world, deciding what the player should encounter next.
“You can imagine it as a hidden deck of cards lying underneath the surface of the game,” Holley said. A number of interactions built into the world, including bounty boards, encounters in the open that feel random, and visitors to Atsu’s campsites, all become a potential draw from that deck, shaping the progression of each player’s journey through Sucker Punch’s version of Hokkaido.
That philosophy is closely tied to how Ghost of Yotei handles player freedom. Holley and the rest of the developers at Sucker Punch want players to chart their own path, but they also don’t want content to be missed. Nate Fox and Jason Connell, co-creative directors on Yotei, went as far as to say that they put more time into the side content than the main story. It’s that important to make sure the world is filled with compelling stories.
The event deck helps draw players to a variety of content, pushing them from one type of mission to another, including unlocking new abilities, playing different types of combat missions, and experiencing various parts of the story, among other options.
Sucker Punch developed a number of ways to guide players through their world in natural ways. They wanted players to experience the main story of Atsu hunting down the Yotei Six, but they wanted them to do so at their own pace.
“I am going to draw a cone that I’m going to call a cone-of-entry. It imitates the movement of a player as they go into the open world,” said Sucker Punch narrative designer Ariadna Martinez during a separate GDC session. “This means I’ve identified an entire section of the map where I know I will find the player somewhere around this cone in the first 20 to 30 minutes of them playing this game.”
This cone-of-entry was a label that the developers at Sucker Punch had for the opening sections of each area in Ghost of Yotei. They were sections of the map where they would know when and how long the player would be there.
That prediction becomes a tool for narrative and systems design. Instead of scattering critical onboarding or key story beats randomly or at set points alongside various missions, the team concentrates them where players can interact with them to receive mission-critical information about the area, story, or overall history of the in-game world.
“That means I can start putting those first-hour needs, that pivotal information that my teams needed to give out–where am I going to put it? I’m going to put it in this cone,” Martinez said. In some cases, a seemingly random encounter with a bandit or enemy samurai would lead to a short cutscene that informs the player of where the first major mission is in that area.
This structure still feels open, but is guided by systemic rules working in tandem. Players are free to wander, fight, and discover at their own pace, but beneath that freedom is a carefully constructed framework ensuring that every path eventually leads somewhere meaningful.
In moving from Tsushima to Yotei, Sucker Punch has built upon its open-world philosophy. The studio’s take on Japan is still meticulously handcrafted, but the systems guiding the player have become more sophisticated while remaining largely hidden beneath gameplay and story.
