Ghost of Yōtei: PlayStation puts blockbusters back on the menu

Firstly, what took so long?

Sucker Punch's latest is a follow-up to 2020's feudal Japan-set adventure Ghost of Tsushima, one of the last big PS4-exclusive releases from Sony.

"Games do take a long time to make, so it's no small chunk of your life," says Nate.

Ghost of Yōtei relocates the action a few hundred miles north, to the Honshū region, and the setting a few hundred years later, to 1603.

This time the story follows Atsu, a female warrior on a quest to exact revenge against the Yōtei Six - a group of warlords responsible for her family's murder.

With a previous game to build on, it's not a completely fresh start but, Nate explains, the project is still a huge undertaking.

Just having a new main character, for example, requires input from writers, animators and character designers, to name just a few of the roles involved.

Behind the scenes there are many, many more.

Although Sucker Punch has roughly 200 employees at its base near Seattle, many hundreds more work on its games.

The credits for Ghost of Tsushima, for example, contained about 1,800 names.

Some of those will be from abroad, or from outside companies that specialise in certain technical fields.

"Making a video game requires all sorts of different skills, from incredibly technical people... to people who are very driven by emotions, like our writing staff," says Nate.

"And these teams work in co-ordination. It's like conducting an orchestra.

"You need to have all of the elements coming together."

Nate says that a dizzying number of elements can go into a single scene - from music to the programming that makes leaves blow across the screen at a pivotal moment.

"All these teams have to have a sense of where they're going," says Nate.

A sense of direction is something fans have accused PlayStation of lacking in the last few years.

Under its previous boss, Jim Ryan, the division launched development on 12 online multiplayer titles, known as "live-service" games in the industry.

Some of the most famous examples, such as Fortnite, Roblox and Call of Duty, keep players engaged for months and generate huge amounts of money.

Sony has had success in the space with last year's Helldivers II, but a disastrous failure with Concord, which was taken offline just two weeks after its release.

It has since cancelled multiplayer projects based on some of its most popular series, including God of War and The Last of Us.

Pursuing the multiplayer market is a strategy Sony has admitted is not entirely "going smoothly", but it's said some titles with online elements, such as Gran Turismo and baseball game MLB: The Show, have performed well.

The stars of its most recent promotional showcase were Saros, a follow-up to 2021's Returnal, and the long-awaited Wolverine game from Spider-Man maker Insomniac - both single-player games.

High-profile releases can be magnets for controversy, as Sucker Punch recently found when a developer's joke about the death of right-wing American activist Charlie Kirk prompted a backlash.

The studio eventually fired the employee involved, and founder Brian Fleming told journalist Stephen Totilo that "celebrating or making light of someone's murder is a deal-breaker for us", when asked about it.

Some right-wing video game influencers have also attacked Ghost of Yōtei for featuring a female protagonist.

Nate says it was an "unconventional choice", but key to the story the developers wanted to tell of an underdog defying society's expectations.

As the game progresses, Atsu's reputation as an Onryō - a vengeful spirit found in Japanese folklore - grows.

"People think there's no way this woman could have taken out members of the Yōtei Six unless she is a supernatural creature," says Nate.

Big releases can also invite another kind of scrutiny - hype.

With the gap between new games widening, it puts pressure on developers to deliver something that will impress fans.

How do you cope?

"Certainly there's a lot of expectation that games will be beautiful and emotionally compelling," says Nate.

"And that pressure definitely gets us going, but it's nothing compared to the pressure we put on ourselves."

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