While many open-world games are known for having a plethora of content that players can experience, Ghost of Yōtei developer Sucker Punch Studios believes that it’s also important to cut things out. During a talk at GDC 2026, as caught by GamesRadar, co-creative director Jason Connell spoke about needing to cut out unnecessary content, and how difficult it can be for some developers to let go of one of their own ideas.
“We try to make it a pretty positive thing at the studio,” he explained. “It’s hard – you make an idea and you’re like, ‘I don’t want to shed my idea, I really want to see it through’. But we try really hard to make cutting things from the game an incredibly positive thing, because it can be.”
To ensure that Ghost of Yōtei wouldn’t end up too bloated, Connell revealed that the studio started cutting things out of the game each week. To further maintain developer morale during this, people would be encouraged to proudly reveal what they had cut out from the game, to the applause of the other employees.
“We just started doing weekly cuts and celebrated them,” Connell said. “People would get up in front of the whole team and say ‘here’s what I cut today’, and people would clap. It turns out it actually works really well, people like to be clapped.”
“Cutting the game is sharpening. If you have four things you can work on, and you got rid of one of them, then suddenly your game is a lot better,” he continued, noting that it’s “really important to do this.”
“Frankly, there’s too many ideas. There’s all kinds of cool crap that we want to do in every single game, and there’s not enough time. And because we’re not growing our team beyond where we are, there’s not enough people either. So there’s no excess, other than trimming.”
During the same event, Connell, along with co-director Nate Fox, had also spoken about one of the ideas that ultimately got cut from Ghost of Yōtei: rock climbing inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. However, he noted that the mechanic didn’t really work well with the idea of the wandering ronin that Sucker Punch Productions was aiming for with protagonist Atsu.
“If something is not going well, we can be like ‘does that make you feel like a wandering ronin?’ And if the answer is no and it’s a sucky feature, then why are you working on it? Just move on.”
Fox noted that, after playing Breath of the Wild, he wanted just about every game to offer similar freedom to climb anything the player could want. However, this clashed against the open-world design of Ghost of Yōtei, which had invisible walls to stop players from heading into unintended areas. Ultimately, he said that, “if we gave you a tool that said you can climb anywhere, and you started using it and you found bupkiss, it pretty much trains you to stop climbing, because exploration wasn’t worth it.”
Ghost of Yōtei is available exclusively on PS5. For more details, check out our review. Also take a look at our review of its recently-added co-op multiplayer mode Ghost of Yōtei: Legends.
