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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
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