Ghost Of Tsushima And Yōtei’s Legends’ Co-op Modes Are Experiments According To Lead Designer

Ghost of Yōtei was both Game Informer and one of my own favorite games of last year. The single player campaign is dense and often solitary by design. Atsu spends a lot of time alone, pushing even those who want to get close to her away. The new Legends mode, which released March 10, is not a lonely experience. Like Tsushima’s similarly titled Legends mode, it is a full campaign of levels that can be played with others. The amount of additional game on offer is impressive, even more so when you consider that it is all free for Ghost of Yōtei owners.

I played through the Legends mode (though more content will be added as soon as April) and spoke with the mode’s lead designer Darren Bridges about the process of developing a multiplayer mode alongside a huge single-player campaign and asked the important questions: why does this mode exist and is there financial incentive to adding such a big, free campaign?

Game Informer: I know your title at Sucker Punch – lead designer on Legends – but how does that work? Did you work on the single-player game and eventually move over to Legends? Or has Legends been your focus for a while?

Darren Bridges: I’ve been almost exclusively working on multiplayer for all the development of Ghost of Yōtei. We had a small team that initially started working on multiplayer as the single-player campaign and systems were in development. And then as content wrapped on the core game, more team members moved over to help finish Legends and prepare it for launch.

Did you have to wait for mechanics to be solidified? Like how countering works, for example?

It’s an interesting process. So, there’s some things that we can build independently that are multiplayer-exclusive. But if you played the game, you recognize a lot of the systems are adapted and moved. Pulled into co-op multiplayer online context. We want it to be familiar for players who have played the core game who know Atsu’s story. You want to feel like they can use their skills and apply them in new ways and multiplayer.

It was a kind of a give and take as we moved along through development, as new systems would get developed, we pull them in and figure out how they fit. Some things worked great adapted to multiplayer. Some systems are more about, either single player story or narrative or don’t fit as well in a multiplayer context. And so we try and adapt things that would be a good fit for multiplayer.

Zeni Hajiki is one. When Ghost of Yōtei came out, players were like, “I want to play this against my friends.” And so that’s in the lobby. You can play Zeni Hajiki, the coin-flicking game against your friends. You can even do couch, local play. You can pass and play with somebody on the couch. 

So adding that was directly in response to people playing Zeni Hajiki in the single-player game?

Yeah, that was a big part of it. It’s obviously a head-to-head game, so we were interested. The lobby was a feature that we added in Ghost of Yōtei Legends. And our goal for the content there is to give players something to do while they’re waiting, because if you play co-op with other people, often there ends up being times of waiting. And you can obviously tweak your loadout or your build, but we wanted to give players other things to do, like the Bamboo Strike Challenge with leaderboards or PvP Zeni Hajiki. There’s trainers in there. There’s things you can do to test your loadout. It’s a, “what do you do while you’re waiting for your friends?” space.

I hope this doesn’t come off as rude. My big question about the mode – this extends to Tsushima Legends, as well – and I don’t mean for this to sound dismissive because I like the mode and played it a lot, is… why do this? What is the purpose and goal of this mode? Why add it?

I will say, when we were working on Legends for Ghost of Tsushima as a studio, we hadn’t done multiplayer… I mean, really ever. There was a little bit of same-screen multiplayer in Sly 2 back in the day, but we’d never done anything online or networked. I think for a samurai game, like a combat samurai game, it’s such a natural thing for players to be excited about, or be interested in it being a thing I want to do with my friends. I think it’s part of the fantasy. In the beginning of Ghost of Tsushima, you’re running down a hill with other samurai near you.

We knew that we wanted to do co-op from the beginning. We just were trying to figure out how this fit with what we want to deliver in the single-player campaign, which is a grounded, narrative-driven experience. And so we felt like the best way to marry those two was to create a built for co-op experience that took those same systems and themes and put them in a more action-focused, co-op-focused experience.

Is there a business purpose to Legends’ inclusion? Is there financial value to adding a co-op mode like this, which doesn’t have micro-transactions, right? The entire experience is fully free, right? I didn’t miss a storefront hidden in a menu, did I?

No microtransactions, yeah. It’s free for all players of the game. All owners of Ghost of Yōtei.

We view it as a complementary experience. So, you have a single-player campaign story, and then, this multiplayer add-on feels like it’s providing good value to players. If there’s a strategy thing, I think what it comes down to is, staying true or delivering the fantasy that we want. Which is, like I said, a samurai fantasy is often side-to-side with your allies, and it feels like a natural fit. And just providing good value to players. That’s a good strategy.

So, it’s not like Sony says, “You guys have to add multiplayer!” It’s not some command from on high?

No. When we started ten years ago, the original pitch for Ghost of Tsushima, we knew we wanted to do multiplayer as part of it.

It was an experiment. We didn’t know how it would land. But the player response was really strong. There’s a lot of enjoyment, and people really engage with it. And so, we were like, “We should do it again for Ghost of Yōtei.”

Beyond, I assume, the desire and potential necessity of having more time to develop the Legends mode, what is the reasoning for it not being available alongside the launch of Ghost of Yōtei? Was there ever a discussion of, “We should have this full package available on day one.”

Definitely. There’s logistic challenges. It felt like a natural fit for the development of the content. But, I think – and you played it  – so the Legends framing is that this is the story, or pieces of the story, that happened in Atsu’s experience in the single-player campaign, kind of retold years later by a narrator. We kind of imagine this as being maybe 50 or 100 years later. Someone telling a fantastical story about what happened, but some of the details have been lost. Atsu’s not talked about, and some of the characters have been exaggerated. So, the bosses you find are not human-sized. They’re giants with supernatural powers.

And I think that – obviously, even if someone has no context for the core game, the core story, it should be accessible and enjoyable by them – but I think, there’s a cool appeal to players being able to experience the single-player story; live through it; face all the Yōtei Six in human form, and then get to see it revisualized and recontextualized in this fantastical story. I think that’ll enhance their appreciation and excitement. 

Can you tell me about the art direction? I love how, after spending so much time in Atsu’s life in a grounded and realistic setting, it’s exciting to visit such a strange and abstract version of this world and also not really be beholden to the physics of the world. Like being able to teleport.

When we built co-op initially, we wanted to give ourselves every opportunity to build it specifically in ways that enabled it to be easy to make, fun co-op experiences for players. And when you have fantasy elements or supernatural elements, it’s easier to make content or mechanics or rules that enable that and facilitate that co-op play.

And there’s tons of interesting fantasy ideas in Japanese culture that we tap into and bring in The Oni, or Yuki Onna, the snow woman, or of course, the giant bosses themselves. I think it’s a fresh experience for players and on the development side, too. We love building these grounded, open-world experiences, but it’s fun to take a break and do something kind of crazy. The artists always enjoy just spreading their wings a little bit.

I mentioned the teleporting mechanic, which is something that feels like a product of Ghost of Yōtei’s borderline magical, non-existent fast-travel load times. Is that something that would have been fun to have in the single-player campaign, but simply wouldn’t have made sense in Atsu’s grounded story? Were there discussions about building mechanics like that that wouldn’t make narrative sense in the main game?

When we’re brainstorming ideas for what to incorporate, we’re looking for anything that opens up new gameplay opportunities, whether it’s navigation or cooperative elements or enemies or hero abilities. And that one seemed like a fun fun idea to have, especially as one of the most fun things in stealth gameplay is being able to climb up on a building and jump down on someone. And so being able to teleport across the world, above someone’s head and immediately drop down and assassinate them and then start finding all the people that are nearby just seemed like a fun experience.

What are the plans for adding additional content to Legends? You don’t fight all six of the Yōtei Six.

Yeah, it wouldn’t be the Yōtei Six without the last two.

The raid is going to be launching in April, so it’s coming soon. The raid will be the most co-op-focused content. A lot of the content in the existing game is built to be enhanced if you’re playing with other players and easier and there should be opportunities to work together. But there’s no point where we say, “Oh, you can’t continue unless you have another person by your side doing this.”

But with the raid, you really want to have other people that you’re comfortable with that ideally you’d be on mics with. We’re really forcing you to rely on your teammates when you play and coordinate. It’s the most co-op, co-op. You’ll need high-level gear, high-level cooperation. It should really be a good teamwork experience.

This, admittedly, would have been a better first question, but how long have you been with Sucker Punch?

Sly 2 was the first game I worked on. You, know… now that I’ve said it, I think Sly 3 had multiplayer, but anyways – yeah, Sly 2. I started in 2003 at the studio, so it’s been awhile. I came in halfway through development on that one. So, that was my first experience in game dev.

For more on Ghost of Yōtei you can read our review here, or watch the video review below. You can also read our interviews with co-directors Nate Fox and Jason Connell, and lead writer Ian Ryan.