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Developers need to strike the right balance to not overwhelm players (and controllers) with too many buttons and verbs when making combat-heavy games because, as Ghost of Yotei's creative director Jason Connell explains, you run the risk of "cognitive overload."
Speaking to GamesRadar+ about how to manage the complexity of combat as you unlock more weapons and abilities, Connell admitted "the cognitive overload of all of the systems and all the buttons on the controller can be quite intense, and honestly, this is actually a real challenge when you're making the game."
Connell went on to say that "when you're making [a feature], you're working on the thing" and "you don't have the play experience of somebody... like 60 hours [in]." So when it comes time to playtest something, the experience can get pretty overwhelming.
"But you have to remember that somebody started off with just the katana, and then maybe they got dual katanas, and then maybe they skipped the odachi, and then went a while without getting a weapon, and then they got the Kusarigama. It's many hours sometimes in between these, and they have a lot of time to be like, 'OK, I'm gonna switch between one weapon, OK, now I'm gonna switch between two weapons.' It's not typically the case, what we find when making it, like you go from one to five, and suddenly you're just like, doing the pretzel hands, trying to figure out exactly what to do and how to do it under intense combat," Connell continued.
How does Sucker Punch get over this hurdle? Naturally, they playtest a ton and think of it like a pressure cooker: "'Do we need a pressure relief valve? Do we need to create interesting curveballs?' Being disarmed is like the ultimate curve ball, right?... So we're constantly monitoring 'are we overloaded, are we not overloaded, do we need to actually add some excitement into the mix?'"
The whole process "goes through many years of thoughtful consideration by a very specific team that only focuses on this," according to Connell, perhaps explaining why Yotei doesn't feel unmanageable, even when you have more weapons than Atsu could realistically fit in her pocket.
