Ghost of Yotei has a lot of climbing in it, but that's because developer Sucker Punch was really trying to emphasise how steep Hokkaido really is - plus, you need more ways to get around in a game with so much freedom.
"There's this idea of freedom, right?" creative director Jason Connell told GamesRadar+ in a recent interview. "That's one of the main reasons that we spend a lot of time in making sure that you can climb.
Connell explains that open-world games "grounded in reality" don't have the luxury of letting players loose with a "magic teleportation thing" or other flashy means of transport. "That would break the reality bubble of what we're trying to create. You try to create non-combat verbs that fit with the world."
There's also the challenge of setting a game in Hokkaida, which has "tons of mountains all over the place" so "suddenly you have to deal with those mountains, and you can choose them to be problems or opportunities." Sucker Punch chose the latter, giving players a "really cool reward" for taking a hike to see a shrine, say "- not just a visual reward, you get to see out over this whole place."
"But we found it to be a bit challenging to imagine a game like this with as much freedom as we want without having some aspect of climbing," Connell added. "Now, we did invest in some quicker ways to get down, like, whether they're expressive, simple ways, like the quick repels from the top of shrine climbs because they're really high up, or they're actually sort of interactive ways, like slides, which were some my actual favorite features that we had in the game... And that's just trying to make the steepness and the epic vertical-ness of Hokkaido an opportunity, instead of a giant hurdle."
