Fundamental to any creative endeavour is killing your darling. It doesn't matter how good an idea is, if it doesn't fit, it needs to go. Ghost of Yotei studio Sucker Punch Productions is all about cutting out fluff, to the point the team celebrates getting out the samurai sword on their work.
"We try to make it a pretty positive thing at the studio," Jason Connell, co-creative director on Ghost of Yotei, says during a talk at GDC 2026 attended by GamesRadar+. "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."
The company started running little ceremonies for people to champion how much they got rid of each week, for adulation from the rest of their collaborators. "We just started doing weekly cuts and celebrated them," Connell explains. "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."
I can imagine so. Editing and making minor tweaks and such can be incredibly quite mundane, thankless work. In some cases, what's different mightn't even be all that noticeable. Having a forum where people run through what they've done lets progress be noted, before things progress.
"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," Connell adds, saying it's "really important to do this." He points out prioritizing helps the workflow considerably as well, because Sucker Punch is a leaner team than many other triple-A studios, and whatever makes people's workload more efficient when molding something as vast as Ghost of Yotei, with a huge, historical open-world, is a plus.
"Frankly, there's too many ideas," he states. "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."
