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Ghost of Yotei's devs tried to add a climbing mechanic heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but eventually cut it because it didn't fit with the ronin fantasy they were honing in on.
Speaking at a panel during GDC, Ghost of Yotei co-directors Nate Fox and Jason Connell discussed how they moved from a small group devs prototyping the sequel towards full production. A key part of that process, Connell explains, was creating gameplay pillars and being prepared to move away from ideas if they didn't fit; "if something is not going well," he says, "we can be like 'does that make you feel like a wandering ronin?' And if the answer is no and it's a sucky feature, then why are you working on it? Just move on."
One of the casualties of that development philosophy was a rock-climbing mechanic. Fox says he "played Breath of the Wild and thought every game" should feature its 'climb on anything' approach, complete with stamina bar and inevitably falling to your death when that bar ran out. "We got right in there and started prototyping," he explains, ending up with a system that was even working within Ghost of Tsushima; "It was going to be magnificent."
Unfortunately, it just didn't really fit. The world the team had created for Ghost of Yotei had a lot of "walls that you weren't supposed to climb up," but Fox says that "if we gave you a tool that said you can climb anywhere, and you started using it and you found bupkiss, it pretty much trains you to stop climbing, because exploration wasn't worth it."
The result was that the team went back to the more prescribed climbing routes present in Ghost of Tsushima, which would guarantee players a reward for the time they invested in exploration. Elsewhere in the panel, Fox and Connell spoke about how valuable Sucker Punch found liberally cutting features that weren't working, but in this instance, Fox says the team "should have known ahead of time" that the climbing system wasn't a good fit for Ghost of Yotei - because "rock climbing is not a core aspect of being a wandering ronin."
