Ghost of Yotei Creative Director Warns: Controller Complexity Is Overwhelming Players

Sucker Punch's Jason Connell lifts the lid on the studio's make-or-break hurdle — 'a real challenge' at the heart of making the game.

Action games love to hand you a mountain of cool toys. The trick is making sure your brain (and your thumbs) don’t melt once it’s time to actually use them. Ghost of Yotei is very much in that lane, and creative director Jason Connell walked through how the team tries to keep the combat from turning into a button-mashing knot.

Too many buttons, not enough brain bandwidth

Talking to GamesRadar+, Connell admitted that managing complexity is a real design headache. When you stack systems on top of systems and remap half the controller, things can get overwhelming fast. And inside the studio, it can be hard to see the forest for the sword trees: designers are deep on a feature, not 60 hours into a save file juggling everything at once. So when you slam new mechanics into a late-game build for testing, it can feel like you went from one weapon to five and suddenly your hands are doing yoga poses under pressure.

The slow drip is the point

Out in the real game, though, players aren’t getting buried all at once. Connell broke down how the cadence actually looks from the player side: you start with a katana, later unlock dual katanas, maybe skip the odachi entirely, then eventually pick up a kusarigama. There are hours between these milestones, which gives people time to practice swapping from one to two weapons, then two to three, and so on. That spacing is deliberate so the move set grows without turning into a memory test.

The pressure-cooker philosophy

How does Sucker Punch make sure it stays readable? They test obsessively, and they treat combat like steam building in a pot. Sometimes you let tension out; sometimes you spike it with a surprise. Connell put it this way:

"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 are constantly monitoring 'are we overloaded, are we not overloaded, do we need to actually add some excitement into the mix?'"

Yes, getting disarmed is one of those intentional curveballs. It can be annoying in the moment, but it resets your rhythm and forces you to adapt, which keeps long fights from going numb.

Why this doesn’t collapse under its own weight

Connell says there’s a dedicated group inside the studio that spends years tuning this stuff and nothing else. That kind of long-haul polish is likely why Ghost of Yotei aims to stay manageable even when protagonist Atsu is hauling a frankly ridiculous arsenal. The team is constantly asking whether to reduce stimulus, increase it, or just get out of the player’s way for a bit.

• Pace unlocks so players learn one layer at a time (katana, then dual katanas; odachi can be skipped; kusarigama shows up later).
• Playtest late-game builds to find where the mental load spikes.
• Add intentional breakers like disarming to shake up autopilot.
• Watch for when the action is too crowded and carve out relief moments.
• Keep a focused group refining combat flow over years, not months.

About all that climbing...

If you have noticed how much you’re scrambling up cliffs in the trailers and previews, that’s on purpose. Connell says the team leaned hard into the idea of freedom, and the setting does a lot of the work for them. Hokkaido’s terrain is steep and, in his words, flat-out epic, so the game lets you clamber all over it. The verticality isn’t filler; it’s the vibe.