Ghost of Yotei Devs Say the Tsushima Sequel Isn't Longer — It's All About Epic Scale

Good news if you hate bloated sequels: Sucker Punch isn’t trying to turn Ghost of Yotei into a 200-hour life commitment. Co-founder Brian Fleming told Game File that, sure, Yotei will likely take a bit longer to finish than Ghost of Tsushima, but length wasn’t the point. The goal this time was scale and polish, not padding.

So... is it longer?

Technically, yeah — Fleming says you should expect it to take a little longer to beat than Tsushima. For context, Tsushima’s main story usually runs around 25–30 hours, which is already a full meal for an open-world game. Personally, I’m perfectly fine with that range. There are too many must-play releases every year to be trapped in another never-ending map vacuum.

"Our goal was to not grow the duration of the game."

That line, per Fleming, is how creative directors Nate Fox and Jason Connell framed the mandate. In other words: make it feel bigger, not just longer.

What they actually focused on

This is where it gets a little inside baseball. Fleming described the studio using the sequel to level up the entire production — not with extra hours of quests, but with better everything. Think of it like tightening every bolt on a well-built machine:

• Performance improvements across the board
• Upgraded rendering
• More functionality, plus a wider layer of polish
• Smoother transitions in animations
• Better sound design and implementation

He called it a kind of joyous process: taking something good and aiming at great. Less feature creep, more refinement.

Bigger feel, not busywork

Fleming kept coming back to the idea of a stronger "sense of grandness and scale." That’s the target — variety, scope, and spectacle — without inflating the runtime just for the sake of a bigger number on the back of the box. If that ambition means the game ends up a touch longer, fine. But the length wasn’t the design goal.

Money talk

Also notable: Ghost of Yotei reportedly carries a budget of roughly $60 million. In today’s sequel economy, that’s restrained — especially compared to the soaring costs attached to marquee follow-ups like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and Horizon Forbidden West. Sucker Punch seems to be chasing a bigger experience without the runaway price tag.

Bottom line: expect Yotei to feel larger and more refined than Tsushima, not simply stretched. That’s the kind of sequel philosophy I’ll happily take every time.