Ghost of Yōtei: Behind the Scenes with Rob Davis

When Rob Davis came onboard as the campaign director for Ghost of Yōtei, developer Sucker Punch's follow-up to their 2020 PS4 epic Ghost of Tsushima, he knew that the previous game had set certain expectations. Davis had come from the God of War team, and was moving from a series that leaned on Greek and Norse mythology to one that was more grounded in cinematic language.

The first game had featured an optional Kurosawa mode, which added a film grain over a black-and-white image to replicate the feel of director Akira Kurosawa's jidaigeki chanbara films. The second game in a series can often set the tone for what that series is going to be going forward, and for the second game in the Ghost series they wanted to lean in further to that feeling that players were in the middle of a playable samurai movie.

"I made a rule for myself that I would watch a samurai film every night for a year," Davis tells me. "Not a bad gig, actually."

I spoke to Rob Davis in a meeting room at a hotel room a short distance from the Melbourne Convention Centre. The night before Rob Davis had delivered a panel to an eager crowd at PAX Australia. It was the first stop of a small Australian tour for Davis, who was born in Sydney and previously worked for several local development studios (credits include Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 3, Destroy All Humans 2 and The Saboteur) before moving to the US in 2010 to work for Microsoft on various Kinect titles.

Source: Press Kit.

"I made a rule for myself that I would watch a samurai film every night for a year."

ROB DAVIS
Campaign Director

As Campaign Director, Davis was responsible for directing Ghost of Yōtei's missions and much of its open-world material. "The running joke at Sucker Punch is I am the person who plays the game more than just about everyone," he says. "I was always playing through different builds of the game and working with the designers on the moment to moment pacing and on the overall adventure."

"Our goal is to take the initial really inspiring pitch from (Creative Director) Nate Fox and (Art Director) Jason Connell of a wandering mercenary on a tale of vengeance in the lethal land of Hokkaido beyond the border of the south, and then look into every mission of the game, every part of exploration and ask ourselves: how can we get the maximum flavour of a wandering mercenary out for vengeance? How can we tell the tale of Atsu as someone who has an emotional and action-filled story ahead of them?"

Turning to cinema was a good starting point for Davis. There were many older classics among the films he watched, and he particularly enjoyed the Lone Wolf and Cub series, live-action adaptations of Kazuo Koike's legendary manga series: "Ogami Ittō is a particularly cool wandering mercenary who always sort of gets the job done and has a trick up his sleeve." The classic anime series Rurouni Kenshin was a highlight, as was Ugetsu, a ghost story from 1953.

Some of the influences of the films Davis watched during this time are felt quite overtly in the game. The Takashi Miike visual filter available in this game pays tribute to his samurai films, with 13 Assassins (a tremendous film) in particular standing out to Davis. Kurosawa, inevitably, remained a fixture: films like Ran, Seven Samurai, and especially Yojimbo served as key inspiration. "Yojimbo was pretty much the film," he says. "You ask yourself the question, 'what if we could bring this to life through the game?'"

Source: Press Kit.

"How can we get the maximum flavour of a wandering mercenary out for vengeance? How can we tell the tale of Atsu as someone who has an emotional and action-filled story ahead of them?"

ROB DAVIS
Campaign Director

But while Yojimbo is about a gruff mercenary who plays two warring clans against each other, Ghost of Yōtei is, fundamentally, a revenge story about a young woman going up against the Lord who murdered her family, and the coterie of masked villains who serve him. For inspiration, Davis and the team turned to another movie about a woman on a trail of bloody vengeance.

"The original inspiration for Kill Bill, and (director) Quentin Tarantino is quite open about this, is a classic film called Lady Snowblood", Davis says. " Like Ogami Ittō or like Atsu, Lady Snowblood is not afraid to get the job done. And she's not honour-bound, she's hell-bent on getting vengeance. But like Ghost of Yōtei, the emotional cost of her humanity on her vengeance quest becomes more than the initial start point."

As part of their research for Ghost of Yōtei, Rob and other members of the team travelled to Hokkaido to immerse themselves in the culture and environment they would be depicting. The Ghost series has a solid following in Japan, and the team understood that representing another country and culture in a game that they were going to sell back to that region required consultation and education to get right.

"Honouring the samurai cinema and honouring Japanese culture is incredibly important to us," Davis tells me. "Building off the success of Tsushima, we were able to get our process quite tight. But at a human level, when we went to Hokkaido ourselves and saw it and felt it and touched it, it makes you want to try even a little harder. And it makes you feel the pressure a little bit. But it also makes you inspired to do right by those whose culture you're honouring."

Davis, in fact, studied Japanese at college, but had not returned to the language in some time. "I'd sort of forgotten how much I love Japan and Japanese culture," he reflects. "I woke up a little part of myself that I hadn't seen in 10 or 15 years." Throughout the project, there was a sense of "pressure and responsibility to do right by Japanese players"; many of the processes and advisor relationships they'd set up for Tsushima were returned to. Physical sales figures show that the game's launch was the biggest for a Sony-published game in the region since Spider-Man 2 in 2023.

Making a game set in 1603, in the area now known as Hokkaido, also meant engaging and consulting with the Ainu people, the island's indigenous people. For Davis and the rest of the team, making sure to honour the Ainu people, including "the patterns, shapes and architecture" that arose from Ainu culture, was important. "We partnered with Ainu advisors, and we were fortunate enough to meet with them when we went over to Japan," Davis says. As part of this meeting, the visitors from Sucker Punch went on a foraging expedition with them, and viewed objects and art from the period at a museum.

"There was a lot of learning to do about the myths and about the different beliefs of the Ainu," Davis says. "We were able to put certain assets and certain materials in front of the Ainu, and then quickly turn them around if it wasn't working."

Source: Press Kit.

Making a game set in 1603, in the area now known as Hokkaido, also meant engaging and consulting with the Ainu people, the island's indigenous people. For Davis and the rest of the team, making sure to honour the Ainu people, including "the patterns, shapes and architecture" that arose from Ainu culture, was important.

Ghost of Yōtei is built on the same engine as Infamous: Second Son, released for the PlayStation 4 in 2014. While that might sound creaky by today's standards, if you've played the game, the results speak for themselves. Institutional knowledge within the studio, and familiarity with the tools, sped certain processes up. "We've gotten quite fast as a team at changing something that doesn't work or honouring a detail from our advisors when we get feedback," Davis says.

Rob Davis might be the person on the team who has played the game the most, but by the time the game was released, everyone on the team had spent a lot of time with it: every six weeks, the whole team would spend their Friday playing through the game to see what kind of shape it's in. "We're trying to have each other's backs, check in on each other," Davis tells me. "We see how we're doing as a team, see how we felt about it compared to Tsushima."

"And, yeah, it takes a bit of time to take the whole team offline every six weeks to play through the game. But the taste and talent of our team as it relates to honouring Ghost as a franchise, honouring Japanese culture, and honouring Atsu as a brand new origin story hero, is a lot of work. And there's lots of things we have to edit and change along the way as well. That constant playtesting and constant checking in on each other has really helped to see how we're actually doing."

By the time we spoke the game had been out for nearly two weeks, and Davis was relieved - the game was well-received by players and critics. "One thing we've noticed coming out of the early players is just how much people are loving the open world," he says. "We're so used to looking at every little piece in isolation that seeing players respond positively to the open world and to Atsu and to the combat in this game has been very satisfying and heart-warming."

"We came back to a simple philosophy throughout development. We know players are intelligent. We know players are curious. We know players loved Tsushima. We can trust ourselves and we can trust players. We know that if we inspire players to be curious and make the world interesting to explore, and if we create content that, when you arrive, is meaningful and is interesting or challenging or mysterious. We can make players a convincing promise that exploring will be worth it."

Ghost of Yōtei is available now on PlayStation 5.