Looking for Cool in Open-World Games

Ghost of Yotei, the latest PlayStation game from Sony-owned developer Sucker Punch, doesn’t try to hide its thematic influences. Its story, about a woman named Atsu who’s seeking revenge on the gang of brigands who murdered her family, cribs generously from films like Lady Snowblood, Seven Samurai, and Yojimbo. The game is less interested in tracing its design lineage, but marketing does that just fine: It’s a PlayStation Studios game, and those have a house style. The pattern’s been set for some time now, with games like 2017’s Horizon: Zero Dawn and 2018’s God of War (and their sequels) following in the footsteps of Uncharted and The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog—a game that feels like a movie, strives for photorealism, takes itself seriously, and is preferably set in an open world full of things to do. 

Style, however, is the problem here. Style is how you keep people from noticing that you are playing a very familiar tune—and, in case you’re adequate, the way you get them to reward you for it. Style is what pushes a piece over the sting from spectacular and compulsively playable to cool, and possibly even culturally important. Style is idiosyncratic and palpable, and within the more and more fraught and high-stakes world of big-budget online game growth, would possibly even be extra essential than substance. 

Ghost of Yotei makes for an excellent case research in type. Here is a partial listing of Cool Things within the sport:

1. The title
2. The weaponry and armor of varied warrior castes circa Seventeenth-century Japan
3. Your sort-of pet wolf who will combat with you after they really feel prefer it
4. The roughly a million dramatic photographs of your character staring down a rival in a windy discipline as flower petals fall
5. Zeni Hajiki, a playing sport that is sort of like marbles however is performed with cash and has turn out to be a really large drawback for me 

But is Ghost of Yotei itself cool? I’m undecided that it’s. Being filled with cool issues doesn’t make a factor cool; that is a set, not a high quality. 

Yotei pursues its style pastiche not simply in story content material, however in type. The sport contains three “filmmaker modes” that aesthetically tweak the expertise: Kurosawa Mode applies a black-and-white filter and defaults to Japanese audio; Miike Mode, named for Takashi Miike, seeks to emulate 13 Assassins by bringing the digital camera shut and upping the blood and dirt; Watanabe Mode seems to Shinichiro Watanabe’s anime Samurai Champloo and pipes in lo-fi hip-hop beats to kill samurai to. 

All of those modes compromise the expertise ultimately. The black-and-white filter negates Yotei‘s cautious use of coloration, which is supposed to information the participant via the world; the chilliness beats are discordant with the overly somber tone of the sport’s narrative; and Miike Mode, as the sport warns you, makes it so you will not see some enemies you usually would, upping the problem significantly. A extra fashionable sport would pursue these thrives extra holistically, using them to bolster the expertise with out hampering it. Instead they really feel like roads not taken, little glimmers of the Sucker Punch that used to make Sly Cooper video games. 

Yet there’s some whimsy tucked away in a couple of of Yotei’s many aspect actions, which hints at a playful studio keen to have interaction with gamers in a means that’s unapologetically video-gamey. Among my favourite issues to do in Yotei are the Bamboo Strikes: little stands with bamboo poles mounted on them so that you can lower down together with your sword. Doing this is tougher than reducing most issues within the sport; you need to hit a sequence of three to seven buttons within the time it takes for Atsu to slice via each bamboo pole in a single fluid movement. Execute a Bamboo Strike efficiently, and generally a chunk of bamboo will fly upward so that you can slice mid-air with one other button combo, simply as slightly flourish. The sport incentivizes you to do these actions (because it incentivizes you to do every little thing) by tying them to one of the crucial helpful rewards: Bamboo strikes enhance Atsu’s most Spirit, which is used for therapeutic or exceptionally punishing assaults. 

But Bamboo Strikes are additionally price doing as a result of they’re cool as shit, little arcade-style challenges in an in any other case very severe sport concerned about verisimilitude. They’re additionally the a method by which anybody within the sport is having any enjoyable. Early on, some individuals problem Atsu to do a bamboo strike after downing a jug of sake; pull it off, they usually lose their minds. In one other area, a samurai doubts Atsu’s talent as a result of she is a girl; nail the bamboo strike, and the asshole loses his hat in a wager. Complete the bamboo strikes in a verdant hideaway with nary a soul in sight, and little foxes will come out and dance in delight. 

When you take into account this, and different, less-playful-but-still-engaging actions, the concept Ghost of Yotei is a revenge story is sort of bunk. All of Sony’s large first-party video games aren’t actually tales. They have tales—many tales, even—however the video games are supposed to be theme parks designed to drive up engagement, or Sunday crossword pages the place the puzzles are all solved with the appropriate weapon to crush the appropriate protection, thereby liberating limbs out of your opponents. (18 Across: A sickle-like blade on a sequence, finest used towards shields.) 

There is nothing inherently improper with this strategy. Ghost of Yotei places large effort into depicting the dismemberment of samurai; it additionally desires you to notice the breeze via the mountains, caressing technicolor flower patches as you summit an imposing peak. It desires you to be invested in sating Atsu’s thirst for revenge and her want for creative success as a musician. It’s a bloody rampage via the countryside of a tradition it additionally desires to respect. These contradictory targets are fairly foolish, and they don’t seem to be new to the world of video video games. 

This dissonance doesn’t suggest that good, partaking storytelling cannot be accomplished in an open-world online game. Every few years there is a terrific instance: The Witcher 3 is a perennial favourite, as are Assassin’s Creed 2 and the Red Dead Redemption video games. These classics work in live performance with the incongruity of open-world video video games, offering narrative peaks to punctuate the fantasy of spending time of their richly imagined locales. Unfortunately for Yotei, its narrative is sort of standard, echoing among the greats along with its PlayStation Studios labelmates. Which, once more, is ok: Story is simply one of many many issues open-world video games have to supply. Style, then, can fill the hole. 

On paper, the 2016 Ubisoft sport Watch Dogs 2 is about as standard as open-world video games get: sprawling map, a great deal of sidequests, loads of doodads to gather. But the sport was about hacktivists, and actually wished to immerse the participant in its characters’ mindsets. Hence an anthemic, maximalist rating by producer Hudson Mohawke—a daily collaborator with Yeezus-era Kanye and peak Drake—and its in-game vogue, which nodded to the Bay-area tech bro performance the sport was concerned about lampooning but additionally provided louder, extra vibrant outfits that bucked towards such conformity. The sport had gamers inhabit not only a world, however an perspective, one which was bolstered with each hack you initiated on the push of a button.

2012’s Sleeping Dogs is one other nice case research in open-world cool. Like Ghost of Yotei, it’s a pastiche, a celebration and remix of Hong Kong motion film tropes. To obtain this, developer United Front Games constructed its methods to strengthen that particular fantasy: Guns, for instance, are each uncommon and cumbersome to make use of, far much less thrilling than the kung fu obtainable to the participant. 

Crucial to each examples is that their strategy to type is complete: The means the video games look and sound informs how they play. The result’s one thing that is not simply enjoyable however cool, a piece that’s assured in its execution even when a few of its particular person components could also be missing. Do I keep in mind the principle plots of every of these video games? Absolutely not. But I positive as hell keep in mind taking part in them and the way they felt: rad as hell and concerned about giving me greater than only a suite of compelling gameplay challenges to discover. 

With this in thoughts, Ghost of Yotei‘s stoicism is its largest hindrance. It reaches in lots of instructions and doesn’t choose a comportment to face all of them with, past severity. This is unusual for a sport that’s successfully a interval piece tackle Kill Bill, one of the crucial aggressively fashionable movies ever made. Instead, Yotei is inert, counting on momentum and always pulling you from one focal point to a different through the wind, a fowl, or foxes to point out the best way. There’s no confidence within the rigorously constructed fantasy that being a wandering swordswoman will probably be compelling in and of itself. It’s the other of cool: self-conscious. 

And possibly that’s what separates an excellent open-world sport like this from an excellent one. A little bit goddamn panache. 

Joshua Rivera

Joshua Rivera is a Philadelphia-based tradition author whose work has appeared in GQ, New York, Vanity Fair, Polygon, and others. You can observe him at @jmrivera02.