Stop Making Me Stare At Mini-Maps

How Ghost Of Tsushima and Yotei fix open world design

Ghost of Tsushima game screenshot captured by the author on PS5.

How often have you been playing a game where you’re forced to follow someone along a path drawn on a mini-map? This happens in basically every narrative-driven game from the last twenty years, and it almost never feels good. All of your interactivity is stripped away to go from marker to marker, so you don’t break the scripting.

Games have struggled with this balance since they started telling stories. The original Half-Life was praised for its incorporation of scripted plot elements. It wove little story moments into its action and carnage. They were quick and simple scenes, but gave players added context for what was going on…though you couldn’t really do anything other than watch them.

This practice grew so much over time that it’s now often the subject of derision. Players don’t want to stop and look at random stuff, they want to play. Cutscenes have to be big and explosive and also short if they want to keep player attention. Worlds have to be big, but they’ve become so big that they now need to tell you where everything is with a little on-screen display.

Not every game has the production ambition of a Hideo Kojima or Rockstar title. Not every studio has the budget to also craft a glorious CG movie to go with their game. So they fall back on awkward tricks like “follow this glowing guy,” or “go to these points on the map.”

I get it. They have to do this so that you can see all the content. But the trick is making it feel like you’re not doing that. How can a game support player agency while also telling its own story?

My Favorite Open World Design

I’d argue that few titles do this better than Sony’s’ Ghost Of series. Tsushima and Yotei are both strong, narrative-first games, but they blend that with a sense of play and discovery. These titles make you feel like you’re actually discovering things and making choices…while also gently nudging you in the right direction through context clues and little bits of writing.

In Tsushima, you play as Jin Sakai, a fallen Samurai who has to navigate a war zone and try to take back his home. After a thrilling opening, you’re plopped down into an open zone and given some objectives to complete. You then begin to wind your way around, finding new locations, items, and battles to participate in, gathering skills along the way. The game is as easy or as hard as you want it to be. If you want to storm right into some tough camps and try to take them out without first getting the bow, you can totally do that. The game doesn’t put up red barriers or yell at you for not obtaining an important weapon.

At the same time, it’s still a linear and fast-paced experience. There are only so many places to find in its world, and every one of them offers some kind of boon or value to your quest. Villages of NPCs have in-world conversations that will gently help you figure out where to go next.

The UI and UX design help immensely with the feeling of freedom. Most open world games force you to spend a significant percentage of your play time navigating by using a mini map. In the Ghost games, Sucker Punch took great care to make sure you can actually look at the game screen. You can pick an objective off the main map screen, but you’re then guided there by the wind. Animals pop up every so often to try and push you in the direction of a side mission, but you’re free to ignore them. You get to soak in the beauty of the game world the entire time you’re playing, rather than constantly planting your focus in the corner of the screen to see where to go next.

Yotei takes the non-linear progression of Tsushima and scales it way up, allowing you to tackle most of its content in any order you’d like with only a few progression gates. The game’s revenge-driven narrative has a set beginning and ending, but you get to weave your own path between them, and extra bits of dialogue account for the choices you make along the way.

Both of these games look like any other modern title on the surface. They both have large maps full of stuff to do. But they use clever design strategies to immerse you into their worlds so it never feels like you’re just finishing a checklist. You decide to go to the next town, or the next cave, not because it has some item you need to complete your quest, but because it looks interesting. These games balance carefully-incorporated player freedom with the constant presence of curiosity. You’re never out of things to do because the world never lets you see its hard edges. Instead, it subtly guides you to the next cool bit of content.

Ghost of Yotei game screenshot captured by the author on PS5.

Fixing the “Follow Problem”

Yotei and Tsushima do both require you to follow NPCs, but they infuse those moments with purpose through their writing. They’re always going somewhere important to your own quest, not just following the script to the next scene. And the devs also came upon one super clever touch that I wish other games would borrow. The NPCs you have to follow in Yotei will move at your speed, so you have agency over the interaction. If you walk, they’ll walk. If you run, they’ll run. If you trot on your horse, they’ll slow down to talk to you. Suddenly, what’s usually a passive and boring interaction is under your control.

It’s not super practical to give gamers full freedom in a narrative-driven game. A few games have tried to do this but it takes so much extra work, and it doesn’t always benefit every player. Baldur’s Gate 3 contains dozens of interactions that most players won’t ever see outside of fun YouTube videos, as it tries to account for weird stuff you might try and do. That’s the exception, not the norm, and it took years of additional development work and player feedback in early access.

I love the balance of openness and linear storytelling in the Ghost games. It makes them so replayable, because you can get a great narrative or you can just noodle around and fight some dudes, and you’re never far off from either task. They trust the player to find their own way, while also making sure that way is filled with interesting stuff to do that pushes you ever-closer to the ending. The content is still typical open-world stuff, but it always gestures at the larger context.

It’s game design magic, and it’s wonderful.

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What’s your favorite example of a game that respects the player? Let me know in a reply!