Rise of the Ronin director wants next game to ‘achieve things we weren’t able to this time’

videogameschronicle.com:

The director of Rise of the Ronin says he wants to see Team Ninja‘s next game accomplish things that couldn’t be managed this time around.

Before the PS5 exclusive’s release last week, Fumihiko Yasuda and producer Yosuke Hayashi spoke to VGC about its development and the lessons it had taken from the experience.

According to Yasuda, Rise of the Ronin—Team Ninja’s first open-world game—was created to provide a change from the studio’s usual output.

“Until now, we’ve been creating games based on Ninjas and Samurais,” he told us. “We wanted to create a game that has a sense of freedom as well as a rich story.

“For this title, we decided on the concept of Ronin. We wanted players to become a Ronin, explore an open world and be able to affect the story. Of course, we have established a foundation with our action combat systems.”

Yasuda explained that the game’s conception was around eight years ago, and at the time, he was playing  games like Assassin’s Creed and Red Dead Redemption for inspiration.

However, he conceded that Ronin’s open-world environment provided a “challenge” for the studio and that he hoped its next project would learn from this.

“Rise of the Ronin was a big challenge for us, because it’s something we hadn’t done up until now in terms of the level of freedom and the story while retaining the action gameplay,” Yasuda said. “I believe we were able to realise the concept, and I’m hoping that as players get their hands on the game, they’ll be able to experience it as we originally envisioned it.

“I think going forward, our challenge is to build from that and perhaps achieve things we weren’t able to do this time, and continue to build from there.”

Producer Hayashi added: “We’re always trying to do a lot of things with each title, and we’re always trying to utilise what we learned in the past on what we work on next.

“I think with Rise of the Ronin you’ll see that it’s kind of an amalgamation of the games that we’ve worked on in previous years. We’re going to