So apparently there’s this thing happening with Ghost of Yotei where people are being left… to forget the whole main storyline? Like really. Someone under the name of Yokio on Twitter mentioned that they were 31 hours deep in their playthrough and they had just been in side content all along. THIRTY-ONE HOURS! And would not even say that they’d finished the main quest! Wild.
This tweet was accompanied by a screenshot showing their progress, if you even want to call it that, and the reply sections have hundreds who are saying the exact same thing. Another person under the name Darko wrote that they’re almost 50 hours in and have just killed the snake. FIFTY HOURS. That’s an entire week’s worth of work full-time with just messing around in Yotei’s universe. Another player, NotKob3ni_, said they’ve had to really sit down and commit to finishing the main missions because the distractions were piling up too fast to keep track of. Which honestly? Mood.
This appears to be the common storyline with the game. Folks get so into the side quests that the whole “save the world” thing would try to just pass unnoticed. And honestly, how could you blame them? The world is brimming with stuff to do. Bounty hunting, fox statue hunting, random encounters-for a few dozen hours engrossed with side content, and the main story would never get done.
The response of the community on this has been downright hilarious. Kevo Spaceboundlego just replied with a string of laughing-crying emojis and ended with “this facts tho!!!” Pretty good summary of the public opinion there. Specifically, more people are really feeling these experiences. omldahs chimed in with the joke of “them bounty people are getting no rest though,” meaning that with 31 hours of side content, those bounty targets must be physically exhausted.
Strangely, the game starts to provide a solution to this in quite a bizarre way. diffrinse states that Yotei basically tries to remind you about the main quest after every side mission completion-at least early on in the game-but then the world map is just ridiculously dense and brimming with things to discover, so these two intents of the design kind of clash with each other. In short, the game’s trying to say, “Hey, remember that important mission?” and the players are basically like, “Yeah, yeah, but first let me find all these fox statues.”
Side quests here are much more than mere backstory. Hard challenges are lurking at every step of the way for the players. shadowthief19 told of the Oni defeating him about 7 times, which sounds about right for some of the nastier side bosses. And geezy__ defeated the Undying Samurai on Lethal Difficulty about 24 hours after he started, so no small feat.
The actual players also talked about their various experiences of side content. KingSteve1987 is still working through various target kills, just having taken down the Oni and now heading toward the Kitsune. So while the side bosses are competing against each other for attention, the players are kept busy comparing notes on which ones they’ve defeated and arguing about their places on the main story.
It reminds me very much of games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, where the side content just completely takes over. Weykoz actually mentioned going back to KCD2 after his Yotei playthrough, which says a lot about how well a style of game can work when done right.
“We can tell because, already, many people are calling this their game of the year.” Darko went ahead and dropped the #GOTY tag, which is probably a very good sign if the side activities are drawing your attention more than the main storyline.
The community banter about this phenomenon is another thing altogether. This whole map system thread came about because of a complainant, Yokio, who said that cartographer maps were hard to use: “I’m not a cartographer!!!” This spawned thousands of jokes about players struggling with navigation systems when they should have been ignoring the main quest.
From the bottom of our hearts, just knowing this “virus” has created a world in which the players truly do not want to leave, lets us know that the side stuff is more than just some filler story in-between. For many, this has become the main act. With players going off, citing 30, 40, 50 hours of going off on their own in just side quests, we can safely say someone really went to D&D with the devs and walked away with Best Open World.
Is this good design? Debatable. What counts for really is that people have such an insane amount of fun fleeing retreats into Yotei. Sometimes getting lost is just what an open world ought to do for you, and the main story will be there for you to come back to whenever you want. But those side quests? Well, they’re calling your name right now.
