Team Ninja Wants to Build on Rise of the Ronin’s Open World with Future Games

Rise of the Ronin diverges from the kind of games Team Ninja has becoming synonymous with in a number of ways, chief among them being its open world setting. How well it executes on its open world is up for debate, but the developer wants to keep building on the foundations it has laid down with the recently released action RPG as it looks ahead to its future games.

Speaking in a recent interview with VGC, Rise of the Ronin director Fumihiko Yasuda talked about the challenge of developing Team Ninja’s first open world game, and said that the studio’s goal now is to build on that template in the future and try to “achieve things we weren’t able to do this time.”

“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,” he 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.”

Rise of the Ronin producer Yosuke 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 utilise what we learned with Rise of the Ronin to further expand our work going forward.”

In our review of Rise of the Ronin, we gave it a score of 6/10, saying, “In spite of solid combat and fun traversal, Rise of the Ronin is, unfortunately, Team Ninja’s most underwhelming game in years.” Read the full review through here.

Rise of the Ronin is available on PS5.