After Ghost of Yotei's release, reactions online have made something very clear: players around the world find themselves so engaged with our open world content that they continue to delay their main story playthrough, sometimes for countless hours, as they instead choose to bask in the wandering ronin fantasy of our game.However, during development, this was not always how playtesters felt. In fact, there was a time when playtesters chose to skip most of our open world content while rushing into the main story instead, causing onboarding, comprehension and progression issues. So how did we manage to turn things around?Join Senior Writer and Narrative Designer, Ariadna Martinez, for a deep dive into how narrative design was instrumental in solving the challenges of engaging and retaining the player's investment in Ghost of Yōtei's open world. Discover how effective narrative design was able to identify and tackle the underlying issues that were causing players to lose interest in our open world content, allowing us to increase player retention, and ensure full investment in our core gameplay loops, progression systems, and story during those first crucial hours (and beyond) primarily through non-linear content.