In 2021, Toshihiro Nagoshi, who began his videogame career with Daytona USA before creating the Yakuza/Like a Dragon Series, left Sega to found his own studio at Chinese tech giant NetEase. Nagoshi Studio has yet to announce the name or much of anything else about its debut game, though Nagoshi has previously compared it to Yakuza by saying, “the scale of the game will be bigger”.
Even that vague statement seems to no longer apply. In an interview with Famitsu (machine-translated by VGC), Nagoshi walked back that boast, saying, “the current version is so large that it’s almost too large. This time, while researching existing games, we started by making a fairly large map with roads and highways. Now we are gradually shrinking it down and exploring the best balance for the game.”
In response to the interviewer pointing out that some people like a game with a big map, Nagoshi replied, “You could fill it in with some element to create a sense of density, but it’s not modern to have similar experiences repeated over and over again.”
The developers of every live-service game in existence, and a fair few singleplayer open worlds, would probably disagree. But it’s not controversial to point out that even well-received games like Ghost of Tsushima get dinged for having repetitive activities dotted across their maps, making them eventually feel like thin butter spread over too much toast.
“I feel that the era of games where the volume is the selling point is coming to an end”, Nagoshi said.
Nagoshi left Sega after 32 years at the company. As he said at the time, he felt distant from the act of actually making games after reaching “the top management level”, and had no desire to climb further and become the CEO of Sega.