Yotei is continuing Sony's trend that started late last gen of iterative sequels. Which I can honestly say I didn't enjoy any of them anywhere near as much as I did the first games in those franchises. Having put well over 100 hours into Tsushima fully completing the campaign/expansion and the multiplayer, it left me feeling a bit burnt out lol. I was already feeling burnt out on open world games in general. Loved the hell out of the game, but can't say I'm gonna be in a huge rush to play Yotei.

I don't think iterative sequels are a Sony trend. The majority of sequels are iterative lol.

This has been the case for most games since ever.

Dark Souls was doing that on the PS3, God of War on the PS2, Resident Evil on the PS1, Mario on the SNES, Megaman on the NES.

This is literally the norm.

Lol that's fair! Looking at the games I've played over the past few years, it's mainly been original IPs or sequels that have been completely separate from each other (just finished Doom: The Dark Ages, which is nothing like the previous games) so Sony's sequels have really been the only traditional sequels I've been playing in recent years.

The biggest aspect I am looking forward to is the removal of the Ubisoft checklist open world! That was probably my least favorite aspect of Tsushima.

I've honestly never understood this concern of iterative sequels.

Expecting sequels to always have huge fundamental changes from previous games is not even the norm.

When I look at Yotei, I see enough changes to the core formula and individual systems that I'm lost at where 'iterative' concerns begin or end.

I'm not bothered by iterative sequels, because if I love a game, I usually want more of it. 

The bigger issue is that iterative sequels today take ~3x longer than they did 15 years ago. And that can be pretty frustrating. Naughty Dog basically made an entire Uncharted trilogy in the time it is taking them to make Intergalactic.

But I also think it's way more complicated to what makes a game great. I think there are lots of small changes that can make or break a game. 

That is a good point about how long games take to make. Video games are much more expensive than ever before. I heard somewhere where developers are no longer crunching as much. This is because the experience senior developers were leaving the industry and video game companies were desperate to retain talent.

This may change soon because the tech industry took a big hit. AI could also help speed up game development.

Jason Schreier: “I'll put it this way: it's not a new IP but it might feel like one. Maybe that's why people are confused. Please don't ask me more questions about this - if I wind up reporting more information at any point in the future it'll be in an article, not on a forum. I can also confirm that Ashhong knows what they are talking about. And that the sci-fi stuff (that people have apparently believed for years now?) is nonsense.”

The last I knew about Ashhong was when they showed excitement about how people will react when the game is finally revealed.

Welp, I was part of the people who thought for years that Santa Monica next game was scifi, Barlog fooled me completely LOL but I'm happy it isn't because with Intergalactic, SAROS and Horizon we have enough scifi in the works.
Ok so Santa Monica and Barlog are re-imagining another Sony IP, that's way more interesting. Time for the speculations to begin but I have none lol, I'll have to wait.

The scifi project was after Ascension, wasn't it? It has been cancelled for a long, long time now. Were they supposedly trying it again after not even showing this one?

BTW, so Santa Monica got another studio IP to work on? Bluepoint was doing that for God of War, but I can't imagine which IP Santa Monica would work into... it's likely an action game, tho.