Shadow Of The Colossus Director Says New Game Mechanics Are Dead

21 July 2025

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shadow-of-the-colossus-director-says-new-game-mechanics-are-dead — Shadow Of The Colossus Director Says New Game Mechanics Are Dead

Remember when every once in a while, there’s a new game that would appear and show you something completely fresh out of the oven?

I remember when the first Assassin’s Creed was released, it was lauded as a “revolutionary” game because you could climb pretty much every building. Looking back at history in this fictional manner isn’t something that was present in other video games during its time.

Could you think of an instance when you’d just simply boot up a title and discover new ways to play that you’d never imagined before?

In a dev discussion alongside Katamari creator, Keita Takahashi, at DenfaminicoGamer, Ueda said “The age of game mechanics is over.” But before you panic about the future of gaming, let’s dig into the perspective of one of gaming’s innovative directors.

What Ueda Said About Gaming’s Future

In a very insightful game dev discussion for Keita Takahashi’s latest project, “To a T,” Ueda shared his perspective on modern game development and revealed his belief that we’re no longer in an era where developers need to introduce entirely new game mechanics with every release.

I wonder if we are no longer in the era where we need to provide new devices or new game mechanics every single game

—Fumito Ueda

He further suggested that “even if the mechanics are not new, a game dev can focus on the game’s overall feel and art style,” and he has a point because whether a dev likes it or not, it’s simply more cost-effective to improve the existing mechanics than spend countless hours coming up with a new one just to place on top of the existing pile.

The Problem with Modern Game Design

Another thing that stood out during the interview was Ueda’s call for game devs to be aware of and stop trying to pump nuisance and unnecessary content into their games.

If you are often forced to do things while playing games, you will simply quit playing and will just go and watch dramas or Youtube

—Fumito Ueda

We’ve all experienced that, and with how most AAA titles are so focused on making you grind and getting more money via microtransactions, he’s right in saying that a game’s overall value in terms of entertainment and play time needs to strike the right balance.

My honest take, though, is that games don’t need to make you feel like you’re doing a chore and good games don’t need to have an average of 150+ hours to complete. What a good game needs is a great idea, a good story, and relatable characters. However, despite video games being in a multi-billion-dollar industry, we’re still hard-capped by those three things.

Breaking Traditional Barriers

The discussion also revealed how dramatically the gaming landscape has changed from Ueda’s early dev days.

The Shadow of the Colossus director shared how technical innovations have made so much progress throughout the years, from the time when people would be amazed if grass moved the moment your character came into contact with it and how it was something you’d most likely see in gaming showcases back then, but it’s now normal to see it within an entire game and no one would be surprised by it.

The conversation also touched on how games are often constrained by expectations and traditional formats. “Video games are still a young medium, and there’s no definition of what a video game should be, so shouldn’t we be a bit more free?” said Keita Takahashi.

It’s a great statement coming from the unconventional mind that brought us “to a T”, who further added to his point about breaking conventions rather than being boxed into traditional formats.

The key takeaway from this interview isn’t that games will stop evolving, but that the evolution might come in a different way. Personally, I think this is a lesson that’s best conveyed to studio owners and CEOs who chase for a “unicorn” or revolutionary mechanic when they could’ve just focused on refining the game experience and artistic expression more than anything else. Just take a look at how Indie games have evolved over time. All it takes is some creativity and passion.