If we want our ass to be kicked, the game can do that.

Chris Zimmerman, co-founder of Sucker Punch, said the following to WCCFTech: „There’s a range [of challenge] because different people play games for various reasons. Especially when you’re talking about open-world games, which are big games, so you have players who are just tourists, there are people who are story-driven, there are people who are action-driven. For us to be successful, we kind of need to appeal to all those groups, and one of those groups are the people who are really, really into the action and want a challenge. That’s part of the experience for them.

The story is about Jin being forced to change and being challenged by these overwhelming numbers of Mongols — I want to feel that. And the game will entirely give that to you if that’s what you want. We will wreck you if that’s what you want. At the same point, if you’re playing to be a tourist, you still need to feel like you’re challenged, you don’t just want a cakewalk. The game needs to scale down to provide the right challenge, but still, make your choices feel meaningful. If you can cakewalk through every fight, then the parts where Jin is sneaking around don’t make sense anymore. Why would I do that? No matter who you are as a player, if your experience doesn’t match Jin’s, the story won’t land. There does need to be a challenge for everyone, but what that’s going to mean is going to depend on who you are as a player.” Which means there will be several difficulty levels – our guess would be five. Zimmerman also said they haven’t decided whether we will be capable of changing difficulty levels on the fly or not.

Sucker Punch’s concept resembled an Akira Kurosawa movie for a long time, but the minimalistic design won’t stay: Ghost of Tsushima will have a user interface, a HUD, and Zimmerman says they removed it for the E3 demo so that they don’t have to explain everything and to make the demo as distraction-free as possible. The final version of the game will have a HUD, it is confirmed.

Jason Connell, the art director, answered a few questions on Twitch. He said the choice of color palette came from the fact that Japan is gorgeous – they wanted to show a contrast between the beautiful locations and the vigorous combat; the big world will not be full of sunshine all the time. The devs’ goal is to implement the island entirely, as well as have a story that will be a pretty faithful homage – there will also be new locations added to make the world exciting to discover. Regarding character development, Sucker Punch didn’t say anything – stealth and combat will play the most significant role – Jin will go from a training-all-life samurai to a lethal warrior through the plot, whose enemies will be „multi-dimensional” and believable.

Ghost of Tsushima also got a brand new video, which we will not spoil this time – watch it for yourself. The PlayStation 4-exclusive, which will allow to use the Japanese voices, has no release date yet at the moment.

Source: WCCFTech, VG247, DualShockers, DualShockers