The Japanese-Mongol fights will be the biggest game so far for Sucker Punch.

Jason Connell, the art director of Ghost of Tsushima, was interviewed by IGN. Here, he said the following: „It’s a lot bigger [than InFAMOUS: Second Son]. It’s Sucker Punch’s biggest game we’ve ever made by a landslide, both in the amount of stuff that’s in it and also just sheer landscape, square footage-wise.

As a story as big as ours and a game as big as ours, it is incredibly important to us that people understand Jin’s journey first. It’s a lot to take in. So the first part, we want to make sure that you understand who he is, what’s happened to this island. So there’s a little bit of setup. It’s really important to do that before we just open the flood gates. But once you get to that point, then it’s pretty open.

We’ve learned a ton and we’ve just built on tech, on tech, on tech, and we have amazing technical rendering gurus at Sucker Punch. They’ve managed to pull out every little ounce of performance [out of the PlayStation 4] so that we could have our dreams of making this game. You can see pretty far in the game as we show off, and that’s not some fabricated thing with hacks. You can just get down from that mountain and go to those places. It’s stunning what they’ve been able to pull off for us from a technical perspective.”

He also got interviewed by a French YouTuber named Julien Chièze. Here, he revealed that he has two games he considers his favourites. These are Shadow of the Colossus and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. They also were a big influence for Ghost of Tsushima due to them having simple-but-deep artistic direction, and he wanted to recreate them with better visual fidelity.

The game’s immersion factor will be important. There will be no traditional objective or a quest marker – the latter has been replaced by the Guiding Wind, and we can also turn off the traditional glow for the items that we can pick up. The flute will not be the only instrument in the game, but he didn’t want to go into further details, as it might be potentially related to the plot. There will also be no incentive in hunting the animals n the game. They are only there to make the background environments more believable. The standoff mode can also be used when infiltrating Mongol bases. However, using a heavy armour will make Jin less agile.

Back to the IGN interview, Connell confirmed that we won’t be forced to choose a side like in the inFAMOUS games: „We realized it was more important to us that we wanted to tell a human story of someone who is this way and has to evolve into something else, versus transform completely into something else. He doesn’t flip flop back and forth, it muddied it up for us. We wanted the story to reflect his transformation [from a Samurai to Ghost]

There are important story moments that are more reflective of this change than others. But the reality is that even as you have gotten to some story moments, you can still play the game as this Samurai, you may just be more potent or more powerful. We don’t make you choose between [samurai and Ghost].

When he’s a Ghost, he can turn around and play as a samurai because he’s always a samurai. All his training, using the Katana, that stuff is buried in him deep. On the stealth [State of Play segement], if you wanted to jump off the roof and start fighting like a samurai, you could do that. We don’t spec you out and suddenly you can’t play as a samurai. He’s always at his core, his heart of hearts, a samurai. The Ghost is this legendary warrior that he’s evolving into,” he said.

Ghost of Tsushima will launch on July 17 on PlayStation 4. The game will require about 50 GB on your PS4’s HDD.

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech, PSL, GR

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