Jin Sakai, the protagonist of the game, was trained as a samurai, although he later left the paths of bushido to become a ghost.
In the light of the rising sun, a warrior brandishes his katana with quick, accurate, and graceful movements. Blood gushes and the opponent falls dryly to the ground. Ghost of Tsushima, the newest from Sucker Punch, aims to capture the full essence of the spirit of the samurai. The game, which has already completed its development, will feature a patch from day 1, which will help polish the last aspects of the product. The player, meanwhile, must master the art of the sword if he wants to survive in a time as hostile as exciting. Chris Zimmerman, founder of the study, has shared on the official PlayStation blog the keys to the combat system.
“Our goal with Ghost of Tsushima has always been to capture the heart of samurai fantasy to transport you back to the time of feudal Japan, and thus experience the beauty and danger of an island of Tsushima at war.” Jin Sakai is an experienced warrior, but it is not enough to deal with hordes and hordes of enemies.
The three keys to the combat system
According to Zimmerman, without a good katana match, it would be impossible for Ghost of Tsushima to work. “We could look to the great combat examples of classic and modern samurai movies for inspiration (my reference is the adaptation of 13 Assassins 2010), but things that work in movies don’t always work in games, so there was work to do ”. Therefore, they focused on three specific aspects: speed, accuracy and precision.
Speed was necessary to endow the system with realism: quick cuts are the foundations of katana fighting. “All the attacks in the game have been recorded with our motion capture camera to realistically represent the speed of movement.” The problem is that the attacks were too fast to capture them well. “Human reaction time is slower than you think: it takes us 0.3 seconds to respond to a visual stimulus, no matter how simple the stimulus and response are. That is the time it takes for our nervous system and brain to realize something. ” They experimented so that the characters had more realistic reaction times, but the results were not satisfactory. “This is surely because our ideas of what sword fighting is like are rather guided by movies than actual sword fighting.”
An imbalance occurred because the Mongols’ attacks couldn’t be faster than the player’s reaction. “Just by pressing the quick attack button you beat most enemies,” something that detracted from the depth of the game experience. They fixed it with a few tweaks. “First, we realized that while there was a limit on how fast a player could react, there was no limit on the speed of anticipation. If an enemy launches a chain attack, we had to give the player enough time to react to that first attack in the chain, but since we can anticipate subsequent attacks, these could happen quickly and randomly. ”
Then they realized that they could overlap enemy attacks and improved details so that the protagonist could respond to each attack when it arrived, as in the movies they were inspired by. “This combination (super-fast player attacks, multiple enemy attacks) created the intensity we were looking for, the type of intensity we saw in 13 assassins.”
A few cuts are enough
“Respect the katana” was one of his mottos during the development. That leads us to accuracy, another of the characteristics that they took into account. “In the samurai movies that inspired us, a few cuts are enough to defeat the worst of enemies. We didn’t want to stray too far from that concept. ” Of course, the enemies had to respond the same. “Jin spends as much time defending as attacking, and that slows down the speed with which he could deal damage.”
As for precision, the katana’s effects must be accurate: “This starts with responsiveness, making sure that Jin reacts instantly to the player’s orders. Rapid attacks take place in the blink of an eye. We worked hard so that our animations were fluid, so that the movements developed naturally. ” A good attack is nothing without a good defense. In Sucker Punch it was clear to them that they should be rewarded for playing in some way by blocking attacks. Although there is a basic block (press L1), if you do it at the right moment, the enemy will be destabilized and you will be able to take advantage of the transient weakness to strike.
Ghost of Tsushima will be released on July 17 exclusively on PS4.
