Last week we finally got a good look at the open-world we’re set to explore in Ghost of Tsushima and it looked pretty impressive! Now, developer Sucker Punch has given us some firm details on just how large this world is set to be.
A Large World With Inspiration From The Greats
With Sucker Punch stating that they have taken inspiration from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it looks like we’ve got something truly epic to look forward to. Ghosts of Tsushima is set to be a lot more story focused and is set to be Sucker Punch’s largest open world.
Jason Connell, art director for Ghost of Tsushima said: “It’s definitely 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”
With the game being more story-focused than past titles, we may not see the entire world available right away. It looks like after a bit of story development, the rest of the world will open up ready to explore.
Connell says “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.”
This is great news for those who get a little bit overwhelmed with open-world games that don’t have a lot of direction at first. Having a sort of intro area with a bit of a tutorial can go a long way for those jumping into a game for the first time.
“So there’s a little bit of setup. It’s really important to do that before we just open the flood gates. But then once you get to that point, then it’s pretty open”
Eagle-Eyed Viewers Spotted Some Visual Downgrades
One thing that caught a lot of people’s attention during the gameplay footage was the fact the visuals in the game didn’t look quite as good as the demo footage that was shown a couple of years ago.
Now, no developer wants to deal with ‘Watch Dogs’ levels of visual backlash. It’s a shame that the graphics have gone through a bit of a downgrade but Connell has clarified this decision as a limitation of the current PlayStation hardware, insisting that they are pretty much working at the limits.
“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 PS4] 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.”
This is definitely a shame but with next-generation consoles due to release before the end of the year, maybe we can look forward to a next-gen release instead. For now, that’s all the news we have on Ghosts of Tsushima. We’ll be on the lookout for any more news in the leadup to its PlayStation 4 release on July 17th, so be sure to check back often.