Sucker Punch Productions has revealed that it flirted with several ideas for a new game before settling on the samurai theme for Ghost of Tsushima, including pirates and the Three Musketeers.
Ghost Of Tsushima Creator Talks Multiple Game Themes
Speaking on the PlayStation Blog, Brian Fleming, Sucker Punch’s co-founder, said that the studio considered multiple settings before setting its new game during the Mongol invasion of Tsushima in 1274. This wasn’t without its difficulties though, as Fleming revealed the team encountered a lot of ‘creative problems.’
Early on, we concluded that we wanted to build a large, open world experience — and one that featured melee combat. But beyond that we were uncertain. Pirates? Rob Roy? The Three Musketeers? All these were considered — but we kept coming back to feudal Japan and telling the story of a samurai warrior. Then one fateful fall afternoon we found a historical account of the Mongol invasion of Tsushima in 1274, and the entire vision clicked into place.
We had a lot of creative problems. We wanted to tell the tale of one of the only samurai who survived the initial assault, but what was his story? Who would our adversary be? Could we structure a game and story that featured a relatable, human experience — but also surround it with an anthology of other stories to explore? And how would we present the story?
The world we were building had no modern technology, so no cellphones to help us communicate with the player, no glitzy super-powers to create visual spectacle. Oh, and the entire game would collapse if we couldn’t figure out how to make melee combat work.
We had some serious problems to get to work on. In the end, what pulled us through this six (!!!) year project? I think the key was the clarity of the original vision. Unlike any project I’ve previously worked on, Ghost of Tsushima’s topline vision stayed almost entirely unchanged throughout years of development.
Ghost of Tsushima is now available for the PS4, and you can read our full review here.
[Source – PlayStation Blog]