The era of the InFamous Second Son and Firstlight seems to be over after its reign of over nine years over the PlayStation 4 empire. The time has come for Sony to work with something new, to give its users an experience as fulfilling as that of the games of its past.
After much consideration and brainstorming as to what this new era would be like for the users, and what kind of games/gaming franchise to include in this new generation, Sony had finally settled on the fearsome tale of a samurai warrior during the Mongol invasion of Tsushima in 1274.
As much new the storyline may be, one thing that the developers had to keep in mind while designing new games was the melee combat. This certainly posits a few difficult problems for the developers as they had to work around not only keeping the melee combat at its center but they also had to be consistent with the timeline of the samurai story itself, and how best to present life and a story set in an ancient epoch.
Talking about the many difficulties faced while making of the storyline of Tsushima, the PlayStation blog reads,
We’d built our rainy home of Seattle and a powerful visual effects system to provide visual sizzle. Now we were trying to build a place half a world away and more than 700 years in the past… that’s a lot of distance to cover. But the real challenge? The scale. Nothing was immune. World size, foliage placement, dialog lines, missions, characters. These things didn’t just increase, they multiplied. 5x, 10x, 20x, even 40x in some cases. And none of the tools from inFamous were up to the task…. except for our visual effects system.
The project took six years to complete, and the main vision behind the Ghost of Tsushima remained almost unchanged; however, the story did evolve, and the combat went through countless iterations.
The vision conceived at its infancy, that of “a lone Samurai survives the Mongol invasion of Tsushima, and is forced to reinvent himself to save his island home” survived the crunch of six years hard labor.
Keeping all of this in mind, and in a heartfelt blog post, one of the creators of the game Brian Fleming announced that the Ghost of Tsushima, termed as the best work done by Fleming and his team, is now available on PS4.