Ghost of Tsushima PS4 was originally announced at Paris Games Week 2017, but we had no idea what the game would look like then. PlayStation gave us the first look at Sucker Punch’s new PS4 exclusive last month during E3 2018, in which we received some incredible gameplay footage. The game definitely looks authentic enough, but according to Sucker Punch co-founder Chris Zimmerman, the game will be both historically accurate and inaccurate.
In an interview with Gamespot, Zimmerman said that although the developer has gone to great lengths ensuring the game’s authenticity, there were still creative liberties that had to be taken. He said: “The way I think about it is: we’re going to deviate from historical truth, we just want to do it intentionally.” The purpose of this is to balance historical accuracy with gamers’ expectations of how things should be.
Sucker Punch tried being as authentic as possible when it comes to certain details. For example, the scene where the protagonist Jin met Masako in the Ghost of Tsushima E3 2018 trailer was originally written as “Hello, Jin.” The dialogue was changed to only “Jin.” when the developer learned that the “Japanese don’t say that.” Another example would be the name of Jin’s horse. In the English version of the game, its name is Nobu. Meanwhile, the Japanese version of the horse doesn’t have a name, because horses are not given names in Japan.
On the other hand, the depiction of samurai in Ghost of Tsushima isn’t historically accurate due to the fact that “most people’s idea is really based on an idea of samurai which is really more of a 16th-, 17th-, 18th-century idea of the samurai.” The game is set in the 13th century, and the samurai in that era won’t match public expectations of what a samurai would look like. As such, the samurai in the game has been given a “warring states period” armor and look.
No release date has been revealed for Ghost of Tsushima yet. However, with so many upcoming PS4 exclusives in the near future, PS4 players will be spoilt for choice. In the meantime, rewatch the gameplay debut trailer for the game below to tide you over for now, as well as a hands-on preview here.
