That’s a big part of why I recommend folks try AC Origins and Odyssey. They look pretty great!
(I will say that I’d rather play Tsushima over those two. Both in that the combat is a bit more fun and engaging, and also that it looks like you can finish it in under, y’know. 120 hours.)
Although the main content of the game is a furious, level-gated grind, I second the recommendation of AC Origins for its environment. First-rate deserts! The Discovery Tour is a great way to experience it quickly without being killed by level 500 bandits that should be kings of Egypt for how powerful they are.
idk, different strokes, but it’s crazy to me how visually crummy this game looks! like, what’s the term for that school of landscape portraiture intended to put the viewer in the position of an idealized manor lord gloating over his or her property? where all the scenery seems to bend obsequiously towards the gaze, where nothing in the landscape comes across as strongly as the sheer bland complacency embodied in the viewpoint itself - the fantasy of being the one who watches? this is like the videogame equivalent of it. even in-game video footage all looks so exasperatingly managed, in the same way as the fake screenshots that games tend to put on the back of the box - the ones that use dynamic visual compositions not so much to convey a feeling of dynamism as the feeling of looking at it, of getting to be the connoisseur-eye that owns and apprehends all this activity without necessarily having to be involved in it.
it’s creepy to me. i feel like i’ve watched a few different pieces of video footage of this and like, for all the detail, nothing actually registers in them beyond a sense of strange bland adequacy of composition, like a forcefield that no other visual information can get past. in the vein of games that play themselves: games that look at themselves, so you no longer have to. i think one of the traditional minor pleasures of 3d games has been the sheer volume of “bad” (useless, inscrutable, unnecessary, banal) images that they engender, as the camera grinds and clips its way through concrete walls and into empty corners. it’ll be one less reason to check in on any of these things as that gets replaced by tours through someone’s schmaltzy colour-balanced environmental art portfolio.
I think you’re on point- the artifice of the world is very upfront. You quickly pick up that every slightly elevated mound of land is going to give you either a wide view to look at or a dramatic view of the sun or moon (which always hangs low to cast long shadows), but you’ll never get something that feels “normal”. Sometimes the real world is mundane and the contrast between the mundane and the eye-catching can create interest in both, but there is no mundaneness in Tsushima. I think it works okay depending on whether you know what you’re getting into going into or not, but a world that feels natural and full of vitality this is not. It is a world designed for tourists; not to be inhabited.
But again, I’m here for it because I kind of knew that going in.
Also, the game patched in a harder difficulty level yesterday because people complain that Hard is still too easy once you get good enough, but I like how the difficulty modes keep pushing the game towards having more brief, high damage encounters. Not only do enemies do more damage but so do you, so the game leans heavier into that idolized version of samurai combat where battles are decided in one to two slashes. The enemy group aggressiveness is increased as well so you have to actually think more about timing your attacks rather than knowing you only need to focus on one aggressive enemy at a time. I think the quicker combat has a good rhythm and works really well for both the setting and also just this kind of AAA open world combat, the parry/dodge focused style popularized by Batman. It gives it a stronger identity as specifically a samurai-themed game.
That said, people quickly realized that your ninja tools break enemies’ guards and stuns them just as easily, so since you now do more damage the game is actually easier on the new difficulty. 
So check this.
There are these types of side quests/“tales” called Mythic Tales that tend to be a little larger than life (emphasis on the little) and get you sick loot like new abilities. There’s this one called The Six Blades of Kojiro. A monk tells you he’s been told to pass a message on to you by a ronin named Kojiro. Kojiro might very well be a demon because he’s said to have killed 1000 men, and now he want to fight you since you’ve become the talk of the town as The Ghost (of Tsuhishma). But first, he wants you to fight five other ronin working under him before he’ll let you know where he is. And to give you a little incentive, his ronin are going to be holding people hostage until you find them.
So conceptually you can now roam the world looking for these ronin, or you can just check your map to see their locations because this is a regular open world game. They’re located in exotic locations like the base of a waterfall, a stormy coast, or in the middle of an old battlefield and they’re full on Duels, which are this game’s equivalent of boss battles. But when you meet one of these ronin, they give you a couple of sentences spiel about how they’re going to kill you, and you fight and kill them. Then you move on to the next one. That’s it.
The game puts almost no effort into characterizing these ronin. What drives someone like Kojiro to kill 1000 people? Why are these five other ronin attracted to him? Why do they find worth in fighting you? It sets up this story about seeking out this specific set of super warriors but they’re nobodies as far as the game’s writing is concerned. They’re just as generic as the random ronin you’ll find on a trail. And this is emblematic of most of the game’s writing. It plays on so many classic tropes that you know exactly what it’s going for, and the single lines these ronin say can actually give you a clear inclination of the genre tropes that inspired them somewhere in development, but the game itself is so shallow in its treatment of its world and its characters.
For a game like this you don’t even need to be super high quality. At least make it pulpy junk food because that can be fun in its own way. Name these Six Blades like Metal Gear bosses if you need to. But for as much work as they put into making these surreal environments it would have benefited greatly if even a fraction of that quality was put into the things inside it.
I did kinda like the guy who’s all “lemme know when you’re ready,” and when Jin tries to persuade him out of it his response is just “eh, the money’s good, worth a shot.”
Hands down the best piece of armor in the game.
I’ve been enjoying the environments and the general vibe of the game so far. Combat/stealth feels like the least enjoyable part which is frustrating.
Went back and forth on English and Japanese audio. Japanese voices are just better character-wise but rarely match lipsync or expression and so it feels like a spaghetti western. English voices feel fairly milquetoast by comparison. Settled on Japanese in the end since you don’t really see close-ups that often.
I can imagine a more evocative voice cast could inject some energy into the story where the writing fails in that regard. The English cast is generally stern and serious, and abject compelling writing it doesn’t really grab your attention. Whenever you’re walking and talking I will start browsing my computer, half listening to the game so I can still absorb the conversation.
This horse has person on it.
Yeah, it’s an excellent podcast game since very little happens moment-to-moment character wise.
Starting to get the hang of combat and this really does feel like a less finnicky Assassin’s Creed game with nicer art and UI design. I’m onboard with the plot since its fairly simple but characters rarely give us a reason to just like them as people. I’m kinda just roleplaying a hardcore nationalist who is worshipped unquestioningly by all his subjects. You basically play a whiny prince who learns that chivalry isn’t always the best tactic. The samurai honour stuff feels weird in its romantic absolutism (maybe there’s some late game twist where I’m meant to challenge all the old guard characters who admonish me for using more effective tactics).
Also praise be, they finally came up with a decent system of not moving faster than the NPCs you have to follow (although I am sick of this kind of story delivery generally).
I roleplay as a feudal lord who will listen to the laments of villagers as their home burns around them and then walk behind them and take what’s left of their supplies and linen so I can craft myself a new hat.
I think it was silly to have the samurai so steadfast in maintaining the tradition of honorable combat with no variance in how steadfast they really were, but as far as the main plot goes there are only like four or five characters so I guess it also doesn’t give itself room to portray more viewpoints. I thought the game was upfront and brunt in how it hammered in “samurai honor does not work against the invaders”, literally opening with a scene where a samurai challenges the mongols to an honorable duel only to get doused with fire and have his head chopped off, so I thought the game was pushing you to admonish the samurai from the very beginning for their foolishness and from the game’s premise in general.
But having finished Ghost of Tsushima last night I don’t think the game’s storytelling was good enough to say anything interesting about the pros and cons of devoting yourself to an age old code of honor. It presents various situations and shows the outcomes of when regular samurai try to deal with them and when Jin tries to deal with them, but the game’s structure is not interested in devoting time to its world or characters enough for any of it to be interesting or meaningful. You have to put more into the game’s plot than it gives you to discuss its themes (which you can easily do since it’s building off well worn genre tropes) so I don’t think much of its emotional beats are earned. Ultimately I don’t know that the game wants to come down decisively on either side and leaves it up to the player to decide how they want to feel about codes of honor, but due to its inability to interrogate its own world I don’t think the game says much of anything in the end. But it did let me know, repeatedly, that mongols have been patrolling the trails and there’s a woman down at Kechi Fishing Village who could use the comfort of a samurai.
The only caveat is that I have not finished the side-character focused side stories. I imagine these mirror the themes of honor and breaking tradition so maybe these quests do manage to build on the themes on a more personal and affecting level. I may or may not get to them but the possibility is there.
I think the deafness to classism is the weirdest thing to me. Like a lot of the NPC dialogue has strange framing when you consider that most of them know who Jin is and are immediately deferential to him. A peasant gave me a hint about a haiku location and asked if poetry helps warriors and Jin replies that it’s not only for warriors. I know this is basically an NPC just marking a dot on my map but I want to know who he thinks has the luxury of indulging in poetry during a hostile takeover, especially when the populace are mostly homeless and without food.
In the end I think the game is hanging together as a lot of visual pastiche of Samurai media with some light historical sprinkling. But the main theme is almost entirely about strategy rather than ideology (as far as I can tell). There’s no real humanity to it because Jin is so dull and the supporting cast don’t really want much beyond a return to status quo.
The Mongols come off as really interesting by contrast since they’re vicious but well-organised and value cultural exchange.
Odd that you never fight a single Mongol who rides a horse given that they were infamous for their skilled cavalries.
This is very weird and unexpected.
It reminds me of early last gen where every game had to have a multiplayer mode which led to a lot of garbage but also some weird experiments. I think the game has a good rhythm for a Batman style combat system but it could use some more refinement (though I don’t think there’s any fixing the stance system), so I wonder what this combat-oriented mode will adjust. And if a combat focused one-of-these is even something that’s interesting long term.
I was actually recently thinking it would be funny if Sucker Punch just made a Festival of Blood vampire expansion for every game they ever make, but this is close enough.
Yeah, and you can see many moments where SP went through the effort of developing avenues for development but the game just never does anything with them. Like all of the haiku and hot springs. These are areas where you are specifically told to sit still, admire some nature, and ostensibly take some time to just sit back and think. The haiku have you “reflect on” stuff by composing poetry while the hot springs are literally internal monologues. Like, those are specifically there to have Jin express himself in two unique modes. But the writing is such throwaway meaningless fluff. The haiku are gibberish. The monologues are just one to two sentences that have Jin re-state some existing story element.
What happened? I’d like to think someone at SP specifically saw the narrative value these could have added when they were being pitched, so how did the final implementation turn so flaccid? Do I blame the writers, designers, or The System?
Yeah the haiku are particularly weird to me because they have a legitimately interesting set of rules and place in Japanese culture and seem like a natural fit for such a beautiful world with an ephemeral weather system.
But they just fall back on a really basic idea where you pick 3 lines that match syllable rules (in English). If you’re playing in Japanese, the weird irony is that the haiku often end up quite wordy. They often deviate from a focus on nature. Why not lean into the rules about words to do with seasons ( e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kigo) or a specific ‘cutting word’?
There could be a really interesting minigame here that serves as a gateway to genuine interest in the culture.
I don’t mind the ‘reflect on’ so much but I thought it was hilarious that my first option upon getting butt-naked into a hot spring was to reflect on my father or my uncle. Some vaguely Freudian stuff going on in these springs.
The person who pitched the idea (could have been anyone) was not the same as the people responsible for the code logic, the environmental art, the character animation, the camera work, the lighting work, the music and sound design, the writing, and none of those people felt strongly enough to do the heroic work to carry it through. It needed an owner who cared enough about this that they would hound people until it was great or do it themselves, but like most features, it was cast into the production line where everyone treated it with as much care as they did the dozen other things they were responsible for that week.
It’s a key pathology of large-scale media production: without enough ownership of a specific feature or moment, nobody is capable of applying their critical eye to it, and are working to make it ‘good enough’ for the person or abstract concept of project who wants it.
That makes sense. For such long and large projects where your individual work is disconnected from from the visible output, you can end up “just doing your job”.
But this is where team leaders are supposed to come in? Design lead, combat lead, narrative lead, or whatever. I have no idea how game development works so I’m just spitballing here. Does everyone have so many normal development tasks that not even the project leads can work together on the overall game vision, and then consider or exert creative control over whatever is their area of responsibility? Or does general project completion take precedence?
It’s a sliding level of personal involvement and drive across teams and across features. Of course every game is always over-scoped, so production is a matter of figuring out how to keep everyone balanced with work while yelling at designers to stop adding features and then murdering their babies. A specific lead or really, any specific person should be capable of driving a feature they really care about, but if they slip or lose attention just one weak link can wreck it – and good luck clawing back some other team’s time to redo a deliverable that was 80% quality.
In this case, for the haiku feature to work I think a designer and writer would need to be the main drivers. If a designer owned it, they could wrangle the art production but may have ended up writing these (terrible) haiku themselves. Or if they left a writer to it, the writer could have been left with a problem: make modular haiku (dependent on contextual information about the area around the interactable that may not have been finalized until late in the project!) without the time to fix what is actually a tricky problem: modular poetry. It’s a lot easier to read these and realize they’re terrible then to write 2 dozen modular haiku! If it was writer-led, then they would have spent tens of hours chasing down world design and art production to make sure the feature was being supported correctly and that’s not usually in the core competency of writers, who tend to be kind of silo’d and isolated.
And it’s a case where the non-personality of Jin didn’t help them. A character like Geralt has a simple, recognizable personality that writers can queue off of. Instead of ‘write an idealized modular haiku’, the problem would be, ‘write a modular set of quips Geralt might make’, and we’d have a framework for understanding dumb outputs as Geralt making a joke or just giving up. With an idealized blank canvas, the haiku can’t fail and reveal something about Jin; it has to stand on its own right.
I think team organization can explain a lot about the games put out, actually. For example, Ubisoft has the most distributed, factory-like game production model in the world. More than anyone they’ve managed to make worldwide studios cooperate in shipping enormous games and they’ve been able to reuse tech and features across games (like their great water sim). The ‘creative council’ is a small enough, tight enough team that they generally have more interesting game concepts than other AAA studios – tightly-bound, specific looks at historical periods that should theoretically interest me. But the distributed, modular production makes it almost impossible for any one part of the game to rise above mediocre, and their games succeed only in scale and never ever have any specific genius inside them.
A team like Bethesda (post-Oblivion) is driven by the world and dungeon designers, who are responsible for quest design (and writing! (!)) and they structure features off of the world events and quests the team of designers are building. Because of this, they can build much more content at their scale because designers are left alone to tinker with levels and quests. But they’re bad at maintaining a consistent tone or theming or features that drive the game because they’re focused on small contained content objects. This production is probably the same as produced older, more directed games like Daggerfall and Morrowind but when the team moves from a dozen designers covering world, quests, dungeons, system to three or four-dozen the ability of a strong personality like Michael Kirkbride to influence the entire game is muted.
I think the haiku feature could have just been reduced in scope. Having 9 potential lines per haiku inevitably results in some awkward stuff being shoved together to fit a particular scene and not contradict character or setting. Why not just have a ‘correct’ scene-appropriate haiku (it’s Jin who’s writing them anyway) and have the player select the appropriate word for the scene based on the modular rules already provided by Japanese poetry conventions?
I don’t doubt the effort required and the lack of polish certain open world game features necessarily lose and I wouldn’t say the haiku you can make are bad (some end up being pretty good) but it just feels a bit hollow with respect to the source material. Even a cursory glance at the Wikipedia page of haiku indicates some lesser known aspects than them just being 5-7-5 3-line poems about contemplation. It just feels like a missed opportunity. I genuinely love that its in the game, it was a nice surprise and almost antithetical to a lot of open world which always wants you to move to the next thing.
