Sucker Punch considered Pirates, Rob Roy, and Three Musketeers before Ghost of Tsushima

Sucker Punch has revisited its six-year-long project with Ghost of Tsushima on the day of its release for PS4. The studio told the story and never seen before details about the early days of development, in a PlayStation Blog post by co-founder Brian Fleming.

The game had mixed reactions but was also only the third among Western productions to receive a perfect score on Famitsu.

Among its unique traits, players will find a Kurosawa mode, which will allow them to play the title entirely in black and white as a homage to the Japanese movie director.

According to Fleming, when it came to deciding what its next game would be about, Sucker Punch took into consideration multiple options before settling for Ghost of Tsushima.

“inFamous Second Son and First Light had just shipped. We’d completed three big and two small games in the series, spanning nine years of work,” the co-founder recalled.

“The PS4 was still pretty new, and yet it was time for us to move on from inFamous. You could feel it in the room.” 

“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,” Brian Fleming reminded, discussing the key elements of what their next project would be.

He then disclosed three options they had considered for both settings and stories to tell before they jumped onto Ghost of Tsushima.

“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,” Fleming revealed.

Both pirates and Feudal Japan have turned to be quite explored in games this gen, but sure the Three Musketeers, from 1625’s France as told in Alexander Dumas’ historical novel, would have made for a unique setting.

Rob Roy would have made maybe for a less known setting. It’s still a historical novel but set around 100 years later in Scotland and England.

Perhaps, those settings could be explored in the next game from the developer, which is at this point, coming to PS5.

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Paolo Sirio

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