Brian Flemming, cofundador de Sucker Punch Productions, granted an interview to the organization of the Games Developers Conference Showcase in which he participated in an AMA (Ask me whatever) with different online users. Unsurprisingly, he was asked about Ghost of Tsushima, but also Infamous and other trivia.
Sucker Punch was founded in 1997 by Brian Fleming, Chris Zimmerman, Bruce Oberg, Darrell Plank, Tom, and Cathy Saxton. They released Rocket: Robot in Wheels in 1999 and just a couple of years later they got a deal with Sony that led to the Sly Cooper saga, Infamous and finally Ghost of Tsushima. Right now the studio belongs to Sony and the game located in Japan was one of the best sellers of PS4 e 2020.
Pure development
Maybe that’s why you were asked about the implementation of complicated mechanics and why features were removed due to lack of time. According to Flemming, the most complicated thing was the combat, it must work in any terrain, situation and moment, so he considers that designing combat mechanics from scratch is extremely difficult.
On the other hand, he revealed that he can’t remember how many features were cut because it was something they did on a day-to-day basis, something he considers healthy and normal in an open-world AAA video game development work environment.
He was also asked about the transition from Infamous to Ghost of Tsushima belonging to the same genre. Flemming said that Infamous is much smaller than GoT and that, measured in virtual tiles, Infamous has 100, while its current title has 1200.
The co-founder of the study confessed that during the first two years it was really difficult to see progress, creating the terrain of the map and the game is a very technical and not very visual task, so for at least two years they could not implement anything, or even create technical demos.
Finally, Flemming said that they received help from Sony’s internal Japanese studios to be able to represent Japanese culture in the most respectful way that can be done from the West.
You can see the full AMA below.
Chad Stahelski to direct the film Ghost of Tsushima Espada
Ghost of Tsushima is one of the games with the best completion percentage by players
