A bolt of steel, a few quick cuts and the enemy is dead; it’s the fantasy of how a samurai fights. Deadly, precise, fast… but how does that translate into gameplay? Honoring that fantasy, what we called the “lethality contract,” was a major challenge we had in creating Ghost of Tsushima.
Keeping things deadly was a struggle. Assassinations and clashes have nailed it, but what about standard combat? The lethality must have lasted throughout the game. This meant that it had to work for:
- Player progression for over 30 hours through Ghost of Tsushima: Legends armor, charms, weapon upgrades, abilities, and gear scaling
- A large group of players from Easy to Deadly difficulty, and Ghost of Tsushima: Legends Bronze to Gold difficulty, Nightmare / Raid challenges
- A variety of enemies and combat experiences to keep players interested
- Responsive and fast gameplay
The number of moving parts we had to pin down to do all this work (and still be fun) was astounding. Welcome to my work! I am delighted to go into the details of how we have approached these issues.
So buckle up and take out your katana, we’re going back in time.
The “sword-sponge” problem
As players explored Tsushima and upgraded their weapons and skills, the challenge from enemies had to grow in tandem. Upgrading weapons increases player damage, so we’ve also adjusted enemy health and damage accordingly. This was to increase the difficulty and show significant growth in upgrades. All great ideas… but we found out the hard way that there was a fine line between showing power growth and breaking the “lethal contract”.
When we did our first game testing, we received some very negative feedback that enemies felt like “sword sponges.” My favorite quote from players was “I felt like I was hitting enemies with a foam bat.” It was… not what we wanted to hear. The players told us loud and clear that their expectation for the katana was the “lethality contract,” and without it the realism we were looking for was shattered. Undeterred (at least initially), we tried many different versions of “hit points” in different packaging as “armor points”, but they ultimately failed.
We were banging our heads against a brick wall and it was painfully obvious that we had to change our approach. As a result, we have imposed a maximum of “kill hits” on all enemies in the game, even with upgraded weapons. This includes a massive Excel sheet of all the upgrades and armor against all the enemies in the game, and I won’t bore you with the large number sheet (although some of you may appreciate it).
This helped us to be careful and avoid having too high enemy HP, while still maintaining significant improvements. However, we still had to justify any increase in HP to show this growth in power by investing in character art. It also allowed us to visually represent a wider range of enemy types:
However, the problems did not end there. As we implemented new enemy types, with smaller enemy HP values, the experience was boring because they died so quickly. We had to increase the difficulty on other aspects without breaking our “lethality contract” with the player.
Increased difficulty and enemy behavior
Respecting the “lethality contract” has become so essential in the combat experience and difficult to maintain that we decided early on that playing on Easy, Medium, Hard or Lethal, would not increase enemy HP further to add more. the difficulty. In a way, this made other decisions easier by having a fixed point to work from, but it also meant that we had to take advantage of other elements to increase the difficulty, starting with the enemy trying to protect their low HP pool.
Blocking and parrying the player was the main way to protect HP, but our early prototypes were a bit over the top.
Having the enemy parrying your attacks had merit, but was far too common. The enemies felt impenetrable and weren’t fun to fight. The fight has become too reactionary, we just have to wait for a parade and strike… which again was not what we wanted. We wanted players to have opportunities to be attacking, not always passive as the most effective strategy. To do this, we’ve added Stagger damage to heavy attacks to break through defenses, allowing the player to be aggressive.
As a result, how quickly you can stagger an enemy has become a key part of standard encounters. The time it took to shift an enemy was the time other enemies could hit, and that was a critical aspect of how we injected enemy variety. This was especially true when adding high cadence attackers (like double wielding swordsmen), which made for a more difficult experience. We’ve also varied other enemy attack patterns, scaling time per enemy type, and their defense level to change the combat experience even further.
We have tried many ideas of new models of attack and defensive behavior of the enemy. While not all are successful, they are good to look back on.
Too defensive, looks ridiculous
We added Stances right after, to give players more opportunities to express themselves, and another way to be more offensive in combat. It didn’t take long for us to realize our 4 main enemy archetypes directly mapped to the four postures we were building. We changed the stance attacks to Stagger enemies twice as fast, which helped encourage proper use of Stance. It was a double win: it fit in perfectly with the fantasy of being a samurai, sinking between each stance and staggering / killing enemies quickly only reinforced the “lethal contract” we were trying to achieve. .
Against the lethal contract: duels and legends
We knew that having 1v1 Duels had to be part of the game. Having two samurai face to face in an epic way was a requirement. We started working on Duels after firmly establishing the idea of the “lethality contract”. We have therefore kept the HP pools at a low level. Not only did it feel bad, it was hilarious too fast.
While the Samurai Cinema trope is two swordsmen clashing and the first strike kills, we knew players would have different expectations. It was boss fights with high challenge and intensity. We had to bend the contract and honor this moment.
We’ve increased HP, attack speed / damage, range of movement, and added evasive actions. Players liked it but during testing some felt they lagged too long but when we lowered their HP they said it was too short. We succeeded when we split the Duel into “phases”, via Sword Shock, where each piece of the fight had an appropriate amount of HP while keeping the fight the length of time we wanted.
Like Duels, Ghost of Tsushima: Legends forced us to change the maximum number of “kills”. This was especially true with Oni, who are considered mini-bosses and are mythical foes. So like Duels, we’ve increased HP to meet those expectations. Also, as Ghost of Tsushima: Legends can have 2-4 players attacking a single target with a huge range of abilities (many ignoring defensive behavior), and we had to take care of scaling Ki gear. , it was necessary to increase the HP pools.
Combine all this: player skill, progression and become “the ghost”
So far, I’ve mentioned a small subset of what kept the “lethality contract” alive, but there were many other aspects that supported this concept while increasing the difficulty. Here are all of them, including what I have discussed so far:
- Enemy defensive behavior (step counter, block, dodge)
- Speed of enemy attacks, group aggressiveness and duration of combos
- Time required to block, parry, and dodge players
- New sets of enemy moves to learn
- Players solve the gains of skillful actions
- Damage from enemies
- Increase enemy HP (last resort)
All of these have also been essential in supporting many different types of players and more axes for player growth. We wanted skilled players to gain mastery over combat, which was created by tightening up all of the above aspects (like parry timing), while upgrades (plus armor and charms) would release those limits and would show this sense of growth. This, along with different difficulty levels, allowed a wider range of players to enjoy Ghost, with multiple ways to achieve victory.
In deadly trouble, we took all of these to extremes, but interestingly, to honor the “lethal contract” we owed. increase damage caused by the player. Not only did it feel fairer to you, but battles could be over in a second, whether it was victory or your own demise, which we thought was right on target.
While we wanted to have power growth, we didn’t really expect the scale of player play until we moved on to more difficult stories. We initially predicted a narrower reading of the content based on how we saw players engage in the game during game testing, but in real life conditions it was very different. As a result, many players have “mastered” themselves before encountering more difficult stories. Although not ideal, we preferred this to the alternative of players feeling ineffective and breaking the “lethal contract”.
Additionally, we wanted to empower the player to take the same journey as Jin to become “The Ghost.” Assassinations, Kunai, smoke bombs, etc. had to be extremely deadly to strengthen not only was it more effective than being a samurai, but also to have a reason to use them. Feeling “in control” with these weapons was okay and it fitted better with the story we were trying to tell. Although I freely admit, these Kunai are a little too easy to get from bodies;)
Phew! This was just the tip of the iceberg on how we approached the “lethal contract,” one of the pillars of Ghost of Tsushima’s combat balance. I would love to continue, but it has to end at some point! Hope the next time you change your stance and destroy this Spearman, you can understand a little bit about what made you feel like a samurai.
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