Post Script
Why Ghost Of Tsushima proves the open world genre needs a next-gen overhaul
Jin Sakai is a forward-thinking kind of samurai. He instinctively understands that a principled approach isn’t going to work against such a dishonourable opponent. He’s ahead of his time in other ways, too: he has, after all, managed to invent the haiku some four centuries before it actually existed and six before the term was coined. Anachronistic as its poetry may be, Ghost Of Tsushima’s moments of reflection are welcome: culturally and thematically meaningful if not historically accurate. And they’re a rare point of difference in a sandbox game that too often falls back on familiar ideas – with familiar shortcomings.
To give the developer its due, it has at least attempted to put its own spin on established openworld tropes. Take that guiding wind, for starters. Swipe upwards on the touch pad, and rather than a waypoint icon popping up, a visible gust will blow in the direction you should be headed. From a purely cosmetic standpoint it’s an improvement, a diegetic way of making sure you don’t get lost, the swirl of petals and leaves an added bonus. It’s narratively meaningful, too: it’s suggested that this is Jin’s late father showing his son the path he needs to take. Yet it only blows when you’ve got a target in mind; in other words, a marker you’ve already selected from the top-down map. And you’ll still get a distance notifier in the topleft of the screen. Rather than keep swiping to be sure we’re on the right track, we often find ourselves following that number, watching it get smaller or larger to gauge whether we’re on the right track.
The other methods it uses to draw your eye only work up to a point. You’re told to look out for plumes of smoke on the horizon, or flocks of white birds. Yet there’s not enough high ground from which to scout locations, and no way of targeting places of interest you see from Tsushima’s peaks. In practice, unless you’re riding blind without any destination in mind, it’s not too common you’ll spot something (other than the odd Mongol patrol) to distract you from your current goal. At least not with some assistance. A golden bird will occasionally show up to lead you towards areas of interest. And when you pass close to a shrine or a fox den, or you find yourself within the vague vicinity of a farmstead or village, its name is announced on screen in large text. Any feeling of unaided discovery is lost.
By contrast, sometimes you’ll wish it gave you a little more guidance. Its decision not to highlight anything is a double-edged sword. Mongol-controlled areas are so expansive that you can spend a long time looking for the objectives it demands you complete before you’re done. Retrieving every single banner, freeing every caged falcon or locating every cache of stolen iron often involves a tedious search before we’re allowed to burn the place down. It’s an issue that persists in friendly settlements, too; surely we shouldn’t have to spend several minutes hunting for merchants or armourers?
That’s typical of story missions that have you doing an awful lot of following, while being kept on a tight leash. We wince when, during an apparently linear combat sequence at the very beginning, we’re told we’re “leaving the Tale area”, having seemingly been encouraged to move on. In another mission we find what we think is a clever way around an enemy base, only to be told once more that we’re not where we’re supposed to be. Stray too far from an ally on horseback during a sidequest to chase a fox, perhaps, and you’ll see the same message again. Granted, to commit to a story mission in an open-world game is to strap in for the ride, to willingly limit your boundaries for a more authored experience, its pace dictated by the developers. But surely they could afford to be more flexible than this.
Away from the main plot, meanwhile, the sandbox structure routinely tempers your achievements. The reminder after we’ve beaten a leader that we need to defeat five more to unlock a new stance diminishes the sense of triumph at finishing him off (not least when obtaining it makes the other stances less effective against that particular opponent type). Shrines feels rather less sacred when we’re told we need to visit another six to earn an extra charm slot – a minor charm slot at that. And it undermines the importance of the artefacts you obtain. It’s the kind of game where you get a supposedly ‘unmatched’ piece of armour and spend all your resources upgrading it, only to be sent on a mission where your reward is a superior set.
True, many of these minor irritations are by no means exclusive to Ghost Of Tsushima, and maybe it’s unfortunate to bear the brunt of these criticisms when for large parts Sucker Punch is simply following entrenched genre rules (and rarely quite so as closely as Days Gone). Admittedly, we’ve been spoiled by Cyberpunk 2077’ s narrative approach, which folds in elements of immersive sims for more dynamic yet still cohesive storytelling. Yet as we mindlessly nudge the stick between clearly defined handholds to climb a cliff face – and later run along the edge of another until a prompt deigns to let us descend, our recently-gifted grappling hook only capable of latching onto ropewrapped branches – it’s hard to shake the feeling of déjà vu. Instead, we look at the messy mob combat and the rudimentary stealth, and realise that had Ghost Of Tsushima been released four or five years ago as an Assassin’s Creed game, few would have batted an eyelid. For an innovator like Jin, that’s not good enough.
A sandbox game that too often falls back on familiar ideas – with familiar shortcomings