Creating Feudal Japan from Across the Pacific

[Music] thank you for uh taking the time to watch my presentation uh which is titled uh creating ghosts from across the pacific hi everyone my name is jason connell i'm a creative director and art director at soccer punch and our director on um ghost of tsushima i have an art and background art and computer science background roughly 17 years experience um doing what i do i come from a background of lighting shaders lighting and color and cinematography and um and yeah and if you want to reach me you can reach me at my twitter here at uh art envelope i work at sucker punch production sucker punch productions has been around for um for coming on i think about 25 years and they've made some super cool action games i've been i've been there for

about 11 years um i was a big fan of sly cooper and a super big fan of infamous and i came around the time that infamous 2 was being created and eventually we went on to make a game called infamous second sun which is made in uh seattle and that's actually really about where we're located we're located across the water from lake wat unlike washington and bellevue and which is just super close to seattle for those who don't know and so that was kind of our backyard and creating this open world action game of the guy who has superhero powers and uh you know the power of doing right by the details not all the details but the details to sort of capture what seattle could feel like was a great uh learning uh for us because our next game was about bringing the authenticity of an open world environment to a place that is pretty far away from us and we had to to really utilize some of our skill sets but um really frankly we had to develop a whole lot of new skill

sets in order to make this uh work this is very um very different from um seattle so and was also far back in time and i'm talk of course i'm talking about uh ghost of tsushima now you know this time we're not creating seattle we're creating um or representing a culture that we do not know uh it's not familiar it's not local by any stretch of imagination we are not inherently experts and it's certainly not anywhere close to 1274 in fact it's so long ago that it's hard to actually dig up history about it you know go sushima is a is an open world um action samurai game inspired by real events in history the mongols invaded in 1274. and to make this game we really had to partner with people across the pacific to make a game that respects the genre and the culture we effectively had to change the way we make games and had a lot to learn along the way now everything that i'm going to talk about

today is super important but it probably could come off at some point and it sounds like you know maybe each one of these topics is just too laborious and you may ask yourself was why is this actually important you know um that i'm going to talk a lot about how much time it takes to sort of solve some of these problems and you might think wow that's a huge tax on making fast decisions and you know we all want to fail fast it's video games it's creative endeavors that's true but you know time time it does take time to sort out some of these issues and you know simple things may seem more complex but to us solving these issues and developing these relationships with our consultants and stuff was sort of the cost of entry so why is this important you know it's important because we felt like we had a duty to treat this with care to fulfill the expectations of the genre and to do so with thoughtfulness because that was our goal we wanted to create something that people who like this

genre of movies or books or other games that could be excited about it but it was uh viewed as something that was done with thoughtfulness so to this day ghost sushima has won some various awards including some specific accolades by japanese gamers and press famitsu 44 out of 40 was super humbling for us and recently nate and i got and extended to the rest of the studio uh awarded honorary tourism ambassadors to sushima which is just like the coolest thing that's ever happened in my life but it did take a lot of work to get here so let me share a little bit about our journey in making this game from across the pacific this talk is broken up into four sections i'm going to talk about how ghost came about sort of uh hinging on almost didn't come about because of a single fear uh sort of our transition into having to take the position of learning we're directors and leaders and that's how we've made games we built upon you know we make decisions built off our expertise but this time we're gonna have to sit down and listen to somebody else

tell us what they think is is right for us and uh this particular game and that's that's a different frame of mind as well as the complications of once you do become that suit and you do hire consultants you're gonna get feedback about history and culture and sometimes that goes in conflict with the game you're creating and you gotta you gotta sort that out and um and i'm gonna share with you uh some of our insight there and lastly it's kind of a form of its own uh it's like entertainment consultant uh is what inspirations do you have and what inspirations uh specifically we had for ghosts let's start off with talking about the beginning so it was august 2014 we just created infamous first light and uh you know it took us took us a little bit of time to figure out what we're going to do next we knew we had the opportunity to create a new ip and we had some ideas and these ideas you know we had said we had something like 150 people at the studio at sucker punch these ideas um that we had were very

broad they're cool ideas but they're very broad and you take every single person in the studio and they they form their own slightly different variation of what that idea could be and it was just really hard to bring it to a super sharp simple idea and that's what we needed we needed an idea for our next game that was we didn't want everybody to be on the exact same page because that's what you know having variation and differing opinion is what makes great games but we needed something that was sharper and more simple and really powerful and that our 150 people weren't going off wildly in different directions and what we decided is that we needed another strong player fantasy to fulfill and frankly we've done this before right second son or excuse me infamous in general is a superhero player fantasy or the sly series is about being a thief we have expertise here and this was this was something that we've done a great job with in the past so we knew we wanted to do that again what's the super clear player fantasy we wanted to fulfill so we talked about being a

medieval knight and what that might look like a medieval night simulator or something like that or you know hey we could do a modern thief game and we have some expertise in the past some of those people are still at the studio hey could we do this and then we had the beauty the samurai the the game that we ended up making but we actually crossed this one out really fast um uh nate and i um we were like we're totally uh culturally inexperienced here i'm not sure if we know how we can make this game um we don't have uh cultural experts we don't have experience hiring that that many to make a game as big as epic as we'd like to we sort of had this moment of fear so we were cursed down night and thief for about two more weeks i don't remember how long it was exactly and then we came back and we're like you know what we love samurai stories we're huge fans of samurai cinema kurosawa or um you know i know nate's a big fan of uh graphic novels like lone wolf and cub or sagi jimbo we're so inspired by

this that we felt like we should at least give it a shot because at this point in a project if you don't have enough ambition and passion to carry you through now you're not going to for the next four or five years i mean these games will take so long to make so samurai it was we decided we were gonna try it and we gave it some art and we started working on it and we had um um we had we had we had ourselves going in a direction but we still had that fear in the back of our minds how are we going to do this thoughtfully we had this very real cultural journey that was in front of us that we needed to understand and figure out how are we going to accomplish it and the interesting thing is that very quickly we realize well we do have some pretty big advantages for example we had people within our organization that we had worked with for a long time there were japanese that were big fans of sucker punch that we could talk to and give them the pitch and tell them what we were planning on doing and you know just

just get their feedback and shihei shitazon was so excited about the game and gave us some feedback about how we might be able to create it that it gave us ambition that we might be able to pull this off and frankly for us to be successful here we didn't know how how much we were going to be doing this but we did know that there were some things we're going to have to change and the way we make games first of all every time you make a game somebody's going to get hired an animator or a graphics engineer producers this time there was this whole new subset of team members that we were going to have to hire that we had never experienced working with in the past people that even at that point when we started you know we knew we had uh for example religion we needed somebody to help us with japanese religion because we were totally an experience here but as time went on that team that list just grew and grew and grew but we knew that we're gonna have to kind of reshape our minds a little bit about what type of team members we're gonna need in order to pull this off and we're gonna have to do research now

every game especially these big games like this you know there's there's lots of research that goes in like shader research you know for example but not to the level of like historical religious you know cultural deep cultural research and consultants guiding it it's just something that we've just totally never done before these two were going to catapult us into being absorbed with information we're going to constantly be giving information and that really catapulted us into the second section i want to talk about so we had ghosts we our fears of creating it were defeated by our excitement and some of our partners and like you know shu being so supportive so early gave us enthusiasm to move forward but now we have we are put into a position where we no longer can just sit there and be directors about literally everything we we had to sit down a little bit and sort of frankly buckle up and and and take in information and realize that we're not gonna be driving literally everything that's that's good

and um and i'm going to talk a little bit about that so we sort of had to became the become students and becoming a student is is um is kind of got a couple things in common right like gotta show up gotta have an urge to listen gotta have an uh yearning to learn probably gonna accept the fact that you don't know everything it's certainly about checking assumptions if you i saw a samurai movie one time um that's great it might have some great information in there but it's great to sort of check those assumptions with some consultants they might be like yeah but it doesn't work the way you think it might and and that was really good for us and frankly the most important one around the topic of being a student is really getting into research and especially field research if you can and for us it was really beneficial because that's the really exciting one we actually got to go on a trip to sushima and japan and do real research and that's that's just so much deeper than your typical cursory kind of um well google's

not cursory anymore you can learn anything on google but um this was just so powerful for us that it helped uh augment the work that we're already doing from a research angle i can we're photos that we're looking at and documents we're reading online actually getting to go to the place and i took all these pictures i'm about to show you i kind of went there thinking you know you know this is going to be one thing but it really provided proved to be sort of beneficial in ways that i i had no idea that i would walk away from that trip feeling the way i did i really went into that trip thinking oh this is gonna be great we're gonna go on this epic trip to japan you know we're gonna gain a ton of knowledge of what it is that we were building and how to create it effectively and this did become true right you know sushima in greater japan and all this you know on our entire trip this did become true we we we learned about you know what did the buildings look like how tall were they what materials were they made out of

you know those cool katanas and nodacies and odachi's like how how do you create a sword what types of foliage should we use in certain climates of japan thousands of photos hundreds of pages of note two trips to japan with 10 plus members of our sort of senior leads and directors we brought back an enormous library of photos drone footage you know you name it to reference from it was it was awesome but to me the real beauty was so so much more important than that it was building new relationships with people that were going to guide us passionately guide us and desperately has one they had so much energy for for helping us and we were so inexperienced here like just learning the types of questions we needed to ask and you know um and and how to document it and how to uh categorize our notes like it's just

there's just so much to take in but the human connection with some of these people like the guy in the black chair here his name is jonah jonah guy and he worked for sony japan helped organize our first trip i was on the strip with him and he was so invested in answering any question we had introducing us to food he took us to the shrine which is where one of the warriors that fought at this actual real invasion he fought and died here on this beach and there was a shrine here commemorating this fight took us there took us to the beach where the invasion actually happened called komodahama beach honestly i thought it was just gonna be those photos and sort of just like what we're making and what became true was i was so invested from an emotionally perspective promotional point of view like i came back home thinking i really want to do right by all the people that helped us and the new colleagues that i have and the new friends that i had i really wanted to do right by uh the locations that i saw

and i think our entire team felt that way and so you have this like personal investment that's far bigger than just creating a piece of entertainment and it really helps drive your ambition and your passion and your patience to to tackle some of these very challenging problems ahead so that personal investment is very real when you take on a project like this you're also going to learn a lot about various uh you know things like here's a katana or a natachi i can't remember exactly what this one this one is but you learn a lot about how a sword is created and this right here is called a suba and zuba is just this hand guard and that's what i kind of went into this trip thinking it was and then i went to a sword museum and i realized and this sword museum was just insane they make swords they have old decorative swords here and you realize this suba is not just a handguard it is a handguard it's a lot more than that it is icons of just artistry and mastery just beautiful pieces of japanese artwork that i just kind of thought was a cool looking handguard and you realize that

sometimes it's connected to family sometimes it's connected to the stories there's there's so much art and craft that goes into a single sword and that even that little piece of inspiration that little nugget of knowledge drives so come you come back home in months later and it drives so much energy to create our own weapons and our own swords and getting those details not just to be cool but if we had a character that was her name was masako who was going after the the people that killed her grand her grandbabies she's a hunter and so going after you know when we have to create this piece of artwork it's not just a generic piece of cool art it's connected to she is a character in an artfully poetic way deepening her story or deepening our main hero story which is jinsekai the sakai storm you know it's deeply connected to him and his pushing out the mongol invasions which you know they say that a windstorm came and pushed them pushed the mongols off the island and that's that's like us being inspired by the

artistry and the craftsmanship even in this single suba and so that research trip did give us a lot of photos it didn't give us a lot of great um uh you know reference guide but the personal investment to do a great job coming back home and saying man jonah was a great guy i wanted to write by him um how can you know and feeling that you're now you're part of a team and that inspiration carried us through uh so many so many hard times and i can't recommend a trip like that enough we did have to grow our team uh we grow our team quite a bit this isn't all of them but these are the types of positions that we sort of grew in terms of the consultants we bring on we had a number of people from sony japan that um actually helped us from the very beginning um uh kotami actually ended up moving over to the us and at some point and he actually worked on our project full-time for a number of years he's a great producer a great consultant he's he's just incredible and so we've surrounded ourselves with some internal folks and then we actually surrounded

ourselves with some you know language consultants some mongolian language consultants we had one person very early on to just help us understand religion the difference between shintoism or shinto and buddhism or a temple and a shrine is very confusing and it's even more confusing for 1274 predating the meiji restoration it even gets more complex and so having someone that was just an expert in this very complicated area was so helpful obviously our game's about combat there's a ton of combat consultants that we had and all of them were just exquisite and just amazing and just so so helpful and we even had some people that weren't necessarily brought on to be consultant guides like shigeru omobayashi was our composer one of our two composers and he's japanese and he would see our game and he would give us feedback and of course that was just like so great to get feedback from our japanese composer and to hear his voice and to just understand what he thought we were making and what we could do to

to make it better so even though he's making the music and i couldn't wait to hear the music i was also excited that he was invested enough to say hey you know maybe these plants could be different and that was that was excellent so we've equipped ourselves with new colleagues to guide us and we've sort of gotten into this position of learning or really sitting back and taking uh taking a seat taking a position of learning from these guides so now we have these historical guys and we have these consultants cultural consultants surrounding us but we still had to make a game and sometimes there's this conflict you know the you know something the guide says is very different than what you need the game to be and you have to resolve this conflict and this is where all i can tell you right up front is that the majority of time it can take to get these problems right because it's about balancing um you know uh you know how can how can the game be an incredibly fun game but

also a poetic and artful and thoughtful experience and that takes time and it takes time getting to know your consultants it takes time getting to know your game and that's a that's a huge part of what we what we do and so i'm going to talk a little bit about some of our examples and some of our goals with what we are doing so at the very top it's important to really highlight what we were building now we are not and we never want it to be a sort of a sushma one for one rock for rock stone for stone you know building for building simulator first of all the game is it takes place in 1274 it's just so long ago it's hard to even understand exactly where things were but furthermore that's not our team size it's not our goal it's actually our goal is to really just get enough of those details right to transport you in an artistic and respectful way if the details are really important we're going to get them right we're not going to mess those up and we

surround ourselves with people to get it right but outside of that we want you to feel transported and it make it feel memorable for you and actually this is just for its worth this is exactly what we did with second time we made the game in seattle but you know pioneer square doesn't look anything like our pioneer square it has similar brick types and material types the space needle is in the game but it's not exactly in the right spot and you know we were um there are two bridges but they're sort of nowhere near the same type of bridges that we have here it's about the impressionistic view of something a blurry-eyed view showcasing sort of the feeling of a place you know people's perception of seattle's rainy and wet it is then then we should deliver some version of that and maybe we push it and we may be expressive so we're trying to create a sushi that can be expressive and artful and entertaining but culturally thoughtful as well now if it's not about getting every single detail right

that's great you might think that saves you some time but i'll tell you it i don't know if it does because literally as soon as you invite the you know your consultants to sort of kind of partake in giving feedback on every axis of your game you realize very quickly that every department is going to be affected by this so you have to plan for the time so just to run through a couple of things you may not consider i've heard all of these on our game there's an instrument in the game that's playing you know was that instrument really around in 1274 or you know uh those outfits they don't really look like the history reference that i saw or that family crest it's it's real and it's a modern crest and it belongs to some modern family this could you know be sort of looked at poorly you know the story moment is anachronistic or the architectural style is off or the modern the dialect is too modern it's not about i could go on and on it's not about getting all of these right because we don't have the time we could

work on this for 10 years and you could get some of these wrong it's just creating that stuff what which ones are important that's the ones you want to work with your guides on which ones are the ones that we must get right and which ones are going to be transportative and you want and and you want to get those right because in the end details really do matter getting details right is so important and i'll tell you right now i didn't really know what a torii gate was before i took on this project i kind of knew but you know taking on this project you learned very quickly what it is but you know you know in our team we started first putting the gates in the in the in the world and you google tori gate and you're going to get something like this pretty quickly you're going to see something modern it's a little flashy it's it's larger it's it's not of humble origins it's of you know pretty pretty big origins and you work with your consultants pretty early and you realize this this is not really representing a authentic view of old japan this feels very new and modern and you get guidance that like maybe you should head back into a more natural feeling where you feel like they're made out of

natural pieces of wood they're humbler in size to represent the smaller community that um you know sushima uh uh you know had and there's a lot of amazing shrines in on sushima but we we were representing it a little bit poorly at first in our first kind of look into it so it's about going one level deeper deeper on those details to make sure that you get them right and so thanks thanks for our guys for helping out with those details and there's a lot more especially around religion that i could go into but i'm going to hit a couple other topics like naming now naming a hero for a new ip that nobody's heard this name before yes it's so hard you want it to be short and sweet and has personality and easy to say you know regardless of what you're making you want these memorable names and uh you know we had this complication here that you know was brought up it's like oh well are we going to name him in the english version are we going to name him like it would be in japan where he would have the family name and then the given name are we going to do a european cell

or you know how my name is like jin sakai jason connell and we actually had to talk about this because all of your scripts will have to be written this way you know it's it's a pretty big change if you're going to do it in english we had to talk about you had to create time to have this discussion which we've never had this problem before now this problem ended up solving itself because we decided to make a japanese localization track ship with every single copy and you can select it from the very first menu in the game we realize that this is going to solve itself we're just going to let people play the way they want to play but that time we did consider the options early on we had to discuss this our consultants brought it up i think ryu brought it up himself and there are other issues that we had with names like we had a character whose name shipped with yuna but her name was yonei for a very long time and that name actually came from one of our japanese partners very early now her character over time started morphing into a character that um had modern ideals and sort of uh

that name yonei sort of started clashing with sort of her character type over time and we started getting feedback from our consultants and our kind of partners that her name didn't really fit with who her who she's becoming and man we had already done written some stuff we had been working on this name for a long time and to us yonei and yuna sound so similar we don't know and so we're completely blind to this and so you have to trust in the people you're getting guidance from and so for this particular example even though we didn't understand and maybe we were even perplexed you have to ask them and you have to trust and when they when somebody says oh the character doesn't feel like it matches the name it's really kind of pulls you out of the experience for them if the name felt very old it was an old feeling name and this character was very modern in their ideals that's bad to us that's i don't want that for any of our characters so we ended you know even though we had production sort of things to sort out we ended up changing the character's name now again i could continue going on and

on and on with a ton of examples in fact probably could give a two-hour presentation about all these types of examples but that's not the point the point is this stuff it takes time it takes time to sort them out it takes time to realize which consultants are the are the right people to handle different types of tackle different types of problems it takes time to hire consultants the whole process takes time and even even uh with us being pretty committed to it it still uh still takes a lot of time so i think that's one of my most important points that i wanted to convey in this is that even though our team treated this very very very seriously it still just took a lot of time so i do think there's some some some some things i can share though that might be helpful so here were a few ways that we um you know we when we get a piece of feedback that we could potentially see the feedback be broken up into different types of answers um so we'd get a piece of feedback and talking to our consultant they would say oh you know what this is an okay thing to experiment in so we'd be good to go

and we would try some experimentation we'd get some feedback that's just like a hard no this is super you know um you need to avoid this uh this is not what you think it is and we just full stop we just listen sometimes there's game needs and um and the game has to function a certain way there's it's got to be fun we want the progression to work a certain way and that doesn't mean we don't listen to our consultant say oh we just kind of keep going back saying okay what if we try this or what if we tried that and you know typically we can find something that works that feels uh comfortable and we can both have our cake and eat it too and then sometimes it's my favorite you can have feedback that inspires design and inspire big design changes let me give you a couple examples we at one point in the script had sepaku which is this act of sort of killing oneself and um super clear feedback very early on that that was something we should avoid it's out of time period it felt like we were shoving it in because it's a trope we thought it was very interesting we

certainly didn't want any of that so we actually rewrote that out um and and we've never looked back was the right decision and we're really glad that we removed it um we get feedback about architecture in our game so we did have a lot of architecture that was kamakura period inspired if you know that's actually the time period that these buildings were built there was a certain way they looked but at some point we started experimenting with other types of building structures and we got some feedback that why are we doing this and we would talk to them and what we learned is that you know what it's actually great if you do a good job with establishing kamakura as the base and then you're sort of exploring in architectural styles to try to create unique feeling across the island or little pockets of you know um you know memorable locations and it was okay to experiment that was that was good for us to hear same thing with outfits by the way sometimes the game has needs and our game specifically we wanted no mini map we wanted no compass we didn't want we wanted to be able to look around the island and see what you want to do next but

sushma is like hills everywhere and super dense forests we have a horse you gotta ride a horse you gotta fight you you can't be on steep incline so we actually had to flatten some areas out we still have lots of hills we had to flatten some areas out we had to deforest a little bit so that we could get that um you know those flat areas where you could see where you're going next and we had to work with our consultants about what the right feeling was and we eventually got there in a great way but that was a lot of where the game had needs and lastly we used to have hunting in the game because i think it's very common and you know have bow sea animal must kill and there's this like feature that's hunting and games that is great for a lot of games and we didn't particularly want to go deep on it but moreover we got feedback that hunting you know deer was just so it was so strange because hunting mindlessly didn't really fit into the culture of japan you know it was sort of like that a lot of huge respect for animals especially these deer so okay we had to reevaluate this at the same time we were discussing ways in which we could you

know maybe um uh make gin fall in love with the island how can we inspire him to really feel like he's being guided by the island more and this changed the way that we treat animals sort of next thing you know the wind came up and then we had birds we de-incentivized uh killing deer and sort of kind of gave us a whole new look at some of the way we treat animals in the game so i'm going to talk a little bit about some of the takeaways for some of the areas where our consultants and our guides came into sort of uh almost like conflict with some of our game goals and how we sort of maybe overcame some of those and some of the takeaways well first of all 1274 was so long ago that there were a numerous amount of historical discrepancies and variation in what we were um kind of uh researching it was just it was just kind of all over the place we just surround ourselves with enough guides that would give us

good feedback and we would have to take the best approximate guess to sort of solve some of our historical based issues you know we surround ourselves with the facts and try to do the best we could each example as given by the previous section with the four quadrants each example completely different challenges i mean there are different teams there are different challenges there are different levels of passion and sometimes uh sometimes it's even technical hurdles like it's it's it's uh it's could underline and bold this but it's just so different for each um piece of feedback that you might get now one thing that we did was really helpful is we had uh katami he was sort of our point person he was at the nexus of almost every single piece of feedback that we tried to address in fact actually he became so close to um some of the team members i know for me

in particular i utilized my my my my relationship with relay grew so much throughout the part of this project because i would talk to him so much and be like hey what do you think about this hey what do you think about that you know anytime he and i or one of their leads had an idea about doesn't matter if it's an animation thing you know how the character holds a sword or a story thing or an architectural bit i we would call him and say hey what do you think about blah and if he didn't know then he would kind of um go down the list if he would know who to talk to and would either point us in the right direction or he would take on the problem himself he was so invested in having that single point of contact allowed us to be very proactive in um our endeavors to sort these problems out if you know and point at them as in the ideation phase not wait till they're already through production and it was also made it really great to uh it was you know i think this is a great goal um luckily for us it never turned into an us versus them or you know game versus history in a real

you know um conflict like negative sense it was very collaborative and it was that way because it felt like we had you know people like you today helping us that were just part of the game team like we were just trying to create a great game together and that collaboration is key because we are a team and i can't say this enough too that it really isn't about getting all the details perfectly fit and right and even our consultants would guide us here it's it's about very specific ones are very important it's inert enough to earn that belief and that trust and that respect and um and that's and that and then the rest of it's how do you create the great piece of poetic entertainment that we were hoping that we would create and that sort of goes on to talk a little bit about the next section you know that's a little bit about how we dealt with some of the feedback and how entertainment and sort of our guidance along the way could sometimes collide um and hopefully that's helpful to you but you know this next section is really

you know i want to talk about what inspired ghosts and how frankly this is you know the other pieces of entertainment ended up being sort of their own uh consultants in a way you know i want to talk about her frankly our inspirations we talk a lot about various types of other consultants that we had that were you know very specialized that we brought in to help create the game but one and very important strategy is that we studied you know the works of all these great creators that came before our game was even an idea or even sometimes before we were around you know how how have japanese artists and you know filmmakers and japanese game developers depicted japan in the past or maybe japan like places if that's a made-up place so our goal was to create a piece you know an entertainment piece a piece of a work of art and a game that sits right next to the artistry that we were frankly inspired by so much growing up

frankly we had decades of entertainment and consumption that have been ingrained into who we are and so we really believe that looking at some of these neighbors some of our most influential pieces of work could really help guide us so i'm going to show you some of the inspirations that we had ones that we held onto really tightly even though it might have taken some time for you know for a while for us to really kind of see the benefits come come out so we did set out with a few very distinct visual inspirations in mind famous simplified illustrators from japan like khasuy kawasei featured really low detail style block print artwork bold and high contrast yet really impactful you don't really see the rocks in the sand and these illustrations but what you do see is the memorable shapes the bold colors it's it's very curated and there's a lot of overlap with this simplified look and feel to this wonderful game called breath of the wild that showcases really great just you know kind of restrained and disciplined

use of color and this like single beautiful species of grass it's like lovely like lovingly flowing through in the wind it's beautiful and there's this low noise feeling this high color and saturation and this great curated feeling to both of these so the question was could we take these types of inspirations and apply them to a more realistic samurai epic that was the question and this proved to be pretty hard you know we were frankly inherently western game artists and and our goal was left her own kind of path was sort of heading towards the path of general general realism and so a common goal in games is to create these realistic spaces and uh we just got done with second son which was like had a little bit of that realism and that grittiness you know seattle's very different you know and we kind of really headed this way pretty hard but it just felt like something wasn't right it wasn't really transportative it wasn't very memorable and at one point it certainly didn't

feel like some of those references that i just showed you and at some point on the project you know fairly early yoshida-san uh gave us feedback that his you know memory and this is great his memory of japan is that it was more green he felt like it was missing that and i just really like that i thought that him saying his his memory of japan is that memory you know because memories are this like blurry thing where you don't see the every single tiny little detail right but you know the really the only things that that that resonate with you or something something will stand out so if we were going to create a firm forest why would we go with the one on the left when we could honestly head more in this direction where we create a fern forest that is single and species type it's like all consuming like we want to leave you with the memory of a firm forest it's certainly more saturated more green and hopefully you you step away from that feeling like i visited the fern

forest and i know where it is now and this had a lot of overlap with you know some of the references that i kind of mentioned earlier and certainly some of the paintings um or the illustrations that i mentioned as well from kawase so now this this this this was resonating with us and so we started taking the game in this direction and boy the visuals exploded everywhere you went in the game you could find this magnificent beautiful simplified yet still gritty and kind of realistic if you wanted to look at it it had realistic features but it was very simplified in like species and that that that that was so important to us it was this was so important to us the noise like the low noise to try to match this like feeling was so important to us that we created tools that our artists could use to find areas where there was too much noise in the game if it was red it was too noisy and the artist could go in and do a pass to remove the amount of noise and therefore you could have this you

could very quickly and easily isolate that this rock texture here was a great rock texture but it was very noisy and you could go in and address it and simplify it down and let it sit down and sort of be complementary to the art style that we were trying to go for instead of this maybe adding more unnecessary realistic noise to the frame and this was wonderful because we're making we're making an open world game and this was our visual target and where we landed was you know sort of in the cinematic um stylized view of the game where there was minimal sort of species around around the world in terms of foliage but really really really impactful and colorful and at the textural level we try to remove as much noise as possible so you see the details that matter which is sort of a theme for this entire topic or this entire talk and that manifested into multiple different types of biomes and an art style that sort of resonated with our fans in the end but it's not

all about obviously style and color there's tons of other areas we were inspired by that changed the course of the game cinematography could go on and on about the types of cinematography that we were inspired by i'll just say that we looked at a lot of old and new samurai movies and we would look for patterns and there were patterns that would pop up and a lot of these films and one of them is which is like a centered framing with a human or a subject matter and in the very very center but it's very equal framing and so we would look for these patterns and then we would look for areas whether it was in marketing or in the actual game cinematography that we could utilize these patterns in our own ways because we know it would resonate with other fans i had watched these types of films etc here's another one duels if you've seen a samurai movie there's this it's not about the duel it's about the human tension that's so palpable between these two fierce warriors that are sort of

standing behind this beautiful backdrop everything is just so amazing around them and yet there's just this silent tension between these two people and you know i didn't grow up necessarily watching samurai movies in fact i grew up watching what most of us would feel like in the in the western the us might be more familiar to which is westerns and they have the same thing because they are inspired by that there's the same human tension is so palpable between two gunslingers that is two people with a sword and so we really felt like this was a great thing to capitalize on in terms of like put into our game having that human tension because you've seen it in samurai movies and it's real and it's human but it was also familiar so what we did is we created a number of very specific tools in our game and those duels are set against unique backdrops really beautiful display of environment art there's this human narrative that usually is going on between you and the person that you're dueling it's fairly serious they're

actually pretty tough too that and there's a cinematic that happens before that builds the music it's really built around having tension before the fight we would also create a feature later on called standoffs that would let you have systemic duals so you could get into those more often more frequent at your own discretion getting that tension was really key for us we also were inspired by a number of books whether it's graphic novels for entertainment or if it was documentaries and books that would help us understand the history you know both of them do so much but you know the entertainment based books the graphic novels the artistry in them we could learn i think what we learned was like human connection and variety of types of complex relationships whether it was you know protecting a young you know kid or you know something about betrayal like somebody that might betray you and certainly the books we learned about just that how can we best depict the mongol invasion um and and do right by what um

these history books could help us help us out with so we look to several books as well sometimes our research and uh and our kind of entertainment inspiration overlap and our historical research and our kind of love for samurai cinema overlap and in one particular way it came out with just this like crazy interesting super new idea for the game so we're big fans of um you know movies kurosawa movies these movies that have wind and movement in these famous samurai classics but turns out i mentioned a little bit before but the wind also had a major part in the actual history of the events of 1274 the invasion the belief is that this windstorm known as the divine wind sort of pushed the mongols back to see and protected japan not once but actually twice and that's kind of an incredible story so incredible that we really um decided that we should underline this

and it ended up becoming a mechanic in our game it uh in our game the wind if you haven't played it the wind actually guides you there's no mini map or compass you sort of kind of pick the wind's next target and the game's particle effects and the wind would sort of blow in the direction you need to go next so many reasons why this was like was a was a was a fun decision to come to but it took that historical research and understanding it took the years of samurai um movie watching that that we kind of were so inspired by and it took us sort of kind of coming up with a variety of ideas to get there and so those overlapping themes really helped us come up with a really poetic and great feature that uh really propelled the game in a lot of ways so one of our greatest inspirations um in the end came full circle we're we're finishing up the game and i mentioned that you know um we were so inspired by kurosawa you know we actually ended up having a

mode in the game called kurosawa mode and it was introduced into the game after working with the kurosawa estate showing them our game sort of having a couple back and forth answering some questions and really trying to faithfully show them what we're trying to create and so much of our game is inspired by the art and the cinematography and the storytelling of a kurosawa classic we were just so honored to get to have this relationship and to have this feature and to have it named such because in the end the fans of our collective uh you know whether it's games or watching his you know those films our collective biggest fans together could enjoy this this crossover in this way in our game and that was that was that was kind of like um sort of towards the end of the project it was just this uh really rewarding moment for everyone uh here at the team so just to kind of recap we talked about

how ghost got started with a simple player fantasy idea that almost wasn't samurai because we were scared of this topic we were scared of how we were going to do this you know and i'm so glad we went back and and and really chose samurai it was the right choice for us and i'm so glad that we kind of faced that that problem um and that challenge head-on and and uh and and didn't let our fears sort of tear us away from our dreams uh we we talked a little bit about our uh kind of journey into taking a little bit of a back seat learning from people the art of learning if you will and and just being really proactive and developing frankly new relationships um with a bunch of amazing people that help make our game great and this is where the relationship is forged right like the complex solving between game and authenticity and what happened in history and you know making entertainment and you know original story versus you know what happened the true events this is

where the relationships of all of our consultants thrived and came alive and and um and hopefully that section was helpful in sharing how we dealt with some of those those uh uh subjects and lastly you know way before we ever decided to make this game we were fans of the genre so of course we bring bring forward we bring forward our own kind of depiction of how it how we would hope it could be represented and how we hope it can be appreciated and so those inspirations are really important and sometimes those inspirations are guided by consultants as well other consultants can give us feedback about its representation in japan and how they might may or may not view it but those inspirations are kind of what starts you off to begin with so you have to have them throughout the entire game you know so to sum up you know creating massive pieces of entertainment they take years to create five years to create six years to create games are they're so

complicated they're minor miracles that they get finished at all sometimes you know and this is saying you're going through a lot of extra work and you might ask why go through all that extra work you know the year spent talking about these reference points the labor sometimes reworking you know names you know for us it's we really wanted to create a game that repres that thoughtfully represents a culture that is not our own and and then that comes with a sense of responsibility and and if we wanted this to resonate with the wide audience um in a way that all those classic samurai films did for us or some of those games and books that i mentioned did for us then then we really needed to pay attention to this and we needed to take it seriously so make no mistake the responsibility is real and it's super heavy and it takes a lot of energy and patience uh but like most things um you know uh requires strength in relationships with people around you especially things like this you know that team that you develop along the way

can can be really transformative in the game that you can create so we're honored you know that it played out the way it did and uh and we did learn from many mishaps and lacks of judgment along the way but we cannot really express how thankful we are that you know all the consultants that did help us on this project as well as all of our teammates in japan the localization team recorded audio people that recorded audio from us from japan like it's just the list goes on and on so i'm just going to put a big loud thank you out to the world for anyone that ever helped give guidance and feedback on our project and helped us understand more what we are creating so that we can make something that fits the expectations of of a great samurai game a great piece of samurai media so thank you all for helping us recreate uh feudal japan from across the pacific so thank you for uh listening to my talk

and um sucker punch is hiring if you're looking for a new adventure cheers [Music]