Honoring the Blade: Lethality and Combat Balance in 'Ghost of Tsushima'

[Music] hello this is the talk honoring the blade lethality and comet balance and ghost of sushima this talk is going to talk a lot about how the samurai fantasy impacted our design decisions and our combat balance throughout the game but before we go into that i'll talk a little bit about myself my name is theodore fishman i go by ted i've been at sucker punch for 11 years i'm the lead combat designer there and i've worked on systems and combat design all the way through and of course mostly on combat design on ghost of sushima so before we get into the actual core design issues we ran into it's important to talk about the samurai fantasy flash of steel few quick strikes and the enemy is dead that is the fantasy of a samurai this is a trope instilled in via samurai films manga anime you name it we had to fulfill this trope but how does that translate into game play how do you balance a combat for a

grounded game especially without with character and player progression throughout the game or where you can't have everything die too fast but not but still feel lethal that is the core we needed to succeed at and we had features like standoffs and nailed that feeling of lethality and honoring that trope and fantasy but how combat is initiated is was the main purpose of standoffs that didn't really go into the standard combat loop how do we bring this feeling of standoffs and match those expectations how do we honor the blade feeling lethal and sharp so let's kind of break down the core design problem we wanted satisfying player progression that included armor charms weapons you name it and that had to be for 30 hours of gameplay for an open world game players could go wherever they wanted they could go you know do content whatever they wanted to so we need to have that be satisfying and we had multiple difficulty modes whether

it be easy to hard and later lethal which we added and we also support a two to four player co-op mode for bronze and up to raid tier difficulties plus we had a variety of enemies to keep players interested and escalate challenge and difficulty throughout those enemies and you know you know feel it through the progression of the game and we're also an action game you know it feels to feel fast-paced it has to be responsive you know how do we get players to understand what's happening and read you know like oh that felt meaningful that felt like there was an impact on my decisions and the choices i made for my builds my armor whatever maybe but the whole risk that's part of this is that things start to feel like sword sponges that did that hp inflation could you know spiral out of control specifically because of like oh they i need to challenge the player and then this sword upgrade doesn't feel meaningful that could be a huge issue and this is one of the major issues we had to try to you know tackle so we had to escalate those challenges we tried things right so the first one was

like you know standard rpg leveling right level differences scale damage and damage to the player damage to the enemy and also you know we should health bars and show how the big difference of each sword strike didn't matter but this started to feel really gamey and frayed at kind of the realistic and grounded nature of our game and it also felt like like your store wasn't sharp and it only got kind of worse when we did the extreme case you know other rpgs do this where you have skulls to show the difference between high and low hero to enemy levels it felt very artificial and we needed to escalate in a different way what was even worse was that you could do this in an open world scenario pretty easily if you just kind of travel outside the boundaries originally this was what we're looking for or like yo you should do this mission and upgrade your armor and your sword but this became kind of harmful to the fantasy and we try to go for a different approach let's try something different let's do so like a different wrapper on it maybe literally where we had a shield of hp

around the like a low health of the red health bar so in this video we talked a little bit the show here a little bit about like hey this orange barrier around the red hub points keep them like you know three to four hits to kill the guy but if you could break through the shield we had the weapon scaling and like to go through you know armor faster but it was really opaque and people had a hard time understanding what was going on there um and plus even though it was done in other games which is you know a totally fine way to approach it it didn't feel like lethal or matching the fantasy we wanted for the samurai game so we tried out multiple different things we did a lot of internal and external testing and we wanted to see what players think did this match their expectations and a lot of them was not what we wanted to hear like oh it felt like i was hitting them with a foam bat is this a pool noodle i don't know but the worst case is it really harmed the character fantasy we were going for um we wanted them to feel like a samurai and this was not honoring that

so what could we do to really make sure we honor that i have a crisp idea like what contract do we have with the player this lethality contract you know what does it mean to be a samurai and we talked about the standoffs being core to this like that feeling of the blade is sharp how do we bring that to the rest of combat as i was saying earlier sword combat must be lethal and there's other elements of combat too you know when head shots and assassinations also had a kill and made sense to the players like oh if i use an arrow and hit them ahead they should die we had to be a lot more cognizant of what it meant to players expectations of this fantasy and so we had to be a lot more harder on our limits of our hp you know number of hits to kill without upgrades had to be within a shorter band and even for our difficulty scaling we can say no no we need to keep it lower we need to keep it so that it doesn't inflate even on hard et cetera there have been other ways to do this

which i'll talk about in a minute and there's no rpg enemy levels um part of this was hp inflation but most of it was just harming the reality of the game like we've been we were you know presenting this as a grounded samurai game those rpg levels just didn't fit and that sounds great you're like okay i'll just strip it all away no problem right now we need to have some way to provide challenge and escalation have your you know armor and swords feel meaningful if they didn't you know how do we how do we make sure the players keep engaged with you know their reward loops or you know the combat loop that we're trying to provide so you know we had we had to start re-evaluating what we were doing and say well maybe we need to push on other angles specifically talking about being more defensive for enemies to protect the low hp's we know we're pushing down the number of hits to kill to like maybe four or five maybe three in some cases but we need to have them to block and parry you know pretty standard stuff but we just had we may have gone a little bit too far we tried to say okay no they

have to be really on their toes and have them block and parry that the hero and they're like oh no no no it just was too far it was too too frustrating for players but at the same time though you know like players we they started doing another you know fantasy honoring action of pairing and killing them but it became the predominant strategy we needed to have a way to have the players break through those defenses and still feel like a samurai in an awesome way so pushing on going on the offensive was a big part of this like you know we added a stagger meter a pretty standard portion of melee combat games nowadays um but we try to do it in a little bit different of a way not all attacks did stagger damage light attacks were you know faster and heavy attacks did that stagger damage but they also were the same amount we didn't want one attack to be overly used to the other were like oh you only heavy attack because it just does more damage um and it also really pushed us for helping an enemy variety like that heavy shield guy in the upper right like he

could slow you down so other enemies would come in like that spear on on the upper left it's a huge element of our encounter design and how we actually got an enemy variety it's like a speed of stagger can change how you approach these enemies especially with the speed of heavy attacks but it also lets start to expand what other things a player could do and that led us to open the door to stances if those who know know how our stance system works essentially you match a stance to a specific enemy type so that shield in the upper right you use shield stance or water stance for our game um and it you know breaks through to the defenses faster but not additional damage as i said before because speed of stagger was a huge element of our encounter composition and design enemy aggression and how fast people attack if you break them faster that was a huge deal and it to be clear this is not a hard solve you know unaligned attacks would get reversed or dodged but it wasn't the only you didn't have to do it um however

it was on fantasy and on brand it felt really cool to break through an enemy's defense using the right stance and it was definitely part of that samurai fantasy stances but the reason not to make it a hard solve is this is an open world game they could do it in a com completely different order they may not have the stance or they're like you know maybe they're not skilled enough whatever it may be it's okay not to require it if that they could get around and they still felt smart and like oh i got around his defenses and still killed him that being said this is a great baseline we had to go from expand from here um we had to escalate challenge for the enemies how are we going to do that well a lot of it was actually mirroring like mirroring the lethality of the hero you know less hits to kill to the other direction enemies have to start to be more you know lethal and we had injected variety as i said earlier on the first slides you know weapon usage as i just said and counter composition played into that that includes their aggression their speed and what moves that they have to you know challenge them with new types of attacks including the unblockable and parable attacks but also

of course increase enemy damage that's that lethality i'm referring to where they push back on you but at the same time we still had to increase hp but carefully you know we had to have sword upgrades feel meaningful and a lot of that came down also to character art or you could see the difference like oh he's more armored that justifies it some more but that doesn't mean we went out of control like a huge amount we had to really be mindful of this um so a good example of though is the worst case scenario is you could encounter the far right guy before any upgrades this is the worst case scenario we still would have maybe 10 to 12 hits to kill on that guy that could be bad um but we had some other mechanisms in our world that actually really helped us out so in our actual world we actually broke it down into kind of like prefectures each area had a different tier of enemies so you can see on this map here all the different colors a little bit harder to look at a little bit but the white areas are kind of like the intro enemies and then you have like the orange blue red and green as they escalate through the island

and so you start down here in the lower portion of the island and it's actually blocked off um to the upper part there's a choke point right at the start at the tip of the blue part of the south and that actually helped us say you can't encounter the the green guys at the top you have to you know get past that story checkpoint you have to get some upgrades so that mitigated the upper band it could get up into which is what you're really trying to avoid and it also helped us a little bit with balance trying to make sure that you didn't over leveled i'll talk about that more we didn't completely solve that but it did help us kind of say oh yeah this is as far as you could go for now so with all that in mind you know like what about like how do we present this information how do we show a number of hits to kill now we showed this earlier with the ui there's a lot of layers on the early obviously debugging versions of this but it actually just really noisy a lot of information like can we get away with you know less being more you know a big portion of our art direction was minimal ui and also it wasn't to our benefit that

comet and speed for ghost is actually pretty fast and a lot can happen and all this ui flying everywhere actually made it harder good news we got the armor points which are in some of these earlier ones but we still need to show progress against other stuff like that you can see the stagger bar which is the purple and upper left got turned into this kind of arced bar a little a lighter way easier to see we needed to show progress but we also didn't really need to show hit points because those hits to kill were low we'd have a low health indicator but it was just there say oh you're almost there um that was huge and important to us to make sure that like you still had showed progress for that but we didn't need to have all that information and surprisingly players were more accepting of slightly more hits with less information it's for like the lower band so if you're like five or six hits you might not need to show anything of course if you're higher we might have to show something which i'll talk about in a bit but essentially we were kind of surprised that people were willing to accept more hits if there was less ui to show it especially

with lower hit points so this kind of gets into this interesting question of design by feel or like how do we date it use data to confirm it well we have the kind of standard hits to kill chart a lot of games have where it's like oh yeah this is the number of hits to kill a target based on these progression values we we needed to kind of see what our design sense was and what expectations players had and it's like okay well this is six hits to kill if you have these upgrades how does that feel when we test that and so we kind of charted it all out but it's also kind of understand what the bands are you know we don't players could as i said before go anywhere they want in an open world game they could you know complete some content not others how do we make sure what is the acceptable range if you will between valid is it four to six hits at this point point in the game do they have certain charms and upgrades these are all questions we all factored into our sheets including difficulty balancing like to the hero as i said earlier for enemies we increased damage on different difficulties but we never increased their hp or their stagger values because

stagger had similar implications that hp were if it was too high players would get frustrated i was like oh this guy just feels like a wall but we can push all the other angles that said damage output aggression you know move sets timing for perry and dodge a huge part of that we charted those out in similar things where these number hits to kill the hero and those matching those expectations for the higher difficulties talking about higher difficulties uh we actually added uh another like post-launch kind of an experiment initially called lethal difficulty like we really wanted to push something that was not just harder it was something i felt maximally lethal like oh this is the same way fantasy a little bit more before like someone's dead or you could be dead instantly um it ended up being harder and you know we pushed a lot of the stuff to the extremes but you know we actually increased the damage of the player to make sure that when you're taking so much you can die in two hits that they would also go down in one to two hits and that felt felt right we were trying to do

something different but it did narrow our progression band and we're like okay we want to try this more kind of role playing more fantasy fulfilling difficulty mode but it's it's okay if that progression player doesn't feel as impactful necessarily because this was actually more successful than we thought it was gonna be you know it hit the fantasy the way we want to it felt like this untapped potential and people really started replaying portions of the content more than we expected in a really great way in especially for challenging encounters like our duels appear like i want a new hit run and i want to make sure that i do it perfectly it was just so great to see the community engage with that and also be part of that oh yeah this is what i expected so with all those things in mind like how do we confirm all those you know the difficulty modes the hits to kill how do we know we're in the right band those those ranges i talked about earlier uh well we had to have certain player models in play testing as i said before i keep saying play testing all the time because it's really important um but it's we needed to make sure that we

we hit those progression targets for each of the difficulties and those player types so we had three player types we had the linear average and wide players of how they played the game it's trying to match you know how much of the open world content that they had done linear is just going through the main story average is doing kind of a mixture of a little bit of content some of the side stuff and wide goes as wide as possible so we had a bunch of models based on xp sword level hp's like where they were when they did onsen armor etc and see where they landed and if that matched their expectation for that band of hits to kill in the upper right you can see a chart of five players who finish the game and we consider them the average band and what's really great about looking at that and seeing where they were and how much content they had completed over time we could ask them questions did this feel right to you did the you know the number hits kill feel right well not exactly like that but more like oh yeah did you feel like your upgrades matter did you feel like you were fulfilling the samurai fantasy in this way did you feel kind of like

that journey which is really great because we target this specifically but there are parts where we had to bend the rules you know like not this is not a one size fits all solution you know it may be painfully obvious to you but duels are boss fights and we thought oh we can apply the same kind of lethality feeling to this experience but you know if it's over in seconds you know that's not what players wanted you know we we are heavily inspired by samurai films but even though those battles over in seconds it didn't exactly match that so what players wanted was like a skill challenge they wanted a longer fight enemies more defensive more agile and they wanted to make sure that it felt like it was a longer you know longer experience and kind of saying about the samurai cinema it's it's kind of a reversal of our expectations so we when we kind of had to flip it around and say okay hits the kill have to be higher we have to add a health bar back which actually kind of helped because it made it feel more like an epic boss fight which is the point and we had to kind of

subdivide it a little bit with you know clashes of the sword to say okay this is not too long yeah this is a lot more hits but you know each section feels appropriately length so kind of like players like okay this doesn't feel like a slog so it was an interesting thing because we had to add the health bar not just because of it feels epic but to understand when hits a killer higher we had to add a health bar to say oh am i making progress as i said before in the ui slide we condensed it down to like you know maybe five to six hits or so and that was okay not to have ui in this case players wanted to know how far they were doing how they're doing it's long enough um however you know still there are some issues with feeling too short or too long and we iterate a lot on this in development if we get the right feeling for our duels another element of where we had to bend the rules was our multiplayer mode so legends mode was is a two to four player uh co-op experience and uh there's a lot of realities in multiplayer that we kind of had to kind of accept and that is four versus one or even two versus one target enemies go

down fast and if hp is too low it's gonna be like they can't get any attacks out they don't that's the two the go-to solution for everything it's not what we were we could we couldn't really do the same thing as before especially two because we also had more of a gear scaling kind of like power scaling gear power calculation that would scale a little bit between incoming and outcoming damage plus some of the player abilities are more magical in nature and like you know big area of effect attacks and damage we couldn't just do uh the same thing as before it gets even more uh applicable because supernatural enemies were a big part of this you know the oni and as a result it was a situation where it felt like they're mini bosses and they had their own abilities in magic and buffs like healing nearby enemies or you know regenerating or whatever it may be and it was in a situation where like okay we need a way to show this to the player we got to show ui again um especially because as i said in the dual slide that hits the kill was much higher we had to show that progress and it just it was a completely different expectation for our

players um and as i said before especially with these only enemies we wanted them to live longer and you'll be more of a threat to uh enemy uh so to players so kind of some final problems you know this is a great push for us towards the samurai fantasy but there were some issues we ran into one of them was over leveling um so as i said before the wide player person we didn't know for our player models they went wider than expected in our at home play tests you know it never really mirrored the same thing so you could do almost all the content in this lower portion of sushimo which is izuhara they would do almost all of it and then they would just start steamrolling their way through the rest of the content well part of this was actually acceptable for us on the player journey where oh i'm becoming the ghost i have new weapons new ways to defeat enemies and it's like okay it's okay to be a little bit overpowered um not perfect there's a place we could have done balancing here we tried to use that choke point as i mentioned earlier to kind of like hit a cap but definitely we're like okay

we thought we had a correct range but we're a little bit off there definitely a place to improve for another part of this is damage reactions we talked a little bit about this in the armor point slide i know it was kind of confusing whether you're doing damage or not this still applied in places for us like when you sparks versus blood is what we said a lot like oh if blood comes out they're taking damage um especially like we have a similar stuff from like fighting game terminology like super armor those will show sparks because they're not being interrupted and they're going to come on through but sometimes players would have a hard time reading that especially because their combat speed was very fast that kind of uh combat feedback even the sound effects and haptics and so forth we didn't quite nail that feeling right it was not exactly what you know we didn't get a nail and knock it out of the park but as i said before way big bigger improvement over our previous iterations on giving feedback to the player on damage reactions but definitely room for improvement so last thoughts and takeaways just for for us when working through this problem

you know core design decisions and tuning should really be as much as possible support the character fantasy core systems and core combat stuff like this has a huge impact on the play experience and making sure that you can target say oh no no we don't want to ruin that or undermine it it's easy to get caught into the swirl of saying oh this system will help here or it might or another give us something similar we might have to go back the drawing board a little bit especially for us and i was talking about for lethality you know that goes both ways that you know there's an expectation for that and there's a lot of learnings for us on that that angle and that enemy defensive behavior is critical like the stagger the blocking the dodging you know these are these are core combat mechanics are in a lot of games too but really emphasizing that especially for protecting low hp but in turn of course making sure player verbs and player attacks and actions can counter encounter that gameplay you know stances for us was a big part of that making sure that was a solid part of the character fantasy as i mentioned a second ago and trust your design intermission on what does it feel like this is a lot of

portions of this are designed by feel and it's important to make sure that you understand that hey this isn't like a perfect number that i need to get a certain sense of how it's going to be um but you of course you got to verify with play testing it's always good to play test as much as possible and verify without your own confirmation bias of how you play yourself a million times which you should um difficulty balancing escalation progression should not require major hp inflation it's it would be best to make sure you try to avoid it um especially for in our case like this character fantasy um and a huge element is just making sure you push all the other knobs you got aggression move set timing damage out but all these are really really really core but you should if you're going to increase hp which we had to as well be do it carefully um do it you know thoughtfully with intention it is okay to do so like we did before with character art whether it be like in our legends mode or whatever it may be

those are all important elements to consider but do it in a way that's you're mindful about it so i really hope you enjoyed our kind of a quick look at how we tackled lethality within ghost sushima and its impact on combat balance it was a roller coaster and a ride but we uh we felt like we can land on a pretty good solution um if you want to know more information at gdc 2021 about ghost of sushima specifically more combat things uh there's another combat talk here at gdc from our city ahead chris zimmerman he goes in more of the depth about the mechanics of combat more like how we built them exactly and through the kind of the years of trying to work on this game and if you uh if you're interested just make sure you check it out and uh yeah it's great talk uh and lastly uh we're hiring uh if you like combat things and if you are looking to work in combat design we are hiring a combat designer um this is the kind of problems we try to tackle and what we try to do and uh yeah just apply below if you can and otherwise thank you for your time

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