We changed a couple of things to fix this. It would have been nice to have solved this before Hideo Kojima visited Sucker Punch and tried Ghost combat, since that was the first thing he tried. That created imbalance early on - just hammering on the quick attack button defeated most enemies, which was certainly not the deep combat experience we were aiming for. So your attacks can be arbitrarily fast, but Mongol attacks can’t be faster than the player can react. (We actually watched real sword fights with blunted weapons during development, and they’re way sloppier than we wanted the game to be.)
#KATANA COMBAT MOVIE#
That’s probably because our ideas about how a sword fight looks are driven by watching movies, not real sword fights, and in a movie everyone knows the choreography ahead of time. We actually ran some experiments with NPCs having more realistic reaction times and it looked totally wrong. There’s no problem with your attacks being fast, of course - the NPCs can react instantly if we want them too. This time doesn’t vary much from person to person - we’ve done lots of internal tests, and everyone’s pure reaction times are about the same.Ī lot of the design work we did on katana combat was dancing around these limits. That’s just how long the nervous system and your brain take to figure things out. Human reaction times are slower than you think - it takes about 0.3 seconds to respond to a visual stimulus, no matter how simple the stimulus and response are.
Those realistic speeds created an interesting problem - they were too fast to react to. All the attacks in the game are captured on our in-house motion capture stage, so they represent realistic movement speeds. Katanas aren’t heavy - roughly two to three pounds - so quick slashing attacks are at the center of most katana fighting styles. In the end, we ended focusing on three things: speed, sharpness, and precision.įirst, speed.
We could look for inspiration in the great combat examples in classic and modern samurai movies - my personal touchstone is the 2010 remake of 13 Assassins - but the things that work in movies don’t always work in games, so there was work to do. Without katana combat that looked right, sounded right, and felt right, Ghost wouldn’t succeed. Our hopes of achieving our goal, of creating the time machine we were after, rested on capturing the right feel for the katana. He needs to be something more than the perfect samurai if he wants to save his home. He’s a master of the katana, a confident horseman, and skilled with the bow… but those skills aren’t enough when faced with thousands of Mongol invaders. Our hero, Jin Sakai, has trained his whole life in the samurai way - watchful, precise, disciplined, deadly. Our goal with Ghost of Tsushima has always been to capture the heart of the samurai fantasy - to transport you back to feudal Japan, to live through the beauty and danger of Tsushima Island under attack.
0 kommentar(er)
