When 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ghost of Tsushima launched for the PS4 on this day in July 2020, critical response was split into two camps: this feels like an Xbox 360 game (derogatory) and this feels like an Xbox 360 game (complimentary). I didn’t review the game at the time but, as I explored its go♔rgeous world over the rest of the ꦫsummer, I ended up falling into the second group. It was a good game that had the sense to get out of its own way and deliver a fun adventure, even if that meant drawing comparisons to the previous generation. So, color me surprised that, five years later, Ghost of Tsushima seems surprisingly forward thinking.
Open-world games have found themselves in an interesting position in the past decade. Like the frontier in the early 20th century, they’ve been fenced in. We saw the genre arrive with GTA 3, evolve with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Far Cry 3, and reinvent itself with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild. There have been plenty of good, even a few great, open-world games since BOTW. I enjoyed 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Red Dead Redemption 2, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom immensely, and think they have brilliant wide-reaching innovati🐷ons. In ge🅠neral, though, the genre is now making tweaks and subtle quality-of-life improvements, not blazing new trails.
Gh🐭ost Of Yotei Looks Fine, But Sucker Punch Could Do (And Has 🗹Done) So Much More
From the studio that brought you Gam𒁏ﷺe 1, here’s Game 2.
And so, that makes Ghost of Tsushima the perfect ga🍨me for our curre🐟nt era. It wasn’t overly ambitious, but it introduced small ideas that other games have been able to take and run with in the five years since, and some that still haven’t been implemented anywhere else.
A Living World Instead Of A Checklist
Ghost of Tsushima’s smartest innovation was to use in-world, natural cues to direct your exploration, rather than a minimap or quest markers (although those exist if you want to use th🅘em). In most games you would follow a big yellow diamond at the top of your screen until you☂ found your objective, but Ghost of Tsushima built its GPS into nature. You simply slid your thumb along the touch pad, causing a gust of wind to kick up and blow in the direction you needed to go. Did it make logical sense that you could trigger the wind? No, but you also don’t have map markers in real life, and it was a smart way to keep exploration immersive, even when you got lost.
The game used animals in a similar way. You might be exploring when you saw a fox dart across the path. You’d put your current quest on pause and follow the fox. If you kept pace, it would lead you to a cool side opportunity. This idea was so good that Square Enix repurposed it in last year’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, with baby chocobos leading you to fast travel spo💧ts.
Ghost Of Tsushima Still Has A Photo Mode Like No Other
Despite the majority of triple-A games launching with a photo mode, none have matched Ghost of Tsushima’s. It had fantastic color grading options, plus the ability to add elements of motion to static shots. You could cause a cascade of autumn leaves in the back of a shot, add gusti🌄ng wind, or brood under thunderclouds.
The photo mode also allowed you to frame up tracking shots, snapping shots from multiple angles to form an animation. If you wanted to capture an epic shot of Jin standing in the rain as the camera swept around him, you could do that by simply repositioning the camera multiple times to set key frames. The game woul🃏d fill in the rest.
Ghost of Tsushimaꦿ wasn't revolutionary in 2020, and it isn't five years later. But it was quietly impactful. And in this moment, when triple-A games take a half-decade to make and the open-world genre feels, to some extent, 'solved', quietly impactful is a great goa❀l.
