The wait is almost over, as Sucker Punch's highly anticipated Ghost of Tsushima will finally become available, as the PlayStation 4's final Triple-A exclusive, on Friday the 17th of July, and giving players what has been described as the developer's most ambitious project ever.
In fact, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that Ghost of Tsushima is also one of this generation of console's most ambitious projects, as it will be featuring a massive open world set in Feudal Japan, and its main focus has been to deliver a top product for players to enjoy from both a gameplay and cinematic standpoint.
While Ghost of Tsushima already looks like it will be quite the cinematic experience, it wasn't until the special State of Play presentation that we saw just how serious the developers at Sucker Punch were in regards to this particular aspect, giving players the chocie to play the game in black and white from the very beginning.
This black and white filter was inspired by some of the movies by legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and the developers at Sucker Punch really made the game look like a Kurosawa movie, all things considered.
A recent interview with Entertainment Weekly sees Ghost of Tsushima Creative Directors Jason Connell and Nate Fox revealing that this black and white filter is actually, and officially called "Kurosawa Mode", and that it is particularly inspired by Kurosawa's work, but there is actually more to it being a simple black and white filter.
"We have this great game that transports people back to feudal Japan and Akira Kurosawa was one of our reference guides, especially early on about how we wanted it to feel. As we got closer and closer to making that a reality, we were like, 'What do we call this special mode that we created, this black-and-white throwback?' We threw out a bunch of different words and we thought, 'What would be awesome would be if we could call it Kurosawa Mode'," Connell explained.
Calling this mode "Kurosawa Mode" was not as easy as simply naming it that way, as they felt it was necessary to contact Kurosawa's estate in order to see if this mode could even be named after the renowned Japanese filmmaker.
"In order to do that," Connell continues, "we felt that we needed to reach out to the estate and see if that's something they'd be interested in. We sent a short video showing what it generally looks like, what it feels like. We actually did some research on the curves that may have existed on that kind of film that [Kurosawa] might've used."
As reported by Weekly Entertainment, the developers went through several of Kurosawa's films in order to get the proper tones of black and white for Ghost of Tsushima in order to adjust these colours so that they would fit various times of day and weather conditions to track "how deep were the blacks? How bright were the whites?," and even adjusted the game's audio so that some sounds would actually sound like old televisions.
"We actually toyed with the audio a little bit. Our audio team have an internal tool that mimicked sounds of old TV and, specifically, megaphones, radios, TVs back to the '50s," Connell revealed.
In 1274, the fearsome Mongol Empire invades the Japanese island of Tsushima and slaughters its legendary samurai defenders. Jin Sakai is one of the last survivors of a noble samurai clan. To combat his overwhelming foes, he must pioneer deadly new fighting techniques--the way of The Ghost--and wage an unconventional war for the people of Japan.
Ghost of Tsushima is expected to release exclusively for the PlayStation 4 on Friday the 17th of July.