Ignore the burning buildings and Ghost of Tsushima’s feudal backdrop clearly looks idyllic. Sucker Punch wants you to drink in the PlayStation 4 exclusive’s scenery, so it’s doing away with irritating waypoints, hoping that you’ll explore its open world naturally. The tidbit comes courtesy of an Official PlayStation Magazine preview, in which it claims that the Seattle-based developer wants you to use “landmarks and your knowledge of the world” to navigate it.
The publication continues: “Sucker Punch is no stranger to creating open worlds, but the fairly minimalist nature of the environments is a bit of a departure for the developer. Time in the story will pass as you explore, with titles telling you how much time it’s been since the invasion began.”
Naturally you’ll happen upon enemies as you explore, and you’ll have the choice to attack them head-on or stealthily. You’ll have a grappling hook for traversal purposes, as well as a handful of gadgets to use. “Sticky bombs and fire arrows can help [protagonist Jin] spread disarray through an enemy camp,” the magazine continues. Roll on 26th June, eh? Well, assuming the title makes that date, of course.
[source gamesradar.com, via reddit.com]
Comments 45
It's a brave and exciting decision. It should add to the immersion. Hopefully it has a minimal HUD too.
I hope that fast travel will still be there.
Awesome, I have been playing games lately with little to no HUD. Realized that I have been staring at arrows and mini maps for 10 years now lol.
Oh well, this was the game I was looking forward to the most, but it sounds like it's not for me, I have a bad memory and a poor sense of direction.
Exploration mode on Ghost Recon Breakpoint did this pretty well.
N.i.c.e my most hyped games for this year along with sega genesis best franchise streets of rage 4.word up son
Interesting! I’m even more excited for this game now. One of the things I loved about Breath of the Wild is there were no waypoints or anything telling me where to go, I was free to do as I pleased.
Zelda BOTW also did this. This game looks so good a almost want to wait to play it on the PS5. If the game play matches its looks it could be the standout swansong for the PS4 as The last of us was for the PS3. The peak of what was capable for this generation. At the moment I think God of War has that accolade but the finest should come in the dying days not 2 years before
@SonuvLiberty totally agree. You become so dependent on it, it takes away the incentive to explore. I’m really glad ff7 remake allows you to turn off the map and markers, it reminds me of the original where waypoints wasn’t a thing. Makes you earn it!
@BearsEatBeets after playing God of War with no Hud i hope that is an option. Changed the level of immersion big time
Anyone remember The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? Zero waypoints, no modern-fast travel, you had to actually look at the many objects and terrain to know where your quest objectives are.
Miss hardcore games like that.
Also, compared to modern-open-world games, Morrowind is relatively small, but the mentioned things makes it seem much much bigger and denser.
It sounds cool but I still reckon it’ll ship with waypoint options. They won’t want to put off potential buyers by forcing them to do things for themselves and not walk on autopilot towards a floating arrow.
theres too many dumb casual players to not have an option for waypoints
I'm all for it. It will make you pay more attention to the landscape and the landscape looks fantastic.
Lack of way points reminds me of Everquest back in its early days. No maps and no floating paths to follow. I learned really quick to search out landmarks or death came swiftly.
I really hope this game isn't delayed, tlou 2 delay is enough for me
@nessisonett I remember watching jin using red leaves as waypoint in video previews, like he goes where the read leaves blows in the wind or something like that, which I think is cool
@wiiware yeah same. Please don’t be delayed ghost!
Sounds great. I’d there’s any dev where I won’t mind exploring the world naturally and discovering stuff, it’s Sucker Punch. They are the masters of traversing a world. Ooh, I’m so excited!
@DominatorV93 Yeah, that was pretty dope. People gave you real directions. Have you ever heard of Outward? It’s a newer hardcore RPG, in fact it’s hardcore about the traversal and everything. It’s from a smaller studio and it shows, but it’s got a lot of heart and fills gap that no else has these days.
Despite being a postie my sense of direction sucks so if anyone asks me where some place is and it's not on my delivery chances are I send em in the opposite way to where they wanna go so as cool as this sounds...I hope there is an option to have your hand held too.
Really looking forward to this. Hope it keeps its release date. Also has anyone received their refund yet for TLOU 2 digital ?
@Jaz007 I've heard about the game name here and there but never managed to check it out, until you recommended it for me.
I like what i've seen thus far from the trailers and to my own surprise this game went waaay under my radar.
Will definately consider purchasing it later this year, since i still have quite a backlog.
Thank you for recommending it!
I like how they do it on assassins creed you can choose to get given the way points or you work them out with the clues about like ghost recon break point.
That's really cool. I hope there's a lot of interactivity with the open world as well.
Not sure if I want to nab this on the PS4 or wait to see what it looks and plays like on PS5.
@Amppari imagine bragging about being a more "hardcore gamer". What a virgin.
That's really stupid. Unless the world map is incredibly small and has a lot of unique landmarks it will suck. Watch every area look way too similar and it's just a mess to navigate.
@playstation1995 same as man! I’m also hyped for cyberpunk but I’ll probably wait for PS5 for that
There goes any chance of me playing it. This was my biggest pet peeves with RPGs from 20 years ago - doing it now is a non-starter.
@Boucho11 word up son
That could be good, but depends on the rest of the game. There's the risk that people will easily become lost and get frustrated with the game if it's too hard to navigate.
About eight or ten years back, I was an avid World of Warcraft player while that game implemented showing quest objectives on the map and added minimap arrows as an optional update - basically, waypoints. The before-and-after experience, and the contrast between content designed pre-and-post update, was striking.
Playing content designed without waypoints in mind with them turned on was a degenerated experience - suddenly, instead of having a reason to explore, you were reminded at all times that you were either playing correctly by following the arrow, or wasting your time. It was definitely less effort to play, but it was also definitely less immersive for it, buzzwordy as that sounds. You just didn't have a reason to care about most of the world anymore (incidentally, that wasn't something the game fixed until years later, when they started filling areas with unmarked cool little items and trinkets to stumble on).
Meanwhile, playing content designed for waypoints with them turned off was just... unplayable. Pre-update quests either naturally gave you the context you needed to find their targets, or the world was designed so as to guide you to them. Post-update, though, quests still had rich descriptions, but the location context just wasn't there - it would've felt paradoxically hand-holding to come out and tell you where to go, when the game was already literally showing you. In any case, playing these quests without waypoints enabled was an exercise in futility.
Sorry to ramble - tl;dr, my big takeaway is that whether waypoints are more convenient or degenerate is impossible to objectively say, but having them as an option is a false choice, because whether they're on or off has real, significant game experience implications that the world itself needs to be designed around. I applaud any designer wise enough to see that, and passionate enough about polishing their product to come out and say "Yes, there actually is a right way and a wrong way to play this as it's been designed, and we're going all-in on the right way."
@Akurusu people say it's the best way to play witcher; lazily riding your horse, going any which way you fancy, and memorising locales based on familiar scenery. Less rushing and more exploratory curiosity. But I guess it also depends on how much time people have!
I play games on Easy. This may be too hard for me. But it looks too dope to pass up.
@Johnny89 wow i hit a nerve lol
Great news, I hope it works well and spur other devs in this direction.
It sucks that for ten years we've been playing open world games that amounted to non-interactive stretch of land between waypoints, with linear stories that don't mesh well.
Breath Of The Wild was definitely a step in the right direction, and pulled it off so effortlessly I kept asking myself how and why open worlds were not already like that in practice, when they promised to be like that in theory.
Let's hope GoT keeps up this style successfully and people buy it in droves, so that other devs may take notes!
This hurts casual gamers. If you can sit and play for hours daily, no problem. But if like me, busy and only get time here and there you will constantly get lost because you will forget the landscape. Unless there is an option for them, I'm out.
Big problem is reviewers will say this is great because they do in fact often burn through a game playing many hours in a row for days. They won't understand that if you spend months playing you forget details of the world because they didn't have time to forget.
@J2theEzzo I’ll have to do that when I play The Witcher again on NG+ since my cat armor will be carrying over from the last play through becaus I was just playing the story my first time. In Breath of the Wild I would get lost wandering around, then I’d go to a high spot and see my surroundings and think to myself “oh, I know where I’m at now”!
@SarcasticPeanut Cause they clearly won't add a map for you to use....
I hope they say what they mean. I've heard this before from developers, only to have waypoints and maps marked showing every collectible, ruining the exploration of the game.
After Dark Souls every time I look at a mini-map in a game I feel like I'm cheating.
Dishonored, Deus Ex, TLOU, Batman and many others give you the power of knowing where the enemies are thanks to specific mechanics, and that's fine.
BTW, the best thing remains a fully customizable HUD as seen in HZD.
@Akurusu I'm about halfway through my 2nd playthrough (basically just riding around to get the last of the wolf armour and play some gwent!) and I've been paying much less attention to signposts and things, because I feel I half remember my way around from the 1st, so I can imagine how easily it could be to really lose yourself in the location, if given enough time to digest it all. Still such a great game!
Yes. Yes. All of the yes.
It's refreshing to see a game do away with this and actually rely on world design and world building to instill a more natural sense of exploration.
And sticky bombs? This game just sounds better and better the more I hear about it.
I cannot wait for this.
@andreoni79 Yeah I came here to say something similar. Horizon nailed it: keep or lose as many elements of the HUD as you like. I don't know why every game doesn't have this setup
Ubisoft have recently given the option of either a “guided” or “exploration” mode in games like Assassin’s Odyssey. Seems to work well.
Bummer!! It really should be an option. I don't like it when the developers decide how you should play the game. Some people have limited time for gaming so forcing you to explore the map to get to an objective is time being wasted and better spent playing the actual game. I am truly disappointed by this decision.
Hope that changes - just make it an option like Assassin Creed Odyssey.
If you want to "get lost" in a game for hrs go and do it. But if you can only play for a few hrs - let me have a productive few hrs.
Zero desire (or free time) to run around aimlessly in Real life or a videogame.
I hope it's true. I'm not entirely convinced the report is accurate. It was also an old news from a vague quote that may have been recycled.
Would be great.
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