Master of the Katana: Melee Combat in 'Ghost of Tsushima'
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- Опубліковано 5 чер 2024
- In this 2021 GDC session, Sucker Punch’s Chris Zimmerman outlines the unexpected design, tech, and human capability tidbits discovered along the way to hitting their melee combat system.
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This is one of the best GDC talks I've watched, not just for "combat" but for studio mentality and mindset towards developing games. Thank you for sharing
Definitely one of my favorite combat systems, I was waiting for this.
Chris is seriously good at what he does
Chris has so much knowledge and communicates it well.
You did amazing with the melee combat in this game. I am so glad that you chose to balance the play experience based on feedback that stems from actually playing the combat system. It feels so much more polished that way.
In many other games games it feels like they switch combat system until they find one that gets the job done with the least downsides. But this often leads to the system feeling more shallow. But Ghost of Tsushima is different. It truly feels like there is nuance in how you play it.
Man this is some HIGH LEVEL stuff! I think my favorite part of GOT was that you just point the analog stick towards the enemy you want to hit instead of lock-on souls-like games or even the camera-based God of War 4 (which I absolutely loved).
i can tell I'll be coming back to this talk for quite a while to come. Thank you so much!!!
Such an excellent talk! I loved this video, and it was incredibly insightful and spot on! As a professional game designer, I'm always glad to get these types of discussions about the design philosophy and hurdles other studios have encountered when getting their game to gold! Just invaluable insight, and thank you for your time and effort in putting this together, and also in a way that is easily understood and digestible! Great, great stuff!
the combat system is basically a quick time event where the player gets sorrounded and the players reacts to the actions of the enemies, dodge, block or attack
expertly presented. concise with tons of specific examples. thank you
Very interesting. This is the first time that I hear about how a playtest-focused process works in depth. Great talk with important lessons shared!
I was very surprised because it was the first game that felt like I was really cutting someone down on the surface, not hitting on the object like monster hunter-ish games.
Really cool, but I was hoping for technical explanations
Yeah, I wish there was some way those messages in chat were accessible to us.
Sucker Punch studios are on fire with all this amazing GDC talks
I love ghost and a huge reason why I enjoyed it so much was due to the tight and near perfect combat. I really wish more games would have combat similar to this cause this is easily one of my favorites games in years.
Fantastic presentation. Games design and production gold.
Incredible talk. I'm not surprised that the game was as good as it was seeing this presentation.
Really great talk, this will help me when making my own Melee Combat System
the intro was so hilarious, the slight shade to how everything always went perfectly 😅
Great presentation, kinda reminds me of how I feel when I listen to John Carmack
Wow that was really insightful. I was about to skip to the five rules, stayed for a few minutes, and was drawn in the other 40.
Amazing game with an amazing combat system! Really can’t wait for the next instalment!
I just finished playing this
This game definitely made me feel like a Jin Sakai
A unique combat experience. I hope other AAA games do get inspired and innovate like this.
One can only hope, I feel the Unreal Engine is making developers lazy and less likely to innovate and push the PS5 capabilities
Altho it gets boring but its til good
Such a great presentation, full of invaluable knowledge that can be immediately put into practice, thank you so much.
Combat is so good im 50 hours in now and i havent let a single group of roaming mongals or bandits live
Wow, the tips that somehow applicable to all matters
Are the tech notes available somewhere?
Love this game.
Great speaker, lovely game!
I actually used Stealth and Ghost Tools WAY more once I got the ghost suit. It felt wrong to stealth kill people and use smoke bombs in samurai armor. Next time I play the game I'm going to bee-line the story until I get the ghost armor.
Great design comes from clear intentions of what you want the player to feel when playing.
Ghost of Tsushima was very clear that they wanted the player to feel like a precise skillful samurai, but who's always the underdog. All the design decision for combat feed into that.
I think way too many games just design systems and mechanics just because they "feel" like they should be there, like it's a standard way of doing it, or maybe they try to mimick a system from other games. These solutions feel incredibly hollow and disconnected from the overall experience. Think of making a generic RPG combat system with numbers just because "progression".
This video is such a treat for us who love the combat of this game.
Watching this video was worth the $70 price.
I would like his opinion on animation cancels. Exploit or skill?
Man I'm just drooling listening to someone explain the design behind the combat. All the little inklings I've had about the nuance are touched on. The concepts used to find solutions to problems is so refreshing. And it shows. The quote about "everyone can clap along to a song.." when it comes to timing in combat just blows me away cause when I'm really vibing, especially in Legends, you can feel the drums beating and the combat becomes so beautiful and rhythmic. You can feel it all and "clapping" along looks and feels SO. FUCKING. GOOD! It's simply the best and they consistently talk about "next time,"... 😍🥲😍🥲
Rule #1 "the most effective way to play your game should be the most enjoyable way to play" is such an important aspect. I find this a common issue among more accessible games as trying to span a broader demographic of players usually leads to optional tools that make it easier, which either makes it too easy for many and it's boring, or you have to sacrifice your suspension of disbelief and consciously not use the tools at your disposal and it feels fake. This is actually a consequence even of having difficulty sliders, since you know you can lower it at any time to make it easier. I believe this is where progression elements truly come into play, and where optional in world content should be implemented. I think this was lacking in Ghost, at least in so far it enhanced the players power. The side content isn't integrated fully into the experience, and I believe almost no content in an open world-story driven game such as Ghost should be optional in practice. The most "effective" way to play Ghost is to ram down the main story and just finish it, the rest is optional in case you like what you see. This causes cognitive dissonance where the open world itself feels superfluous and unnecessary except as eye candy in between mission (which Ghost of Tsushima succeeded masterfully at being I might add). The most effective way to play an open world game should be to engage with the world and it's content fully, and the difficulty of the game should reflect that. The semi open world genre avoids this problem by trimming the fat and keeping what is essential (ideally). Examples of that could be God of War (2018) and Dark Souls. There is value in an entirely open world though. It's unmatched in terms of exploration potential and scale. But the bigger the world the more difficult to make it all come together in a coherent package. A core function of being alive is restriction. Without it we would be free to do anything in any way and that is aimless and weightless. When giving ultimate freedom in the form of an open world, you equally need restriction to balance it. There's really no new examples of this being done right but older games such as Gothic and Morrowind come a lot closer to nailing the formula. The areas are separated off in terms of progression, where the enemies are tougher in certain areas, creating a natural flow in the chaos of all that freedom. In Morrowind there isn't even a main questline at first, just hints at it. It takes hours for the main plot to unfurl itself, and this works perfectly with the format. It doesn't separate a "main" questline from everything else, and since your character gets stronger from quests and earns money, few quests are pointless or less efficient than others. You need to evolve your character to even continue the main questline, so you grow with the story as the world grows around you. This is a far more integrated approach to open world exploration design. And the pretty bland and uninspired efforts of waypoints, quest markers, fast travel, scaling enemies and a "main quest" and "side content" are little bud poorly applied bandages that were created to fix problems that if an open world game is designed well, shouldn't exist in the first place. Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is also a fantastically designed open world with many interlocking parts. that enhance the whole instead of limiting it.
what about Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring?
That was beautifuly said
@@TheBlueGoldenHawk Playing Elden Ring right now so don't want to say much about it yet. I've played Breath of the Wild but not enough to truly speak of the quality of it's open world design. What I would say is that I've started playing it several times never getting through all of it, but once I just decided to go straight to Hyrule Castle, I learned to parry the guardians with a shield and basically abused the slow motion dodge mechanic to get insanely strong gear after 2 hours of play to essentially make the rest of the game a complete cakewalk. In that playthrough I completely lost motivation to continue and it only lasted about 5 hours. Other times I've played it the way it was "meant" to be played and had a great time, at least for a certain amount of time. I do appreciate the ability to go to Ganon right away, but feel it was too easily abusable and easy to get into the castle. What it should be is "you can go there now but it's nearly impossible to the degree where doing it would be more tedious and time consuming that just playing the entire game" which then motivates you to go out and make it possible by defeating the divine beasts and getting stronger. That is brilliant. The problem is when going straight to Ganon is easier than not doing it, then suspension of disbelief is gone for doing all other content.
The shrine puzzles feel meaningful because they contribute to the most important aspect of character progression (hearts or stamina). It can get tedious after the 60th shrine but since it's coupled with exploration it's not too bad. I think fewer shrines with more varied content would have been preferable. Similar to ocarina of times dungeons. The thing is I would still give the game a 10/10, but not because it's perfect, but because it delivers a sense of discovery and sense of freedom whilst maintaining a clear goal and purpose pretty much unparalleled. In the context of needing the divine beasts to defeat Ganon, traveling to each area feels natural and meaningful, with each contributing to a greater whole. I personally think the weapon degradation system had many flaws, and that the search for the Master Sword should have been a more integral part of the experience. But there is real value in having no direction and being able to discover something you wouldn't expect. I was completely shocked to see the master sword on the altar in Kakariko forest for example, and it was an amazing moment, and the fact that you needed more hearts to pull it out was a brilliant touch and is the kind of integrated design I'm talking about. It takes an already important goal (getting more hearts) and ups it's importance ten fold. However, the actual power of the master sword and the fact that it breaks isn't worth the effort you put in for this. Especially since the trials to make the sword stronger are harder than getting the hearts. That felt pretty tedious even though it was an exciting challenge. It does too many things amazingly and is a mechanical masterpiece to not overlook it's flaws. They deserve to be analyzed and improved upon in the future but I would never discourage someone from playing it because of them.
I don't know what your exact point was but having difficulty sliders does not in any way shape up expected progression within a game. One difficulty, none or several does not influence what type of game the creators want to make. It shapes up how the players want to experience it.
Your mistake is thinking that a game should buy into its difficulty as its basis of playability. This is a story driven game. You are Jin Sakai. Whatever your Jin Sakai does matches what you do with the controller. The way you experience the game is completely up to you. Your experience is anecdotal and while it is telling of what kind of clamps you can expect from the game in comparison to other games in OTHER genres. It only talks about you and what you would like from it.
@@chillaxboi2109 Interesting perspective, but I think you're missing the point. Firstly, one or several difficulties does affect what game you want to make. Outlast doesn't have several degrees of horror sliders for a very good reason. Amnesia doesn't either, because they're all about immersion. There's little challenge to those games aside from the difficulty of just playing it at all because it's terrifying. If you could make it "easier" by making it less scary, the plot is lost, and you're game has no point anymore. Similar things could be said for Dark Souls. It's combat difficulty is integral to it's themes of death/rebirth, inevitability, and insignificance. You create an option for an easier game, and you more or less create the option to remove core elements from your game, making it a totally different experience when playing on different difficulties, which isn't the goal of such things. The goal is rather to make the experience the same across different degrees of competency, especially between age groups. Secondly, even though you can control the difficulty of say, combat encounters, you can't control the difficulty of anything else. Not the platforming, not the puzzles, and not the exploration. No one would reasonably argue for puzzle difficulty sliders so that young children can play, or so adults will enjoy children's games more. Allowing customization of the experience inevitably cheapens it, especially since players don't know how changing these parameters will affect the result since they haven't played the game yet. Easy/normal/hard doesn't mean the same thing across genres and games. Letting the player decide how hard something is, I believe serves to confuse them more than it helps them. The way we experience games is in little to no way completely up to us. It is up to the developers, hence why they design games and not us. We don't know what we want, we know what we like, and their job isn't to give us endless options on how to experience a game by creating "no puzzle mode" or "no horror mode". Whilst I love the core design philosophy of dark souls, you can't copy paste that across all genres, obviously. However, there are elements that makes its design work that makes all design work. A focused design that knows what it wants to be and isn't trying to be everything at once. Thirdly, you have to define "difficulty" for your point to make sense. All games buy into it's difficulty as its basis of playability, because difficulty comes in many forms of challenge. StarCraft 2 is difficult, because it requires strategy. Amnesia is difficult because it requires bravery. Fighting games are difficult because it requires mechanical skill, reflexes and short term memory. Puzzle games are difficult because they require intelligence. Sandbox games such as Minecraft are a very separate realm of genre since you effectively create your own goals, but even there creativity is a challenging factor. Also, anything competitively multiplayer is in a different realm.
Ghost of Tsushima is story driven in its narrative, but its gameplay is combat and traversal driven. Those aspects require a challenge, the combat is pretty clear cut. Explained in the video. But the open world and traversal has no practical function except as scenery and perhaps a pacing tool. You don't need, in theory or in practice, to interact with any of it to progress. As he said, the most effective way should be the most enjoyable way, and since there's no need and can easily be ignored, it's not effective, and because it's not effective or useful, it's also less enjoyable. This is a cycle of death of both enjoyment and achievement in games that I am talking about, regardless of your proclivity or preference, unless your preference is to do everything in a game for it's own sake, without relevance to the whole, or to complete a game as fast as possible, neither of which are motivations a game should strive to create, and sounds more like ways to get someone to not play their game.
One of the best games of all time.
I would definitely play ghost when Sony releases it on pc.
Chris you are so goddamn right. Thats exactly how my brains works lmao
3:48 so when are you guys GOING to make a remake of that Talking Raccoon game? HUHHH!?!?!
This is a great talk, my only feedback suggestion would to be to have less of a sentence by sentence script and more of a bullet point system. When you were reading from bullets, it sounded very natural. When it was reading sentences it sounded more like you were reading a paper. This is only a small recommendation as the talk was amazingly dense and you're good on camera and speaking.
imagine putting this much effort into a game that can't even run on a computer.
wish i could play your game dude, seems good
I liked realistic combat but i did not like that super mythical moves it felt too much over the top for a open world like this
just release PC version then I'll play :)
buy a ps5
You made a fantastic combat system and then...
- unskippable cutscenes...
- resolve doesn't recharge with time or after dying in a duel... so if you die in una duel you will have an harder time on next tryies. Unless you "cheat" by rechariging it in the duel, not using it until is full (dying a few times in the process) and that try for real.
- the locations are all similar: trees, basic rocks and the same houses all over the place.
- half the things you can do in the game to progress are "walk" (walk with the foxes, wolk to the baths, walk to make an haiku, walk to an aesthetic items - )
- mandatory stealth missions in the main story (when if you get spottet: you lose)
I don't think saying every environment looks the same is entirely fair, Tsushima has diverse and distinct biomes with different styles of towns and plants and terrain. It's not BOTW or Outer Wilds or Rain World or anything else crazy, but... it's a very solid effort in the ubisoft style open world space. And the mandatory mission conditions aren't nearly as gruelling as other games in the space like Assassin's Creed. Don't get me wrong, I hope these tropes die off, I really wanna see more fresh takes on open world games like the others I mentioned, but I reckon Tsushima has got to be... one of the very best entries in this space.
Also you don't need resolve to recharge over time, you get it back in spades when you parry? And there are other ways too, I'm pretty sure.
I also don't remember it not recharging, but I can't confirm that.
@@ZedAmadeus the resolve issue is in duels. If at the start of a duel i have full resolve, use it and still die, i have to repeat the duel, but now at the start i don't have any so it's more difficult than the first time.
It's frustrating and force me to play defensively in a way i don't like... And they literally told in the video that's bad.
@@LucisTorment Okay, fair enough, that does suck. If you're still working your way through the game at all, there is a charm that lets you regain resolve (I think up to 2?) over time, without having to do anything for it. If you don't have it, definitely keep an eye out :)