Given the commercial and critical success that Ghost of Tsushima has enjoyed and the fanbase it has accumulated over the last couple of years, we don’t exactly need an official announcement from Sony to know that there will be a direct sequel to the open world action-adventure title. Work on a Ghost of Tsushima follow-up is very likely well underway at Sucker Punch, and while we do not, of course, know when exactly it will be arriving, we can safely assume that it should be out in the next few years. When it does get here, we’re all going to want to see it improving and expanding upon its predecessor in various ways, and here, that’s what we’ll be talking about. These are some of the things that we wish to see in Ghost of Tsushima 2, or whatever it ends up being called.
JAPANESE MAINLAND
Assuming that Jin Sakai returns as protagonist in the next game and that it serves as a direct narrative sequel, this is probably going to be on top of many people’s wishlists for the game. Ghost of Tsushima let players lose on an open world rendition of the titular island, while the Director’s Cut took us to Iki Island. With a sequel, the natural evolution would be to take us to the Japanese mainland. It would be the best way to expand the scope, to allow players to new sights, and to have an open world even larger and more varied in its sights and locales than that of the first game.
IMPROVED SIDE QUESTS
More and more as time goes on, better side quests have become crucial to open world games, and this is one area where Ghost of Tsushima could be quite inconsistent. There were some side quests in the game that stood toe-to-toe with its golden path offerings, but others felt hastily designed, narratively uninteresting, or just poorly written and surprisingly low-budget when compared to the rest of the game. With Ghost of Tsushima’s sequel having to live up to much higher expectations than its predecessor, we’re hoping the game will spend more time on its side quests in development. Earlier this year, Horizon Forbidden West showed massive improvements over its predecessor in this area, and that’s the sort of progression we’re hoping to see with Sucker Punch’s series as well.
NEW STANCES
This is almost guaranteed to happen, and will obviously go hand-in-hand with new enemy types. Ghost of Tsushima tasks players with switching between stances to counter specific threats from multiple enemy types, and that system is likely to carry over into the sequel- as it should, it was a crucial component of the excellent combat. What we want, however, is some new stances. Something, perhaps, that allows for more acrobatic combat moves, allowing Jin to improvise on the fly a little bit more, maybe reflecting the fact that he’s no longer your typical samurai tied to a strict code. Obviously, having too many stances would ruin the quick and flowing nature of the combat, so the best way to go about it would probably be to replace some of the stances from the first game rather than adding to them.
MORE TOOLS
Jin’s katana is most likely going to continue to be his primary weapon of choice, and honestly, we wouldn’t have it any other way. In the sequel, however, we’d like for him to have some new ancillary tools and weapons to use in combat and stealth. From kunai and smoke bombs to sticky bombs and wind chimes, Jin has a solid arsenal of tools to use in the first game, and we hope to see that being expanded in the sequel. Jin is clearly going from being a samurai to becoming more of a ninja, so perhaps he could have new weapons to go along with that? Maybe something like a hookshot to pull enemies with?
IMPROVED STEALTH
Stealth was a big part of Ghost of Tsushima’s core gameplay loop, and though it was a lot of fun, it was also very clearly one of the game’s fundamentally weaker elements. A lot of that was down to the shoddy enemy AI. To its credit, it behaved in a very consistent manner, but it was also very easy to cheese and exploit. It goes without saying that that needs major improvements in the sequel. Ghost of Tsushima 2 is probably going to be just as focused on stealth as its predecessor was, if not even more so, so making improvements to those mechanics should be a priority for Sucker Punch.
MORE CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCE MECHANICS
One of the most surprising and memorable moments in Ghost of Tsushima comes right at the end, when Jin has to make a very, very difficult choice. For the sake of avoiding spoilers, we’re going to avoid talking about what that choice is, but we’d love to see more stuff like that in the sequel. Making choice and consequence mechanics a much more prominent part of the experience in Ghost of Tsushima 2 would be a logical evolution for the sequel, allowing players to make more moral choices that decide how Jin charts his personal path forward now that he’s completely disbanded the honour code of the samurai.
SMARTER DISTRIBUTION OF SIDE ACTIVITIES
Those damn golden birds just wouldn’t shut up in Ghost of Tsushima, would they? It felt like every five seconds, one of them popped at and started chiming at you, distracting you from what you were doing and leading you someplace else. It was honestly a bit too much at times, like there were just too many side activities crammed into the open world. Thankfully, we already saw an improvement on that front in the Iki Island expansion, so we know for a fact that Sucker Punch has taken that feedback into account. So what do we want for the sequel? Keep doing that. Make sure its open world is smarter about how densely it is packed with side activities and how they are distributed.
HORSEBACK COMBAT
Ghost of Tsushima didn’t have too much horseback combat- just a hint of it, but never enough to really give you a proper taste (though, again, the Iki Island expansion did expand on it to some extent). Standing your ground and taking your enemy head-on very much aligns with the samurai code, sure, but now that Jin is no longer tied to that code, we’d love to see horseback combat play a larger role. That, in turn, would also allow for the game to have new enemy types that specialize in fighting from their saddles in various ways, which is one of many ways it could add more variety to the gameplay on that front.
EXPANDED CUSTOMIZATION
Ghost of Tsushima’s cosmetic customization doesn’t get praised enough. It’s not too expansive, but what it does have on offer is more than solid enough, and absolutely none of it is tied to microtransactions or anything of the sort. We’d obviously love for that to continue being the case in Ghost of Tsushima 2 as well, but we’d also like the sequel to expand on that system. Give us more flexibility in what to customize, and more options in how to do it. Given how important the visual side of the experience is to Ghost of Tsushima, having more control over what Jin looks like in that gorgeous open world would be an excellent bonus.
MULTIPLAYER
Ghost of Tsushima’s multiplayer component, dubbed Legends, was a massive surprise. No one expected the game to have have multiplayer, so when Sucker Punch added that sizeable portion to the experience and then kept on adding to it and improving upon it, it took more than a few of us by surprise. Legends has become such a fan-favourite, in fact, that it getting more of it, ideally bigger and better, would be a huge loss for the sequel. We don’t know if Sucker Punch is going to take the Naughty Dog route and spin it off into its own standalone game and keeping Ghost of Tsushima 2 single player-only, but either way, we sure hope to see more of Legends in the future.
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