Ghost of Tsushima’s Combat Is “Really Grounded and Lethally Precise”

Ghost of Tsushima received its first proper gameplay deep dive last week, and it’s fair to say that the game looked quite impressive in its most recent showing. Across all of its trailers and demonstrations so far, Ghost of Tsushima has impressed across multiple departments so far, from visuals, exploration, and stealth, to its world, premise, and the style of storytelling its going for.

One aspect that has looked relatively less impressive till now has been combat, and it hasn’t helped that in all of it showings, Sucker Punch haven’t really gone into too much detail about how it will work in the game. Recently, however, speaking on the official PlayStation podcast, Ghost of Tsushima game director Nate Fox spoke about combat a bit more.

According to Fox, the upcoming open world game is aiming for “really grounder and lethally precise” combat – which, to be fair, we have seen a fair bit of in trailers so far – while also adding that owing to its nature, players can also die in combat very quickly.

“We have this phrase that we use to describe the combat in the game,” Fox said, “and that’s ‘mud, blood, and steel.’ We want it to feel really really grounded and lethally precise. If you’ve ever seen a samurai movie, you know what it’s like. These men cut each other down with a single stroke of their sword, and to capture that samurai movie fight is different than a lot of games. Because it means you can die very quickly, and your enemies can, too. And that took us a while to get right. We’re very pleased with the results, and we think it shows up well on-screen.”

You can listen to the full podcast below.

Ghost of Tsushima launches exclusive for the PS4 on July 17. It’ll require 50 GB of free storage space on your console.