Ghost of Tsushima’s “Number One Inspiration” Was Red Dead Redemption 1

There’s not a single open world game in the world that hasn’t been heavily influenced by the games made by Rockstar. But though GTA is the game you’d usually think of as being the biggest influence for most, for Ghost of Tsushima developers Sucker Punch, it was Rockstar’s other big open world series that really inspired their upcoming game.

Speaking in an interview with Gaming Bible, Ghost of Tsushima game director Nate Fox said that Red Dead Redemption – the first one, not the sequel – was the “number one inspiration” for the upcoming samurai open world game, not least because of how well Rockstar’s game perfectly capture the atmosphere of its setting and the feeling of being an outlaw in the old West.

“I would say the number one inspiration for the title was Red Dead Redemption – not Red Dead 2 but Red Dead Redemption, – because they did such a fantastic job bringing the fantasy of being an outlaw cowboy to life,” Fox said. “Landscape, the way that people talk to you, the way that you move – all have it brought you into that identity. And for us, I used to say like, ‘hey,’ when I would try and get people excited about the game, ‘think of it like as the same format as that.'”

Of course, another major open world behemoth that many similar games have taken cues from in recent years is Nintendo’s seminal 2017 title, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Fox says that, too, was a game that inspired Sucker Punch (which is something that the developers have said earlier as well).

“When we’re building the game, and a game like Breath of the Wild comes out – that does such an amazing job of showing how the power of curiosity can be stoked in all these many ways,” he said. “While we always wanted you [to] be transported to Tsushima Island and not butter things up, I think that that game really inspired us to try even harder, to go deeper, to just clear out the decks so that you could be just as present as possible in Tsushima.”

Ghost of Tsushima is out for the PS4 on July 17.