Sucker Punch, the same game company that made the original Sly Cooper trilogy, as well as, the infamous InFamous series, has now made a samurai game called Ghost of Tsushima. But that wasn’t their original plan.
According to Gamesradar+, Sucker Punch had planned on making an open-world steampunk game called Prophecy, which had an 11-minute gameplay demo leaked on Reddit, and it was an “urban steampunk setting centred around the exploits of a thief named Tavora, who is not only adept at parkour and combat but uses chemicals to fight enemies and navigate the open world.” Unfortunately, the gameplay demo has been taken down by Reddit’s legal team, but the site Resetera has pictures of a few of the character models. Gamesradar+ goes on to say, “Indeed, both that recently released [Ghost of Tsushima] and the unfinished [Prophecy] share certain strands of DNA, with the swordplay witnessed in the leaked footage showing early signs of what would eventually become Ghost of Tsushima's katana-based battling.”
A lot of speculation floated around the unfinished Prophecy as a lot of its development came off the heels of the most well-received 2014 game InFamous: First Light. Eventually, Prophecy was partly repurposed and partly scrapped in order to create Ghost of Tsushima, instead. Some of the speculations included Sucker Punch wanting to experiment with different styles before deciding on what they wanted their next project to be. Even so far as to have Sony Worldwide Studios Game Development Head, Scott Rohde, play - what is assumed to be - an early version of Prophecy in 2015 and he said: it was fun but in very early development, according to an IGN article. Eventually, though, they decided on samurai action-adventure stealth.
Why did Sucker Punch scrap Prophecy for Ghost of Tsushima? Well, currently, we aren’t aware of exactly why, only that they did. Perhaps it was for the same reason Ubisoft Montreal in 2007 repurposed their Prince of Persia game to make the first Assassin’s Creed (essentially, creative differences) or, perhaps, it’s a far simpler reason? Maybe Sucker Punch just liked the idea of samurai sword fighting more than steampunk parkour. While we may never know for sure why what we do know is that Ghost of Tsushima is a third-person action-adventure stealth game set on Tsushima island in the late 13th century and is available to play on PS4 now.
By Nicholas James
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