Ghostwire: Tokyo’s first-person perspective is paramount
For decades, there has been a stereotype that Japanese game developers and gamers don’t like first-person games.
Like any such statement, it is filled with a long list of asterisks and exceptions. But Ghostwire: Tokyo Director Kenji Kimura and producer Masato Kimura believe there is some truth to this. Suggesting it is due to the stylish character designs being particularly important to Japanese players. As well as general concerns about motion sickness.
However, Masato says that he thinks the feeling is fading away. Noting that he doesn’t hear about it as much as he used to. This turns out to be quite convenient since Ghostwire: Tokyo is not only a rare first-person action game. From a Japanese studio but also a defining perspective in many ways. Kenji refers to Ghostwire: Tokyo as the first first-person Tango Gameworks game. Which is technically incorrect (Evil Within 2 received the first-person mode upon release). But this is the company’s first game built around perspective. And he says that during the development of the game. This led to a lot of experimentation.
“It was definitely a challenge for us,” Kenji says.
“Starting from scratch, just getting the feel of proper walking was difficult because you want your head to bobble a little. But if you do too much head bobbing as you go forward, it makes you dizzy,” he adds. . “And the lack of a bean makes it feel like you’re just sliding across the map. So that’s weird too. Doing everything from scratch was certainly a very difficult task.” The advantage of this experiment, according to Kenji, is that it forced the team to rethink things. That others take for granted, such as how Ghostwire. Tokyo gameplay is centered around mid-range combat rather than anything particularly close. Or far away like in a typical shooter.
Tango refers to ghost wire however, as an adventure game,
It feels more like a shooter than a brawler. You use elemental powers rather than weapons. Allowing you to attack enemies with wind, fire, and water with your hands. Enemies absorb a fair amount of hits and move at a moderate pace, so during fights, there is time to take a breath or even run away altogether. ghost wire there are sneak attacks, a melee button, a parry, and a bow and arrow, but in what I’ve played, they were more like fallbacks to be used as a last resort rather than standard attacks.
In the five or so hours that I’ve played the game for this story,
I’ve often been in and out of combat – weakening enemies from a short distance, then approaching them to finish them off with what looks like an energy wire that pulls from their cores. While I craved some evasive movement to dodge incoming attacks, the action on the default difficulty setting generally didn’t get overwhelming enough to make it a major issue.
According to Kenji, Tango balanced the game to be easy to understand and have good pace and fluidity,
Rather than forcing players to carefully study and memorize different aspects. “The game is all about exploring the city and there are enemies that get in the way, but we didn’t want the combat to be so difficult that it would stop you from doing a lot of that exploration,” he says. “Because it’s a lot of fun to explore. So there are other difficulty levels that you can try if you want to play more tactically, but that’s not the case in a normal setting.”
And this study is also closely related to the perspective of the game.
Kenji says that the team wanted to make the game a bit of a sightseeing experience to showcase a recreation of Tokyo that comes out well in the game, with an impressive sense of variety and verticality. Even the protagonist Akito was designed with a first-person perspective in mind. Going in the opposite direction of the popular logic in Japan they mentioned at the beginning of this story, Kenji and Masato say that the Tango team chose a sort of protagonist who could blend in with the crowd so the player could relate more to what was going on. the character.
To some extent, every game is defined by its perspective, probably in hundreds of subtle ways that we never notice. However, playing the first two chapters Ghostwire: Tokyo couldn’t stop seeing examples of how many of the big, obvious design decisions seemed to be built around perspective, and how everything fell into place, as a result, thanks to the game.
