Ghost of Tsushima: Legends – Finding the fun in Multiplayer

blog.playstation.com:

Hey everyone-  My name is Darren Bridges, and I’m the lead co-op designer for Ghost of Tsushima: Legends. To celebrate Legends’ inclusion as a bonus game in this month’s PlayStation Plus lineup, I wanted to give you all a window into our development philosophy and process.

For me, the journey started in 2016, when Nate Fox showed me the original pitch for Ghost of Tsushima and asked if I’d lead the design on the cooperative mode. I was excited… and intimidated! I knew it would be a challenge.

Concept art of our playable heroes 

I happily agreed to work on it, and my first goal was to make sure we had the flexibility to make decisions that would enable a great co-op experience. A lot of the choices that work in single-player don’t translate well to multiplayer content (and vice versa). After several pitch attempts, we came up with one that really resonated: co-op would be set in a world of supernatural tales told by an eccentric storyteller that Jin meets in his travels.This “Legends” story framework gave us freedom to design and optimize the experience to be inviting, challenging, and enjoyable for multiple players, while still connecting thematically to the world and characters of Ghost of Tsushima.

Once we had established a versatile foundation, we needed to ask ourselves- what actually makes co-op fun? There are many good answers, but here are three major elements that we focused on:

This seems obvious- if you don’t have other players, it’s not really co-op! But a lot of design decisions can make it easier or harder to play together. We wanted to streamline the experience and avoid decisions that would separate players or make it hard to matchmake. Here are some of the features that make it easier to play together:

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