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Ghost of Tsushima's Art Director Discusses its Saturated Landscapes
Players can't stop taking photos of Ghost of Tsushima's vivid wildlands, and that's just how Jason Connell likes it
2020's Ghost of Tsushima is an open world action-adventure game for the PlayStation 4. It puts you behind the blade of Jin Sakai, a samurai warrior sworn to protect his home from the 13th century Mongol invasion of Japan. Ghost of Tsushima garnered critical acclaim and awards for its beautiful depiction of the titular Tsushima, a lush island located in the Japanese archipelago. It's easy to be drawn into the game's rich environments while you ride through endless forests on horseback, challenge foes to combat against a backdrop of falling sakura petals—and pet foxes. People really dig petting foxes in Ghost of Tsushima.
Those friendly foxes are just a fragment of the deeply interactive world Sucker Punch art director Jason Connell and his team wove together for Ghost of Tsushima. Connell says that his art team lay down plans from day one to make Ghost of Tsushima "absolutely stunning and mesmerizing." Connell says classic samurai movies by legendary movie director Akira Kurosawa also fueled his artistic vision for Tsushima. Connell's work left an impression that stretches beyond Ghost of Tsushima's digital borders, as he and fellow Creative Director Nate Fox were made ambassadors of the actual Tsushima island in March 2021.
Despite the urgency of Jin's task, Ghost of Tsushima encourages you to wander off the well-trodden path and make leisurely detours through vividly colored forests and plains. Don't be surprised if you feel a need to stop and take some photos of these eye-catching vistas. As Connell says, Ghost of Tsushima's visuals are tailored to make you feel like you're visiting a place that feels beautifully alien, even though it exists on a map. Mundane scenery of everyday villager life is interwoven with riotous color, and it turns out that combination makes for great photography, perfect for Red Bull Capture Point images. Check out more from our Q&A with Connell below.
When you're traveling across the island, you see little farms and villages and small buildings that make the map feel really alive. They don't always impact the story; it's just they're just there to make you feel more immersed in the game and the experience. Can you tell me about that, and how it impacts the player and what your goals are with that?
So the smaller pieces of art that you might see throughout the world—farmsteads, little fishing huts, little campfires—most of these places are just something that you can kind of pass by and have a moment wondering what might be inside those places. [Tsushima is] a very low population place; we knew we didn't want mega cities all over the place. But we wanted to reflect that fishing and farming were a way of life.
If you're if you're riding through the forest for quite a bit, and you come across a little fishing hut, it's actually kind of interesting. You're like, "Oh, I wonder what's in there." it's an opportunity for us to reward [the player] for maybe going inside that house and seeing what it is. And maybe there's a small little story there for you to unfold, or maybe there's just a collectible or two. Either way, its existence should reflect the, you know, ruralness of the world. Some areas have more fishing huts, some areas have more farming. There are themes throughout the island.
Ghost of Tsushima's Gosaku Armor Set
© Ghost of Tsushima
What your favorite locations [for taking pictures]?
The photo modes in our last two games have been joyful things for me to work on. That's probably because over the course of developing our games, I take thousands and thousands of photos because I'll be like, "Oh my God, this looks great." Or this looks good, let's do some paint overs or whatever. But in our games, the lighting and the cinematography shapes up to be almost like a little cinematographer's playground. Photo mode's goal is to allow you to have that toolkit and be in those shoes for a little bit.
I definitely have some tips. First thing I do is I like to go find an area that has just an overwhelming saturation of color as a backdrop. And it's not too hard to find that in our game—a couple of places I can think of are the Umugi spider lily forest, or peat the fields, which have red flowers everywhere. Any of the white pampas fields—you know, just get a really nice solid backdrop behind you, behind your iconic shot. It could be the ocean, it could be an area where there's just beautiful white trees, it could be the bright blue sky that's in the northern area of snow. But really, look for a solid base of some sort that is interesting.
Mount Jogaku in Ghost of Tsushima
© Ghost of Tsushima
The second thing that I would say is photo mode is immensely more fun later in the game, because you have all the new outfits and you have all the colors, you have all those things available to you. What I like to do is I like to find an area that's, like, hyper red, like the spider lilies. Then I usually find a red outfit. So I just theme the whole thing to be red.
The third tip that I have is, obviously, we have a lot of settings that let you play with color grading and the aspect ratio. Figure out if you want an environmental wide shot with a wide-angle kind of lens, like if you want it to be about somebody lost in the sea of the beautiful environment, or if you want to go really close in and you want to get something intimate. Figure out which one of those two you want to do, change the camera accordingly, and change the depth of field accordingly. I know that anytime I play around in the middle, I'm not as happy. I really like going all the way to the one end where I'm focusing heavily on the feeling of whatever [the subject is] doing. Whether it's an action, or you see something in their eyes, or it's some decorative bit on their arm—something close with a low f-stop and a really shallow focal plane.
Really, just get that hyper focus. Or let it go wide and really let the environment swallow your subject matter, whether it's the horse, or the character, or whatever else you're trying to show off.
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Field of View in Ghost of Tsushima
Field of view and focal length are vital to taking a good virtual photograph
In your opinion, what really makes Ghost of Tsushima visually unique?
I think that what makes Ghost of Tsushima visually unique is probably a couple things. But the thing that I always go back to that I'm really proud that we did is is—we didn't we didn't go for like hyper realism. For us, it was not about the actual individual details of like, how many colors and species and things that are on the side of a rock. It was really [about] taking a step back from that and saying, "How can we create a spider lily field?" These exist. They're rare, but when they people take photos of these types of places, they make people go, "Wow, that's a real place? Holy — that's amazing." So, you want that feeling throughout the game.
When you're creating a game, especially a poetic game that's an homage to feudal Japan, we have the ability to push that style a little bit and say, "You know what, these places exist, let's let them grow and thrive here." And so we allow these areas to be filled with color. You know, there aren't a lot of places on Earth that are a "Golden Forest." It's probably called a golden forest, because it has brown trees, or a little bit of orange, and some red, probably green, but mostly yellows and browns. And [the Golden Forest in Ghost of Tsushima] is, like, yellow. It's like, "this is your imagination's version of what it looked like, right? This is the perfect photographer's dream." And creating that with real species that may have existed on that island—you're fibbing a little bit, but you're doing it in a way that makes you go "Wow, this is really special."
And it's not like there are ten [tree] species in the scene. The fern forest has tons of ferns. Not a fern and a bush and two trees, it's just "Let's flood it with ferns first, like make that be the big read." And I think that that whether it's pampas grass, or ferns, or gingko trees, or spider lilies, or beech trees—this is a theme We went back to countless times. So I think that's number one, you know, and the use of color with that as well.
A Mask from Ghost of Tsushima
© The Fourth Focus - Ghost of Tsushima
Number two, I think has to be the wind. The wind is ever present, whether you're using it to get around the world, or it's filler in a backdrop to make a scene feel more dramatic. The wind ended up being pretty substantially connected to the visuals. Every frame has movement in it. And there's a lot of movies that have had been able to take that and go, but there haven't been a lot of games that utilize that. I'm really proud that we were able to pull that off.
Those are my two favorite ones. Maybe a third are some historical connections, you know, digging into the way buildings were built back then. Trying to get as much of that as correct and authentic and believable as possible was certainly part of the direction.
Have you had a chance to look at any of the photos that players have been taking?
Looking at all the photos that are being created for Capture Point is pretty exciting… People are really trying hard to put their photographer hat on and it's super encouraging to see what people are making already using our toolset.
What are your favorite stunning settings and visual moments in Ghost of Tsushima? Share them on Twitter with #RedBullCapturePoint and #Contest, and if you’re based in the United States, head to RedBull.com/CapturePoint to see how your images could win you some amazing prizes.
