There’s a startling contrast to Ghost of Tsushima . As you pause to appreciate a gorgeous landscape or admire a billowing cloud of smoke on the horizon, you’re likely to be shaken from your reverie by the clash of steel and a sudden splatter of blood coating the foliage around you.

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“ That natural beauty is a super important part of this experience.

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“ That crystalizes in their minds and in the minds of all the Japanese people on the island as this semi-mythical character. This ghost that slips through their fingers.

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Sucker Punch, the studio best known for the Infamous series, has created a realistic, vibrant world overflowing with color and beauty, but as a backdrop set against a brutal, real-life conflict full of war and violence.In a presentation behind closed doors at E3, Sucker Punch co-founder Chris Zimmerman explained that the team had three core tenets in mind when designing Ghost of Tsushima: mud, blood, and steel. Based on the demo we saw, all three are ever-present.It’s not hard to see inspiration from many sources as you look at Ghost of Tsushima, and Zimmerman says some of the most obvious influences, the films of Akira Kurosawa, have as much to do with the world itself as they do with the samurai setting.“If you watch a Kurosawa movie, one of the things that’s really interesting about it is that everything’s moving all the time,” Zimmerman said. “You don’t ever have a static shot. There’s always natural things going on in the background, whether it’s blowing grass, clouds moving by, fluff blowing in the wind, leaves flowing. That natural beauty is a super important part of this experience.”The team at Sucker Punch took great care to maintain authenticity, taking multiple trips to the actual island of Tsushima for reference. Even with a cast of mostly native Japanese speakers, Zimmerman said they still have a dialogue coach for the game for authentic ancient Japanese, “to not have modernisms creep in, so it feels right.”The demo we saw was a live PS4 Pro playthrough of the section from Sony’s E3 press conference, beginning in the open world on horseback and soon moving through a forest corridor and approaching a temple. According to Zimmerman, this entire sequence, including the scenes shown on stage, is actually a side quest, and not part of the game’s main story.The game’s title refers to the main character, Jin, one of the few remaining samurai who is fighting off the Mongol invasion of Japan. While thousands of Mongol invaders are present on the island, they still can’t kill this one man.“What do they do? There’s a mythology that builds up around him. They tell stories. They’re terrified of this guy eventually. You’ve seen what he does to them. That crystalizes in their minds and in the minds of all the Japanese people on the island as this semi-mythical character. This ghost that slips through their fingers.”Zimmerman explained that the game is the evolution of Jin as he moves beyond his samurai training, in terms of combat and traversal as well as ideology. In the demo, Jin uses a grappling hook to climb a temple, one of many ways he’s forced to find new ways to survive. “He can’t just be a samurai and hope to win, so he’s forced to invent stuff, discover stuff, go beyond what he’s been taught and invent something new to be victorious in the end.”Still, there will be plenty of more traditional samurai-style combat, from encounters with groups of enemies to the stunning one-on-one duel that ended the demo shown on stage.“It was important for us to have a fight like this. This is an iconic part of being a samurai, being in a duel. We really want to capture that. So our combat system has to scale all the way up from a one-on-one combat with a worthy opponent like Masako all the way up to dealing with a horde of Mongols.”While Zimmerman seemed to be hinting that Jin will find new weapons and abilities throughout the game, he wasn’t ready to reveal anything beyond the katana seen in the demo. He also confirmed the final game will feature a HUD, but that the team turned it off for the demo. Whatever HUD ends up in the final game will be minimal, though, he promised.Zimmerman says the team’s goal is “to take you to a place you’ve never been, in our case a time you’ve never been, and let you feel like you’re actually there. Just have the controller melt away, the TV, the speakers, and your living room all melt away, and you’re just there.”You'll be able to preorder Ghost of Tsushima soon on Amazon

Andrew is IGN’s executive editor of news and is probably not great with a sword. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter