Sony and Sucker Punch's upcoming Ghost of Tsushima looks to be a love letter to samurai cinema, so it only makes sense that the estate of acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa had some kind of input on the title. In a new feature by Entertainment Weekly, it was revealed that the black-and-white filter in the game (called "Kurosawa" mode) was a collaboration between the developer and those in charge of Kurosawa's legacy.
Nate Fox, one of the creative directors at Sucker Punch, told EW, "I think one that is just crystal clear is the movie Sanjuro. It's a film that features, at the very end of it, a standoff between two samurai...We tried to translate that into the standoff in our game very directly."
Jason Connell, the other creative director, described how the team wanted to honor Kurosawa's legacy by accurately recreating the look and sound of his films. To do so, they toyed around with naming the mode after him. "We threw out a bunch of different words and we thought, 'What would be awesome would be if we could call it Kurosawa Mode,'' Connell recounts. "In order to do that, we felt that we needed to reach out to the estate and see if that's something they'd be interested in."
After receiving a blessing from the estate, the team then went to extreme lengths to research how Kurosawa's films were shot. Most people don't realize, but movies that are specifically shot in black-and-white have a lot of work done with regards to the lighting of specific scenes. To that end, Ghost of Tsushima's mode is not just a simple filter.
Sucker Punch went about tweaking lighting values and blackness depth as well as even increasing the strength of the wind to properly replicate movies like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. Even the audio quality gets "downgraded" as if to sound like it is coming out of a mono speaker. Lastly, a layer of film grain is applied to better represent that era of filmmaking.
In the end, it should make for a mode that feels suitably cinematic. With the blessing of Kurosawa's estate, it will also be authentically samurai.
Source: Entertainment Weekly