Ghostwire Tokyo and its curious design: The city was made before the game

On Ghostwire: Tokyo The game’s setting is particularly important in the overall experience, and its name is in the title. Tango Gameworks (The Evil Within) has recreated part of the Japanese city with a level of detail that, as we tell you in our impressions, has left us speechless. Its narrow alleys and wide avenues have a spooky touch and artistically spectacularand through its setting, its missions, its conversations and its documents, the tokyo culture.

That is why it does not surprise us that the first thing its creators did when designing the game that reaches PS5 and PC next March 25 outside the city, as he revealed to us in an interview Masato Kimura, producer of the title. Rather than an action adventure, it is a recreation of Tokyo. Something that clashes head-on with how games are usually designed. We have heard a thousand times how at Nintendo they have an idea for a game and then look for their own saga with which it fits; or how stories to tell are usually thought of and then some mechanics are implemented.

But seldom does the game stage come first. “An interesting thing about how we approached the development of this game is that we first start by creating the city authentically. The gameplay came after“, Kimura tells us. “We started doing the gameplay after the different parts of the city were done and we started thinking: ‘Okay, what kind of gameplay we can create that could fit here properly’“.

The producer assures that in some cases they varied how the city was built for the benefit of gameplay, for example for combat, but in general it was not: “We prioritize city graphics and city appearance. Sometimes we had discussions about ‘the gameplay could be a little better if we modify this and that [de la ciudad]’. We have modified the graphs a bit, but in most cases we just prioritize the city and we thought of other ways to use the gameplay to fit in with the city.

Spectral combat, Japanese sweets and the PS5 version

In the full interviewwhere the Director Kenji Kimurawe talked at length about the overwhelming recreation of Tokyo that the Bethesda studio led by Shinji Mikami has achieved, but also about the combat system, the different graphic modes that the PS5 version has and even the Japanese snacks that plague the game. play.