Last week Sucker Punch finally gave us a real look at Ghost of Tsushima’s open-world, but just how big will the game be? Sucker Punch has admitted GoT was inspired by Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but will their game be as sprawling as Nintendo’s epic? We don’t have a definitive answer on that yet, but according to Ghost of Tsushima art director Jason Connell this is far and away Sucker Punch’s biggest open world to date…

　　It's a lot bigger [than Infamous: Second Son]. It's definitely Sucker Punch's biggest game we've ever made by a landslide, both in the amount of stuff that's in it and also just sheer landscape, square footage-wise.

　　That said, don’t expect to be able to explore everything right away, as GoT is a little more story-driven than something like BotW.

　　As a story as big as ours and a game as big as ours, it is incredibly important to us that people understand Jin's journey first. It's a lot to take in. So the first part, we want to make sure that you understand who he is, what's happened to this island. So there's a little bit of setup. It's really important to do that before we just open the flood gates. But then once you get to that point, then it's pretty open.

　　Of course, one thing folks picked up on when watching the new GoT footage was that the visuals weren’t quite as detailed as the demo footage we saw a couple years ago. “Visual downgrades” are a largely unavoidable part of making games, as developers are always going to be forced to make tough decisions and prioritize performance, but that said, Cornell insists they’re getting everything they can out of the PS4 hardware…

　　We've learned a ton and we've just built on tech, on tech, on tech, and we have amazing technical rendering gurus at Sucker Punch. They've managed to pull out every little ounce of performance [out of the PS4] so that we could have our dreams of making this game. You can see pretty far in the game as we show off, and that's not some fabricated thing with hacks. You can just get down from that mountain and go to those places. It's stunning what they've been able to pull off for us from a technical perspective.

　　Ghost of Tsushima sneaks onto PS4 on July 17.