Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima is officially out today, bringing fans a heaping boatload of open-world exploration and old school Samurai combat to indulge in. Thing is, the idea of a lone samurai evolving to confront the invading Mongolian Horde is by no means the first concept Sucker Punch had in mind for what would eventually become Ghost of Tsushima, with one of earlier concepts involving pirates.

Sucker Punch co-founder Brian Fleming recently took to the PlayStation Blog to open up about the evolution of the idea of Ghost of Tsushima. “Early on, we concluded that we wanted to build a large, open world experience — and one that featured melee combat,” Fleming began. “But beyond that we were uncertain. Pirates? Rob Roy? The Three Musketeers? All these were considered — but we kept coming back to feudal Japan and telling the story of a samurai warrior.”

Then one fateful fall afternoon we found a historical account of the Mongol invasion of Tsushima in 1274, and the entire vision clicked into place.”

Brian Fleming goes on to detail some of the early troubles with Ghost of Tsushima, particularly the shift from developing Seattle for Second Son to working on Feudal Japan. “We’d helped launch the PS4 with Second Son. We’d built our rainy home of Seattle and a powerful visual effects system to provide visual sizzle. Now we were trying to build a place half a world away and more than 700 years in the past… that’s a lot of distance to cover.”

But the real challenge? The scale. Nothing was immune. World size, foliage placement, dialog lines, missions, characters. These things didn’t just increase, they multiplied. 5x, 10x, 20x, even 40x in some cases. And none of the tools from inFamous were up to the task…. except for our visual effects system.”

Thankfully, things appear to have worked out quite nicely for the studio, with Ghost of Tsushima’s black & white mode even earning the blessing from Akira Kurosawa’s estate to be named Kurosawa mode. Those looking to check out the game for themselves needn’t wait any longer, as Ghost of Tsushima is now available exclusively for the PlayStation 4.

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