Sucker Punch was planning Ghost of Tsushima's surprise multiplayer expansion from day one

Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, the multiplayer update for Sucker Punch's open-world samurai adventure, came as a surprise announcement to most players, but it's apparently been in the works for years.

Legends is out today, and on top of the co-op launch missions, it will get a four-player raid in the near future. Speaking with IGN, Legends lead Darren Bridges explained that Sucker Punch "wanted cooperative multiplayer to be a pillar of the game" from the "very beginning" of the development process, as far back as the game's original pitch.

"We probably spent six months to a year thinking about different ideas," he says, "and ultimately we came to Legends. We've been working on it really in parallel, both on the engine side and the content side from the beginning of the project."

"When we batted around different ideas for multiplayer, Legends rose to the top, in part because it allowed us to connect to Jin's story without [the player] being exactly Jin," Bridges adds. "It allows us to also have the freedom to have cooperative abilities that players can use. We have supernatural elements that allow us to be more flexible with the fiction and the abilities and the techniques, all the way down to the cosmetics. And it allowed it to fit nicely in Jin's story because these are Legends, these aren't grounded."

Legends sports four different classes based on legendary heroes, and both their abilities and the enemies they fight are far more fantastical than Jin's encounters in the main game. Ghost of Tsushima's campaign flirts with the supernatural, but Legends has gone whole-hog, and seeing as how Sucker Punch has seemingly used mode as an outlet for their more wild ideas, we can't wait to see what it has in store.