From PS Blog: "A flash of steel, a few quick slashes and the enemy is dead; this is the fantasy of how a Samurai fights. Lethal, precise, fast… but how does that translate into gameplay? Honoring this fantasy, what we called the “Lethality Contract,” was a major challenge we had in making Ghost of Tsushima.
Keeping things lethal was a struggle. Assassinations and Standoffs nailed it, but what about standard combat? Lethality had to hold up across the entirety of the game."