Ghost of Tsushima was one of the last major tentpole releases of the PS4 generation, and it’s safe to say that Sucker Punch really delivered a quality experience with the game, both from a visual and a functional perspective. It was one of the best-looking games that boasted a great mixture of a strong art direction and competent technical backing, and Sucker Punch looks to be continuing that with the release of the sequel.
Ghost of Yotei is finally here, and it has all the markings of a great sequel; everything that worked in the original has been amped up alongside new additions. You can check out more about the game in our review, but with this feature, we will be focusing on the technical aspects of Ghost of Yotei – what has changed, how it compares to the original, and so much more. With that being said, let’s begin!
Graphics Overview – How Has It Changed In Comparison To Tsushima?
Ghost of Tsushima was built using Sucker Punch’s proprietary game engine, and while it might not have been the technically strongest game from the PS4’s comprehensive first-party library, it was definitely a looker in each department. Strong art direction, solid textures, and a knack for detail ensured that Tsushima looks consistently gorgeous without relying on any extreme rendering techniques.
Ghost of Yotei doesn’t rewrite the playbook in any significant way, but what it does is refine the technical aspects of Tsushima to a higher degree, resulting in a game that looks solid through and through. Yotei makes good use of current-gen rendering techniques such as ray-tracing, and the increase in CPU and GPU compute have enabled the team to make some key improvements in several aspects of the presentation.
By and large, the upgrades that we are seeing in Ghost of Yotei are of the iterative kind; ones that build off of what came before. Be it the improvements in the environments, better facial expressions across the board, brand new weather effects coupled with weather effects, or animations – Ghost of Yotei takes what worked in the original and builds a vast net of new ideas around that makes these additions feel fit in the grand scheme of things.
Character Models
Talking about the character models first, Ghost of Yotei flaunts character models that are comparable in fidelity to most current-gen games. The polycounts on these models are quite high, making them look striking when put against proper lighting. The clothes they wear are made of high-quality, physically based materials that sway to the tune of the wind.
One of the biggest key improvements that we noticed in Yotei has to the upgrade in motion capture. The upgraded tech allows more minute expressions to be caught and displayed in a way that feels realistic, and Sucker Punch had already hinted at this in the trailers – and it looks really great in action.
Environment
Ghost of Tsushima absolutely blew it out of the park when it came to its environments. It was the highlight of the experience in Tsushima, and it stands true in the case of Yotei as well. Sucker Punch transports you to a world that feels like poetry in motion – an artistically apt representation of the Ezo period of Japan.
Rolling hills, large flower fields, bustling villages, active volcanoes, and rivers all flow into one another in a way that feels quite natural – giving the world a distinct sense of authenticity. Textures can have some artifacting along the edges, but they do look reasonably sharp for the most part. Yotei uses a lighter colour palette than Tsushima, but it helps set the right mood and contributes to achieving the desired look.
Environments have a lot of visual density with trees, blades of grass, and flowers growing in abundance throughout – and much like Tsushima, they accurately sway to the tune of the winds. Trees and stones have appropriate geometric complexity, and much like the clothes of these characters, the material of these environmental assets reacts appropriately to light and reflection. Coarse materials like iron or stone wouldn’t obviously reflect much light, but other materials, such as the side of a katana or a pool of water, would accurately reflect it.
Terrain deformations are also a highlight, and walking over mud or snow leaves dynamically generated trails behind the player. These deformations are highly detailed, and can bundle over one another in certain scenarios without glitching out. It seems that Sucker Punch might have taken a page out of Decima Engine in this regard, and it can be quite a looker in action.
Yotei also has many different renderings of water spread throughout its huge open world. You can find clear rolling water flowing through streams, semi-solid ice in frigid areas, soft snow atop mountains and much more. Reflection properties and material quality appropriately differ based on the state of water, and while there are no dynamic melting mechanisms in place – the overall rendering is pretty stunning.
We should also talk about how the world streaming works in Yotei, and this is where Sucker Punch makes great use of the PS5’s expanded CPU and GPU horsepower. Draw distances are significantly higher, and the level of detail doesn’t drop by a huge margin for assets that are further away from the camera. The level of detail swapping also happens in a smooth fashion, and load pop-in and other artifacts are minimal.
Lighting and Reflections
And that brings us neatly over to the lighting side of things, where we get to see a ray-tracing based lighting solution, which is a vast improvement over the probe-based solution that we saw in Ghost of Tsushima. Nailing the look and feel of the world of Yotei is heavily dependent on bounce lighting and indirect lighting, so a rather simple GI implementation wouldn’t work as well as this ray-traced solution. Of course, it helps that the PS5 has hardware-accelerated ray-tracing – and performance doesn’t heavily tank as a result.
The reflections are of consistently high quality, andthe lighting data is reasonably accurate, giving the world a rather realistic look at times. Ghost of Yotei also has dynamic day and night cycles and the possibility of weather hazards, and going the RT route makes these transitions feel quite natural and dynamic in nature.
The same RT implementation continues over to the shadow maps, where we get to see some really accurate shadows cast from a combination of direct and indirect light sources. Shadow maps are detailed and cast at a large scale from the camera, giving the world a rather uniform look around. Artifacts in shadows are largely absent, thanks to the higher processing power of the PS5.
Animations
As a natural extension of the advancements in motion capture, Ghost of Yotei also makes a few improvements to the animation department. The swordfighting and action are inspired by the works of Kurosawa, and it’s a mixture of Samurai Bujustu and artificially induced flair. Animations nicely blend into one another during combat, and enemy ragdolls also properly react to strikes from the player. The new stances also bring new moves and animations into the mix, enlarging the pool of available actions at your disposal.
Animations and interactions aren’t just limited to the combat; you can also find some really cool interactions spread throughout the game. Right from how the horse moves through different terrain to snow piling up on top of trees and eventually shedding under the crumbling weight and the micro-expressions that indicate biting cold, Ghost of Yotei is filled with neat little animations that make the world feel interactive and surreal.
Particle Effects And Other Post-Processing
Ghost of Yotei’s visual presentation is also pretty strong on the post-processing side of things, and Sucker Punch has established itself as one of the best when it comes to particle effects. Be it the power effects of Infamous or the sparks in Tsushima, Sucker Punch always has some great particle effects on show – and that stands true in the case of Yotei as well. We get to see some high-quality alpha particles during fights and explosions, and all of that is paired really well with other effects, such as a per-object motion blur that helps elevate the visual presentation to another level.
Volumetric fog is also generously used across Yotei, be it smoke volumes that indicate points of interest or smoke bombs that feature great light diffusion or even distant fog that serves to sell the sense of scale. Smoke volumes can be dense or light depending on the requirement, and these techniques are also used in conjunction to depict environmental hazards such as typhoons and blizzards or clouds in the sky sandbox.
Lastly, the presentation is capped off with what looks to be PSSR (PlayStation Super Resolution), which helps in smoothening off jagged edges and hides away any visible artifacts without risking a hit on the performance side of things.
Conclusion
Ghost of Yotei’s presentation is an iterative upgrade over Tsushima, and while Sucker Punch hasn’t aggressively pushed the envelope of rendering in any department – it doesn’t mean that this isn’t a good-looking game. The beauty of this game lies in the strong art direction, the biodiversity on offer, and the striking attention to detail – and it will undoubtedly go down as a worthy successor to Ghost of Tsushima and also one of the best-looking games of this year.
