When PlayStation 5 launched in November last year, two Sony first-party developers – Bend Studio and Sucker Punch – tapped into the early cross-generation SDK, allowing Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima to run at 60 frames per second, dramatically improving the experience. Today, in concert with a Director’s Cut edition that includes bonus content, Tsushima has been updated once more – no longer is it running under backwards compatibility, now it’s a fully armed and operational PS5 title, able to tap into the full horsepower of the machine. So, what has changed and how good are the upgrades?
First of all, it’s important to put the improvements to Ghost of Tsushima into two distinct categories. As part of the process, the original game receives a free patch to introduce a number of key enhancements, one of which we consider to be a major upgrade – the ability to enable a target lock-on. The omission of this in the original game was a disappointment and compromised the quality of the combat, so it’s great to see that the developer took the feedback on board and added in the feature. In addition, further controller layout options are added. That’s the extent of the freebies – and if you’re playing on PS5, you’ll still be running the PS4 code under back-compat (the 60fps support remains, by the way).
The rest of the Director’s Cut content – including the PS5 upgrade requires an investment from the user. The cost of this varies according to territory and whether you pre-order or not (pre-ordering gives a discounted £16/$20 price) and it gives players access to the new content, including the Iki island expansion and the actual native PlayStation 5 version of the game – and that’s where we’re focusing our commentary.
Two graphics modes are availability, one which favours frame-rate and the other more interesting option that targets a higher resolution. In both modes, it seems that Ghost of Tsushima retains the checkerboarding mode used in the PS4 Pro version of the game, with both targeting 60 frames per second. The frame-rate option sticks to the 1800p checkerboard presentation seen on the PS4 version running under backwards compatibility, while the resolution option sees pixel counts bumped to full 2160p checkerboard, for added clarity. Dynamic resolution scaling can’t be ruled out, but everything we’ve seen and tested so far does indicate a fixed resolution. Performance on both modes is essentially identical. It’s 60 frames per second locked to the point where dropping back to the frame-rate mode seems to be pointless.