Sucker Punch Productions’ Ghost of Tsushima was a critical hit. After playing the game, many fans were wondering if they will be able to enjoy more of Ghost of Tsushima in terms of any expansion or probably a sequel. Sucker Punch and Sony responded to the fans by announcing Ghost of Tsushima Director’s cut which will include some new features along with the new expansion, Ike Island.
The Director’s Cut has also been optimized for PS5 hardware as a next-gen experience. Talking to Pushsquare, Creative Director of Ghost of Tsushima, Nate Fox, had this to say about improvements based on PS5 hardware:
Yeah, there are absolutely some features that we could put onto the game because of PS5 hardware. So, haptics being the big one. This is a game where we can suddenly let you feel what it’s like to hold a katana in your hands when it gets deflected by a shield. You feel it through the controller because of the haptics and adaptive triggers. Even the Japanese lip syncing. We’re capable of putting that in because the PS5 SSD let us take some of our cutscenes that, on the original version of the game we had to pre-render, and now, we can do them live. And so the hardware makes a difference.
For the new Japanese Lip syncing, Nate had this to say:
It’s real-time rendering. On the PS4 version we would have to pre-render films that we would use to play while we were loading in new chunks of the background. And these films are very, very large. In fact, they’re so large that we just barely got them on disc. But with PS5, because we can do them live rendered, we now can accommodate the extra lip sync.
It’s nice to see that apart from regular haptics and adaptive triggers, some other improvements were also introduced and SSD was utilized effectively. However, the sad news is, as you may already know, the Director’s Cut upgrade for Ghost of Tsushima comes at an additional cost, even for the owners of the original game. GoT Director’s Cut will also be available as a separate purchase of $60 on PS4 and $70 on PS5.
In the interview, Nate has also revealed the size of Ike Island expansion. According to him, Ike Island is almost the size of of the first Act of the game. So it’s basically a DLC expansion with some bells and whistles for PS5.