If you played The ghost of Tsushima, you probably were covered by how fast it loads. Despite taking place in a huge open world, you can quickly travel from one end to the other in seconds, which may give you the impression that the game’s developer Sucker Punch uses literal wizards. It’s not necessary. Moreover, during the development, the permanent staff who are not wizards did not even recognize how unusual The ghostThe loading screens flash and you will miss them.
This came earlier today when Sucker Punch co-founder Brian Fleming attended a digital session ask me-anything the Game Developers Conference Showcase. Talking to moderator Bryant Francis de Gamasutra, detailed the collective shock of the Sucker Punch team to the public reaction to The ghostupload speed.
“We lived in this world where the game worked the way it did for years,” Fleming said. “So when I shipped, and the news was like, ‘Oh my God, the game loads so fast,’ I took it for granted how big the business was.”
As for how the company managed to control such lightning speeds, Fleming credited the art and engineering teams for “understanding the essentials of the game, so we didn’t have to reload all the time.” The team also implemented lower-resolution versions of textures so that objects fade as the player loads into a new environment. The ghostThe idyllic natural art style also played a role, simply being less visually noisy than other high-budget productions.
According to Fleming, fast speed was also conditioned by “basics”, such as “paying attention to the organization of data”.
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Everything Fleming said about the trial is consistent with what Kotaku reported last summer. (Yes, we were among the “news” that “were like ‘Oh, my god …'”) In July, staff writer Ian Walker spoken to Adrian Bentley, senior engine programmer at Sucker Punch, about all the work that went into the cut The ghostloading speed by a significant margin. If you’re interested in a deeper dive into how everything works, you should definitely review Ian’s song:
Today, Fleming suggested that The ghostCharging speeds might just be a look at really fast charging speeds in the future. Asked what development technology he was most excited about, Fleming pointed to the new PlayStation 5 storage system.
“The charging systems there will change the way we think about the way we play games,” he said. “It’s so fast that it’s even possible to download things that are just off the screen on time, and that could really change the way we think about making games.”