Zen of Streaming: Building and Loading ‘Ghost of Tsushima’ [video] | Hacker News Reader

Zen of Streaming: Building and Loading ‘Ghost of Tsushima’ [video]

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78 pointsdanso10 comments

Ghost of Tsushima is the only PS4 game I've ever platinumed (gotten all the achievements for), despite it having a combat system that becomes extremely repetitive and trivially easy halfway into the game. That, combined with its trite samurai story/themes, should've been enough to make me bounce.

But the nearly non-existent load times really is GoT's killer feature, because it allows you to goof around and experiment, die, and get right back into the action without feeling frustrated.

What's even more amazing to me is that it's not just "instant revives", but actual "fast travel". I'm not a huge fan of open world games either, but GoT makes it easy by letting you fast travel across the continent in seconds. Conceptually, instant loading of localized action sequences seems doable. But instantly loading of entirely different environments on demand, from an old fashioned HDD, feels like black magic.

I second everything you said. I was pleasantly surprised (and dumbfounded) when I discovered the quick load-times. After playing many of the Assassin's Creed games, I expected the usual die-and-wait-5-minutes for the world to load, but Ghost of Tsushima continues to impress me in many ways. I'm also one to get easily bored by repetitive combat, but for some reason this game's fun-factor makes it very tolerable.

My only issue is sometimes after completing a mission, there's what appears to be an abnormally long cut scene of the character sitting or standing next to his horse. This is a very minor thing though. Everything else with this game is exceptionally well done.

Great insight! I'll add the Hitman series of games, which have low load times as well. It's a sandbox style of game where you need to spend time exploring and iterating on your course of action to get the full experience. Without fast loading, it would quickly go from fun to unbearable.

Even on Lethal difficulty the combat can be mastered, but for me it was too easy to exploit archery since most of the time there aren't any straight up ambushes in the game and you can see all the world encounters twenty - thirty yards away.

God of War got it right in making the world encounters primarily ambushes and not allowing one-shot ranged combat. The bandits in GoT should've been primarily ambushes with only the Mongol patrols been spottable from a distance.

Used to think it was the PS5's SSD that was the game-changer. Allowing for in-engine cut sequences seamlessly meshing into gameplay. But now I think it may be the 10 Teraflops Navi GPU that devs will seek to unleash ;)

Meh, I think this console generation is actually going to be pretty boring in that respect. Simply put, the concept of "optimization" doesn't really exist in a traditional sense for these consoles anymore. Both Sony and Microsoft have PC versions of their games (and exclusives), they just target the PS5 or Xbox Series X and edit some ini files before shipping it out. It's not like the PS3, where we have some incredibly esoteric/powerful GPU that took decades to learn, or the N64 where there was an all-new graphics paradigm to learn. Now more than ever, your console is just a less-robust PC: even the Nintendo Switch uses relatively standardized hardware.

I think the real thing to be looking out for is how developers utilize the crazy overhead they have. The Touryst leverages newer consoles to perform 6k/8k supersampled antialiasing without dropping a frame. Minecraft with shaders is finally just... viable. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised of Sony introduced some emulation layer to play PC games (a-la Proton) if their competition with Microsoft really starts heating up. Really, the hardware is the least interesting part of this console generation. Building a robust software experience on them, however, is where things get interesting (at least to me).

A common complaint, but look at how titles like Horizon, Death Stranding, or Red Dead 2 play on PC vs on PS4 launch hardware that is now almost eight years old. Would you be playing those titles at 1080p on a GTX 700-series, a GPU that came out the same year and retailed new for nearly the cost of a PS4?

If anything, I think these kinds of comparisons underscore that even in a world where consoles are using mostly PC-originated components and architectures, there are still massive wins to be had when a developer can put their effort into targeting a single hardware platform (or a small number of them, eg pro and non-pro) rather than chasing a million interop issues across the infinity of permutations of in-the-wild PC hardware.

Not that many games are releasing simultaneously on PC and PS5. Id argue that the concept of optimisation still largely exists for the current gen consoles even if they are using mainly off the shelf parts a desktop does not exist that is largely the same; mainly due to the large pool of shared memory that the CPU/GPU use and the ability to target that specific instruction set and hardware which helps too.

Both Sony and Microsoft introduced a lot of new innovations. I'm not sure what you're whining about.

We finally have high performance SSD's which revolutionizes streaming. we have advanced shaders that should allow extreme levels of geometric detail, custom audio engines and more.

Last gen felt like a compromise with machines using outdated hardware, this gen is state of the art with tons of potential

the SSD is the game changer. no one got to fully use it yet.

Remember that games take years to develop and it takes time to build engines that utilize new hardware.

RDNA 2 ofc is also a very good architecture with great features

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