Ghost Of Yotei Gets Developer Deep Dive On Its Stunning Visuals

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A major highlight of Ghost of Yotei is its beautiful graphics, and the developers at Sucker Punch have shared details on how they created its impressive visuals and landscapes.

Adrian Bentley, the programming director at the studio, shared details on the PlayStation Blog about the graphics technology used to create Ghost of Yotei.

The team wanted to build on the feeling of exploration and freedom from Ghost of Tsushima, making this game feel even more open and wild. They achieved this by giving players more independence – less on-screen help, wider views of the environment, and more adaptable fighting styles.

It was challenging to make the game run smoothly on the PS5, particularly given how large the game world is.

Making The Most Of The PS5 Hardware

Bentley explained that a key goal for allowing players to freely explore the game was creating impressive views and clear lines of sight. The idea was to let players discover the game world simply by following what interested them. However, this presented a technical challenge: making distant landscapes, mountains, and plants look good.

Making everything run smoothly requires some processing power to ensure the console’s graphics card can manage it. Fortunately, the graphics card does most of that work on its own, freeing up the main processor to assemble everything and display each frame.

The post highlights the careful design of each area, including its unique plants and how they react when Atsu swings her sword. It also details the realistic way snow falls and behaves on the island of Hokkaido.

Sucker Punch Productions prioritized realistic weather to create the immersive atmosphere in Ghost of Tsushima. Ghost of Yotei takes this a step further with significantly improved fog and cloud effects. The clouds are modeled to realistically hide mountains in the distance and create beautiful light rays when they break apart.

As a fan, I was really blown away by how they handled the snow in the game! Bentley explained that it doesn’t just look like snow, but actually deforms realistically as Atsu walks through it. And it’s not just snow – mud, water, even blood all react to her movements and splash onto her character in a really dynamic way. It adds so much to the immersion!

So, Bentley told me that all the little splatters and stuff are actually super important to making the game world feel real. It’s not just about big things, either – they put a ton of work into how the characters’ clothes move and even how things like dust and particles look in the air. It all adds up to a much more immersive experience, you know?

He explains that by using a fast SSD and well-designed visual effects, they enabled players to seamlessly switch between past and present versions of the character Atsu – even during actions like attacks or jumps – without interrupting the flow of gameplay.

The solid-state drive significantly reduced loading times by using caching and preparing data in advance. This minimized how often the game needed to access information directly from the drive.

Bentley also discusses how the PS5 Pro will use ray tracing to create more realistic lighting and visuals. This includes a technology called PSSR upscaling, which further improves the image quality.

Creating a major, high-profile game like Ghost of Yotei is a huge undertaking, and it’s fascinating to learn about the work that goes into it. It’s especially interesting to see how the developers achieved such impressive visuals in what many consider one of the best-looking games released this year.

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2025-10-24 01:39