Quick Look: Ghost of Tsushima

oh dang the moment I refreshed, here it is.

Looking forward to checking this out

Cant think of the last time i saw a Jason and Alex QL.

Ahh a rare Alex and Jason QL, very cool. Looking forward to playing this tomorrow!

I like the cross country collabos this week. Abby and Jan, now Jason and Alex.

Good PaRappa reference, Alex!

They say every 10 years the dragon from the east meets the arisen from the west and a Quick Look is formed.

Sometimes a certain kind of game comes along at exactly the right time. This is one of these times for me. Can't wait to lose myself in this world.

I can loot items while on horseback? Fantastic.

Hey guys great QL.

I still got a bit to go in TLOU 2, but I’m excited to pick this one up soon.

Not sure if it's how it was recorded and uploaded, but do the graphics(foliage and lighting specifically) look a little rough to anyone? Like even in comparison to the demo PS did a month or so ago?

Can't help but notice on that first "boss" fight, they started giving Jason more and more resolve after retries.

Jason and Alex running a video together? I can't remember the last time that happened but it's a fucking excellent combination.

Looking forward to this a great deal. I avoid most open world games because they're just too damn big, but I'm ready to spend a good chunk of time with this one.

Thanks a lot for this you guys. It's so nice to finally hear some mention of how this runs on the base console so thanks for that especially. I can't wait to play it.

can you wipe the blood from the sword?

Boots on tatami mats? Not very honorable there.

whoa those textures seem on the side of lower res, a lil fuzzy - maybe I'm more ready for a ps5 than I thought :) the lighting looks amazing, cant believe those petals each cast a shadow

Jason + Alex is an unexpected delight. Kind of burnt out on this style of game at the moment, but it sure is purty.

Yeah, that's kinda cool for people who just want to finish the game I guess, and don't care about getting good at the game, but I hope that won't happen on higher difficulty settings

@reap3r160: Might be how the capture is filtering. I've noticed a couple games looking rougher than they should during quarantine. I also don't know if Jason has a PS4 pro.

the trailer was way too good and it hurt the game

To be honest this Black & White mode looks closer to Kobayashi's Harakiri or Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain than Seven Samurai or whichever Kurosawa movie.

But I do love me some good B&W cinematography, but just like LA Noire, this game was just not designed for it. That game also had color coding and contrast issues. One of the strengths of black and white is that it focuses your vision on the important things – the shapes, the contrast, the bright and dark bits. These "cinematic" B&W modes sort of go against that, they actually muddy the pretty sophisticated signaling systems games can have and have it blend into the background. The deliberate, crisp work in the best B&W cinematography uses framing and shapes and contrast to make the important stuff more noticeable, not less. "Black and white is the actor's friend" and all that.

I guess the best way to do it is to have actual black and white models and textures, then have a fancy film emulation effect over the game at all times. TLoU2's film emulation was actually really impressive, the grain and such responded to different lighting conditions and different colors the way film typically does and that was really cool. Seeing the damp dark old buildings that had more wood with green walls react differently than the sort of cement & metal walls and floors was neat.

also this game looks dang gorgeous in color...

Been waiting for this Quick Look. Thank you Alex and Jason.

Really looking forward to exploring the game and patting foxes :3

@frankiebeanz: I kind of agree. I wanted a real story heavy experience, a focused game, and then when i saw the first gameplay footage with the gathering materials "kill x soldiers" I was like ohhh its that. okay then. Which is totally fine but those OG trailers were SO emotional and story heavy.

Is there Japanese-only voiceover? Or we only talkin' dubs here?

[edit] oh they talked about it later, good that it's there

man this looks awful haha. Thanks for the QL tho guys, enjoy the cross-coast content :)

@heatdrive88: My understanding is the Japanese voice over is the dubbed one which I supposed I understand for a game likely focused toward a Western market, but I still find really weird.

Yeah, swipe right on the touch pad. I'll give them props for actually putting shortcuts on all the touchpad directional swipes like Witcher 3 did (the others are the objective wind, weather flute, and I forget the fourth one). Don't know why every PS4 game doesn't use those, it's four free inputs!

I'm honestly really into this game despite it being pretty shallow and dated. It's just pleasant right now to tool around in a lush countryside finding things to do that don't require a ton of thought.

Don't trust sensei, he is secretly studying the protomolecule. He is going to kill all the children.

Hrmmmm. I wish this was less like a video game, and more like an actual Kurosawa movie.

I remember back in the gamespot days Jeff talked about import tuner challenge, a game that he didn’t think was all that great, but kept playing in a guilty pleasure sort of way, this kinda seems like that for the staff. (Not in a bad way I’m saying this)

Haven’t played much open world games in a while so this formula is still a bit fresh, and haven’t seen much samurai movies last last samurai, so I’ll give this a shot.

This game looks great. Hope it comes to PC eventually.

@nthnmllr: how does it look awful? Not sure where you are getting that

Somewhere in Canada there is someone at Ubisoft pissed off by the fact that the alpha for the next Assassin's Creed (Beyond Valhalla. Also thank me later for this DLC title Ubi), only to realise later this one is not made by them.

I think the combat looks pretty fun and the game sure is pretty, will definitely give this game a go. Thanks for he quick look!

the cutscene direction in this is beautiful

@dan_citi: It's interesting to see where they drew inspiration from in that Kurosawa mode. I might argue the coloration and contrast are mostly right, but the disconnect is more physical. I think video games would have an uphill battle trying to make something playable while emulating actual filmic lenses. You're right about Last of Us 2 being good with that aesthetic, but they have massive resources.

What really kills the vibe here is the shot composition. As soon as we see "Kurosawa mode" flipped on in the Quick Look, we're treated to an exceptionally generic over the shoulder shot/reverse shot during some mission exposition. It's excruciatingly efficient and video gamey. Kurosawa famously composed interesting dialogue scenes by directing the audience's eye through movement of characters or the frame itself, often with many, many characters loading the frame. Here we see two stiff models standing at each other with the only movement coming from their lips. The camera can't even move, it's simply replaced behind the opposite character's shoulder. What kills me here is that you don't have to be emulating a famous director to do something remotely interesting here. It's a video game, there's no heavy equipment to move around, you can place the frame literally anywhere in 3D space, and yet they chose something that is boring to look at.

Obviously Kurosawa mode wasn't meant to be more than a reference to the material that inspired this game. I guess I just wish the things that inspired this game went beyond swords fights and cool looking spaces. Kurosawa isn't renowned because he put the coolest swords on screen.

Huh, I thought this game would look better based on what everyone was saying about it being gorgeous. Maybe I shouldn't compare it to Horizon since that's a high bar, but that's also still a three year old game.

Its like a scuffed Sekiro

Ghost Of Guilty Conscience Uncle.

@wicky_sauce: The game looks very bad, that's what I am getting at

This game looks like a drag, like it just isn't any fun, and that's kind of the review impressions. You knew that when they decided to never show it and let the tbullshot trailer dictate opinions.

Seems people are being unfairly harsh on this and constantly comparing it to Sekiro which somehow has gained untouchable status since its release. This honestly looks more appealing to me as it's more a video game-ass video game, looks damn nice and I could probably actually hang with it unlike what seems to be the nigh impossibly hard Sekiro.

This was a good QL!

Also, I'm playing Bloodborne, and I just think I need to play something different right now. I bought Gears of War 5 on sale specifically as a summer game. But this looks so great. Both diversionary and with a decent story. Formulaic it may be, but after all this is a juggle between it and GoW!

Hmmmm...

@ripelivejam: Sekiro isn't impossibly hard. It has a steep learning curve but is eminently doable if you pay attention to what the game is trying to teach you. In my experience, it is also very rewarding instead of merely punishing.

That said, while some comparisons with Sekiro are made, I don't think it's true that people are 'constantly comparing it to Sekiro'. Most of the criticism seems to be about the stale quest design and structure as well as the appearance of the game.

Personally, I think the combat looks fun but the old school open world structure turns me off from it.

Loved this Quick Look and love this take; after spending the better part of a month mired in The Last of Us analysis, podcasts and the general drudgery of reality as a restaurant worker in this current iteration of America, all I need right now is what appears to be this game's brand of Pretty Good and Quite A Lot of It.

Also, to all the comments about the game looking rough, I think that's just the capture of the video. From Gamespot, Kotaku and Digital Foundry's reviews this game looks fucking phenomenal, I'm purchasing it almost entirely as a showcase for my brand new 4K screen.

@superjoe: I am surprised I did not see more people commenting on this. I noticed this when they did that State of Play and I hope that more games do this. I hardly dabbled in the plant collecting in RDR2 because I never wanted to dismount just to collect some Tobacco.