Excellent Ghost of Tsushima Misfires With Bizarre Loading Screens
A magnificent end-of-a-generation PS4 exclusive lands its katana on its foot. | Source: Sucker Punch Productions/Sony
- Ghost of Tsushima has been moderately famous since reviews dropped recently.
- The game had loading screens so fast that they had to be slowed down to make the tips they displayed readable.
- There were a million other, better ways of handling this problem then extending loading times.
Ghost of Tsushima seems to be doing pretty well right now. It’s getting decent critic scores, and in general, fans aren’t hard to find on places like Twitter .
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some issues, however. Take its loading screens. They were just far too fast. According to Kotaku, they were so quick that they had to be artificially extended to make it possible for players to read loading screen tips.
Congratulations go to Sucker Punch for the stupidest thing I’ve heard from the gaming industry in at least a week.
Why Would You Extend Loading Times, Ever?
It’s been a long time since I was so confused about a decision in the games industry, especially coming from a developer like Sucker Punch who is generally pretty good at what they do.
The fact is that Ghost of Tsushima is genuinely a marvel if it loads so quickly that you can’t ready the loading screen tips. Many developers do all they can to reduce loading times, even touting how quick they can be.
Artificially extending the loading screens doesn’t seem like the solution to Ghost of Tsushima’s problem. It was the worst possible way that they could have handled the issue of unreadable tips.
Ghost of Tsushima Could Have Handled Tips Differently
It’s a shame we don’t live in a world where everyone carries a powerful computer in their pockets. If we did, then it would be easy for anyone to look up Ghost of Tsushima tips when they were struggling.
Hell, it’s a shame that games don’t have a simple option that would allow us to collate all these tips into one area. If we did, there would have been no need to make the loading times longer.
Sarcasm aside, there were so many ways that this could have been handled better. Instead, something that was impressive as hell for a PS4 title had to be nerfed because every other game has loading screen tips, so clearly, they’re just important. The next-gen SSD consoles cannot come soon enough.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com.
