If you played Tsushima’s Ghostyou were likely shocked by how quickly it loads. Despite taking place in a huge open world, you can travel quickly from end to end in seconds, which can give the impression that Sucker Punch, the game’s developer, employs literal assistants. This is not the case. Furthermore, during development, definitely non-wizarding employees didn’t even recognize how unusual Ghostthe flash-and-you’ll-lose loading screens.
This came about earlier today, when Sucker Punch co-founder Brian Fleming participated in a digital session ask me anything at the Game Developers Conference Showcase. Speaking with moderator Bryant Francis of Gamasutra, he detailed the collective shock of the Sucker Punch team with the public’s reaction to the Ghostloading speeds of.
“We live in this world where the game has worked the way it has for years,” said Fleming. “So when we sent it out, and the news was like, ‘Oh, my God, the game loads so fast’, we had taken for granted how big the deal was.”
As for how the company was able to achieve extremely fast loading speeds, Fleming credited the art and engineering teams with “understanding what was fundamental to the game, so that we wouldn’t have to reload all the time”. The team also implemented low-resolution versions of textures, in order to disappear the objects while the player loads in a new environment. GhostThe naturally idyllic art style also played a role, simply being less visually noisy than other big-budget productions.
According to Fleming, fast speeds also depended on “basic principles” such as “be careful when organizing data”.
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Everything Fleming said about the process is in line with what Kotaku reported last summer. (Yes, we were among the “news” that “was like, ‘Oh, my God …'”) In July, editor Ian Walker said to Adrian Bentley, lead engine programmer at Sucker Punch, about all the work needed to shrink Ghostloading speeds by a significant margin. If you are interested in a deeper dive into how it all works, you should definitely revisit Ian’s article:
Today, Fleming hinted that GhostLoading speeds may just be a glimpse of really fast loading speeds in the future. When asked which development technology he was most excited about, Fleming pointed to the new PlayStation 5 storage system.
“Charging systems are going to change the way we think about how we make games,” he said. “It’s so fast that even the idea of downloading things that are off the screen at the right time is possible and that can fundamentally change the way we think about making games.”