It’s weird that one of the selling points for the native-PS5 version of Ghost Of Tsushima is lip-syncing for the Japanese audio dub.
Ghost Of Tsushima offers both English and Japanese audio, but all the cutscenes are lip-synced to the English audio only. The upcoming new release of Ghost Of Tsushima, Ghost Of Tsushima Director’s Cut, will include lip-syncing for Japanese audio, but only for the PS5 version.
The official explanation for that prior to this, as posted on the PlayStation Blog, is this:
“Thanks to the PS5’s ability to render cinematics in real time, cutscenes in Ghost of Tsushima and on Iki Island on PS5 will now offer lip sync for Japanese voice over.”
In an interview with Push Square, developer Sucker Punch has explained in further detail why this feature is unfortunately locked to PS5.
“We’re capable of putting [Japanese lip sync] in because the PS5 SSD let us take some of our cutscenes that, on the original version of the game we had to pre-render,” said creative director Nate Fox. “And now, we can do them live.”
When asked for more explanation, Fox revealed that the cut-scenes on PS4 are pre-rendered movies, that take up a lot of disc space. “On the PS4 version we would have to pre-render films that we would use to play while we were loading in new chunks of the background,” Fox explained. “And these films are very, very large. In fact, they’re so large that we just barely got them on disc.”
The PS5 version will see these cut-scenes rendered in real-time so they won’t take up much disc space. Plus, the background of operation of loading elements of the game is a non-issue with the PS5’s SSDs.
This is a more thorough answer on how Ghost Of Tsushima cannot have the Japanese lip-syncing on the PS4.
But if the pre-rendered movies are what powered cut-scenes, why don’t PlayStation offer the Japanese lip-sync as a separate optional download for those that want it instead of turning it as a selling point for the PS5?
As it stands, now have another example of how a super-fast SSD in these new current-gen consoles can improve video games.
Ghost Of Tsushima Director’s Cut releases on August 20 for the PS4 and PS5.
Source: Push Square