Ghost of Tsushima Legends
This article was last updated on 8/19.
The deck is starting to feel a bit stacked for the PS5 and Xbox Series X launch in favor of Sony. Microsoft has lost Halo Infinite as a launch title, which would be one of the highest profile games to launch with a new console in a few generations, while Sony has Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and exclusive consoles access to Gearbox’s Godfall and Arkane’s Deathloop this fall.
But yesterday, Sony got essentially a brand new exclusive with a surprising announcement for its breakout hit of the year, Ghost of Tsushima.
Ghost of Tsushima gets a free co-op update called “Legends”, which is a 2-4 player mode that allows you to take over story and survival missions, and even features a raid of four players. Players will choose different classes and enemies now have supernatural powers inspired by Japanese folklore.
The release date for this is just “falling”, which, given that we’re two weeks away from September, strikes me that Sony may end this with timing with the launch of PS5.
We still do not know what the deal is with games like The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima in terms of how to buy or play them on PS5. But there is reason to reason that at least, a game like Ghost or Tsushima will load faster and perform better on PS5 at baseline, even if there are no other upgrades. And it’s already beautiful enough where that may be all it takes.
This strikes me as Sony is essentially getting another exclusive title for the PS5 launch, given the apparent breadth of this update. I might have been expecting some sort of Tsushima remake for PS5 (which may yet come out), but I did not expect this, and this sounds a bit better, actually new content to play, instead of playing the original game with better resolution than what you had .
Microsoft has obviously “improved for Xbox Series X” versions of their own exclusives coming like Gears 5 and Ori, but there is no such thing as an expansion of Gears of War coming out or anything like what we see here with Tsushima. Yes, it’s likely that Tsushima could have released such a thing anyway, even if we did not intend to launch a new console generation, but since that happens, the timing could not be better for Sony, and yes, I would absolutely consider Tsushima Legends a substantially exclusive release this fall, given how lovely that game was, and that it is completely new content, not a remaster. But that may be coming too.
As always, this will be a challenging case for Xbox, and it’s just gotten a little harder with this announcement. Xbox may have the power edge this time around, but Sony’s first party studios remain on all cylinder fire.
Update (8/19):
Well, since this was written, PS5 actually has lost one of the above mentioned high profile exclusives. Arkane has announced that Deathloop, previously scheduled to be released this fall for PlayStation and PC, has been delayed until Q2 2021, so sometime in the spring. While Deathloop may not have been the highest profile game in the PS5 roster, it was from Arkane and Bethesda and looked pretty good, it’s still a loss all the same. Not at the level of Halo Infinite, maybe, but still.
Deathloop
And it probably won’t be the last.
Outside of Tsushima Legends which we talked about above, Godfall and Spider-Man: Miles Morales as the two main exclusive release titles for PS5. Godfall has shown a lot of gameplay and footage, so it’s possible that it may end up making its promised release window (though strange that it does not yet have an actual date, perhaps tied to launch of next gen). Miles Morales has … not really shown much of everything, but there is reason why, because the original work of Insomniac can use at least some basis, it might be better than other games that ‘ t potential will be delayed.
And yet in 2020, nothing feels like a guarantee. It’s still just August, and PS5 probably won’t be out until November. That’s a long time for anything to happen, including more delays for first or third party games. While some games like Infinite just did not look ready, others like Deathloop looked just fine, and were only delayed, so who really knows what will happen next. Stay tuned for further updates on these startup line-ups, and it will probably not be good news.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube en Instagram. Picking up my sci-fi novels Herokiller en Herokiller 2, and read my first series, The Earthborn Trilogy, which is also on audiobook.
