In Ghost of Tsushima, there are roughly 3 million procedurally generated trees distributed throughout the game.
The era of the PlayStation 4 is slowly drawing to an end. Soon, the PlayStation 5 will arrive and it will undoubtedly knock our socks off with all of its new technology, fabulous graphics, and life-like sound. But we gotta say, we’re still incredibly impressed by what the PlayStation 4 can still do, and in no other game is it more impressive than in Ghost of Tsushima.
Making Ghost of Tsushima as pretty and awe-inspiring as it is wouldn’t have been possible in the early days of the PlayStation 4. Sucker Punch Productions co-founder Brian Flemming and Ghost of Tsushima art and creative director Jason Connell spoke with Eurogamer about the game’s development, noting the differences between making a game at the beginning of a console’s life cycle versus the end of it.
Although Sucker Punch’s first PS4 game, inFamous: Second Son, was technically brilliant for the time, it didn’t have the technology to do what was accomplished in Ghost of Tsushima. For example, to get Tsushima to look like an ancient woodland, Sucker Punch used procedural generation technology to populate each individual tree in the forest.
Just how many trees did they make? About 3 million.
“Our lead environment artists were talking about how they could probably count the amount of trees in our last game,” said Connell. “And in this one there’s just absolutely no way there’s millions I don’t know there’s tonnes."
Which is wrong, as Fleming blurts out: “There’s a number! It’s three million trees."
That’s a lot of trees–too many to be hand-placed, as Connell notes. Sucker Punch needed to make the technology to plant that many virtual saplings that would eventually grow into Ghost of Tsushima.
You can check out the full interview over on Eurogamer.
Source: Eurogamer
