How Ghost of Yōtei builds a wilder PS5 world with new tech

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Sucker Punch has published a technical breakdown of Ghost of Yōtei, outlining the engine changes that underpin its freer exploration and denser natural environments. The studio set out to minimize player guidance on-screen, extend sightlines, and enrich moment-to-moment interaction – all while holding frame rate. The post details upgrades to distant rendering, GPU-driven systems for foliage and cloth, new snow and cloud tech, and image quality enhancements on PlayStation 5. It also confirms ray-traced global illumination on PS5 Pro targeting 60 frames per second and faster loading across the island.

Below are the key technical pillars the team highlighted, along with what they mean for gameplay and presentation.

Rendering a broader, denser wilderness

The team reworked distant terrain and foliage so players can scan the horizon and simply walk toward interesting sights. Distant mountain meshes and materials are baked into high-detail textures, and the GPU-driven renderer was expanded to double the amount of grass and renderable items. In a representative scene, more than 1,000,000 distant trees, rocks and bushes are culled down to about 60,000 items that are actually drawn for the G-buffer each frame.

Procedural-assisted authoring and GPU compute pipelines handle occlusion culling, memory allocation and draw-record setup, with minimal CPU involvement. These pipelines also power runtime systems such as broad flower fields and even occasional ropes and chains. To emphasize interaction, weapons write sweeps into a “cut buffer” that cuttable geometry samples to spawn debris – effectively allowing Atsu to cut most grass, flowers and small plants.

Snow, clouds and atmosphere tuned for Hokkaido

To portray deep winter, Sucker Punch added a terrain tessellation system that increases detail and supports runtime deformation. Characters walking, rolling or fighting in snow render particles and geometry into a displacement buffer, carving tracks and craters. The same system lets combat knock snow off trees and bushes, with added “sparkle” via stable screen-space noise.

Clouds and fog were significantly expanded versus Ghost of Tsushima. Tall peaks often sit in front of fast-moving clouds, so the team stores the average visible depth and squared depth per texel in the cloud map. That enables parallax as clouds scroll, blending three cloud frames for smoother motion, and allows accurate obscuring of mountains. Fog uses local volumetric volumes computed via PS5’s 16-bit floating-point GPU instructions; a light-space cloud shadow map produces crepuscular “god rays,” and artists can place world targets to let rays punch through cloud gaps.

Cloth, particles and grounded characters

Atsu’s layered outfits rely on a high-performance GPU cloth system with multi-layer simulation, collision support, and heuristics that scale to large numbers of garments and hanging cloth. GPU particles further tie effects to the world – they can sample terrain materials, deformation and water flow, so dust, leaves and spray move believably with slopes and rivers.

Characters “push back” against the world using a directional grid deformed around the player to layer texture effects such as being wet, bloody, muddy or snowy. For story moments, players can jump to the past: the game swaps Atsu’s skeleton and geometry while preserving state and animation, updates background and lighting via SSD-speed prefetching, and hides the transition inside a particle curtain that samples the pre-transition frame.

Ray tracing and PS5 Pro image quality

Rather than chase mirror-like reflections, Sucker Punch focused ray tracing on global illumination. An improved baked lighting model is augmented with short-range RTGI, supported by changes to the mesh streaming format that dynamically decompresses acceleration structures for the ray-tracing hardware. With the PS5 Pro’s more efficient RT units, RTGI can be enabled targeting 60 frames per second on PS5 Pro.

For sharper reconstruction, the frame was rebuilt around dynamic resolution with upsampling to leverage PSSR. With a few tweaks – including conservative rasterization for small particles – PSSR requires less hand-tuning than the studio’s standard upsampler and reconstructs finer architectural and foliage detail with greater motion stability.

Loading that stays out of the way

Level streaming is optimized so that each location or terrain tile requires only a handful of SSD reads and patching operations for gameplay-critical data. The engine computes and loads only the texture mips and mesh LODs needed to draw the very first frame, with one read per element. The team “dogfoods” these systems during development – the same fast-loading path is used internally and in shipping builds to surface issues early.

At a glance: techniques and outcomes

The snapshot below pairs the solutions Sucker Punch describes with the results players see on-screen.

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Developer context

The studio frames these choices around the game’s core fantasy – a wandering warrior confronting her past in 17th-century Hokkaido. The post notes ongoing cross-talk between art and engineering during the project’s five-year development and mentions plans to share more technical material in 2026.

Why it matters for players

Final takeaway: Ghost of Yōtei’s tech stack is built to make exploration feel natural and tactile – see farther, touch more of the world, and move faster between places. For players, that translates into denser vistas, deeper interactions and steadier performance, with PS5 Pro adding RTGI and PSSR for cleaner, more consistent image quality.