[Console Games] Ghostwire: Tokyo

[Black CaT]

 

After a year of PlayStation 5 exclusivity, Ghostwire: Tokyo is finally out on Xbox. This open-world horror-first-person-adventure mashup is definitely a unique game, but it did suffer from a range of technical issues when it first launched. Poor performance and sluggish controls plagued the PS5 version of Ghostwire, along with an overwhelming range of graphical options. The good news is that the game looks just as good on Series X, but the bad news is that none of the technical issues have been addressed on PS5 since launch - and so the Xbox versions are similarly affected. Even more disappointing is that performance is lower on Series X, while there are noticeable reductions in quality to the game's striking ray-traced effects.

Ghostwire: Tokyo ships with a sobering variety of visual modes - far too many, really, with none of them providing a definitive experience. On PS5 and Series X, there are an effective 10 visual options for players to choose from - quality, performance, and then multiple variants of high frame-rate quality and high frame rate performance, depending on the refresh rate of the console and whether you want to engage v-sync or not. And on top of that, there are five different settings for motion blur quality - the default looked fine, so we stuck with it. The situation is much simpler on Series S, with a just one quality and one performance mode - but no ray tracing effects.

Ghostwire: Tokyo is an Unreal Engine 4 based game with basic visual features that don't change too much between these options, though performance and quality modes on Series X differ in one key respect - ray tracing. The quality modes pack RT reflections and hybrid RT shadows, and they do make a pretty big impact on the visuals. Tokyo in Ghostwire is perpetually rain-slicked, which means a very heavy use of reflections across the environment. The mix of cubemaps and SSR that's used in the performance mode does a reasonable enough job, but it looks pretty lacklustre when the screen-space information it needs is occluded.

The RT reflections obviously don't suffer from this issue, and look reasonably sharp and very consistent no matter what angle you view them from. The lighting in the BVH structure does seem quite simplified here, so the RT tends to look a bit too dark, but outside of that it does look very attractive and adds quite a lot to the visuals here I'd say. Both the 'quality' and 'high frame-rate quality' modes pack these effects with good results on both. The resolution of the reflections seems slightly lower in the high frame-rate quality variant, but it's a minor difference that's only really noticeable in head-to-heads.

Unfortunately, when we bring in the PS5 release it's evident that the Series X is getting a somewhat compromised experience. The RT effects are somewhat higher-resolution on the Sony platform and there are some small cutbacks on Series X that look a little odd. It's not a huge difference, but the RT is subtly degraded on the Xbox. RT shadows are on show here as well, though it's not as much of a stand-out.

Basically, the quality modes on Series X get pin-sharp, stencil-like shadows on certain bits of interior detail. It's a nice effect, but the slightly diffuse look of the shadow maps can look a bit more realistic depending on scene lighting. Plus, in a couple of areas, the RT shadows on Series X actually seemed misaligned, with light cast through walls and coming out at awkward angles. This was true across the high frame-rate and regular quality modes, which seem to have near-identical RT shadows. However, if we bring the PS5 version back into the picture, the same misalignment issues are totally fixed. It's a bizarre and slightly odd state of affairs, but the RT shadows do look substantially better on PS5 when these alignment issues surface.