I don’t know about you but it appears my installed games on my Steam Deck consist of a forever-growing list of formerly PlayStation exclusives. Many are games that I completed on a PlayStation and love replaying such as God of War (2018) Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Days Gone, and The Last of Us. Most of these games arrived on Steam with the Steam Deck Verified check mark.
And for those like The Last of Us which had a good number of issues at launch eventually received the necessary patches to obtain the Verified status. With that said, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut is currently listed as unsupported but is constantly receiving patch updates and is playable on the Steam Deck in its current form. So much so that every time I create a best settings list for this performance review a patch will be released that addresses the issue I was having.
Let’s start with what’s included in Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut.
- Iki Island expansion
- New story, mini-games
- Legends online co-op mode. (Requires PSN login which I will discuss)
- Digital mini art book by Dark Horse
- Additional enemies, items, and improvements to the overall game
- Archery Master’sAttire (After linking PSN to steam account)
- Charm of Canine Recruitment (After linking PSN to Steam account)
So, the big talking point is the required PSN account login, and understandably so, especially if you live in a market that does not have PSN support. Upon boot up, you will receive a prompt asking if you want to log in to PSN now or later. YOU DO NOT need to log in just to play the single-player campaign. You only need to log in if you want to play co-op or use any multiplayer features. The unfortunate reality is that this is becoming the norm for all publishers.
Ubisoft has Ubi Connect which requires a login before playing many of their newer and older games, regardless of if they are purchased on Steam. We now have Capcom introducing their own required login. Does it make sense to have this requirement for single-player games? No, but from a business standpoint, it does since it’s all about gathering as much data from the players of their games. So I understand why they are doing it and I’m sure for some strictly out of principle this will be a deal breaker but remember it’s not required to play Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut single-player campaign.
As of this writing, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut is 52.37 GB which is great compared to another recently ported game Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition which is 150 GB. I am using the Steam Deck OLED and as you can see from my gameplay performance screenshots I have HDR On and display HZ at 90.
At launch, HDR was not on by default and the game had some lighting issues in that at night it was almost unplayable even with the in-game brightness at full. The resolution to this problem at the time was to turn on HDR.
Now after the most recent patch, HDR is on by default. I’ve turned it off again for comparison and noticed some better lighting adjustments but it comes down to the location and weather condition.
So personally, I think the game looks beautiful with HDR on. As you can see from the screenshots, how the light reflects off the trees in the forest and casts shadows on the ground.
I have FSR off and when turned on I notice some graphical hick-ups. My presets are Medium and like ALL my games I turn off motion blur. You can tweak to get the game running on HI but in large combats, you will experience frame drops and performance slow down so I recommend staying on medium and tweaking around the sliders from this preset. In regards to the framerate I averaged 30 – 40 FPS, again it depends on what’s happening on screen but thankfully I didn’t have any dips below 30.
Overall, Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut performs surprisingly well considering all the open areas and long draw distance. Engaging in a badass samurai fight on a cliffside while seeing the mountains off in the distance is stunning. This is one of those PlayStation exclusives PC gamers have been clamoring for and it’s great to see it not only performs well on PC but also on the Steam Deck.
If you are still on the fence check out our full review of Ghost of Tsushima
