Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut has a Very Weird PSN Requirement
In a bizarre development, another game has been caught in the crossfire of the Sony/Helldivers conflict in which thousands of negative reviews and refund requests forced PlayStation to backpedal their requirement for gamers to log into a PSN account to continue playing Helldivers 2 after the May 30th cut off point. While the dust seems to have settled as players got what they wanted, the upcoming ‘Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut’ (releasing on May 16th) has stirred up its own controversy as Sony seem to be repeating the same mistake that they made just days before.
Image by Sucker Punch
What makes this even more strange is how the PSN requirement is being implemented into Ghost of Tsushima. Most of the game (being the entire single player campaign) does not require any PSN login of any kind. You can boot the game up on Steam and never have to make a PlayStation account if you don’t want to. You will, however, must create one if you want to play the popular ‘Legends’ side online horde based multiplayer mode. This has resulted in some uproar from the community, but nowhere near as much as Helldivers 2 caused just a few days prior. Instead, the problem that players are facing is that they may not be able to play any of the game at all.
Despite the single player section of the game being separate and confirmed by developers Sucker Punch to not require a PSN login, the game has been delisted from Steam by Valve just days before its release from over 170 countries- similarly to what happened with Helldivers 2. Players from these countries who pre-ordered the game have received refunds because of the newly introduced requirement to create a PSN account. If you weren’t aware, each of these 170+ countries are unable to create a PlayStation Network account, meaning it would be impossible for them to interact with the online elements of the game.
Image by Sucker Punch
The problem with this decision is that it locks anyone in these countries out of being able to play any part of the game including the single player as it’s now been fully delisted. Whether this was a decision from Steam due to the requirement for a PSN account locking players out of a chunky portion of the game or another bizarre move from Sony remains to be seen. Its also unclear as to whether the account requirement will be removed in a similar way with what happened with helldivers 2. For the moment, however, PlayStation are losing out of millions of sales across those 170+ countries due to the PSN requirement for Ghost of Tsushima.
