Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut is finally getting its long-awaited PC launch this week, and while the game has mostly managed to escape the aftermath of last week’s Helldivers 2 debacle, there’s been at least one lasting impact that will affect a whole lot of potential players.
After Sony announced that Helldivers 2 players on PC would have to sign into, or sign up for, a PSN account to continue playing on the platform, it was met with such intense backlash that it eventually retracted those plans entirely. That was good news for the community, but it did leave one point of contention with the game having been removed from sale on Steam in over 170 countries where PSN is not actually supported. Despite those mandatory login plans having changed, there’s no sign of it being reinstated, either.
Now, not only have these regional restrictions not budged, but Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut has also been delisted in those same countries. While the game won’t have a PSN login requirement for its single-player portion, it will in order to play the multiplayer Ghost of Tsushima Legends component. This suggests that not only is PlayStation still going ahead with its requirement for PSN accounts in future multiplayer PC games but it’s also seemingly not willing to sell its games in regions where any portion of the game would be locked off – and in part that seems like the safer move.
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Just so you are aware, A PSN account is required for Legends online multiplayer mode and to use PlayStation overlay. It is not required to play the singleplayer game.
— Sucker Punch Productions (@SuckerPunchProd) May 3, 2024
Still, it’s not great news for anyone in the 170-plus nations where the game won’t be “officially” purchasable via Steam, whether or not they’d planned on touching the multiplayer component. Sony hasn’t made a public statement about these changes, but the updated list of unsupported countries can be seen on the game’s SteamDB page here. Steam, the Epic Games Store and Green Man Gaming are reportedly (via The Verge) also proactively issuing refunds for anyone who’s already pre-purchased the game, so it’s seemingly extended to other digital storefronts, as well.
I gave Ghost of Tsushima, in its Director’s Cut form, a 9/10 in my review back in 2021, saying “Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut and in particular the Iki Island expansion does a great job at giving players more of what made the game’s original release special. The brisk new adventure takes Jin Sakai on a journey of reflection and reconciliation that contains plenty of beautiful, memorable moments and some very cool new gear to play with. The updates made for its native PS5 release do feel a touch slim given that they come at an added cost, but they go a long way to refining and enhancing the experience. A great game made better, then, and a fantastic excuse to spend dozens more hours in Photo Mode.”
