The folks over at Sucker Punch have made it quite clear that Ghost of Tsushima represents the pinnacle of understanding of the PlayStation 4’s architecture, with the samurai open-world action game featuring little to no load times as players traverse the massive island of Tsushima. Oddly enough, these hasty load times would have at some points worked as a disadvantage to the player, with the developer revealing that they had to artificially increase some loading times to allow players a chance to read the loading screen game tips.

In a recent interview with Kotaku, Sucker Punch lead engine programmer Adrian Bentley revealed that the team had to “artificially extend downtime” during the player’s post-death loading screen so the game tips that pooped up could appear for “more than a fraction of a second.” Bentley confirmed that the need to do this was due to Sucker Punch’s engine loading strategy, with their particular methodology requiring a minimal amount of disk reads while playing Ghost of Tsushima. “When you die, we only need [to] re-run this quick ‘spawn’ process with most of the data already loaded,” Bentley said. “In contrast, many other engines use serialization-based approaches, which require reloading a substantial amount of data to run again.”

If the concept of intentionally increasing loading times seems like a strange one now, imagine how heinous of a practice it would have been considered to be earlier on in the PS4’s shelf life. Now it just seems like a rather smart decision given how close we are to the arrival of the next generation of consoles.

Ghost of Tsushima is now available exclusively for the PlayStation 4.

So, thoughts on Ghost of Tsushima so far? Have you tried out the game’s Kurosawa Mode yet? Let us know in the comments section below, and as always, stay tuned to Don’t Feed the Gamers for all the latest gaming and entertainment news! Don’t forget to follow DFTG on Twitter for our 24/7 news feed!