After a year of exclusivity on PS5, Tango Gameworks’ first-person spook-em-up disappoints on Xbox Series X from a technical perspective.
Ghostwire: Tokyo released on PS5 last year as potentially one of the last ever Bethesda titles to hit the console. That’s because Microsoft elected to acquire the publisher during the game’s development, but still had to honour its status as a year-long exclusive on PlayStation. However, those 365 days are now up, allowing the Xbox port of Ghostwire: Tokyo to launch on Xbox Series X|S last week. Don’t get too excited, though, because this new version somehow runs a lot worse.
That’s according to YouTube Channel Digital Foundry’s in-depth video analysis anyway, which placed the Xbox version of Ghostwire: Tokyo through its paces and compared its technical performance to the earlier PS5 version. The team’s findings were less than kind. “The PS5 simply runs Ghostwire: Tokyo in substantially better form than [Xbox] Series X,” they said, “which is definitely a disappointment considering how poorly the PS5 ran the title to begin with”. Xbox Series S, as you might imagine, doesn’t fare much better either.
A lot of the issues with Ghostwire: Tokyo on Xbox seem to lie with how the game handles raytracing. After all, being set in a dank and dreary Tokyo necessitates a lot of reflective surfaces, and it’s in this area where the game really struggles – even compared to the PS5 version which already had its own problems. Digital Foundry appear staggered that seemingly not much has improved from a technical and performance perspective over a year since the game initially launched, despite adding new features in the Spider’s Thread update such as a rogue-lite mode.
“The key problems from the PS5 release haven't been fixed,” Digital Foundry went on to say. “Performance is inconsistent, input feels really sluggish, and there are a ridiculous number of visual options. And, on top of those common issues, frame rates tend to be substantially lower, and ray tracing quality is worse and suffers from visual glitches.” Needless to say, it’s not the kind of Xbox port Microsoft and fans were hoping for now that Tango Gameworks is a first-party studio that was previously riding high on the release of Hi-Fi Rush after January's Xbox & Bethesda Developer Direct.
Under the wire
Given that Ghostwire: Tokyo was probably designed with the PS5 in mind, it’s not surprising to see the Xbox Series X|S version release in a somewhat diluted form. That said, Tango Gameworks is now a first-party studio given that Microsoft now owns parent publisher Bethesda, and so more of an effort should have been made to make this re-release shine as bright as possible. I don’t recall there being this much disparity between versions when Deathloop came to Xbox following a year’s exclusivity on PS5.
If anything, following the news that Redfall will be running at a mere 30fps despite releasing on Xbox Series X|S first, this was a chance to silence some of Xbox’s harshest critics with regards to how exclusives going forward will be handled. So far almost every major Xbox first-party release has been compromised in some fashion, be it Halo Infinite’s year-long delay, Redfall failing to hit 60 fps, and now Ghostwire: Tokyo being a worse version on Xbox technically than it was on PS5.
This leads me to worry immensely about Microsoft’s treatment of Starfield. That game has been a long time coming, already suffering from countless delays, but it’s finally set to arrive on September 6, 2023, after failing to hit its November 11 target last year. Hopefully this extra time has been used to polish up the game to an unprecedented standard, because lord knows Xbox Series X|S players need a win when it comes to AAA titles. It has the benefit of not being a port that can take full advantage of so say the “world’s most powerful console”.
