Woah woah woah I agree with everything you just said except the callous dismissal of sucker punch. Ghost 2 will be a show stopper bro. They ushered in next Gen in 2014 with second son. That was the 2nd holy shit PS4 game after shadow fall. They advanced particles and destructible environments in ways you still don’t see often today. And ghost 1 is a beautiful game. The colors pop like nothing I’ve ever seen and they’re doing some cool stuff under the hood like the mass intractable leaf physics. Something you’d previously only get on high end PC’s with nvidia physx. And their wind simulation that makes every blade of their massive, massive, massive amount of foliage sway and react
I've had literally played tsushima in my ps5 for the past 4-5 days, The strong art design and use of colors is what make tsushima great, but imo graphically it's the weakest out of all the best sony open worlds on ps4, the overall textures in the locations, the water, the lack of physics\destruction of any kind (the game doesn't even have fucking ragdoll and still use precanned death animations like a 8bit game for fuck sake), the faces, the stiff digital acting, cutscene direction etc.
It shares a lot of flaws with zero dawn, but you also have forbidden west that has a ps4 version that looks miles better than zero dawn so...
The leaf physics is pretty basic, i think rdr2, tlou2 and some others have better interactions when you touch the grass with your feet\body, the game doens't have physics for a lot of stuff and you just pass through without any reaction, the game is nowhere near the interaction of an rdr2, and the wind stuff was debunked as just a "simple" pattern, i think we had a discussion about this years ago but i'm not sure, i could be wrong on this one, it looks great because you can direct the wind and because of the art design, but it's technically not that impressive, wind blowind stuff has been a thing for a while, tsushima just has massive fields of flowers all reunited on the ground with those vivid colors so it looked super good, but the tech behind is pretty simple\basic, i think zelda botw on a fucking tablet has better wind and grass physics than tsushima because it also effect stuff like fire or smoke, like it's a well coded wind tech that looks great but i need more than wind tech to be impressed in 2025 possibly 2026, i don't know what engine they use, but i need a huge jump in fidelity from them.
I expect spiderman 2 level of graphic but with a much striking art design that is make the game punch above his weight.
Second son looked great for the times but the destruction was just ok and the major destruction was just focused on the black bridges and black structures of the enemies, it was good but hardly mindblowing if you consider stuff like the red faction games or even stuff like stan lee stronghold or mercenaries 2, i have like 5 runs on that game, i'm a huge infamous fanboy but it was rough in more than one aspect, the main characters models have aged terribly,especially the faces, way more than shadowfall models that was a launch game (i guess they were both launch games tbh)
The particle system was great, i don't think it's still the top dog today after a couple of years where devs just flexed their asses by putting a lot of particles in every fucking game, but when you suck the neon from a source is still so good to see even today.
I don't think sucker punch is on the level of modern guerrila or the ND that made tlou2 when it comes to graphic, happy to be disproved of course, i think they are a bit lower than insomniac and santa monica but we are splitting hairs.