PlayStation hasn’t had the best time in the last week after it tried to enforce a requirement for all Helldivers 2 players on Steam to link their accounts with a PlayStation Network Account.
To put it mildly, the Helldivers 2 community didn’t like that, and pushed back on it, which led to Sony reversing the decision. However while that whole fiasco was ongoing, players began thinking about future PlayStation games coming to PC, with Ghost Of Tsushima being next in line.
In response to a player cancelling their pre-order due to the account linking requirement, developer Sucker Punch confirmed that for players just wanting to enjoy the game’s single-player campaign, linking their Steam account to a PSN account will be optional.
However if you want to dive into the game’s online multiplayer mode, Legends, linking your accounts will be required. It’ll also be required if you wanted to use the recently revealed PlayStation overlay, which is less of a surprise since this also involved linking your trophies to PlayStation games on Steam.
“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 single player game.”
Considering the backlash that Sony faced over trying this with Helldivers 2, it could be that Legends players fight back just the same. The big difference here though is that Ghost Of Tsushima is first and foremost a single-player game.
The Legends mode was an unexpected add-on to an already great game. Many players have sunk hours into it, and there will always be a portion of the Ghost Of Tsushima community that keeps playing it, but it is not the same as the Helldivers 2 situation, because Helldivers 2 is entirely an online multiplayer game.
It should also be pointed out that Sucker Punch likely has less leeway to argue this issue with Sony if it wanted to, due to it being a first-party, Sony-owned studio, were as Arrowhead only has a second-party publishing relationship with Sony.
So in the case of Ghost Of Tsushima, you can probably expect Sony to push through any negative feedback it receives over the account linking requirement. We’ll see how things go when it launches on PC on May 16, 2024.
Source – [Sucker Punch]