If you have the ps5 director update, they added really good haptic feedback to the game. And there was an Lengend update that add some more stuff(like NG+ and extra perks) and Legend mode to play. The director’s cut content is also quite nice(entire extra smaller island), some puzzles are pretty nice change of pace, you can learn a lot more about the back story of MC.
I am replaying it with my partner. She doesn’t want to play, but she wants to see the visuals and the story. She makes all the decisions and I just control Jin. It has been interesting because her enjoyment is kind of divorced from the mechanics (other than choosing non-stealth whenever possible).
The only notable thing about the game is that it’s extremely pretty. So I say start it again, see how much this prettiness matters to you on this new TV, and then decide whether to continue.
It’s because backward compatibility would cannibalize the sales on new games. Same reason Nintendo limits releases of old games. If you have an extensive back catalog of games, then new games are less appealing.
Or you do what MS does. Put the old games in your subscription service. Make money with monthly fees from people who don’t have the disks or don’t have an optical drive.
Part of the issue with buying an x-box is that there’s a limited catalog of games and very few exclusives. MS has to offer something more than just new games. PlayStation is the dominant gaming platform globally and has been for a long time. They want people buying new games at $70/ea. They don’t have to incentivise people to come to their platform as much.
Xbox’s Backwards Compatibility is definitely a big deal; but as someone who loves old games as a concept and has never thrown out a console, it’s not as big a selling point as you would think/ hope.
I personally wanted to try some of the PS2/PS3 only games and didn’t have a PS3, so I bought one used a while back. I probably only logged maybe 10 hours in it before getting completely side tracked by my backlog of modern games. And while I know that’s anecdotal evidence, it really seems like the allure of classic games might not be enough of a selling point.
This is something I think Xbox had the right idea about. While BC is very useful in concept, there aren’t so many classic games that would draw people away from modern games; so you only have to support those few games.
With that in mind, I think Sony could offer BC for their relevant PS2/ PS3 exclusives since they would only need to guarantee emulator performance for a much smaller number of games. I don’t think it’s likely for Sony to do this until they are no longer the dominant console, though, as they can make more money selling their PS3 subscription service.
From a game presentation standpoint, BC is a huge issue and I would personally love to see it happen for the PS5 (and I’d like to see it expanded to all games for the Xbox as well); but I doubt there would be much return on investment for developing the BC features, and that’s the only motivation for corporations.
You’re absolutely right. However I will add to your initial point. If I could have paid an extra $100 - $150 (for the hardware) in order to have PS1-PS3 games play on my PS5, I would have just so I could have it as an option. Bonus points if the entire PS3 digital library (especially the PS1 classics) were still available.
Not the original commenter, but I did pay the extra $100-150 for the PS3 for backwards compatibility. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have. I played maybe like 3 PS2 games on it. I was far more interested in then current-gen games. I sorta got swept up in the hype of BC back in the day, especially when Sony stopped production of BC PS3s. I literally ran out and got one before they all disappeared; I still have it.
Looking back, the option wasn’t worth it. But we’re different people, different consumers. Our needs and wants differ.
Pretty sure the PS5 drive can’t actually read CDs, so that’s the PS1 library and most early PS2 games gone right way, even though they can be emulated pretty easily. The PS3 should be possible, but they haven’t bothered when you can play it streaming.
I guess the awkward truth here is that there’s no real business need to have it. Most of us into retro games will have a way to play them already, either via PC emulation or old consoles. And if you show a Gen Z kid some of the horrors we used to enjoy on PS1 (although I maintain Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf is an underrated classic), they’d run screaming back to Fortnite and CoD.
It would be nice to have it, but nobody is not buying a PS5 because they can’t run Terracon. They’re still selling them as fast as they can make them, even with the economy in shambles.
I remember when Sony announced they were stopping production on backward compatible PS3s. I ran out and got one, because I still had PS2 games I wanted to finish. The BC PS3s were more expensive than their non-BC counterparts. And the PS3 was already an expensive machine.
I think I played 2 or 3 PS2 games on it. And never with consistency. Plus, these older games looked terrible on modern HD screens. And frankly, I was more interested in playing current gen titles. For example, I got a PS5 so I could play FF16. Not so I could keep playing FF15 or FF13. It really ended up being a real waste of money to buy that more expensive PS3.
And many of the games eventually re-released on other platforms: PSP/Vita, Steam, Switch, later-gen consoles, etc. I play a lot of JRPGs, so that helps.
Backwards compatibility is something I really don’t care about. It’d be nice, I guess. But I still have my PS3 and PS4. If there’s something I really want to play, I can boot those up. Or just see if the game is available on Steam.
Sony changed their CPU architecture every time until PS4/5. The only reason some PS3s could play PS2 games is because they had also had PS2 hardware in them. Xbox has been x86 the whole time.
The simple answer is that microsoft is a far more advanced company in terms of programming an OS, the gap shows when you compare console securities, where virtually every nintendo or sony device had software vulnerabilities, while microsoft consoles tended to need to be hardmodded
As someone who programmed drivers for nt, it’s not, the reason it’s easier is because they started later.
Xbox is a mature x86 windows platform, vs ps1 which is an embedded mips system.
They started with their windows directx stack and just kept with it, while ps did a random walk all over the place.
Msft also had really boring hardware, like, they started with a crappy pc, then made a crappy ppc pc, then went back to a crappy pc. The software was simplistic, while Sony made really interesting hardware designs, that turned out to be hard to program, till the ps4 when they just gave up.
Msft traditionally isn’t very good at operating systems, they’ve just had infinite resources and infinite monkeys for 40+ years, and they’ve been stubborn enough to make it work somehow.
I would argue they had to give it up to get the indie scene onboard as I heard many nightmare stories for indies from PS3 era. Was it worth it? I’m sure contributed a great deal to the success of PS4 but it made the PS into just a more affordable gaming PC.
Totally worth it, they spent unimaginable resources trying to make those architectures programmable, now that’s all almost free, they just compete for published titles and maybe some secondary features.
MSFT was in a better position because they didn’t need to spend those resources, and more importantly the devs didn’t either, they could write windows games then port them over easily. Now it’s just as easy to do that for ps4/5. All that matters is nailing exclusives and looking cool, plus some marketing which msft sucks at.
It’s too early to decide if it was. Yes it was the safest bet, Even though PS4 had a great deal of success you also need to keep in mind, a lot of it was because of politics. Nintendo and MS made huge mistakes at that time and Sony basically ate their lunch.
The older generations were always innovative and pushed the envelop as far as possible, but now PS just a gaming PC that is not upgradable like an actual PC. if you don’t recall, the most hyped thing about PS5 was the controller, which is not what you expect the main point of buying a new consol to be.
On the topic of exclusives, I personally hate them. I think it makes a false sense of value in modern consoles where in the past they were intentionally made to take advantage of the architecture to showcase the unique quirks (and ofc the power) of this machine in a tiny box. Now they are usually just political leverages even though the games can be ported to other platforms.
So to reiterate, I agree it definitely had positive net for Sony in the short run, we’ll have to wait and see if it will payout in the long run.
Exclusives are terrible for the customer, but they’re a way for corporate to control the market, which is a good for them.
We’ll see, but I was on the dev side of that nightmare, Sony would have gotten crushed the next gen, they barely made it out of ps3 with their extended developers in tact, nobody liked programming the cell, everybody loves the current system.
But it does reduce competitive surface area, so we’ll see. Nintendo is winning now because they didn’t follow the same path but they did innovate, more than almost anyone before.
My question is: What innovation do you see that could have been worth a unique architecture to Sony’s developers?
I agree with your sentiment, after all what is a game console without games.
What I want isn’t necessarily a unique architechture, rather I want a unique experience. I think looking at Smartphone landscape expresses my concerns much clearer. All phones today are basically just reskins of same phone in design, purpose and architechture. Sure there are some novelty phones with smaller audiences for the sake of novelty but what makes you choose a phone over the other is just marketing at this point. I’m afraid that’s where we’re headed with consoles. The difference is the home consoles are replaceable.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to use the phone metaphor, every improvement in one phone rapidly spread to others, so even budget phones have features better than the top of the line phones a decade ago.
Now game developers can go back to focusing on games, and console makers can focus on trying to make better consoles without having to blow ludicrous resources on supporting developers or just making the thing work, they just rely on amd making better chips which seems to have worked.
I totally get where you’re going, and I agree we need that macro-innovation as it were, but games were a nightmare of hacks and bullshit for decades, I think a period of consolidation is good right now, then we can start the whole race all over again with crazy new tech.
It doesnt say anything about modern consoles though. Although its dofferent at the start, their modern consoles are still effectively full of exploits. Hell VERY recently, “backup” PS4 titles are running on the PS5. Security is the main reason why BOTH the PS5 and the Nintendo Switch do not have easily accessible web browsers while Microsoft can.
I heard that the Xbox is basically like a PC (since Microsoft is so adept at this), so backwards compatibility is natural. But what you said about x86 architecture is interesting.
The original Xbox, Xbox One, and S/X are all basically x86 PCs, but the 360 was basically a Power Mac. Microsoft was literally using PowerMac G5 towers as early development kits for the 360.
Supporting 360 games is pretty time consuming and requires emulation. MS has been slowly chipping away at it for years.
The Xbox 360 was based on the same weird, in-order PowerPC 970 derived CPU as the PS3, it just had three of them stuck together instead of one of them tied to seven weird Cell units. The TL;DR of how Xbox backwards compatibility has been achieved is that Microsoft's whole approach with the Xbox has always been to create a PC-like environment which makes porting games to or from the Xbox simpler.
The real star of the show here is the Windows NT kernel and DirectX. Microsoft's core APIs have been designed to be portable and platform-agnostic since the beginning of the NT days (of course, that isn't necessarily true of the rest of the Windows operating system we use on our PCs). Developers could still program their games mostly as though they were targeting a Windows PC using DirectX since all the same high-level APIs worked in basically the same way, just with less memory and some platform-specific optimisations to keep in mind (stuff like the 10MB of eDRAM, or that you could always assume three 3.2GHz in-order CPU cores with 2-way SMT).
Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One seem to be run through something akin to Dolphin's "Übershaders" - in this case, per-game optimised modifications of an entire Xenon GPU stack implemented in software running alongside the entire Xbox 360 operating environment in a hypervisor. This is aided by the integration of hardware-level support for certain texture and audio formats common in Xbox 360 games into the Xbox One's CPU design, similarly to how Apple's M-series SoCs integrate support for x86-style memory ordering to greatly accelerate Rosetta 2.
Microsoft's APIs for developers to target tend to be fairly platform-agnostic - see Windows CE, which could run on anything from ARM handhelds to the Hitachi SH-4 powered Sega Dreamcast. This enables developers who are mostly experienced in coding for x86 PCs running Windows to relatively easily start writing programs (or games) for other platforms using those APIs. This also has the beneficial side-effect of allowing Microsoft to, with their collective first-hand knowledge of those APIs, create compatibility layers on an x86 system that can run code targeted at a different platform.
The PowerPC cores aren’t the problem, emulating that is pretty straightforward. It’s the many SPUs that present a huge headache to emulate in a performant manner.
And yeah, MS building everything on Windows and DirectX also makes things considerably easier.
Funnily enough, one of the few legitimately impactful non-enterprise uses of AVX512 I'm aware of is that it does a really good job of accelerating emulation of the Cell SPUs in RPCS3. But you're absolutely right, those things are very funky and implementing their functions is by far the most difficult part of PS3 emulation.
Luckily, I think most games either didn't do much with them or left programming for them to middleware, so it would mostly be first- and second-party games that would need super-extensive customisation and testing. Sony could probably figure it out, if they were convinced there was sufficient demand and potential profit on the other side.
That’s easy for me, the Snowrunner Year 1 expansion pack. Specifically Lake Kola and Imandra, when coaxing a heavily laden truck through the deep snow, day slides to night and the northern lights come out. A borderline spiritual experience because to get there you have to have got through things that seemed impossible.
Ah yes, IIRC they’re quick, light, but lack the sort of pulling power one would want in mud … kinda hard to find that outside of a full-blown motorbike!
I find it has more than enough power and torque than I’d ever need. The problem is there is no rear tire. It runs on two front tires so you don’t get a thick knobby tire at the back to spin you out of deep mud.
I went overboard after and bought super aggressive off-road tires for when these wear too far down 🤓
Truly depends on how I ride it. For mostly on road travel at 60-80 km/h I’ll get about 40km range but if I drive it off-road with hills I can get about 3.5 hours of runtime and 60+km.
These are all estimates as I’ve never ridden it long enough to fully drain it from 100% to 0.
Ya these things are quite highly variable so claims will be all over the place.
They’re way more expensive but very worth it. Zero maintenance (except for brakes when I’m not using regen and tires) and just normal chain degreasing/lubing you’d do on any bike.
It is the cost that’s holding me back now, I paid €2700 for my 2021 Tango a year ago and it has an expected lifespan of about 10 years at my current rate / style of use. There are other factors, but that’s the main one … I figure it will be the last petrol bike I buy.
The marketing for it is dire, it’s basically a slow, lightweight, farm bike that can get pretty much anywhere off road, which is ideal for where I live
Oh whoa that’s a very interesting looking bike. Looks like a mix between dirtbike, scooter, and older Yamaha cruiser bike with that headlight. I dig it!
It cruises at about 80km/h and on road the range is about 300km (I get 2.5L/100km but my other half gets 2.2L/100km because she doesn’t ride as agressively).
The original version was made as a cheap farm bike for Spain, but the new facelifted version is … a cheap farm bike in a new hat, lol
Snowrunner for me too. I nearly gave up in frustration at the beginning though, as the trucks are near useless at getting through any mud or water. But the stunning physics and landscapes etc kept me going. Once you have your bearings and get a decent truck, the whole experience changes.
I’m at 86% main story progress of ff16 and the game is such a letdown after reading people hyping it up so much… feels like a chore at the moment but I’m so close to the end I’m just gonna power through it
They’re perfectly capable of running old games, they proved it times and times again. They just don’t want them to be backwards compatible so you have to buy them again.
lol, I’d rather have the first party modern bangers Sony’s pumping out then…checks notes…literally no good first party games on my xsx since I bought it. Backwards compatibility is great, but I don’t spend $600+ on a console to play old games. I can keep my old consoles around for that or emulate.
Depends on your tastes doesn’t it. I’ll take a hundred smaller projects like Pentiment, Hi-Fi Rush or Psychonauts over another generic open world adventure or sad dad simulator.
Lots of weird incorrect answers in the comments. MS 100% has changed CPU architectures and needs to emulate old games. The 360 was basically a PowerMac.
My guess - the Xbox One’s launch catalog was trash, and MS doubled down on emulation to build it out. Then they never stopped. They kept plugging away at it, and now they have a giant asset for GamePass.
MS got a head start because they were desperate for good games in the early days on the One.f
I’m finally at Disc 4 of Final Fantasy 8 Remastered. Tried playing this game several times, but never finished it. I decided to use all the QoL options (combat boost, 3x speed, no-encounter) to avoid being frustrated by the gameplay (junctioning, drawing, etc), and I’ve been enjoying the story, even post Disc 3 twist.
Having finally had a few days off, I recently finished Crysis 1 and Warhead. I’m currently playing Crysis 2. Great games. I can’t believe I’ve never played them before
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