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.
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
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.
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).
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.
Xbox has always doing the x86 architecture(Edit: as corrected by following comment, 360 was not.) so it’s much easier to do BC. For Sony or Nintendo it’s just not worth the effort until the emu is mature that they can just reap the benefit. PS5 can already play almost entire PS4 library, Anything PS2 or before can be emu pretty consistently if you are trying to get it done, then it only left PS3 in a weird place. For PS3, many good games already have a PS4/PS5 remaster games, for non-best sellers you can probably get a cheap ps3 slim with enough storage to play those left out games.(ie, PSN only Puppeteer), OR stream them like you mentioned.
If you’re not averse to piracy, you could go that route.
If you are averse to piracy, and have consoles to play on, buy used copies of games (where it’s even possible to) - the publisher sees no proceeds from that.
Failing that… There’s a lot of great indie games out there that aren’t problematic. I know it feels like you’re missing out if you aren’t playing whatever the current big AAA game is, but really, there’s plenty of indie games that are just as good, or that you’d get just as much enjoyment out of.
I'd recommend against piracy in either case. Part of the action you take as a consumer is not just refusing to give Bad Company A your money, but you're also giving Bad Company A's product less attention and mindshare while spending money and attention on Good Company B's product, encouraging more of Good Company B's product to be made. The likes of Ubisoft, EA, Activision-Blizzard, etc. used to be the companies that made games that a lot of us loved, but they trimmed their portfolios of their less profitable (note that I didn't say "unprofitable") games, which means they're not scratching all of the itches they used to scratch, and they've diluted a lot of the games that we still enjoy with business models that encroach right up to the point where they annoy or anger us. So if the business models they're using now piss you off, it's important to stop supporting those and instead show that buying a great product at a fair price is what we as customers want.
For me, if a game requires an internet connection instead of letting us host our own servers or run a LAN or run local play totally offline, I don't buy it, I don't pirate it, I don't play it. I just move on to games that respect their customers.
You know, it’s funny, I used to feel big FOMO when it came to games I wanted to play. Then the Epic Game Store came along, and started paying for timed exclusives, and I adopted the philosophy that I’d just wait for the games to get a Steam release.
There’s only been a handful of instances where I even bothered buying them once they came to Steam; turns out that by not buying them when they’re being hyped by all of the new release marketing, I’ve mentally moved on to other things by the time they come to Steam, and I just don’t feel the need to buy them anymore. I just needed help getting past that initial mental hurdle.
The same applies to companies whose philosophies I object to; as long as I have a reason to mentally justify not buying them initially, I just lose interest in the products entirely very quickly.
People would often respond to me with the sentiment that "games aren't fungible", which is true, but there's so much good stuff out there that something else will be pretty close to the itch you're looking to scratch, great in its own ways, and you don't have to feel lousy about supporting it. Like if Diablo IV feels scummy, I hear Grim Dawn is great. That kind of thing.
If you didn’t enjoy it the first time I don’t see why you would now, even with a better framerate. It’s still the Assassin’s Creed Kurosawa Edition it always looked like, just smoother.
I didn’t mind it, but if you don’t like AC gameplay, you won’t take to this.
Try Days Gone instead, that one actually feels like the better gyro and framerate of the PS5 improves it.
I feel you, it’s tough knowing that there’s great games out there and feeling like you can’t play them. It’s even tougher when the people around you are playing them too, especially when they’re telling you how great they are.
I think your partner has the right idea with supporting indie developers, generally speaking the money stays closer to the creator, so it feels like you’re more directly supporting them. But you’ve also got to be careful because individuals can be just as vile as organizations, there’s been times that I bought a game, thought it was great, and then found out after the fact that the creator is outspokenly transphobic or something like that.
I want to mention Hogwarts Legacy as a specific example. It’s a game I don’t want to support because JK will profit from it, and she supports the erasure of people like me. I have a friend who played the game, and from his account the game itself is pretty hip. The character creator is supposedly pretty inclusive. He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care. Does that mean we shouldn’t support them because an evil individual profits from it? It certainly added some nuance to the situation that I hadn’t considered.
I think the best way to stay hopeful is to play games that you really enjoy. For me, it helped to educate myself on this list of dark patterns in gaming, and to find games that don’t include these features. To me that says that the creators want you to enjoy their experience to the utmost, because generally speaking the more dark patterns are in the game, the more the game is designed to profit off of you. You should be the one to profit from the game IMO.
He raised the point that JK had very little to do with the development of the game, and the development team seems to really care.
The development team got paid regardless of how well the game sold, and unless the company operates a system of employee profit-sharing, they’re not going to see any of the benefits of the game doing well. So the “buy it to support the devs” argument doesn’t really hold any weight, save in the hypothetical scenario that they’ll get a payrise for working on the studio’s next title.
That’s a good point, I never really considered that. The argument does hold some weight for the live-service model, but to my knowledge that’s not really how that game operates.
But there’s plenty of support besides financial too. I’d agree that as a developer I do care most about being paid for my work, especially if I’m going to work on a AAA game. But for my own projects, I mostly care that people play my games and enjoy them, even if that means piracy or streaming.
I dunno, sometimes “supporting the devs” these days just means not sending them death threats. But I also think that if we look at financial support as the only way to support a game then we risk dehumanizing the people who work on our toys.
When it comes to the corporate world, your purchases are like your vote in politics. WotC has done some stuff that lots of people (myself included) don’t like. They’ve also done some stuff people really do like.
The situation around the open gaming license was the perfect example. People boycotted D&D beyond, and other directly related products, but very few boycotted the D&D movie, because people wanted to discourage Wizards from the specific license changes, but didn’t want to discourage making good movies for our niche audience.
Obviously not all companies have separate things like this. Activision/Blizzard are more monolithic, and so selectively boycotting them is harder.
All this said, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so if any boycott is costing you too much, monetarily, mental health-wise, etc., you shouldn’t feel bad for breaking it
I once heard "when you vote with your wallet, people with more money get more votes", and that really helped me internalize how unlikely it is to expect occasional boycott to beat executives investing millions in marketing to lure entire audiences of well-off customers might not even be informed of the issues going behind the scenes. You can boycott for your moral satisfaction, but to enact actual change, it isn't enough.
Frankly, it depends on how micro or macro you’re willing to think, and how much that personally bothers you. At the end of the day we live in multiple systems of oppression and exploitation that make it very hard - and sometimes outright impossible - to properly consume something without being unethical. From The Good Place:
“Life now is so complicated, it’s impossible for anyone to be good enough for the Good Place. These days, just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making!”
From my personal point of view, there’s a few choices. The first is, you can just not consume. There’s more than enough indie games, as well as plenty of old-AAA games that won’t directly benefit their companies anymore. You can also pirate, if that’s not an online game.
From a more cynical point of view, your individual purchase (and, frankly, even a organized boycott) won’t make a difference to these companies. Modern capitalism doesn’t rely on genuine profit, just on the idea that an IP or corporation is profitable, and that’s enough to attract investors and investments, and inflate its share price as well as its value in the eyes of capitalists. This is a gross oversimplification, and generally only applies to the largest names, but still sadly relevant.
So at the end of the day, you have to think to yourself: Does it bother you to consume something? I won’t buy or play anything related to Harry Potter media because JKR disgusts me, but I see no issue with indirectly supporting WotC. Likewise, while the decision to not support Blizzard products is very easy (they don’t really make that many), I can’t say their scandals forced me to stop playing any more than their lack of dedicated support to their products.
There’s rarely an absolute moral good when it comes to consuming products, even indie ones; Publishers like Chucklefish and Dangen had their own share of abuse and neglect, and sometimes individual creators are just, well, assholes.
Indies really are the way to go for both customers and developers if they want a better, more ethical and respectful environment. It is a risky career path, but given how many major publishers treat the developers under them, it's not like sticking with mainstream would lead to a comfortable stable livelihood either.
Baldur's Gate 3 really put me in a dilemma, but I think I'll ultimately buy it because I want to support Larian Studios more than I want to avoid Wizards of the Coast. I wouldn't trust Wizards enough to get One D&D and the likely tabletop lootbox hell they are scheming, but BG 3 is delivering a good product that deserves support. Though buying the Divinity games is an alternative if you don't want WotC to get any money.
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