Last week, Dark Souls specialist Lance McDonald tweeted about the PS5’s backwards compatibility feature before removing it. Resetera conquered the tweet.
“There has been some confusion in the past and I can delete it now: The PlayStation 5 can run all PlayStation 4 games without whitelisting per game. Sony continues to test titles, but the system will not prevent you from testing untested to start. “
After this was deleted, a later tweet reported: “I deleted a tweet out of respect for the platform holder, feel free to interpret that however you want.” This was also deleted.
If true, this essentially means that you will not encounter barriers when playing a PS4 game on your PS5 – no “whitelisting” would mean that you can try every game and see how it plays. You may not have an experience identical to the game when it runs on PS4 – but you do not have to wait for Sony to add that game to a list and give you permission to play it on PS5, if this tweet is correct.
This would be a good thing, and is largely expected nonetheless. While the solutions that enable backward compatibility in PlayStation consoles have varied over the years, this is how Sony has always done it from a player’s perspective. On PS2 you could play your PSone games. On PS Vita you could play your PSP games. And on early PS3s, you could play PSone games and even most PS2 games before Sony changed the hardware to cut costs.
Below, we’ll talk about what we know about the PS5’s backwards compatibility feature so far, and explain what we think is right and wrong about Sony’s approach.
What do we know about compatibility with backwards PS5?
What McDonald’s said in his deleted tweets is in principle consistent with Sony’s own, which muddy discussion about how far PS5’s ability to play PS4 games will go.
Back in March 2020, Sony’s Mark Cerny first explained how backwards compatibility worked on PS5. Rather than putting the PS4 chipset in the PS5, it would instead “incorporate all the differences in the logic of the previous console into the custom chips of the new console.”
This means that the backwards compatibility feature in the PS5 will be there in every console, and not later removed to save cost, as it was on the PS3’s ability to play PS2 games. That decision immediately made the PS3 a less appealing console.
“Performing PS4 and PS4 Pro titles at increased frequencies has also added complexity,” Cerny said. “The momentum is really massive this time around and some game code can’t process it. Testing has to be done on a title-by-title basis. However, results are excellent. We recently looked at the top 100 PlayStation 4 titles as ranked by playtime, and we expect almost all of them to be playable at launch on PlayStation 5. “
In a follow-up blog by Platform Planning & Management SVP Hideaki Nishino, Sony expanded that to include many more compatible games than just the top 100. “With all the great games in the PS4 catalog, we’ve made significant efforts to engage our fans their favorites to play on PS5. We believe the vast majority of the 4000+ PS4 titles are playable on PS5. “
Again, this largely coincides with what McDonald mentions above. Whitelisting would mean players have to wait for individual games
“In his presentation, Mark Cerny provided a snapshot in the Top 100 most-played PS4 titles, demonstrating how well our backward compatibility efforts are running,” Nishino added.
“We’ve already tested hundreds of titles and are preparing to test thousands more as we go to launch. We’ll be providing updates on backwards compatibility, along with many more PS5 news, in the coming months. Stay tuned!”
This is the best approach
A little more clarity from Sony on how backward compatibility will work would go a long way, but we’m fans of the approach. You can basically buy any PS4 game now with the confidence that it will probably work on PS5.
And since you can not even order the PS5 yet, we can not praise Sony too much for the lack of information on the subject – plus it’s a situation that is likely to change over time, as more games become available hifke. It is likely that further details on backward compatibility will be revealed in addition to other info on key hardware, such as the dimensions of the console, or indeed the release date and price.
Still: we’ve said it before, but it’s disappointing that Sony still sees PS Now as the only outlet for its older PlayStation titles. The PS4 apart, there are great games on PS3, PS2 and PSone that are basically wasted time unless they are so popular that they get a remaster, or you are a collector.
The selection of older games on PS Now is meager – and we do not expect Sony to take Microsoft’s approach to supporting the vast majority of games from their older consoles. Sony just doesn’t have to work so hard to wow gamers – and moreover, PS4 games on PS5 will probably seem like enough for most gamers.
If nothing else, it’s cool that in an age of digital downloads there’s some real continuity between these PlayStation consoles. Sony now seems to care a lot more about it than back when the PS4 launched, and you could speculate that Microsoft’s zealous approach to backward compatibility was a factor in that move. On PS4, you could not play PS3 games, which means that if you bought The Last of Us, Saints Row 4 or Arkham Origins in 2013, it would remain on your 7-year-old console.
Hopefully this is a sign that backward compatibility is standardized between the two console giants.
