HEY SONY, PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME LEAVE MY VIRTUAL LIFE BEHIND WHEN I FINALLY JUMP TO PLAYSTATION 5.
We need to take our games collection with us into the next generation, whenever it happens
Looking back at the first couple of years after PS4 launched, that period seems a little hazy. With so many games and so little time (and money), you could be forgiven if you didn’t play everything released in this heady period. Dipping back into some of these bygone classics and curiosities, such as The Division, Watch Dogs 2, and 1888: The Order, it strikes me how well they hold up, even now.
Technically still very accomplished, and playing better than at launch given the slew of updates, many of these early releases should be on your must-play list. But why am I looking back? With rumours of PlayStation 5 fuelling web clicks and media chatter (Sony’s not confirmed anything), the need for proper backwards compatibility is rising to the top of my large wishlist of next-gen needs.
It’s a shame we can’t play PS3 games on PS4 (outside of PS Now), and it would be a minor catastrophe if PS5 put up a wall against us replaying our current-gen collection, or dipping into old games we missed out on the first time around. Imagine heading into the shiny frontier of PS5 with PS Vita being the only viable backwards-compatible console in Sony’s corner.
OLD GOLD
Until now Sony has managed to stem the need for backwards compatibility with PlayStation Now and some fantastic remasters and remakes, but it’s not only physical releases and classic games that need to be considered when we talk about replaying our games collections – there’s also the free-to-play games that we are encouraged to invest in, both in time and money.
There’d be a minor riot if we couldn’t take our virtual lives inside Fortnite or Apex Legends onto PS5. Imagine a moment when the millions of GTA Online players weighed down by five years of Shark Card debt are told to start again. Chaos. Many of us have crafted these games into versions we love. Encouraged to build second lives inside these virtual worlds, the thought of losing all that content could even deter some from jumping to a new system. The next gen, oddly, needs to also be about the current gen.