With our new next-generation consoles being capable of playing games from the previous generation, naturally, there is some room for confusion, especially when a game has both an old and new generation version. Thankfully for PlayStation users, a new update for the PS5 adds alerts if the console notices that you are, probably unintentionally, running the last-gen version of a game that has a PS5 version available to play. Through this update, Sony has addressed an issue that has been plaguing its users since the new console became available to them.
As noted by many users on Twitter and other social media platforms, if you start a PS4 game on your PS5, that action will now prompt a dialogue box. That dialogue box is an alert that will let a player know that they are playing an older version of a game when they could be playing the new and improved PS5 version.
When the PS5 first launched, many of the available cross-generation games would default to their PS4 versions for some reason. Seeing as how this would result in players owning brand new hardware and not even being able to use it when they were playing, many players were disgruntled. Of course, many PS5 players felt underwhelmed because they didn’t notice there was an issue. When they were playing cross-gen games, they would actually be looking at the PS4 version, so it would seem like they had wasted their money on hardware that didn’t make graphical improvements. Thankfully, this new update seems to have solved the issue for PlayStation gamers.
Even though a solution exists now, Sony definitely didn’t handle it as well as Xbox Smart Delivery, which can auto-detect which version of a game is most optimized for your hardware and automatically downloads the correct one when you attempt to play it. Smart Delivery definitely lends itself to hardware iteration much better than PlayStation’s solution, to an extent where Microsoft is simply calling the next generation “Xbox” instead of distinguishing between the old and the new.
Before this new update, you had to go through a tedious number of steps in order to ensure that you were playing the right version of your PlayStation game on the 5. Those steps included visiting an options menu next to the main game page, and selecting an extra icon to open a menu that would inform you of the specific platform. Needless to say, it was pretty annoying to go through.
Sony has been doing their best to market their own games that offer free cross-generation upgrades, including Sackboy: A Big Adventure and Spiderman: Miles Morales. Third-party developers can choose whether to offer free upgrades or not at their own discretion, but so far many of them choosing to do so. Ubisoft is offering its entire fall catalog with free upgrades, and EA is likewise offering upgrades to nearly all of its sports franchises via its dual entitlement program.
