In a sly little behind-the-scenes update, Sony has made a change to resolve one of the PS5’s most frustrating issues. A new PS5 prompt will now pop up if you mistakenly try to play the PS4 version of a game that has a PS5 upgrade available. The prompt will clearly let you know that you are about the play the PS4 version of the game and ask if you want to switch to the PS5 version instead.
Previously, many players had been mistakenly playing older PS4 versions of games due to some confusion on the PS5 dashboard about which version of the game was installed and selected. PS5 upgrades are often entire new and separate applications, which makes it easy to play a PS4 version via backwards compatibility rather than the proper new-gen enhancement of the game.
The update was first brought to wide attention by Tidux on Twitter, though a number of other players have posted similar findings.
New? #PS5Share pic.twitter.com/JEY2BU37H4
— Tidux (@Tidux) December 22, 2020
In order to even run into this issue, you’d need to have both the PS4 and PS5 versions of the game installed (the PS4 game could be on the internal SSD or an external hard drive). This is unfortunately easy enough to do mistakenly through the PlayStation Store, which still presents some confusion on which version of a game is being downloaded. There are also a number of games that are technically still PS4 games being played via backwards compatibility, but benefit from PS5 enhancements without a full proper PS5 upgraded version (see Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us Part II, Days Gone, etc.)
This is an effective solution for games like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Destiny 2, and a number of others that have two different versions (along with free upgrades to the next-gen version). With big differences in games like Destiny 2, which included a jump from 30 fps to 60 fps and a new FOV slider exclusive to the newer console, it’s certainly worth making sure you’re playing the newest and best version of the game.
Thanks to being an entirely new application, most of these games also include a whole separate Trophy list for the PS5 version, which gives Trophy hunters a reason to want to go back and play the last-gen versions too. While some games like Destiny 2 will just award all of the Trophies immediately, others, like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Immortals: Fenyx Rising, require players to earn the trophy separately on both versions.
Microsoft’s solution for this is a feature they call Smart Delivery, which automatically makes sure you are downloading and playing the best version of the game available on whichever Xbox console you are using.
Sony appeared to add this notification without any kind of PS5 firmware update or announcement of the new feature, so it’s unclear what kinds of under-the-hood changes they can make to the console without full system software changes. It’s also unknown if this is just a temporary solution for a better fix in the future, or if this is Sony’s slightly cumbersome answer to Smart Delivery. Right now, this game version notification only seems to apply to launching the application, not the download and install process, but without any official patch notes or announcements from Sony, it’s up to users to discover the range of this generation version prompt.
Have you benefitted from this notification yet? Have you actually been playing the PS4 version of a game, but switched to the PS5 upgrade thanks to this prompt? Let us know in the comments.
[Via: VGC]
