Love it or hate it, a notable PlayStation trend this generation has been remastering PS4 games for PS5. Even though the console is fully backward compatible, we’ve gotten dedicated PS5 versions of the two The Last of Us games and will soon be getting new versions of Until Dawn and Horizon Zero Dawn for PS5. I find these remasters understandable, yet unnecessary, but I’m more frustrated that Sony isn’t giving this treatment to the games that really need it.
I might be beating a dead horse by complaining that PlayStation VR2 doesn’t have good first-party support. A year and a half into the headset’s lifespan, it’s abundantly clear that Sony is ready to move on to the hardware, especially now that there’s a PC adapter available. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the discourse around PSVR2 would be different had Sony decided to remaster games like Astro Bot Rescue Mission and Blood & Truth in the same way it is doing with Horizon Zero Dawn.
One of the big new reveals of Tuesday night’s State of Play was Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, which features upgraded visuals and rerecorded dialogue. Meanwhile, the only things shown off on the PSVR2 front were third-party games. One of those really struck a chord with me, though. Hitman — World of Assassination is getting a PSVR2 release later this year that’s basically an enhanced and expanded version of the PSVR1’s Hitman 3 VR. Seeing that gorgeous PS5 remaster for a game that’s already readily playable on the console next to a PSVR2 remaster of a game PSVR1 that players could try before highlighted what might’ve been Sony’s worst missed opportunity with its second VR headset.
I’m part of the subset of PSVR2 owners that didn’t own a PlayStation VR headset for my PS4. As such, I never got to check out renowned PSVR games like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, Farpoint, Firewall: Zero Hour, Déraciné, Everybody’s Golf VR, and Blood & Truth. Rush of Blood and Firewall Zero Hour both received PSVR2 successors, but everything else Sony published for its original VR headset is trapped on that hardware as PSVR2 is not natively backward compatible with PSVR.
We’ll likely never know why Sony decided not to make PSVR2 backward compatible with its predecessor, but I can criticize the company for not bringing any of those lauded PSVR1 games over to the new headset. Games like Hitman – World of Assassination VR demonstrate that PSVR2 revisions for PSVR1 games are possible, while PSVR1 titles like Arizona Sunshine are getting full-on remakes for the hardware. Sony has done neither with the PSVR1 games it published.
I would’ve loved to see Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Blood & Truth, or Farpoint specifically get the same remaster treatment The Last of Us Part II and Horizon Zero Dawn have. Reviews show that these are already great games; they just need some spruced-up visuals and compatibility with modern VR hardware so a whole new group of gamers can experience them. And if Sony framed them as full-on remasters rather than simple PSVR2 updates, it could have fleshed out PSVR2’s meager game catalog.
Remasters for games like Blood & Truth wouldn’t have been new games, but they would’ve at least beefed up the PSVR2’s first-party support beyond Horizon Call of the Mountain and saved these well-liked games from only being playable on a single piece of hardware. Many of the PSVR1 games Sony published deserve to be more widely available, but it appears Sony plans on abandoning them for the foreseeable future.
This all comes back to the fact that the games that typically require remasters or remakes the most often don’t get them. It makes more sense for Sony to rerelease a bes-selling PS4 game like Horizon Zero Dawn alongside Lego Horizon Adventures and have a better chance at making a lot of money from it rather than take the risk of creating remasters for less successful VR games for a niche PS5 peripheral. That may make more business sense for Sony, but it begs the question of why Sony released the PSVR2 in the first place if it didn’t plan on supporting it with first-party content.
As a PSVR2 owner, this is incredibly disappointing and yet another reminder of how much Sony sent out its second VR headset to die. I want to try those PSVR1 games, but I can’t do so unless I track down the PSVR1 headset, PlayStation camera, and Move controllers required to do so. If Sony knew from the start that PSVR2 wouldn’t support backward compatibility, it should’ve folded more PSVR1 games into this remaster and remake initiative it has recently been on.
