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One of the PS5’s most impressive exclusives leads next batch of PS Plus games

By Tomas Franzese May 10, 2023

Sony revealed a large and varied batch of games coming to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium this month. Its headliners are Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, a true PS5 exclusive that utilizes the system’s technology for visually impressive and seamless rifts between areas and worlds, and Humanity, a quirky new puzzle game launching day one on PS Plus Extra.

Rift Apart is a must-play for PS5 owners, so it’s a good thing that Sony has finally made the decision to add it to its subscription service. Some great indie titles like Rain World and Lake, as well as the full Tomb Raider and Dishonored series, will also be available on PS Plus after May 16.

On the classic games front, it’s a PSP-dominated batch, with Logan’s Shadow completing the Syphon Filter series’ presence within the PlayStation Classics collection.

A lot of good games, including Marvel’s Spider-Man, are leaving PlayStation Plus on May 15, so it’s good to know that a lot of other interesting games will be hitting the service on the same day. Here’s the full list of games that will be added to PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium later this week.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
Humanity
Watch Dogs: Legion
Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin
Bus Simulator 21: Next Stop
Thymesia
Rain World
Lake
Conan Exiles
Rune Factory 4 Special
Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town + Expansion Pass Set
The Evil Within 2
Wolfenstein: Youngblood
Dishonored 2
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20-Year Celebration
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Soundfall
Syphon Filter: Logan’s Shadow
Blade Dancer Lineage of Light
Pursuit Force
Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered

If any of those listed games excite you, they will be available with PS Plus Extra and Premium starting on May 16.

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Gaming Staff Writer

Tomas Franzese is a Staff Writer at Digital Trends, where he reports on and reviews the latest releases and exciting…

Gaming

Why playing PS3 games on a PS5 is way harder than it sounds

A stack of PS3 games.

PlayStation Plus Premium will give players access to a library of classic PlayStation, PS2, and PS3 titles starting this June, which is exciting as the PS5 only is backward compatible with the PS4 currently. Unfortunately, it comes with a caveat: All PS3 games must be streamed from the cloud and can't be played natively on the console.
We're over 15 years removed from the PS3's launch, and there's still no good way to play many classic PS3 titles like Infamous or Metal Gear Solid 4 on modern platforms. Sony is content to continue PlayStation Now's approach to PS3 gaming with PlayStation Plus Premium. This stands out when Xbox and Nintendo are doing a relatively good job at natively emulating or remastering games from older systems for modern platforms.
To learn why PS3 games are so hard to bring to modern consoles, I spoke to Whatcookie, a contributor for the popular PS3 emulator RPCS3. Whatcookie, who chose not to share his name, is also known for creating a 60 frames per second patch for the PS3 version of Demon's Souls. He broke down what makes PS3 emulation particularly frustrating and sheds some light on why Sony is content with streaming PS3 games from the cloud instead.
CELL it
The system architectures of the PS4 and PS5 are so similar that isn't much of a problem to run PS4 titles on Sony's latest system, with a couple of exceptions. Compared to that, the PS3 has a different CPU that has more in common with the PS2 than Sony's modern systems.
In short, PS3's CELL microprocessor had some very unique capabilities, which meant that developers over-relied on the CPU at the time. This approach ultimately makes PS3 games harder to emulate. Whatcookie broke this all down for Digital Trends in greater detail.

"The Emotion Engine from the PS2 as well as the CELL in the PS3 are both built to do floating point math as fast as possible, to the detriment of other aspects of performance," Whatcookie explains. "The CELL even surpasses the PS4's CPU in terms of floating-point performance but loses out on every other measurable aspect of performance."
The uniquely powerful CPU of the PS3 already makes it an odd system, but the PS3 could also move 128 bytes atomically and had a weaker GPU than the Xbox 360. This combination led to a weird post-processing workaround for developers that Whatcookie called "unfriendly to emulation," where developers would offload post-processing to the CPU.
"This means moving a rendered image from the GPU over to main memory, emulating the post-processing code, and finally moving the image back to the GPU's memory from main memory, where the GPU will draw the UI over the processed image and finally present that image to the screen," Whatcookie says. "This type of round trip is very unfriendly to modern GPUs, where post-processing a 720p image would likely be faster than moving the image to main memory, never mind all the other steps."
These extra steps on a function that developers would usually contain to the GPU make emulation difficult. Still, a large dedicated team at RPCS3 has put in a lot of work to create a functional emulator for modern PCs. According to Whatcookie, it's totally possible to get PS3 emulation working on a PS5.
"The PS5's CPU is a decent deal faster, and combined with the kind of shortcuts that developers of commercial emulators make -- the official PS2 emulator on PS4 has many game-specific patches and hacks -- it should be possible to achieve full speed on whatever games they choose to release."
So why doesn't Sony put in the effort to address these issues and get proper PS3 emulation up and running on PS5?
Just because you can…

Gaming

Persona 5 is the first game to leave the PS Plus Collection

Joker in Persona 5 holding a knife.

PlayStation Plus subscribers have been treated to a few free games every month. That won't change in April, but instead of just getting games, users will also lose access to one title. In what may be the first of many game removals, Sony is removing Persona 5 from the PlayStation Plus Collection.

For anyone who is already playing the game through PlayStation Plus or has previously claimed it, Persona 5's removal from the PlayStation Plus Collection isn't an issue. Users who have already added the game to their library will still be able to access the massive JRPG. Likewise, anyone who adds the game to their library before April 5 will be able to access it as long as they have a PlayStation Plus subscription.

Gaming

The best open-world games for PS5

A character sits in front of a glowing, yellow orb in Elden Ring.

Even though the PlayStation 5 is less than two years old, there are still a ton of great games available for it spanning numerous genres. The PS5 has everything from shooters to sports games, RPGs, and platformers, along with a wide variety of open-world adventures. While "open world" isn't necessarily a genre in and of itself, it's a style that millions of players have fallen in love with over the years. These days, open-world games are quite common, meaning the competition to grab your attention is much stiffer. And with the likes of God of War Ragnarok down the pipeline, there will be plenty more to play in the future.

Despite this, there are so many fantastic open-world games available on the PS5. Some lean into horror, others send you to historical periods, while one, in particular, lets you explore the entire galaxy. There is no shortage of open-world games to play on PS5, and here, we'll go through all of the best ones to choose from.