While early impressions of the PSVR2 Praise a variety of featuresAlong with the overall quality of the experience, backwards compatibility is a feature that won’t make it into Sony’s new PS5-exclusive headset. The company’s last-gen VR titles remain there.
In most latest episode of the official PlayStation podcast, Hideaki Nishino, Senior Vice President of Platform Experience at PlayStation, spoke about the standout features and development saga in the design and build of the new VR headset for the PS5. When asked directly if last-gen VR titles would be playable on the new headset, Nishino explained, “PSVR games are not compatible with PSVR2 as PSVR2 is designed to deliver a next-gen VR experience.”
Nishino highlighted the PSVR2’s expanded feature set as an obvious reason for this, particularly the haptic feedback-enabled controllers with adaptive triggers, plus inside-out tracking and eye-tracking, among other things. “Developing games for PSVR2,” said Nishino, “requires a very different approach than the original PSVR.”
To be honest, it’s hard for me to name even half a dozen memorable titles on the original PSVR. But there’s no denying that this is some kind of crap, especially when these games are probably known for only appearing on such specific hardware for a limited time. While it looks like the bigger titles, such as Resident Evil 7get full PSVR2 support, games like Robinson: The Journey or golem risk being lost over time if they don’t appear on other VR platforms.
If you followed with the saga of backward compatibility on PlayStation platforms, something Xbox has delivered very thoroughly, perhaps this will not surprise you. Hopefully these forgotten PSVR classics, whatever they are, will find a way off the island of misfit Sony experiments.
