The console’s unnecessarily complicated architecture mean Sony’s never really entertained the idea of backwards compatibility, meaning many games can only be played using PS Plus Premium cloud streaming on the PS5.
But that’s where remaster specialists Nightdive Studios, who’ve brought back a bunch of classics including Turok and The Thing, come in.
In an interview with VGC, boss Larry Kuperman said his team is “ready” to face the challenge.
Studio head Stephen Kick added: “I think that architecture – I mean, I remember the talk when the system was first released, of how difficult it was for developers to ‘get’ it – and that’s a big problem with backwards compatibility.
“So yeah, if we get to that, or I should say when we get to the PS3 era games, it will be a challenge that we have to face. But I think that we’ve had enough experience to where we can do a serviceable job on a PS3 remaster.”
Kick continued to speak specifically about Free Radical’s ill-fated PS3 exclusive first-person, Haze.
“With a game like Haze – let’s say hypothetically we had access to that, and that was our big title for 2028, right? – we would go to the original designers, and we would say: ‘It didn’t do as well as you had hoped, I’m sure you’ve had a lot of time to ruminate and to think about what you would have done differently.’
“We’ve had these discussions before with [the original] developers on some of these games, and we’ve given them an opportunity to come back and say ‘this is what I would have done’.
“In the case of System Shock 2 Remastered and a lot of these other games that we’ve been looking at, as soon as you bring them over to newer hardware, some of the problems start to clear themselves up, like frame rate, refresh rate, texture resolution, streaming, [and] loading times.”
Are there any PS3 era games in particular that you think warrant the remaster treatment?
Personally, we’d love to Nightdive Studios potentially partner with Sony and bring back series like Resistance and Killzone, which are pretty much only really playable on the PS3 these days. We’d also love to revisit the MotorStorm titles on more modern hardware.
