While there’s plenty of excitement bubbling for PlayStation VR 2 right now, Sony has confirmed some disappointing news that the PSVR 2 will not be backward compatible for playing original PSVR games.

Speaking on the Official PlayStation Podcast (as spotted by Nibellion) PlayStation senior vice president of platform experience Hideaki Nishino said, “PSVR games are not compatible with PSVR 2 because PSVR 2 is designed to deliver a truly next-generation VR experience. PSVR 2 has much more advanced features, like [an] all-new controller with haptic feedback and adaptive triggers, inside-out tracking, eye tracking, 3D audio is coming together and 4K HDR, of course. This means developing games for PSVR 2 requires a whole different approach than the original PSVR.”

This means that any previously released games for PSVR that want to make the jump to PSVR 2 will need to have an upgrade or a port of some kind to the new system, similar to the PS5 upgrades of PS4 games we’ve seen released in the last couple year but without the crutch of backward compatibility. We’ve already seen some games being confirmed for PSVR 2 that are being upgraded, including No Man’s Sky, but this means that fantastic titles like Astro Bot Rescue Mission, Blood & Truth, WipEout VR, Moss and Moss: Book 2, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners will be getting left behind. That’s a crying shame.

Without backward compatibility, Moss: Book 2 will need to be ported to play on PSVR 2.

There’s a number of core technological reasons for this, given how dramatically different PSVR and PSVR 2 are in how they work. In particular PSVR 2’s motion tracking is a completely different inside-out system that uses cameras built into the headset to track, while the original headset used an external camera. There’s also the way that PSVR works with the PS5, relying on the backward compatibility PS4 frameworks and the old PS4 cameras, in order to be able to track the DualShock 4, Move and Aim controllers. There’s no equivalent PS5-native controllers, outside of the PSVR 2 specific Sense controller.

However that doesn’t make this any less disappointing. Sony has made the decision to cut off the last generation of VR, where we’ve seen PC VR systems able to accommodate multiple different tracking solutions, varying controllers, and individual headset features. Then again, SteamVR was always designed to be an open platform, while PSVR was a fixed function design, but then Oculus was able to navigate a shift in tracking type between the original Rift and Rift 2.

When it arrives, then, PSVR 2 will be a fresh start. Sony has confirmed that PSVR 2 will be released in ‘early 2023’, but is still holding off on giving a solid date or price point – not surprising when they’ve just increased the price of the PS5. They has also revealed the core specs of the headset, stated that there will be over 20 launch titles for the system.

A terrible decision they’ve tried to justify with a load of marketing wank. What he really means is “we want to make some money from upgrades and don’t want to spend the money making it work”.

It was looking good and should have been an easy decision to get one, but they’re slowly managing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I guess some stupidly high price is getting announced soon?

I have to say I’m more hyped about PSVR 2 now than I had been initially, as I recently started to play my PSVR more often and liked it. The big hassle there is the setup with all the cabling, so if that will take less effort with the PSVR 2, it would make me play it quite a bit more, I guess.

That’s a shame, though, I expected them to do better and make it backwards compatible, also to get those on board who already have VR games (through Plus), but no device to play them yet. And there is a number of games I’d still like to play out of the current VR offering, so at the very least, I expect them to make sure it’ll be easy to port games over. Let’s see whether the game library for PSVR2 will be worth it, I’m still hoping for HL:Alyx and maybe even Alien:Isolation…

PSVR 2 will just be a single cable and can much, much more easily scan and accommodate your room’s layout and furniture.

The back catalogue will just depend on developers. Hopefully Sony is providing some way for developers to shift to a newer VR SDK, similar to the PS4-PS5 upgrades. Going to be a faff with the game upgrade process, though.

Seems a terrible decision as it’ll mean practically rebuilding their PSVR customer base from scratch. anyhow, i’ve barely used mine since this year, i enjoyed Skyrim, NMS and a few other bits n bobs but ultimately the tethering, real world disconnect, occurrence of drift, disappointing control choices or lack thereof all conspired to make me feel less enthused about VR for the time being.

The PSVR drift got really, really bad for me after a year or so.

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