A new Sony patent dealing with giving out trophies via older game emulation points towards more Playstation backwards compatibility features. The patent was filed on November 30 of last year, and was only posted publicly last week on the website Patentscope. Sony will likely show the feature to fans sometime soon.
While newer Playstation consoles such as the Playstation 5 and Playstation 4 can play games from older consoles, those games have been specifically ported over to the Playstation 4 so their trophies work properly. Some games from the Playstation 2, however, are still only in their Playstation 3 versions.
Even though these still work on newer Playstation consoles, their ports are still geared towards the old architecture, so any trophies that players achieve in them won’t be acknowledged by the system. The patent appears to be addressing this issue.
Ordinarily, getting these games to display trophies on the Playstation 4 or 5 would require the game to be modified to have a “native” port on the Playstation 4. The new Playstation backwards compatibility patent, however, should help to get around that, making it so that the games don’t need to have their coding messed with.
It’s possible that Sony is aiming to implement this into the Playstation Now service, which lets people play a number of different Playstation games from previous consoles. Since only the best Playstation 4 games are backwards compatible with the Playstation 5, this is the most likely option.
The company could also be planning to expand the Playstation 5’s backwards compatibility capabilities, much like Microsoft did by adding original Xbox games to their Game Pass service. But since the patent has only recently been revealed, all we can do is speculate about Sony’s Playstation backwards compatibility plans.
While being able to play other games from older Playstation consoles on the Playstation 5 would be fun, the final say on that belongs with Sony, so all we can do is wait and hope to see games like that outside of Playstation Now.
