505 Games took to its website to lay out the reason why it won’t be upgrading original copies of Control for the next generation of consoles.
With the upcoming PS5 and Xbox Series X, many gamers are looking at recently released titles to see if they’ll have backwards compatibility, remastered versions, or similar upgrades available on the new consoles. One title many fans have had questions about was Control — both about the Ultimate Edition and the original version of the game.
In a recent blog post, 505 Games explained its decision to not upgrade the original versions of the game. According to the developers there were “blockers” to any idea they came up with that would result in certain fans getting left out. The most fair option in their mind was to give original versions of the game backwards compatibility and only upgrade the Control Ultimate Edition.
This means that owners of the new edition will be upgraded for free to the new consoles while owners of the original version will only have backwards compatibility.
The company did clarify that the Ultimate Edition does not have exclusive content of any kind. There is fundamentally no difference between the original and bundled version and no unique expansions for Ultimate whatsoever. The main difference will be that the Ultimate edition is optimized for the new consoles resulting in better performance and features.
As the developers point out it’s an answer that some fans won’t “want to hear." Some will likely be frustrated that the only way to enjoy the advantages of the newer consoles is to buy the newer edition of the game. It’s not unheard of in this industry though, if players wanted to play Skyrim on their PS4 they needed to buy the appropriate version, after all.
It’s likely the frustration comes from the fact that other developers are offering free upgrades to players with original versions of the game, like Bethesda is doing with Doom Eternal. If Ultimate was exclusively for the next-gen it likely wouldn’t have caused any waves. The current perception for some is that they’re simply choosing to upgrade one and not the other in order to milk profits, in spite of the claims of technical problems from the developers.
As with any new console generation release there are going to be growing pains and frustrations for both fans and developers. Fortunately, many games like Control are appearing to be backwards compatible this time around, something that wasn’t the case when the PS4 came out showing things are improving to some degree.
Source: Control Website