The State of PS3 Emulation

Lately, I’ve been thinking on the state of 7th Generation emulation. Particularly for the Sony PlayStation 3. This is because the games unique to that platform are not backwards compatible. Because of that reason, many of them are at-risk.

Sure, there are plenty of multi-platform games, like Fallout 3, but most of Sony’s first-party line up is stuck on the system. For example, the Resistance series was mostly on the PS3 (with a couple of portable titles), as were games like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. While some of these may still get a port down the line, there are still around 180+ games stuck on the system.

Sony was has at least kept the PS3 marketplace open, albeit with some roundabout ways to add funds to your account there. However, we don’t know how long that this will last for. As of July, Microsoft will be shutting down the Xbox 360 storefront. There is cause to believe that the PS3 and Vita storefronts days are numbered. The era of the 7th generation has long since passed.

Thankfully, there are those who wish to see the games on the PS3 continue to be playable for the foreseeable future. Some have come together and created the wonderful RPCS3 emulator. While it is still very much a work in progress, those working on the software have made so that 69% (nice!) of all PS3 games work with the emulator with minimal issues. They have even made it so that all games at least boot and make it to a menu screen.

This is important work, because the 7th generation is a pretty important one for gaming. It represented the first full leap into online gaming. In previous generations, there was some experimentation, but the focus was solely on offline play. While we can’t always preserve all online games (RIP MAG), emulation projects like RPCS3 can allow for games that were locked to a system to playable in the long term.

This emulator provides a better way to play some console-focused games, in my opinion. For some games, there was a base game and then came DLC by piecemeal. Some SKUs allowed all these pieces of a game to be packaged into one disc, particularly on the PS3, which had greater storage capacity than the Xbox 360, due to using Blu-ray discs instead of DVDs. This helps these games be able to be stored in a complete fashion for the long term.

For RPCS3, this means that these games can be backed up or played off the disc with the emulator. People can continue to play the games they bought using a method like this. Consoles will still offer the best experience, but we don’t rightly know when our PS3s will die on us. Having an emulator as a back-up option is always nice, because it gives up piece of mind.

Another wonderful thing about RPCS3 is that even if the game is not in the “playable” state, it can still possibly be completed in the “in-game” state with some handy tweaks to configurations that can be set for each game specifically. There are also patches that allow players to change up the game experience to their liking. For example, a very handy change is to set a game to 60 FPS, so I can get a smoother experience.

All in all, this can help keep many of these games alive longer, particularly the Sony exclusives stuck on the PS3. While the company has made some available through its streaming service, the aspect of game streaming is not yet at a reliable state. For example, I played through Fallout 3 last year using the game streaming from the PS+ benefits I had. The game’s resolution often dipped really badly when there was a bad signal. This is even worse depending on where you’re at. I imagine if I were stuck in my hometown still, it would be next to impossible.

Until these games can run natively on the platform, we have to rely on either having a working PS3, or using emulation. Again, the former is going to be the best way to experience these games as intended, but the latter provides an option when a PS3 is no longer available to use. So, solutions like RPCS3 become our best bet for allowing these games to continue to be available. I’m really interested to see more and more games jump up to the “playable” state as time presses on. The work is tricky (due to the Cell processor already being difficult to work with), and I wish the devs all the best!