Changes are coming to PlayStation Plus, and with them subscribers' libraries will expand significantly, making a large selection of classic and modern games available to download. The service upgrade will finish its regional rollout next month, adding tiers to the pricing.The new PlayStation Plus Premium tier is already available in Asia, allowing players from the region to download a selection of PS1 games and play them on PS4/PS5. Unfortunately, players quickly discovered problems with the versions distributed, and a new update seems to have made things worse.The PS1 games distributed through PlayStation Plus Premium are the PAL versions, meaning they run at 50 frames per second as opposed to 60 in other regions. Following player complaints Sony has released an update to the PS1 Classics emulator to upscale to 60 frames per second, but does so in a lazy way: the new version simply blends the previous frame with the current one to give an illusion of a higher framerate. Doing this does not fix the problems the lower framerate may have introduced and in fact introduces a new one in the form of ghosting artifacts, which similar to motion blur in modern games can ruin screenshots and feel strange to use.
It seems like an easy fix would be to just replace the PAL versions of the games with the NTSC versions, but now that the service is already out in some regions that could cause players' save data to be incompatible. If the emulator was made specifically for the PAL versions that could also cause issues with the games, possibly also leading to frustrating consequences. The problems are a shame since re-releases are an opportunity for legitimate improvements, which actually were included in the form of save states, gameplay rewind and added trophy support for some titles.
Originally this change were made for the different TV standards in PAL regions, but now that many PAL countries are converting or have already converted to new standards, the regional separation is no longer necessary. The PAL versions of games are often considered the worst versions because of the low framerate and bugs that the conversion may have introduced, though this varies per-game.
While the PAL versions of most games are generally considered worse, there are notable exceptions where the North American release is the worse version. Sometimes content differs per-region or the PAL version actually ends up with bug fixes since it launched later than the others. The best-case scenario for PlayStation Plus Premium games would probably be to include a region option, so players can choose which version of a game they want to play.
The new PlayStation Plus tiers launch in the Americas on June 13.
