Bethesda has clarified the situation regarding getting the Fallout 4 upgrade on PlayStation.
The upgrade has allowed Xbox and PC owners to upgrade easily. For PC players, on Steam and Epic Game Store, they just have to enter their respective platform client and upgrade from there. The GOG version doesn’t have the upgrade yet, but as reported by Windows Central, they should get it soon.
Xbox owners get the upgrade free, so that if they own the game on Xbox One, they can upgrade to the Xbox Series X|S version for free. In the exact same way, PlayStation owners who own the game on PlayStation 4, can get the upgrade to the PlayStation 5 version for free.
Game Pass subscribers pay a monthly fee, of course, but in a way they get the best deal, since Fallout 4 was just a small part of their library, and they didn’t have to pay extra for the new version. Game Pass subscribers who logged into their accounts have likely already availed of the free upgrade.
Now things are different for PlayStation Plus subscribers. Fallout 4 is part of the PlayStation Plus library, but subscribers found that they were not able to do the upgrade. Bethesda took to Twitter to explain the finer details for them.
In their initial tweet about this, the official Bethesda Game Studios account said:
“We’ve seen some confusion regarding the free Fallout 4 next-gen update for PlayStation Plus Extra members. The Fallout 4 next-gen update will be available to PlayStation Plus Extra members through the PlayStation Game Catalog. Your patience is appreciated while the teams work on this.”
So just to be clear, PlayStation Plus Extra subscribers are also eligible for a free upgrade, but Bethesda is still working on it for now. Other fans who prodded about this further received this response from Bethesda Customer Support:
“Fallout 4 Next-Gen Update will be available for PS+ Extra members. We do not have any information regarding PS5 Catalogue or PS+ Essentials.”
So, if you didn’t understand their response, there was no PlayStation 5 version of Fallout 4 before this week. The Fallout 4 GOTY version that people were playing on PlayStation 5 for about two years now, is actually the PlayStation 4 version. Before the upgrade, players could see a rise in framerate if they played the game via backwards compatibility on their PlayStation 5 consoles. However, the upgrade is a proper port to the latest console generation.
And, of course, a PlayStation Plus Essential subscription provides the minimum features for subscribers. That includes online play and access to the PlayStation Store, but you need to ramp up to PlayStation Plus Extra to avail of the PlayStation Game Catalog, that includes Fallout 4.
In any case, if you’re a PlayStation Plus Extra subscriber now, you should hold off on buying a separate copy of Fallout 4. While they were promised the same thing Xbox gamers were promised, they shouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t quite the priority for this feature.