A big lesson that game publishers may take away from 2017 is to skip the Wii U and PlayStation 3 versions.
Like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, community developers already have Persona 5 running on a PlayStation 3 emulator. Nekotekina, the primary developer of the RPCS3 app that enables you to run PS3 games on a PC, has uploaded a video of Persona 5 running on a Windows machine with an Intel i7-5930K processor. Unlike the emulators for the GameCube/Wii (Dolphin) or Wii U (CEMU), RPCS3 doesn’t support most of the releases for Sony’s last-generation console. But despite its early, work-in-progress status, RPCS3 is progressing quickly, and it’s ability to run publisher Atlus’s anticipated role-playing game is evidence of that.
“Persona 5 is literally 10 times faster in all scenarios now, going from about 1 to about 10 FPS in the opening scene for example,” reads the RPCS3 blog. “In battles and dungeons, Persona 5 can peak at 30 FPS already.”
Games like Catherine and Demon’s Souls have also seen serious performance improvements on the latest versions of RPCS3.
“Catherine also runs at a stable 30 FPS in all scenarios with an overclocked Haswell-E 6-core or a Ryzen 7 8-core,” reads the blog.
But it is Persona 5 that could get the most people talking about the PS3 emulator. Nekotekina has even begun working on the emulator full-time, which likely means RPCS3 will see improvements even more rapidly in the future.
While Persona 5 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are out on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, respectively, they are running on PC-based emulators due to their last-gen versions. Developers have had much longer to crack those devices, and that makes them more susceptible to this sort of emulation.