Frontier Developments have announced that those picking up Planet Coaster: Console Edition for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will have free upgrades to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions of the game, respectively. The game will be out on all four platforms sometime Holiday 2020.
The news came in a new dev diary for the game, which also revealed the game’s new tutorials for the console release, the new TV-friendly UI, but also that the game will support mouse & keyboard on console.
For their next-gen upgrades, Frontier will be adopting Xbox’s Smart Delivery system, meaning there will be just one cross-generational release both at retail and digitally, with an optimised version of the game being installed for each console and cloud saves.
It’s somewhat trickier on PlayStation, it seems, and we’re waiting for a reply as to whether saves and progression can be transferred from PS4 to PS5. Considering Dirt 5, Yakuza: Like A Dragon and other examples, this may not be possible, but Frontier do have a partial workaround detailed in the dev diary: Frontier Workshop. This is the company’s home-grown online sharing platform, where you can save a park, share it with the Workshop and then download it on another console.
Update: Frontier have explained the save sitaution as follows:
We’re also happy to share more information on how save games will work for both platforms! For those playing on Xbox, all progress can be carried over from current to next-gen. While save data is not transferable between PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, PlayStation players will be able to bring their creations with them by uploading them to the Frontier Workshop and then downloading them again in their next-gen park. We’ll be discussing more about the Frontier Workshop in the next few weeks.
It should probably go without saying at this point that if you buy the game no disc, you’ll need a disc-based next-gen console and to have the disc in the drive to be able to play.
We went hands on with Frontier Developments’ console-bound rollercoaster management sim a little while ago, finding a chilled and fairly intuitive translation of one of the company’s biggest hits. In our Planet Coaster: Console Edition preview I wrote:
“It’s been far too long coming, but Planet Coaster: Console Edition does a great job of bringing the charms of theme park management from PC to console. There’s still some work to be done in refining the controls, but this is more than a quick port that reconsiders how to present the challenges of park management to players and gives more and new options for how you can build the theme park of your dreams.”
All that’s really left now is to wait patiently for Frontier to confirm the release date…
Source: press release, Frontier