I was watching some Youtube videos while I lifted weights yesterday and I saw one trying to make a defense for the most recent Fast and Furious game. It did not make me want to pay full price for that game but it did leave me craving an arcade racer, so that evening I flipped on my Xbox and loaded up Dirt 5. Dirt 5 was my first 9th generation game. I bought and played it on November 10th, when my Xbox Series X first arrived, and thought it was...fine. I ranked it in the bottom half of the 20 or so 2020 releases I played last year, but as a launch title for a new console I thought it was adequate; with weather effects that were as impressive as any graphics I've seen yet and a simple throwback arcade racer style and structure that reminded me of other launch titles from the past. It was a game I liked but did not love; a "right game at the right time" title well served by having a next-gen version ready to go at launch with enough bells and whistles to make an impact in the moment.

My point is that while I enjoyed Dirt 5 it was not some game I had a deep love for like I do with Forza Horizon 4, nor was it some old game that I was very nostalgic about. But when I booted it up to run a few races, I saw something that surprised me. The splash screen had changed.

Dirt 5 released some DLC while I wasn't playing it, and like many games do it changed its splash screen with the updated version. Booting into the game there were some other changes too. The game prompted me to join yet another company specific online service for some free liveries (no thank you!) and when I went to the campaign it opened a selection screen to choose between the original campaign and 2 DLC campaigns that had been added.

None of this was shocking in 2021, but for some reason it made me feel uneasy. I was able to load up my old campaign progress (I finished it but didn't do every single event) and load into a race and it was pretty much the same game I remembered. There may have been some performance upgrades and tweaks, as there often are for modern games, and it's possible that there were small changes to other elements such as changing out the advertising on the side of the tracks. I didn't recognize some of the songs on the soundtrack but I can't find any information about them adding any so they were probably always there and I just forgot them in the 4 or so months since I played the game. The racing handling felt the same as it had before. It was still Dirt 5. But the splash screen and other changes had given me a faint feeling of unease. It was like returning home after a semester at school only to find that an old favorite restaurant had closed down, or there was a new mural where there never was one before. It was the same, but not the same. Time marches on. Nothing is suspended in amber forever. Things change.

Except they didn't used to in video games. If I go back to an old favorite launch title of the past it is pretty much the same as I remember it. The old graphics look the same. All the old glitches and quirks remain intact. I know that the soundtrack hasn't changed because it's what's on the disc or cart, and that's it. Video games used to be perfect little nuggets of nostalgia because they were what they were as printed on the disc. They were like books or movies, moments in time. We all remember how well everyone reacted when George Lucas went back to make some nips and tucks to the original Star Wars trilogy. People want cultural items to be the thing they remembered when they first encountered them.

Games aren't like that anymore. I don't think there's any way to play Dirt 5 as I first encountered it. I don't know what's on the disc (which I don't even have because I got it digitally) but I'm sure it's not the version I played, since every game gets a day 1 patch. Dirt 5 is a smart delivery game, so does the disc have both the Xbox One and Xbox Series X version or just Xbox One? I have no idea. And of course if I tried to play the disc version without updating I would probably be locked out of online play and the downloadable create-a-course function, meaning that I'd actually be playing a version far more different from my original purchase than the current version, where both those modes still work. There's just no way to go back. And that's even more true for people whose first encounter with the game was with whatever it looked like in February or at some other intermediate point between launch and now. That version exists only in some internal archive at Codemasters, if it exists at all. Not every developer bothers to maintain archives of every released version of their games.

Of course Dirt 5 is not even a particularly strong example of this. So many games are live services and constantly changing. There are whole sections of Destiny 2 that are gone from the game even though it's still being actively supported. Immortals: Rise of Fenyx gets new quests added and removed as promotion from time to time, even though that's not really a live service game so if you missed some of those promotional quests you can never do them. The Grand Theft Auto games tend to get huge chunks of their soundtracks, essential for enjoying the game, stripped away in the purchasable version because even though they make literal billions of dollars, Rockstar can't be bothered to get perpetual music licenses and if you want to play the original version of GTA San Andreas or GTA IV right now I hope you have the disc and a console that's not Internet connected. At least those games have true disc versions. There are plenty of games that don't. Multiplayer servers go down and content is lost. DLC gets "retired." Entire systems go offline.

There are full boxed retail products like Battleborn that had single player content that's just completely unplayable in any form now. And as games rely more and more on server side updates and patches, and more and more go always online, all this stuff gets worse. Cyberpunk 2077 is playable in its original form with a disc, but who would even want to? They sold a beta, not a finished product. The finished product isn't even out yet, almost 6 months after official release.

There's been a lot of talk about game preservation with the recent announcement of the closure of the PS3 and Vita stores, and then the subsequent rollback of that announcement, but I don't even know what the term means at this point. A copy of Super Mario Brothers 3 is still a copy of Super Mario Brothers 3, and as long as it remains in working order it will always be a copy of Super Mario Brothers 3. Dirt 5? The content is still there and playable and something that's recognizable as Dirt 5 is still perfectly playable, but it's not the exact game it was at launch. Destiny 2? Who the heck even knows what that means at this point.

I know that in this age of Fortnite and Animal Crossing: New Horizons the idea of preserving a game as it was is kind of silly. Even when I was young games like EverQuest were always online and ever changing. Earlier in the 90s there were MUDs that would have server changes that would alter the game between log ins. You could argue that this has been the state of gaming at this point longer than the final fixed version printed on physical media was. Even consoles have had DLC for over 20 years.

But it didn't used to be every game, and it used to be something you opted into. Now your console will just change things about your games overnight with a quiet update patch. One day Dirt 5's splash screen looks one way and the next day it looks another. You won't even see it happen. And the fact that it was Dirt 5 that changed is what was so impactful for me. This is a simple arcade racer throwback. It's like a dozen games I played way back on PlayStation 1. Games I could dig out and play now and they'd be exactly as I remembered them. Ridge Racer and Test Drive and Need for Speed. But unlike with those games I can never quite go home again to Dirt 5. It was a launch title for me. It represents the beginning of the 9th generation. That version is already gone, less than 6 months later. We've moved on. There's a dragon on the splash screen now.

I don't have some overarching point here. I don't think it would be better if Dirt 5 still had whatever bugs and performance issues it had at launch. The new splash screen is fine. It's colorful. There's nothing wrong with it. But when thinking about video game preservation we often think about things like the "final" code base and the production assets and all that stuff, and these days that's not even likely to be the version most people played. The vast majority of games are most popular soon after launch, but they get updates for months if not years after that. The "final" version is different from the version most people saw. Preservationists don't have access to the internal archives of the companies, and those archives might not have everything. If someone goes in and fixes a 3D model of some cactus in a racing game because there was a texture problem is there any reason the company wants to preserve the old, flawed, cactus? It was an error. But it might have been something that players noticed and remembered. It might have been part of their experience, something they talk about when they reminisce about the game or talk about what it was like. And now it's gone and unless someone happens to have that old version on some dusty hard drive somewhere it might not be retrievable.

It's just another way video games are getting closer and closer to real life. Even in the digital world of 1s and 0s nothing stays the same. Change is inevitable. You can't go home again. Dirt 5 has a new splash screen. There's a dragon on it. That's cool, I guess.

Great read!

Maybe this is why I've largely started to distance myself from modern games 1.) because nothing seems to interest me to even pick up these new consoles which is a first, and 2.) because retro gaming is exactly the opposite - the games have been the same for 30,40 years ... and because of that the discussion around them seems fresh, not stale, and exactly the opposite as "closer and closer to real life" you mention. Even with all the glitches and all.... KTL-NAL just got a 800M+ score in DoDonPachi with Type B ship ... now all 3 DoDonPachi ships have 800M+ scores... anyways I digress... that'll never happen with modern games.

... yes there are new hacks and patches (Vitor Vilela's SA1 Patch for Gradius 3 just dropped - now that's an interesting story in and of itself)...

... but very few modern games do developers and gamers "let breathe" ...

For me, enjoying retro games with friends has been so much more fun because you can sit with a game for several weeks and not once have to be distracted to discuss " the latest update " or whatever, look up strategies invented 20 years ago, and compare them with your own you invented a few minutes ago.

I think this is legitimately the first sign I've had that I'm finally getting old and obsolete.

I'm good with it, though. I still play gunfire reborn with friends on weekends and read out the patch notes and laugh and have a good time. Never once played a game of Among Us though.

Yep. Old.

This entire topic of game preservation is one of those areas where I feel like I exist in a bubble outside of literally everyone else I've ever interacted with. And it's not like I don't understand logically why it's a big deal to everyone.. all of the arguments and concerns are almost always sensible.

But emotionally I'm just kind of...okay with it? All of the things I own and enjoy will in some form or another break or change or become otherwise unusable. I guess I could opt out of this if I decide to preserve them forever like some sort of precious rose in a case but then what's the point of them at all?

And accepting this makes it easy to pivot the same mindset over to all my digital goods. Stores will fade, licenses will be revoked, all manner of bizarre circumstance. But fundamentally it's not much different than my SNES just sort of not working anymore, or the laser on my PS2 no longer reading discs particularly well.

I do accept that in this I think I am the weird one.

I've heard DiRT 5 got mixed reception by the community for not feeling like the main DiRT series at all.

What I've known about DiRT's main series, it was supposed to feature simcade driving physics rather than arcady, despite DiRT 3 felt more arcady than the first two installments but still more realistic than DiRT Showdown (Spin-off in the series) and DiRT 5.

For Xbox Series X's game box packaging, it does look pretty confusing (Judging its banner says "Xbox" while the sub-banner says "Xbox One and Xbox Series X"), how are some customers suppose to know for which console it is?

The difference is that hardware failure is on the user's end. The games still exist and are playable unless there are no more working SNES or PS2 out there. With modern titles with online DRM, if the publisher went out of business (or stopped paying bills to securom/denuvo or whatever), and if nobody bothered to preserve/pirate their games, every copy across the globe is rendered unplayable simultaneously and there's nothing the end user can do about it.

I saw someone on Twitter saying something like "I have no interest in X game because it's not a live game." It was an opinion I'd never seen expressed before and reminded me of the echo chamber of only hearing/talking about video games on Giant Bomb, which apparently has a unique mindset.

I started playing Hitman 2 recently and found that the Featured Contracts section seems to keep all of the highlighted contracts on the list, rather than cycling them out. It was unexpected and appreciated, especially since there are challenges associated with completing a certain number of them.

@aktane: I'm an old too. I think there's a lot to be said for having static games that don't change. One of my favorite games from last year, Monster Train, got an expansion that seems to have done some rebalancing and while you can turn the expansion part off, the changes just totally threw me off because everything just felt different. It's not even a bad expansion, it's pretty good, but for some reason the change alone threw me. Maybe I'll try it again at some point.

@efesell: I think you're actually the normal one. When Jim Ryan said that most people don't like old games he was right. The numbers bear that out. Enthusiasts and hardcore gamers want the ability to play those old games but even they don't actually do so all that often. The vast majority of gamers are happy to play stuff and move on.

I am right with you on physical not being more secure than digital. I have lost more physical games to various issues like disc rot, theft, putting them in storage etc... than I have digital. The Xbox 360 games I bought on disc are mostly in a storage unit right now because I have no room for them. The ones I bought digitally? Some are downloadable on my Xbox Series X at the touch of a button.

@gtxforza: The disc works on both Xbox One and Xbox Series X. That's the idea behind smart delivery. I don't know what's on the disc if you can't access the online patch and download though.

I can't make a long comment on this because I'm on a phone, but you have to give up on multiplayer games staying the same. Siege can't stop kneecapping Jager and I'd really like to play Aztec in CSGO again but they've removed it from the game. I'm sure I could find it in the server browser but you cannot matchmake to it. Or Dust 1. How the fuck do you remove Dust 1 from Counter Strike? Well, they did, and it didn't seem to get much attention.

I could play 1.6 or Source, I suppose, but that's not quite what I'm looking for.

@justin258: yeah true - but luckily for me, fightcade exists, and Street Fighter 3rd Strike hasn't changed in 22-ish years :) and boy the online play on that is the best I've ever experienced, lag wise and accuracy wise too. Digression aside, I agree, online shooters in general will always have customizations, custom servers, and all that, the unification of which will always be a good thing for the player base - but the removal of content is rouuuuughhhhhhhhhh and whack. real whack.

This phenomenon first rankled me in Team Fortress 2. Now I love TF2, and lots of things were added over time, to the point of being the first instance of some neat (randomly dropped player cosmetics in multiplayer FPSes!) and less neat (pay us $2.50 to open this loot box you got!) ideas.

The problem was that, after a certain number of changes, the game just stopped feeling like TF2 to me, in a Ship of Theseus situation. If I dropped the game for a few months and came back, I was greeted by five or six new weapons I had no idea what they did. Because every class had so many more options now, the elegance, and (for me) the readability of the game was hurt. When a Demo turned a corner, was he going to use his normal kit? Or the other explosives? Or just run at me with a broadsword?

Funnily enough, after years of being turned off TF2, a couple friends and I hopped back in for a couple rounds last week. Coming at it fresh, it didn't feel nearly as different as I remembered. But, regardless of how valid or not those initial feelings were, TF2 was absolutely the first time I remembered being overwhelmed and turned off by a game's live service.

...and then I look at Destiny and can't even comprehend playing that thing without being overwhelmed at all the menus and constant new updates.

@lapsariangiraff: What if the real Team Fortress 3 was just Team Fortress 2 but later? Did I just blow your mind? I'm sorry if I did. I didn't mean to (yes I did.)

Destiny 2 is just a wild clusterf$@( of a game. They built the first game but found that they made too many mistakes to allow them to manage the assets so instead of continuing to build on it they made a second game.

The second game also proved unmanageable and their solution was to cut big chunks that people had paid for out of the game and in the process render the story unfollowable for new players.

AND IT'S SUCCESSFUL.

Truly we live in wild times.

I have a personal grudge against Destiny because I feel like I wasted a bunch of time in the first game, and that it was full of player unfriendly crud like their refusal to matchmake their best content and the absolutely bonkers Grimoire cards system (which I could have accepted on its own terms if it were possible to view the cards in the game, which, remember, it wasn't!)

Then Luke Smith made his famous statement about throwing money at the screen and I turned on Bungie permanently.

But if you look at Destiny 2 objectively it's still a wild thing.

That's just not true. Every cartridge battery will eventually die. Every CD and DVD has a limited life span. All optical disc lasers will eventually die. Physical media is not future proof by any stretch of the imagination, and at some point in the not too distant future a majority of old games and consoles will no longer function through no fault of any user.

@ll_exile_ll: Sure, but my point is, they don't all fail simultaneously.

True, but every SNES and PS2 game has been dumped/ripped and they exist as perfect digital copies in so many different places that they're now preserved forever. The lifespan of the original media is no longer relevant.

Obviously this sort of thing gets much more complicated with digital-only games and huge day one patches, but even there, people are figuring out how to dump updates from digital stores and preserve them.

@frytup: @goosemunch:

The point is, at the end of the day it's up to fans and preservationists to keep this stuff alive. Whether it be because of a server shutdown or disc rot, all games are equally at risk and will rely on fans to keep them alive in the long term.

@ll_exile_ll: I don't agree that all games are equally at risk. Huge difference between a DRM-free game on GOG vs. an exclusive game on Stadia, IMHO. Though it's indeed up to fans to make responsible platform choices to ensure that DRM-free storefronts are financially viable and preservation is possible.

@ll_exile_ll: Yeah, it's up to fans to preserve but you are still missing the point. Physical doesn't all magically go away a certain date in a cloud of smoke while digital could die instantaneously if the game was always online or require some check against an online server that no longer exists.

@bleichman: Always online is not a matter of physical vs. Digital. There are lots of physical discs for games that always online, like Destiny.

Authentication checks can also apply to physical games as well as digital, as we've seen with some of the recent PlayStation news.

So neither of those is actually a distinction between physical and digital. That's about the hardware and the game's design.

@bigsocrates: Yeah, you're right. Didn't think of that.

There are pros and cons to both. Digital games are often at the mercy of publishers bothering to keep them alive, true, but they can technically last forever. Nothing will stop a disc from rotting after a certain amount of time.

Between digital and physical games, digital games have the potential to last a lot longer. The only problem is when access to a digital game is lost, it's due to decision makers at a game companies either being negligent or malicious, so it feels worse emotionally than the simple fact of hardware failing due to age.

Bottom line is you're either at the mercy of the lifepsan of physical media or corporate decision makers, there's no escaping the issue of games have a ticking clock.

@bigsocrates: good read as always.. i do wonder where we will be in 20 years or so, because when you think of it game preservation started because a bunch of older gamers wanted to play the games they grew up with. I know there is more to it then that, but they believed these games to be important and worked to save them for future generations.

When we get 20 years from the release of dirt 5, are we going to have the same flux of older gamers who want to relive those glory days? I would honestly suspect not, gaming has changed so much now that i dont know if the nostalgia will be there for the ps3 to ps5 era. Just a hunch, and there will certainly be some people who miss it, but even fewer then i think todays crowd. Thats not to say that it isnt important to preserve these games, but i wonder if in doing so people will really be that involved in the minutia that gets recorded.. if 20 years from now you can boot up a preserved dirt 5, it will be more amazing that it works regardless of which splash screen it uses.

How long does the optical media used for games last anyway? Hopefully at least 10,000 years. Otherwise, I have some old classic games in my attic that might just fade away. How disconcerting.

There are many factors, including but not limited to:

• The type of disc (CD, DVD, BD, etc.)
• The type of materials the disc is made out of (cheaper discs won't last as long)
• The environment your discs are stored in

There are many different numbers floating around, but all seem to agree that DVDs and BDs should last a minimum of 30 years. It's possible the best discs kept in optimal conditions could last significantly longer, but 30 years seems to be the baseline.

A great read as always @bigsocrates

I agree and dont have too much to add other then to share a long winded and parallel story in the opposite direction...

This recent conversation on the preservation of gaming sparked my own curiosity and I learned that my old jam Black and White 2 is not available digitally anywhere. Dont panic, I say, You own the CD-ROMs of this game. So I call up my Mom and she searches her crawls space for an old box of games that never made the big move with me to the Arctic. Turns out she could find the elusive CD key and all four discs. Naturally pretends she cant and colludes with my wife to surprise me.

None the wiser I give up only to find a copy of Black and White 2 on my desk after coming home from a work trip.

Success! I then go to install it into my computer... with... no... disk drive...

I can solve this. I go and pick up a cheap USB disk drive for 25 bucks. I'm back in business. Install the disks and fire up the game - DRM error. I investigate further. Turns out the type of DRM that Black and White uses hasnt been included in a build of Windows since VISTA. No way around it without Pirating.

TLDR; Even if you have the physical, Gone-Gold copy of older games the march of time can still take it from you.

@ll_exile_ll: Neither digital nor physical will last forever unless copied to other media (hard drives die too, just like discs) and at that point you're emulating or using a hacked system so there's no real distinction between physical and digital anyway. It's all digital in the end (except carts with helper chips, which are a bit more complex) so there's no true distinction. You can play PlayStation 1 games, which all came on disc, off a flash cart or hard drive. The only question here is how long the authorized version will last.

@imunbeatable80: Thanks. I'm an old so I don't claim to speak for the kids, but game preservation has always been something that only a small number of people cared about so I'm not sure that will change. I think that PS3 and Xbox 360 gamers are already nostalgic, but I'm less certain what PS4 and Xbox One nostalgia will look like. It will exist because nostalgia already exists, but for kids who grew up with Minecraft and Fortnite will they care about the older versions? Fortnite changes so rapidly that it's hard to have enough attachment to any one version for there to be nostalgia for that. It's also not really about the game in the way that even something like WOW was (that's a game that has changed a lot where people have tons of nostalgia for its original form.)

That being said, there are people into preservation now who care about what I would consider insanely detailed levels of minutia. Like if the second print run of a game fixed a couple typos that were in the first people want to make sure both are preserved. So it's hard to say. As to whether anyone will have nostalgia for Dirt 5 specifically...probably not many. It's not a game that provokes passion in people. It's also not a game that likely did well among kids, and that's where nostalgia is really built.

@junkerman: You mean you didn't keep a Windows Vista machine around for just this occasion? Dude you just outed yourself as a filthy casual.

I'm sorry that happened. It sucks when DRM hurts legit purchasers more than pirates, but it happens quite frequently.

@bigsocrates: yeah, i just think of the changing environment around games, which we have talked about before. Games media has changed, the advancement of the internet, even twitch means that kids dont experience games the same way we did growing up. Now i'm no scientist, but i wonder if sitting and stewing with a game for months like we had to, pouring over monthly magazine articles, or drawing our own maps and notes create a stronger attachment (and thus longer lasting nostalgia) then kids these days.

Obviously thats not to say some kids dont play one game for months (see fortnight), but having access to constant information about the game, being able to watch someone else play it on demand, and access to playstation + and game pass, makes me question if nostalgia will be that strong for kids today.

Linking back to preservation, there are people that care about the minutia and preserving all games, but i also wonder when they pass the torch to the next generation, if it will be the same. Its like getting a new job, first you learn exactly what the previous person did, and then as you get comfortable in the role you start making changes, and is one of those changes going to simply be preserving the "most updated" version of a game?

All of this is hypothetical of course and we wont know until the time comes.

This is a more obvious problem now. But it's been a problem from the start. And arguably a much more pernicious problem with older games, where there was less awareness of changes between versions (then and now).

I've seen a few talks from the "Play It Again" project at PAX Australia and related events and they've discussed at length what it actually means to 'preserve' a game if a lot of the context of its release is lost. eg. To what extent is something like Zork 'preserved' if you play it in a browser window rather than a late 70s dumb terminal?

Another example occurred on this very website where there was a recent, excellent, series where Ben Pack played the "Original Rogue". Except he didn't play the original, he played what was essentially the HD remaster for DOS released by Epyx several years after the fact. It didn't even have the '@' for the player character that is iconic for the entire genre.

I think this is a large part of why organisations like the Video Game History Foundation or more academic efforts are more interested in preserving cultural ephemera and artifacts around the culture of videogames than just the games themselves.

I think about this a lot, and I think you summarised it really well. Ultimately I think it's an impossible problem to solve - I can't play the first Destiny in the way it existed during that first year (heck, I can't do that with Destiny 2, either). But in some ways that's the trade-off of having a live service game, and I wouldn't trade the experiences I had playing them in the moment for something inherently more "preserveable" - some things are very much of the moment, and as such can only truly exist in that moment.

It's a more difficult line to tread with less explicitly "live service" games, as you bring up with your Dirt 5 example. I like the idea of retaining games in their old formats but it certainly becomes a tough ask. Some games offer it in their Steam options, or in-game, which I always appreciate even if I barely use the feature. It's why I like to push for the likes of playthroughs and YouTube walkthroughs of games - it's maybe the best way to preserve experiences that change over time. I can go back and watch videos of Spelunky 2 from before they dramatically changed one of the mid-boss encounters, if I want to reminisce on how that changed over time after release.

@imunbeatable80: It's definitely true that kids these days are unlikely to obsess over single games the way we did because there are many more games available and they are much easier to get. It's unlikely you're going to find a kid who has the equivalent experience of their Gamgam getting them Kickle Cubicle for their birthday and them playing that over and over because it's the only new game they have for 6 months and loving it with all their heart until someone comes along years later to claim it's barely better than Adam's Venture: Origins and basically say that their dear departed Gamgam probably never even loved them if she got them such a mediocre game.

Of course according to Jim Ryan all old games are worthless so...

But anyway, modern kids engage with games differently. But they are also more likely to play the same game for many years and have social experiences with those games. A lot of kids grow up playing Minecraft and Fortnite together these days. And even when you have lots of options and variety you still have favorites you are nostalgic for. I had virtually unlimited access to books as a kid because my parents would buy me as many as I wanted and I could go to the library etc... but I still had favorites I am nostalgic for.

I do think there will be preservationists in future generations. Look to books as an example. There have always been people who collected first editions of books even though they're old tech and people had free access to them for a long time (through libraries if nothing else.) Media has an impact and there are always young collectors.

@magnetphonics: Obviously it has always been an issue, but even when there were prior editions in the past at least they were all released as individual physical items that could be tracked down and archived. All digital versions are much tougher.

Obviously you can never recreate the circumstances under which a game was played, and that's important, but I think of collecting things like marketing materials as more about academic preservation of game culture than game preservation per se. It's still valid (and I've donated to such efforts) but it's more complicated. Even with that stuff you can never truly recreate the feeling around something like Mortal Monday and what it was to encounter that marketing and momentum at the time. In theory you can play Mortal Kombat in its various versions and still experience what they were like, even without that context, just like we can read older books despite not being in the culture context where they were released.

Ben and Vinny just picked a convenient version of Rogue to play and I think were better served by it for what they were doing. I don't think the goal was preservation it was just to experience the game. And I think that even remasters and the like do that pretty well. That's part of what makes this topic complex. Is Dirt 5 in its current form still Dirt 5? Pretty much, yes. Is there value in preserving a version with the prior splash screen? Not for 99% of potential uses. But then there's that 1%...

@y2ken: On the one hand I agree with what you wrote. On the other hand there are people who are going to want to play Vanilla Destiny some day and I'm sure there will eventually be private servers to let you do that. I also think that for something that changed as much as Destiny did there's value in being able to go back just to compare and see how it changed from an academic/game design perspective.

The PS5 version of Dirt 5 got an update around a month or so after its release which introduced slowdown that wasn’t present in the launch version.