I know Persona 4 as a special place in our hearts here on Giant Bomb, so I thought folks would like to know there's some strong indication that Persona 4 Golden could very well be coming to PC (via Steam) this very weekend (13th/14th June). Still not confirmed by there's a lot of strong evidence which Eurogamer detail in their article linked below. So what's your thoughts? Would you love to see P3Fes hit PC? Or even eventually PS5 Royale make it's way to the PC too.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-06-09-jprg-classic-persona-4-golden-reportedly-heading-to-pc-this-week

I'd be very very surprised to see P3FES get a port, since that's arguably the hardest to port of any game in the series. But if this is true I fully expect P5 Royal to get a port before long, since that seems like the far more obvious port than Golden.

This makes me so incredibly happy. I hope they add steam wallpapers, badges and stuff too. I rarely care about that stuff but for Persona 4 I'll make an exception and go all in. If this game has Steam Achievements I need to get 100%.

Naming my character Charlie Tunoku.

Playable Funky Student mod when?

Curbing my enthusiasm for a moment, I hope that the artwork supports resolutions beyond 720p; which was fine on a 5 inch OLED, but might be less than desirable on a 34 inch monitor. Also, dual audio would be nice just to avoid Chie's/Erin's more lispy linereads.

This would be really cool. I do hope they come to Switch as well, that would be my favorite place to play them. But trust me I'd be happy with PC alone.

It's too good to be true but there seems to be a lot of positive buzz about this being for real. It's my favourite game ever, so I'll buy it ASAP.

I have emulated the original at 1440p and even the PS2 assets hold up quite nicely. It'll look like a PS2 game but still look good.

The move definitely makes sense. The only way to play P4G right now is having a PS Vita, PS TV or emulation, with the first two being unreasonable if you only wanted to play P4G. I think this is a good move on Sega having their games show up on PC, like what they did with the Yakuza series.

With all that said, I hope they do something with the game like remastering or use higher quality assets instead of a straight up port because I don't think P4G will look that great when blown up on full screens.

Awesome! If it comes to PC I will definitely get it!

...is a Nocturne remaster too much to hope for?

@zeik: what is it about Fes that makes it hard to port?

@liquiddragon: It's a PS2 only game with all the problems that entails for porting to PC. It's certainly not impossible, but it's definitely more work.

That Eurogamer article mentions it popping up with a Denuvo support page which is...concerning.

@zeik: They could put it on PS4 if they wanted, though. They have that PS2 emulator they used to release a bunch of PS2 games on PS4 with trophies, like Jak & Daxter and Ape Escape 2 before they just...stopped for...reasons? I guess they weren't selling that well, but I think Persona 3 FES would, given the renewed interest in the series and the fact that there's literally a Persona 3 dancing game already on the series.

@zeik:o, I thought you were suggesting there were some special reason. They at least put P3 & P4 out on PS3 as PS2 Classics, tho I did hear some issues with save corruption if I'm remembering right. I can't imagine it'd be that hard to get P3 to run on a PC if the PS3 could emulate it reasonably well.

Persona 3 deserves an ultimate edition w/ all the P3P stuff in a home console ver.

@bigsocrates: I don't think those were really emulated. They were just straight up enhanced ports with higher resolution graphics and trophy support. Which is probably why they stopped doing it, if they weren't selling enough, because it actually required a modicum of extra effort.

The PS3 did the straight no-nonsense ports, but considering the PS3 originally came with PS2 backward compatability I assume it had some lingering architecture leftover that made that process simpler. And yeah, not every port was great.

Never could get into P4 myself but man oh man, did I laugh throughout Vinny's and Ryan's play through.

What surprises me, is that there's no word on a PS4 release. You'd think this would have been done years ago.

@zeik: That's not correct. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/01/unlocked-ps4-consoles-can-now-run-copies-of-ps2-games/

The higher resolution graphics were just achieved through upscaling and while trophy support did obviously need to be added there's no reason to think that took a lot of extra work. It's possible that for some of the games they needed to do some hand tweaking (this is true of Xbox 360 backwards compatibility on Xbox One, which also uses emulation) but the majority of the work is handled through emulation. These are not true ports, and as far as I've seen nobody has suggested they require a massive amount of work. Of course you still need to figure out licensing (which could be an issue for Persona 3 FES if there's something screwy with the music rights) and do QA testing, since not all games work with the emulator, so it's not as simple as shoving a ROM onto the system, but it's definitely not prohibitive.

Aha! Is this our chance?... to experience this majestic game on modern PCs? I actually just finished a rewatch of the ER recently so this is excellent timing.

WHAT.

i was once in the market for a PS TV with the EXPLICIT INTENTION of playing this game due to this website's adoration.

AT LONG LAST, IT WILL BE MINE.

Comin after all the surviving Vitas with a knife.

I've never finished any of the Persona's but if there was one that I played and enjoyed the most, it's definitely Persona 4 Golden on the Vita. To be able to play it again on PC and actually finish it would be fantastic. I still listen to the soundtrack to this day from Golden, soooooo good! I really hope this rumor ends up being true. I'm currently trying to go back and actually finish Red Dead Redemption 2 which is quite the undertaking. Add this and Persona 5 as games I need to finish, plus Last of Us 2 and Ghost of Tsushima coming up and I got a lot on my plate. I see Persona 3 mentioned glowingly a lot, would love to play that one if it was ever ported somewhere, not sure how the game play has aged though...

@thehende92: P3 Is not substantially different from 4 in how it plays. You have an entirely AI controlled party in that game which evolved into a much bigger hassle than is actually the case in the game itself.

Otherwise Persona has mostly just been making QOL changes since P3.

no don't devalue my PS Vita copy /sarcasm

If Danganronpa can be ported for PC, I'd think P4G should be a doable thing right?

It is out on Steam. Right now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113000/Persona_4_Golden/

seems kinda crazy they just dropped it without any fanfare.

@chronologist: Pretty sure it went up before they intended, as they were still trying to tease it during the PC show after it already went up.

Or maybe they just don't care. It is just a port that was already leaked after all.

I'm downloading a Persona game on a personal computer. Wild. The landfills are going to be overflowing with PSTVs and Vitas.

Oh its dual audio as well.

Neat.

Dual audio is cool, but I just want someone to mod in original Chie.

Irony of ironies, I'm beating Persona 4 Golden on Vita right this moment. Been playing since August. I think I'll still prefer it on Vita since I don't care much for gaming on PC, but I'm really glad everyone else gets a chance to play it.

@zeik: I've always felt original Chie was a case of "really trying her best" and it made it endearing after a while.

@efesell: Yeah, it's not like the best performance ever, but it's earnest and endearing. It's also still just the voice I most associate with character and I just can never get used to the new one.

I wonder if this is a way for them to start porting more of those games over or a really weird one time deal. It's strange to bring over P4 first, instead of P3 if they plan on doing more releases.

The steam forums are obsessed that the game has Denuvo in it and it remains the most miserable place on the internet to read.

@humanity: can’t start the show w the showstopper. You start w the ok one and work your way up to the best one. 😁

Oh, and I just realized that this opens the flood gates for people bitching about Persona 3, 5, and the Shin Megami Tensei games not getting ported instead.

This is why we shouldn't have nice things.

@berfunkle said:

...Wait, what?

I could argue otherwise, but that's a topic for another thread.

When the next generation of consoles overshadows the current generation.

@facelessvixen: Ack, my bad. Years ago, Vinny and JEFF did an endurance run of Persona 4.

@facelessvixen: That actually sounds about right.

Hope this leads to P5 going elsewhere. Also months ago Atlas has some survey out there asking fans what Persona games they'd want to see on Switch so I wonder if P4G will make its way there which I would honestly prefer to play it there but I'll take P4G where I can get now that I no longer have a Vita

Bummed they didn’t release Persona 3 FES alongside it.

I like Persona 3 way more than Persona 4. Though it is nice to get Golden off the Vita.

Both FES and P3P are easy as hell to emulate though on a half decent PC. And FES in particular (unlike P3P) looks great when paired with all the enhancements emulation brings. So it isn’t the end of the world I suppose. I doubt a PC port of Persona 3 would look any better than what an emulator can already put out unless Atlus commits to an actual remaster.

Dual audio meaning Japanese?

Really want OG Chie voice in this and I bet it'll get done by fans.

So have the graphics been improved for this release? Does it look like a Vita game running on a bootleg emulator or an actual PC game?

Thats great but wish it came out for Switch

Part of the reason it worked so well for Vita was the portability

90+ Hour Games are more suited to Portability. This is the same reason i never could beat Persona 4 on PS2 and why Persona 5 took me 5 months to beat.

I actually prefer the Golden Chie voice. Suits her character more. Chie from Vanilla sounded like a Woman from her mid 30's.

So how good is this port? Surprise ports don't exactly have the best track record and this is a new port from a company that has never, or has rarely, done PC ports.

@haz_kaj said:

I'll be that guy and say that Yui Horie is the superior Chie, just because.

@justin258 said:

Durante did a PC Port Analysis on IGN (not going to link here, just google it).

Seems to be a decent PC port, but there is artifacting in the anime cutscenes due to their low original resolution. Also the game seems to be coded poorly so it should be running way better than it currently is. Even on Durante's workstation machine he cannot go above 160 FPS @ 720p (even though it was expected to run close to 500+ FPS).

I actually just now found that. I rarely go to IGN but for whatever reason did tonight and saw it and was going to post it here. Link: https://www.ign.com/articles/persona-4-golden-pc-port-analysis

Also the game seems to be coded poorly so it should be running way better than it currently is. Even on Durante's workstation machine he cannot go above 160 FPS @ 720p (even though it was expected to run close to 500+ FPS)

The report also says that if you leave Vsync on and don't expect a framerate comparable to Quake III on modern computers, then it's actually pretty good. I don't think he meant to imply that it's poorly coded, more that it's weird they decided to call the API over and over and over again instead of just allowing it to run at insane framerates. The following paragraph is important to highlight:

However, there is a question of how much running into these limitations actually matters in the end for a game like P4G. Would it be nice to be able to run it at a locked 240 FPS? Yes. Is the basic capability of running at greater than 60 FPS at all more than I expected going into this? Yes again. So if, perhaps, the development resource decision was between making the game work at arbitrary framerates, and optimizing the drawing scheme, then I would very clearly say that the right decision was made.

In my personal case, I'll be playing this game on a TV and not a PC monitor so that doesn't matter all that much. In a more broad case, refresh rates higher than 144 are expensive, higher than 165 are rare, and I don't know of any consumer-level product that has refresh rates higher than 240. Being unable to run a turn-based RPG at higher than 160FPS doesn't really sound like a problem to me.

Anyway, yeah, what we appear to have a is pretty good port of Persona 4 Golden for $20, $25 if you want the soundtrack (and why wouldn't you get that!?).

I hope somebody comes up with a mod to put in the vanilla voices for Chie, Teddie and Kanji. I don't think I will play it anytime soon without something like that. Of course, Golden probably has new lines not in the original to consider, but after buying the game on Vita and playing a little with the new voices, I decided to put it down. Just have too many good memories of those characters from my play-through and the endurance run to hear them as strangers. The P4 endurance run is still my favorite thing ever from Giant Bomb.

@nathhaw: Kanji is still the same, Troy Baker is not replaced until after Golden.

exactly. god damn. we finally got persona on pc folks.

@colourful_hippie: Its an absolute no brainer. Hopefully this finally gets the floodgates open on ports. SEGA/Atlus is leaving so much money on the table.

@efesell:

Thanks for the correction. Yeah, probably didn't get that far, but I heard somebody say in a forum today that Kanji was changed too. Maybe they were talking about a game after Golden.