[UPDATE] Renowned leaker billbil-kun has revealed that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is expected to launch on April 17, although early access will begin two days earlier for the Premium Edition. Pre-orders are scheduled to open on March 25.
[ORIGINAL STORY] The ESRB has published the official rating for the PlayStation 5 version of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, sparking inevitable discussions about the game's imminent debut on Sony's console.
This title went back and forth several times. It was already planned to go fully multiplatform in the beginning, but then Microsoft renegotiated the deal with Disney and Lucasfilm after its acquisition of Bethesda to make it a PC and Xbox exclusive. However, by the time the game actually got its final release date, Microsoft had shifted its policy toward multiplatform releases. At Gamescom 2024, it was announced that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle would launch in December for PC and Xbox and in Spring 2025 for PlayStation 5. The latest rumors point to a release on Sony's console sometime next month and today's finding of the ESRB rating certainly supports this theory.
MachineGames has already published a few post-release updates, although to be fair, the game was already great at launch, as I discussed in my review:
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is an excellent adventure/action game that features one of the best Indiana Jones stories, great level design that rewards exploration, and awesome ray traced visuals. This might just be the best game dedicated to Dr. Henry Walton we've ever seen.
Still, some of those improvements could come in handy for this new version. The game now supports fully ray traced shadows; moreover, the most recent update introduced support for path tracing on AMD (and Intel GPU) and AMD FSR 3 Frame Generation integration. Given that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle already featured a great ray tracing implementation on the Xbox Series X, it is possible the developers might push it even further on the PlayStation 5 Pro, which features several hardware-based ray tracing optimizations.
Could this game be the first path traced title available on the PS5 Pro? Maybe. When we floated the idea of path tracing for Sony's console in an interview with System Architect Mark Cerny, he remained cautious, adding that developers 'need to have a highly optimized strategy for doing it if you're going to do it on PlayStation 5 Pro'. Well, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is likely the most optimized path tracing game available right now, so there's no better candidate in theory. We'll see if MachineGames actually tries it or sticks with a more conservative enhanced ray tracing target.
