The Playstation 4 Topic

[Doctor Oak]

Sony is, without any shadow of a doubt, announcing the Playstation 4 this evening.

The live stream is available here from 11pm GMT tonight: http://chr.ms/ps4

Here's a bit of a rumour roundup from Gizmodo UK: http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/02/if-the ... l-be-like/

As usual for gaming announcement events like this, the chatroom will be taken over by the live discussion as the stream begins, so if you want in on the action, click the chat button up top and have the stream open in another window.

I don't have much to say about the rumours except that at the expected price, I'll have one day one. But don't expect any pricing announcements this side of E3 at the very earliest. Also, it's highly likely that our 'day one' will actually be around this time next year, while everyone else gets it at the end of this year. So, yeah, that's lame.

I'll post my actual thoughts after the reveal.

 

[Linkachu]

I'm having some difficulty summing up my thoughts on the PS4 reveal, likely because the live stream was so damn crappy and I barely caught half of what was said, but I rather liked this video:


I'll try to give some solid thoughts laters once I've had time to review all of the major news points in fuller detail.

 

[Sir Red]

For those that did not get a chance to see the Press Conference, here is the abridged version. Hits most of the major points.


Really though, I feel like this whole thing was kind of pointless. They held the press conference and didn't really show off anything or sell the console in a way that would make me need to have it. I feel Sony could have easily held off on this until they actually had more things to bust out and something concrete to really show off their system with.

I just got the feeling that they did this to try and one-up Microsoft and announce the PS4 before the 720(or whatever it will be called). Then again, this may just be the fact that I don't really care for Sony and I'm trying to find reasons to slight them. :V

 

[Demelza]

Won't lie and say I've ever cared for a console which wasn't Nintendo before, and likely never will, but this announcement made me curious nonetheless.

To me though, the Playstation 4 is nothing ground-breaking, it's just bigger and better than what has come before it. Plus most of the new, social, stuff they seem so focused on pushing towards us, while nice, would need a stable internet connection, which you aren't going to get in the middle of nowhere like I am.

It isn't awful, but again I don't see it as being ground-breaking or a must have console at launch. The Wii U wasn't either, mind.

 

[Doctor Oak]

Really though, I feel like this whole thing was kind of pointless. They held the press conference and didn't really show off anything or sell the console in a way that would make me need to have it.

I'd disagree. We don't need to see what the box looks like to learn a lot about what the system itself is.

As far as specs go, Sony have done a good job in making the PS4 a strong advancement over the PS3 and offering a competitive edge against PC games for a few years at least. The key player here is that 8GB of GDDR5 RAM - something you won't even be able to put in your PC without at least two graphics cards at about the cost of the PS4 each. The rest of the specs aren't much better than what's inside, for example, my PC - but the main thing is that they're custom built and optimised for performance in a single hardware use case. You could match the specs of the PS4 exactly and still come off worse on the exact same game on PC - and you likely would spend a fair bit more money doing it. As for PC players, the fact that PS4 is based on x86 architecture instead of the Cell processor is a massive boon that will benefit both platforms in terms of well done and quickly built multiplatform titles - which is easily the most important thing these days as most AAA titles are not exclusives any more.

The social aspect of the system is quite obviously the Miiverse concept played out properly by a company with an inkling more about how the world outside their own weird insular minds actually works.

The killer app, though, is going to be that cloud service provided by Gaikai. Being able to play full, free, instant demos of (hopefully) any and all games? Awesome. Being able to join in as a spectator or guest player in another player's game without needing the game yourself? A great option. A massive back catalogue available to not only your PS4, but the PS Vita you regret buying? Great.

The games are prettier (and, to be completely fair, also more capable in terms of AI and world building) versions of what's come before - yes - but what were people expecting? There was never going to be a generational leap like the last one again. The awkward stages of the '3D' era of gaming from the PS1/PS2's time have long since matured into well rounded, expansive games we've been experiencing in the past few years. These are gameplay experiences that could never happen before, but there's not really anywhere for them to go but "better, faster, harder, stronger", etc, etc.

The real advancements in gaming today are in how we play and interact with games. That's why Sony's move into a more social, always-on, space and the stride towards instant gratification with cloud gaming (similar to the same effect we get from playing online browser games or phone apps that take a mere couple of seconds to load rather than the time and effort of traditional media and gaming) all make a lot of sense in defining what the PS4 will mean for gaming in the next 5-10 years.

Now, the next Xbox will do a hell of a lot of this itself (and maybe more besides - though unless MS makes a snappy purchase of OnLive, the cloud stuff looks off the cards), which is going to make it pretty hard to place the Xbox and PS4 apart (again). Which is exactly why Sony made this announcement now, not at E3. The two consoles will almost certainly launch alongside eachother (in America at least) and Sony are fighting for the mindshare now that they lost to the Xbox last time by letting it release earlier and cheaper.

I enjoyed what I saw (through the God-awful stream) for the PS4 - and I'd almost certainly get one if it hit that sweet-spot of under £300 - but that doesn't mean I'm not also eager to see what the competition will be like. Ultimately, I will almost certainly end up with all three consoles again, and I am quite looking forward to the idea of having a console that can outpace my PC again (I've been avoiding console games a fair amount for the past year as a result of their falling behind), so it doesn't matter a hell of a lot to me whether Sony or Microsoft end up with the best of the best.

But, like I say, what I saw was enough to sell me on the capabilities of the system, and if it were coming out tomorrow at £300, I'd be first in line.

 

[Doubled]

While I am somewhat enthused for a new system, I really hope that they don't make the same mistakes that the PS3 made, like outrageous announcing price, fps games that are basically clones of each other, etc. I love that they are adding a bunch of new stuff, but I have a feeling that we'll be putting up with the same crap with the PS4.

Personally, I hope that they get some new exclusives that aren't characterized by what god they can kill or how many heads you can explode with one round. It kind of felt like the PS3 was trying too hard to feel grown up, I guess? I don't know if I'm making sense, but maybe somebody understands what I'm saying. Regardless I'll probably wait a year after its release to get one if I decide to.

 

[Linkachu]

I'm personally scratching my head at why Sony's being so secretive regarding the emulation of current gen PSN games on PS4. I understand them not wanting to invest time into disc-based backwards compatibility, but digital games too? That's a bit of a game changer for me. I wasn't too keen on purchasing another new console at launch to begin with but being unable to play my current PS+ games on the thing would definitely stay my hand. I'm very content to play through my PS3 games first and then buy a PS4 later when it has a bulkier library.

 

[Doctor Oak]

I'm personally scratching my head at why Sony's being so secretive regarding the emulation of current gen PSN games on PS4. I understand them not wanting to invest time into disc-based backwards compatibility, but digital games too? That's a bit of a game changer for me. I wasn't too keen on purchasing another new console at launch to begin with but being unable to play my current PS+ games on the thing would definitely stay my hand. I'm very content to play through my PS3 games first and then buy a PS4 later when it has a bulkier library.

The reason for it is the change in architecture from the Cell processor to the x86 architecture in the new AMD chip. It's the same thing as the issue with Windows 8 desktop and Windows 8 on the Surface RT. An app has to be built for that architecture for it to work, so x86 desktop apps won't work on the ARM-based Surface RT, and Cell PS3/PSN games won't run on the x86 PS4.

Sony's getting around the backwards compatibility issue with disc-games by offloading it onto the cloud. They could do this with PSN games, but it would never be as good as native and poses its own set of challenges.

My guess is that Sony would rather developers port their games to the x86 architecture and release them natively on the new PSN than give them the lazy crutch of putting it all through the cloud (which would lead to a fractured and frustrating market). Of course, the downside to this is that said work almost certainly won't be free for the end-user. Best case scenario is probably that they go Nintendo's route and ask you to pay a small charge to upgrade your existing purchase. But maybe it'd all be up to developers/publishers anyway. There is the benefit that almost all PSN games are also XBLA games, and all XBLA games are x86 games. Porting should be a relatively painless task on par with porting from Xbox to PC.

At any rate, more than the cost of bunging in the actual physical hardware for backwards compatibility (the only possible way of having any for the PS3 at all - meaning there'd literally be a PS3 motherboard inside the PS4 alongside its own), the actual physical architecture of the new CPU is the key thing standing in the way of even attempting emulated backwards compatibility. So it was just never going to happen. It sucks, but the benefits of the PS4's hardware to developers and thus to users can't be overstated, so it's definitely necessary. We can just hope that there'll be a decent uptake of porting PSN games and allowing us to keep our existing purchases available without extra cost.

It wouldn't be a terrible idea to keep that PS3 hanging around for a couple of years though. Especially if you've got a lot of purchased (not PS+) digital titles.

Personally, though, I don't. I think the only PSN games I actually bought were the Sonic Mega Drive games. 'Cos, Sonic. I'll invariably buy/get them again when they're released for the PS4 either way.

 

[Linkachu]

Makes a helluva lot more sense when actually explained. Sheds more light on why Sony's being rather hesitant about making official statements too. They may not even be fully sure yet which way they want to go.

Thanks, Alex. ~~

 

[Doctor Oak]

They may not even be fully sure yet which way they want to go.

That would seem to be the case with many things about the system.

It's not too surprising, really. The thing won't be into production until late summer at the earliest, so there's a fair amount of final R&D going on even now, after the announcement. I'd imagine that the final feature list is very dependent on what Sony can learn about Microsoft's plans. I can't see Microsoft cutting ties with existing XBLA content, though. There's no real point to it as the games should run on new Xbox hardware natively with minimal trouble. XBLA content, after-all wasn't designed as Xbox content, but built on its own XNA platform that's already portable across Windows and Xbox. For that reason, it seems likely that Sony will address the issue of the PSN games people have already bought when the time comes for those games to be ported across.

The finer details of that, though, are going to be made by people in suits, and that's probably why Sony's being as quiet as possible about the entire thing. A clear picture may not come about at all until launch.

 

[Fumanshu]

The controller looks good. The handles look more comfortable, the D-pad looks like the Vita one which is good, convex D-pads are a good idea and the buttons look unchanged which is a great thing because the playstation always had some of the best buttons on its gamepads.
Dont know about the triggers yet, the PS3 triggers were shitty as hell and only good for those that play racing and FPS games.
I dont care about the screen.

Gaikai sounds like a bad idea because it further removes control over our games. It also looks a lot like Onlive and something like that cant work properly with our current infrastructure.
I will have to read up on it as I dont know enough about it yet but it looks like bad news.

Backwards compability was a fad, I wouldnt expect it from many future systems. Its too expensive in the long run and its generally a better idea to keep the old systems.
Honestly I would prefer to save 100€+ and just keep my old stuff.

Specs are good. Power of the core is over. No more batshit insane alien architecture that nobody understands. Easy ports, easy development.
Ram is always nice for big worlds and loads of thing on the screen.

Share button is a great feature. Finally a proper screenshot feature for a console. Some games had it at some points but it was usually limited. Time to take some of the few postiive things from PC gaming.
Streaming feature is also very nice. I like to stream games to people that dont have the consoles I do or simply cant manage difficult stuff and this is extremely convenient.

I would like to see some games.