Sony
held a 2 hour press event in which they announced and discussed the next PlayStation, PlayStation 4. I was
actually surprised that Sony went
with the title of PS4, since in Japan
4 is associated with death (kind of like how in the west 13 is an unlucky
number); I didn’t think they would want to associate their brand with death
because it doesn’t really inspire confidence.
That being said Sony went on
to show off their new controller with: a touchpad in the centre, motion control
like in the PS3’s controller (although
it wasn’t referred to as six-axis), a change to the shape of their L2 & R2
buttons, a big bright light on top for motion tracking and to clearly indicate
player positions (blue light = player 1, red light = player 2) and the removal
of the START and SELECT buttons for OPTIONS and SHARE.
The SHARE button might be the thing that I
found to be the most interesting about the whole device. With it you can, at any time, pause your game
and enter a rudimentary theatre mode where you can cut a certain section of
gameplay footage from your session or pre-set it to something like the last 5
minutes and upload that to the internet.
You will not be able to upload these videos directly to Youtube, but Sony seems to have the intention of making their own social
community site where millions of gamers upload and share footage of their games
and interact with other players. You can
even live-stream your gameplay and invite friends to watch and perhaps give you
advice on how to get through certain parts.
If you want to show your friends how things are done you could not only
invite them to watch you, but you could also send them a video or if they grant
you permission, you can take over their game remotely and beat that boss they
couldn’t handle or discover that path they just didn’t see for them. The idea of remotely controlling someone’s
game is interesting (as well as a little terrifying) and I’m sure some people will
make good use of it, but I don’t know if it will be something that really
becomes all that popular. I worry that
there will be a lot of gamers who end up with relatives or friends constantly
badgering them when they are online to hop in and beat something for them. That being said if you can transfer funds
from your PlayStation account to friends one could make some extra cash by
helping people get through difficult or confusing sections for a small fee. I mean some people pay money for better items
in order to progress, why not just pay for a better player to get you through a
difficult part? I also want to point out
I will never pay someone to do this, I just thought it would be interesting if
this became a thing, sort of like gold farming in World of Warcraft. Lastly on
the subject of people controlling your game, they talked about the potential
for developers to find specific players (most likely through looking at your
uploaded video or perhaps anyone who earns a specific and difficult Trophy) and give them “director” status
allowing them to influence friends games, rather than just taking them over, by
dropping in items or perhaps highlighting certain paths. Even if this feature is possible and they
come up with an easy and clear way of give players this ability it is not
something that every PS4 game will
have as developers will have to specifically build this functionality in and
that seems like it would only happen on occasion or perhaps almost exclusively
form 1st party titles. Also I
find it doubtful that this “director” status will be available for any games at
launch or during the initial launch window.
Sony is also
focusing on a much more real-world friend oriented gaming network. You will still have a gamer tag that you use
when doing random matchmaking, but it sounds like they either want to integrate
sites like Facebook and Twitter or do something similar
themselves and give you more options for interaction with specific people that
you know and want to connect with. With PSN you can also background download and
download a small amount of data then begin playing a game or demo before the
download is complete. This is a really
cool feature that I’m excited about because it means I don’t have to see a
demo, decide I want it and then wait an hour to play it. Sony
said that every game will come with a trial on PS4 because of this ability and I hope that means that every PS4 title will be available for
download, so titles can’t just opt out of offering players a trial by just
sticking to retail. This is an
especially big deal in light of the Aliens:
Colonial Marines fiasco that has been talked about a lot recently. Unfortunately Sony did not mention if every game is guaranteed to be available
through PSN, nor did they say if
they’re even committed to making sure, let alone guaranteeing, that the
downloadable versions of games are available at the same time as the retail
release. One announcement that bothered
me and that I hope is an option that I can switch off is automatic downloads of
the PS4’s recommendations based on my
list of games. Not only are the Xbox
360’s recommendations in more than a few instances laughable, but I, like a lot
of people, have a cap on my internet service and I do not want my PlayStation downloading trials, demos
and trailers all day long because it thinks I will like them.
The PS4
has come out with a lot of promises and one that I don’t believe will ever come
fully to fruition is full backward compatibility with the past PlayStation libraries through online
streaming. Sony came out and said that it is their intention to one day be
able to offer players all PS1, 2, 3
& P games through PSN, so that you can play all your old
favorites. Backwards compatibility is an
import feature, especially early on and the PS4
is incapable of playing anything other than PS4
games when it launches. Sony makes a lot of money on HD
collections, so even if they did put their entire back catalogue online they
would charge you for those games you played in the past, with a possible
exception for PS3 games because your PSN account has a log of your
games. If they don’t charge you per game
it will be a subscription to their cloud gaming backlog that you pay monthly
for in order to stream as many different games as you want. Just to be clear, yes you are streaming them,
not downloading, not owning in any real way.
That being said I doubt they will even manage this as they failed to
make every PSP game playable on Vita like they said they would.
Lastly Sony
is still trying to garner interest in the Vita,
so now with the PS4 you will be able
to have the console run any PS4 game
and stream it to your Vita where you
can play it. Personally I wouldn’t want
to just leave my console on all day while I’m out so I can play (that reminds
me: PS4 will have a sleep mode so you
can save energy and then pick up right where you left off, the intention being
that you never have to boot up your console and wait a couple minutes to play
ever again) and I don’t believe that many people who have slow internet will
get much enjoyment out of the latency from streaming the video to the Vita and sending the button responses to
the PS4. I think this might help people who have a Vita enjoy it more, but I still think
that in order to sell the Vita it
needs its own original games like Media
Molecule’s Tearaway.
One thing that was confirmed after the press conference
came from Engadget who spoke to Shuhei Yoshida, Sony's Worldwide Studios president, who told them that PSN titles players have purchased will not
be able to make the jump to the new console.
The actual console was not shown during the
press conference, nor was any price point or range for it, but Sony did announce that the PS4 will be
coming out in the Holiday season of 2013.
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