Debate of the Day: Playstation 4

sony4

In case you’ve been living in a black hole the past 24 hours, you’ll know that Sony debuted Playstation 4 last night. Well “debut” may be a strong word. They announced that it existed, that it will have good graphics and that a lot of people will make games for it. They did NOT in fact show the system itself (but they did show the controller?) and there was no price given.

For a moment by moment account of the presentation and my thoughts on it, you can read through my lengthly liveblog here. But now, I want to hear from you. What did you make of the presentation if you watched it? There is some stuff to discuss. We saw a lot of potential games for the project from Killzone: Shadowfall to Infamous: Second Son to The Witness from Jonathan Blow. We heard an awkward announcement that a Final Fantasy game is coming to the system, with no more information.

The system has no boot up time at all, you can do Wii U style remote play using PS Vita synergy, and you can play games as you download them. Of couse, this still leaves a whole bunch of questions, but what do you think about what you’ve seen so far? Was the press conference worthwhile or a waste of time?

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11 Comments

  1. I watched a little of the awkward as all hell presentation (the more I watch these things the more I wish they would hire some real presenting talent, I don’t care who actually came up with the idea. Not every game/console/platform requires a cult of personality surrounding it; Gaben.)

    The one thing that really stood out, and scared the crap out of me, was all the junk about social gameplay and online play. I prefer my games one player by a wide margin. I don’t want to rely on other people for my fun times, let alone the inherent frustration of lag, dropped connections and crappy hosts to have a fun time.

    If they can give me a great single-player offline experience, I’m down like James Brown. Unfortunately, this presentation wasn’t geared to people like me at all. To be fair however, I only really saw the guy talking about letting your friends take over “in the hard parts” (WTF?) and playing games as they download (something I’m surprised to realise I’d never noticed, and will now frustrate me), along with the love-in about their new social platform.

  2. Show the console. How hard is it to present the actual dang console on stage? What Is it made from dead baby fetuses and goat hearts? Does it emit high levels of gamma radiation? Show me the actual product you are selling Sony!

    Even better just have a TV on stage then have a couple of guys walk out and hook the new console up to said TV and start playing actual games! Tech demos mean jack $%!^ to me and after the Aliens Colonial Marines fiasco I imagine the smart consumer feels the same way.

    Show the product on stage doing what its made to do and I will buy in a heartbeat if it looks good.

  3. I’m not a console gamer so I don’t know if it’s possible for me to get excited, but it looks like a pretty powerful system, so that’s good. Honestly I wouldn’t want much more than that, the social media stuff wouldn’t be necessary for me. Killzone doesn’t look that impressive, graphics are great I guess but I want the new power to be invested into new innovations as well, and Killzone looks like an unimaginative shooter to be honest.

  4. I have absolutely NO interest in the social gameplay. None. I will never use the share button; I have no PSN friends, I don’t use Facebook, I’m not interested in what others are playing, and have no interest in anyone “spectating” me.
    I am not interested in remote play, I will never buy a Vita, I’m not interested in Move. I just want to SIT on my ass, with a NORMAL controller, and play my game. And speaking of games…not a single one shown last night interested me. At all.
    I’ll just stick with my PS3 thanks.

  5. Wow, SOCIAL gameplay! What a novel concept! Ohmagawd I’m like SOOOOO excit….[snore] Show me the games or go fuck yourselves, Sony and Microsoft. You’re driving me into Valve’s arms before you’ve even gotten to the starting line. At this rate when my 360 kicks the bucket or I get bored of it, I’ll just buy a PS3 rather than a next gen console. Nobody is showing me a goddamn thing to get excited about other than Bungie.

  6. Oy vey, people ranting about the social features is starting to turn me off. I have zero plans to ever use them but I don’t begrudge their existence, some people love that kind of stuff. They love posting videos of their gameplay, seeing other’s videos, etc. Sony would be idiotic to just ignore that.

    That aside, I didn’t see the debut myself but I’ve been reading about it all day and I’m happy with what I hear, particularly on the games and power front. This definitely seems like it will blow WiiU out of the water, so it makes me concerned that 3rd parties AGAIN won’t develop for Nintendo. I don’t need another system gathering dust. I want to know if PSN is still free and if the price is reasonable. If both of those are good, I’m going to be planning to get me one of these. Well, unless Xbox is super-impressive, but, it will probably be a PS4 for me.

  7. It looks like exclusivity is going to be even less of a thing this generation, since everything will be running on PC parts its safe to assume that porting between systems is going to be even more easy. Undoubtedly that was part of the reason for choosing an x86 CPU. There will be exclusives, just not to the extent that there were.

    I’m amused they refer to the system as a ‘SUPERCHARGED PC’ Considering the guts aren’t very high end. – Jaguar is equivalent to an atom CPU. It’ll still serve well, but I think its important to look past the marketing talk.

    The thing that excites me most (as primarily a PC gamer,) is the memory, as that has the greatest influence on other platforms. Many games have been designed with keeping in mind that the consoles it would be running on only have half a gig. There is a reason they haven’t been able to put decent textures in games for years and years (with some exceptions) but now this will help alleviate that. I also seem to think it is a bit more ‘futureproof’ than half a gig was for the consoles back when they decided to go with that.
    It also has the potential to make 64-bit executables more mainstream, as now there are only a handful of games that employ them (as PC is the only one system that supports 64-bit atm.) even under 4GB of memory , running 64-bit can have its advantages, so it’s a big win for everyone.

    People disappointed with the presentation yesterday should brace themselves for more disappointment, as there is no reason to assume that MS will do anything wildly different (the biggest difference will be the window dressing) the New xbox is going to have similar specs to the PS4, the difference being it will be running windows 8 (possibly some Xbox-variant of it.)
    Guts-wise, Basically we’ll all be running PC’s, with locked-down specs or otherwise, it’s just a matter of the software on top and what it offers.

  8. Did I hear correctly that my downloads on the PS3 will not transfer to the PS4 and that backwards compatability is a no go? That probably turns me off the most.

  9. Very meh. I don’t care about posting scores to FB. I don’t have enough online friends to jump in and out of games. I don’t really even want social interaction with stupid 12 year old kids.

    This reminds me of some of the terrible cell phones right when the first Iphone came out that had dedicated facebook buttons…

  10. For me, I didn’t see any games that would interest me enough to justify buying the system, and I have been gradually moving away from console gaming because I have a much better PC that can play things like Planetside 2 on high graphics settings. You can’t really compare pc spec to console, as the architecture is very different but I still prefer the versatility of my PC to the limited capabilities of a console.

    It doesn’t really appear that PS4 has anything new or particularly different to offer with it’s social functions and share button. These are all things that have been around a while on PC and people aren’t really impressed that consoles are finally catching up. I am also one of the gaming hermits that don’t use things like social functions very much.

    The lack of backwards compatibility is very concerning, as I would expect that the games I purchased for a less powerful machine should work in a better machine. I have heard that PS4 will include a game streaming service and possibly inserting a valid cd for a PS1/2/3 game would enable streaming for free. That would be ok, but knowing gaming companies, I don’t think they would bother to put that in place if they can force everyone to rebuy their games again online.

    Also, the play-while-downloading thing is really gimmicky. If you really can’t wait a few minutes for your game to download then download speed is the least of your problems. I have downloaded a few games on PS3 and really I just played something else until the game finished DLing.

    The touchscreen in the controller seems gimmicky as well. How are you supposed to use that in addition to normal gameplay functions? It seems like it would be limited to just menus and non-gameplay functions. Maybe I’m wrong but it doesn’t seem like a very useful position and probably won’t be very easy to use. Why does it even need a touchpad anyway? Are any games being developed that could use this? I find touchscreen things difficult to use precisely anyway so I wouldn’t probably enjoy losing a game because I can’t use the touchpad easily.

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