Well, it’s official: the PlayStation 4 is coming out this holiday season, but there is still lots of info to come in the next few months, so let’s look at what has been revealed so far.
First, a bit of a recap on the release of this info: About a week ago Sony released a video advertising a press conference on November 20 about the future of PlayStation. This conference was by invite only, though it was live streamed online – at a horrible quality that failed for me partway through. If you want to catch the entire presentation you can easily find it on YouTube. In the lead-up to this conference, Sony released a number of videos showing the evolution of the PlayStation brand, one each for the PlayStation through PS3, and another about the PSP and PS Vita. So in pretty much the worst surprise ever, Sony officially announced the PlayStation 4, focusing on its system specs (kind of), its new controller and camera system (kind of), network (kind of), and some of the new games under development. As you can tell from my description, the ‘reveal’ of the console definitely left something to be desired as they used a lot of buzzwords, pretty visuals and slides, but really didn’t give many hard facts.
First the hardware where Sony did a great job of making admitting defeat and following everybody else sound like they were being revolutionary. The PlayStation 4 features an integrated CPU and GPU to allow for increased performance through shared memory and resources. The overall system uses ‘supercharged’ PC architecture and features 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. The RAM increase is definitely a great improvement (the current PS3 only has about 256MB of RAM) that will allow for much more demanding games. The funny thing is that Sony was really proud of themselves for being revolutionary when they brought out the PS3 because it used a Cell style system that was partially designed by Sony. While the cell system has great capability it was a pain for developers to program for and still is. The industry has traditionally used the same style of coding for pretty much all games – you design a game for PC and it will work on an Xbox without requiring a complete re-write of the code – but not with the PS3. Developers had to completely re-write entire games to work on a completely different system architecture. So now you have Sony bragging about how they are going with a PC architecture to help developers unlock the system’s full potential – oh, so the same kind of system you ditched in the last generation for something revolutionary – welcome back Sony.
Another piece of hardware that was revealed was the new controller, which Sony pretty much had to show as pictures were leaked last week of the hardware. The cat was out of the bag and Sony had no reason to try and keep it a secret. The controller looks fairly similar to the PS3 controller (no attempt at another boomerang controller this time) with some minor tweaks to the controls. The analog sticks appear to have a concave top similar to the Xbox 360 controller, which should help with aiming so your thumbs don’t slide off anymore. Also, the triggers seem to be changed to flare outwards rather than tapering back, again this is similar to the 360 and gives better grip. The biggest difference in the controller is the replacement of the Start and Select buttons with a single Options button, a new Share button, and a capacitive touch pad. The Share button will integrate with the new community based features Sony is pushing for the new console, but more on that later. The touch pad is similar to the one on the back of the PS Vita and will allow for new gameplay mechanics. A glowing light has also been added to the controller to mimic the glowing light on the Move controller. This light is the new way to visually identify the player instead of the numbered LED on the PS3 controller, and can also be used to indicate when a message is received or when the character is low on health. Sony has also acknowledged that while Move controllers for the PS3 will work with the new system, the Dualshock 3 controller (and all 3rd party I would assume) will not work with the new system.
The PlayStation Eye camera is also getting an upgrade, with the new camera looking more like a cross between the Kinect and Wii sensor bar. The PS4 Eye contains dual cameras and four microphones which will be a huge gain for Move based gameplay. That’s another thing – Sony is pushing Move still, and it will apparently be even better with the processing power of the PS4 backing it.
Features of the PS4 focus a lot more on integrated networking and interaction with friends. The new PlayStation Network is being developed with a focus on video game streaming abilities. This will allow for games to be played while they are downloaded, or even through the cloud potentially. Sony is also pushing an instant-play functionality, where you can simply press the power button and the system will go into an extreme low power mode while caching your gaming session into memory. When you return you just start up the system again and you can continue from exactly where you left off. Additionally, most, if not all, of the PS4 games will be playable from your PS Vita, which should hopefully give consumers more reason to purchase the portable system. Part of this network sharing is integration with your friends and social networking, and that is where the Share button on the controller comes in. Press that button on you can post video or screenshots from the last few minutes of gameplay (it appears to be cached for a period of time to allow for recovery of the perfect screenshot). Through the new network you will be able to view live broadcasts of your friends playing their games, and even take over their controller if they need help (is it just me or does that seem kind of creepy). Sony is also pushing for more sharing through your real identity, not just a gamertag style identification. Potentially mining from your existing social networks (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) your profile will be based on your actual name and picture, with the gamertag remaining for times when you want more security.
As part of their presentation Sony showed off several games that are currently in development, including Kill Zone: Shadow Fall, Knack, Drive Club, Second Son, Deep Down (Working title from CapCom), Diablo 3 (coming to consoles from Blizzard), and Destiny (new FPS from Bungie). Knack is a platforming game similar in style to Ratchet and Clank, where your main character is a tiny robot that can use telekinesis to pick up items and weapons to increase its size. The sheer number of individual items that are rendered as components of the robot’s body show the processing power being used.
In a similar thread, Sony showed the development of video game characters through the years as the processing power increased and polygon counts for characters increased. A beautiful rendering of an old man showed the potential for character modeling using up to 30,000 polygons. Of course, the detail of a character is not the end-all be-all of showing emotion in characters. The story and characters have to be good, you can’t just increase their polygon count and assume it will suddenly make a boring character more emotive. Also, we are nearing the point where increased polygon counts are really useless. When you increase a character from 50 polygons to 500 you get a huge improvement, 500 to 5000 it is even better, but 5000 to 50,000 really isn’t noticeable, so why put in the effort? Of course you could theoretically render ten times as many 5000 polygon characters on screen, but the improvement to a single character is pretty much pointless at this point.
So you may have noticed that I didn’t comment on the appearance of the system, and there isn’t an accompanying photo of the system for the article. Well, that’s because Sony didn’t actually show the console itself, which is kind of weird. Pretty much everybody interested in the next generation of systems knew that the PlayStation 4 was in the works, there were plenty of rumours about system specifications and new games under development. The fact that Sony was backing down and returning to a PC architecture was also already known. The new controller was leaked a week ago, and there was plenty of speculation about what its capabilities were. So besides some details about the network (which is still rumoured to be using a paid system like Xbox Live), and actual confirmation of some specific games, Sony really didn’t deliver much. What would really have gotten people talking about the system would have been actually showing the system – what does it look like, what will it cost, and what is the actual release date? In subsequent reports, Sony executives confirmed that they haven’t even seen the finalized console, while the new controller was only finalized a couple days before the news conference. Another press release had some actual data on the system specs, showing that the system will feature an internal hard drive (capacity and user-replacement is still unknown), Blu-Ray drive (support for 100GB discs is unknown), USB 3.0, and HDMI output. Interestingly, the console will apparently support 4K ‘user content’ such as pictures, but games will not be offered in the new HD level.
While news outlets rarely give any attention to gaming (unless they are blaming some kind of violence on games) they likely would have given more coverage to the release of the PS4 if they could have actually showed off the console. Showing off the controller? Definitely not as interesting. Everyone had their eyes on Sony on November 20th, and they had the opportunity to really show off the new system, but they didn’t. Now they will likely wait until E3 to reveal the actual console, and it will be after this date that they can actually start advertising for the full launch (giving them a window of about four months). Sony had the opportunity to unveil the console and be the only real ‘Next Gen’ console in the news until Microsoft announces the new Xbox. Now they have lost the momentum they built, and Microsoft is going to benefit. Now that Sony has shown part of their hand Microsoft has the opportunity to plan an even bigger event (and maybe get the live streaming working better), show their new console, and steal Sony’s spotlight. Consumers are visual people and nothing sells a product better than an image of the actual product, not just a listing of some buzz-words and veiled specifications.
Microsoft is definitely planning the best reveal they can come up with, benefiting from Sony’s mistakes, and once again getting the opportunity to be the first console out of the gate (at least in terms of marketing) while being able to still view their competition. This will be a very interesting next couple of weeks as I am definitely expecting Microsoft to announce their own press conference within the next month. Until then, enjoy your current generation system, think about how you are going to be able to justify a new console (maybe you really don’t need some of those textbooks), and Keep on Gaming.
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