Well, what a night it was. Last night at 11pm, Sony officially announced the PlayStation 4. And here is the breakdown of the entire thing:
- It is a 8-Core AMD CPU codenamed “Jaguar”. That’s right folks. It’s a x86 processor. It also has a 2nd processor to manage uploads and downloads.
- 8GB of GDDR5 Graphics – This is F***** Ridiculous. 8GB! Holy Moly! That is one powerful GPU. It beats the hell out of the new nVidia GeForce Titan (sp) that was announced last week. A powerful consumer level graphics card on the market has a max of 2GB GDDR5, so to see that quadrupled is absolutely insane.
- It comes with a 6x Blu-Ray Drive (which is 3 times faster than the PS3 drive)
- A HDD (We don’t know of the size yet) and USB 3.0 (That’s kinda cool).
- A new controller. It now has a Touchpad, a ‘Share’ Button and even a lovely ‘Options’ Button.
Now that most of the console stuff out of the way. Let’s get onto the games.
‘Knack’ was the first game to be announced for the PlayStation 4. Not much is to said about the game at this time, but from the trailer. it looks great.
New “Dashboard” XMB
It will now do a “Purchase and Play” system. If you purchase, you will be required to download a bit of the game to get started and then while you are playing the game, the rest of the game will download in the background. This is already in World of Warcraft, where you have to download a bit of the game and then you can download the rest while you play. I like this idea very much!
A new feature which has been added is “Streaming Games” but not as you know it. Thanks to Gaikai (A OnLive like clone) that Sony bought last year , users can now broadcast themselves gaming to their friends and even create highlights that can be shared to social media sites like Facebook and YouTube. While this is great and all, this won’t work that great for users in Ireland as we have crap internet. Hell, I even wrote a post about how much Irish Internet still sucks. You can read that here.
Your friends can now help you if you are stuck in a game. They can essentially “remote” into your PlayStation and start playing the game for you. This seems brilliant if you are not living near your friends or something. Well done Sony on introducing this.
You can also ‘Remote’ Play games using it’s companion device….the PSVita.
They are calling this new system “PlayStation Cloud Service”. This looks to be very intriguing and I hope to see more about it at E3 this year (Side note here: I will be covering everything to do with E3 2013 from June 11th to June 13th. LiveBlogs (like last night) will be happening for the 3 major companies (Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft).
We got a quick look at some gameplay of the new KillZone: Shadowfall. The graphics just look soooo pretty. What I wonder is, with this technology that Sony has now, what are games going to look like in 12-24 months time. This looks too good to be true.
We got a look at a new racing game IP known as “Drive Club”. Now, normally whenever a racing game is debuted at a event like E3, it always looks pretty. You swear that you were looking at a real car. That’s how crazy it looks. Right down to the stitching in the car! If I was to buy a PS4, I would constantly have the rainbow drool meme face. You know the one that I am on about.
Next up, we got a look at inFAMOUS: Second Son. At first, I thought this game was Watch_Dogs, but it wasn’t (That is coming in a bit) and the game looked great. I have never played any of the inFAMOUS games, so I might try and pick up the 2 games for PS3 and start playing the series.
The Witness is one of those “WTF” games. It’s a open world game with puzzles. Can anyone else say “Myst”? Yeah, this game is like Myst, but hey, it looks great and that would be a game that I could play and actually have fun with. Last night, during the Live Blog, I called this “Fort Boyard: The Game”. It still…kinda is that but without that Leslie Grantham dude. He put the fear of god into me a child.
MediaMolecule (The Creators of LittleBigPlanet) came on to demonstrate their new “sculpture” making program that uses the Move (Yes, it works on the PS4) and that renders in realtime which looks absolutely brilliant I hope that comes out as a actual game and that was we seen was not a tech demo.
Capcom came on and showed a tech demo…Nothing to report on that
Capcom also announced some game called “Deep Down” (Working Title) that looks like a Skyrim/Monster Hunter. It’s Capcom, what do you expect.
Square-Enix came on and showed their latest breaking innovative tech demo and…we…are..all…like…???! Square-Enix just showed us “Angi’s Philosophy Final Fantasy” from last June that we seen right before E3 2012 happened. But they didn’t call it anything. The video just said “Square-Enix”.
Then the “Final Fantasy Brand Manager” came on stage to announce that they will be making a announcement on the new Final Fantasy game later this year (E3). Well, that is going to be 1 of 3 things. 1) Final Fantasy Versus XIII 2) Final Fantasy XIV that people have been waiting for for ages or 3) Final Fantasy XV (I hope this one actually happens).
Ubisoft came on stage to show us “Watch_Dogs” which still looks amazing even though it is the same thing that we seen at E3 last year. Nothing new to note here.
Then out of nowhere, PC Master Race developer Blizzard comes out on stage and announces that Diablo III is coming to PS3 and PS4. This would be the first time that a newer generation Blizzard game is coming out on a console. I will be looking forward to that when it releases.
Now, when Activision came on stage, I thought to myself “This is going to be the new Call of Duty announced”. But then I realized that A) Infinity Ward is going to make the announcement at CoD XP and B) It’s too early to talk about the new Call of Duty title. They came to talk about Destiny.
These 4 dudes. The saddest looking people in gaming. I am serious. Look fun for the camera. FFS. You don’t need 4 dudes to stand on the stage while one of the them tells you a bit of information about the game that you already know from watching the trailer last week. You will see more of Destiny (probably a first gameplay demo of it) at E3 2013.
And that was about it.
There was no price, no release date set and we never seen the console itself. All we know is, it’s happening and it’s already started.
My opinion: I am not going to purchase this console on Day 1 yet! They are pushing the useless Social features that you are never going to use on it. We seen 2-3 good games, but again, this was only the announcement of the console. We weren’t expecting any games to appear here. let’s hope that at E3 this year, they will allow us to see the goods and actually demo it. I am not going to E3 of course, but it would be lovely to go to.
Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this piece and I hope to see you sometime for another post mortem of a announcement. 🙂