PS4: Fourward

After months of speculation, Sony has unveiled the Playstation 4...sort of. While Sony unveiled a few games, partners, system features and tech, they never showed the box. While unimportant at this stage of the game, it was one of a few questions raised going through the show and afterwards. Some have been answered, others not so much. So let's run down the list of important features and announcements, shall we?


The Name: Playstation 4
While may proclaim that "Four" in Japanese is close to the meaning of "death" Sony threw caution to the wind of this fake myth by calling it the Playstation 4 or PS4 for short. I applaud Sony for keeping it simple and avoiding naming confusion like the Xbox 360 and Wii U.

The Dualshock 4
The leaks provided by Destructoid and later Kotaku were true, the Dualshock 4 will have a Move light on top of it, concave triggers, a larger d-pad, a touch-pad, wider handles, a headphone jack, a speaker and share/options buttons (replacing the Start/Select buttons). Overall I prefer the look of the prototype as it was more basic and had a Vita-like d-pad. The Move light looks like something out of Tron, so it sticks out in an unnatural way. The sticks look fine and the pad keeps its' traditional face buttons. It looks like it'd make a great replacement for 360 controllers on PC as well.

The Hardware
The PS4 will surprisingly have 8gb of GDDR5 ram, up from the rumored 4gb. This is a huge change since it not only matches Microsoft in terms of ram amount, but destroys them at the same time in terms of speed; Microsoft is rumored to have 8gb of GDDR3 ram, which is much slower. The CPU will be x86 based and the GPU will support 1.84 TFLOPS, up from the rumored 1.8. However the CPU will only have 8 cores from the rumored 12, showing a significant change in focus from the PS3, which is in-line with PC specs today in terms of design philosophy. It's a nice step up in power from PS3 and should be a lot easier to develop for, but this does come with a price.

No Backwards Compatibility
While not unexpected, it was announced that PS4 won't support PS3/PS2/PS1 games natively, but instead will be rolled in phases through Gaikai. With that, you will be able to stream older digital titles you buy instead of having native compatibility/support for these titles. It's a bad idea all around as streaming technology is nowhere near where it needs to be to work, especially for graphically intensive games. For older titles, it makes no sense to not have local support and is a slap in the face to long-time Playstation fans, especially when the system is more than capable of emulation PS1 and PS2 games locally.

Share
One of the buttons on the Dualshock 4 is "Share," which is a new PS4 feature to the hardware. The system will constantly record the last 10 minutes of gameplay for you, so you can upload screenshots and videos to various sites directly from your console. It's also possible for your friends to jump in from across PSN and help you out in spots that you get stuck in. These all sound like good ideas, but the implementation of it seems perplexing and very pie in the sky. They sound like ideas of local play but implemented through the internet, something that's novel for some things. But ultimately it seems like it could cause privacy issues as well as alienate many single-player gamers, especially since PS4 comes with its' own camera.

Not Kinect
During the Presentation, a new look Eyetoy was seen in Presentations and looks to be part of the final package. It features 2 cameras on a long bar that will keep track of your controller. It remains to be seen if you can be the controller or not, but it shows that Sony is up to its' old tricks again when it comes to "innovation" by using what others have and claim it as their own. For what purposes will it be used remains to be seen but it is disheartening to see.

Used Games
After the conference, it was confirmed to Eurogamer that PS4 will play used games. A truly positive note for once.

The Games
For the most part, the games were steps up from current generation consoles. I don't believe they were jumps people were expecting, but things like Killzone Shadow Fall, Infamous Second Son and Square Enix's laughable retread of the Luminous Engine were disappointing. The only bright spot was Capcom's internal engine tech demo of a game called "Deep Down" which seemed similar to Monster Hunter and Dark Souls. It's questionable if it was a target render or real time, but it was still the only thing worth watching as Watch Dogs, Ubisoft's initial gateway drug into Next Gen floundered with screen tearing and framerate drops. At least Sony teamed up with Blizzard for Diablo 3 on PS3 and PS4, right? Right? For the most important part of the show, nothing showed me why this platform is worth buying on Day 1, especially since my older games will have to be rebought if I want to play them.


Overall - 6 out of 10
Sony's conference was a lot of fluff. While it all sounded nice in theory, there wasn't much real world execution seen. I remain skeptical of next gen even more so than before. While developers have been given more power and tools to work with, it seems once again, before last gen, that not many are going to use these tools for anything other than pretty graphics. The cost of entry to PS4 remains a question, as well as the cost of the services they are proposing. If they are high, Sony may fail once again and be forced to bow out from a race that they were formally called "King."