Updated: PlayStation 4 Becomes Reality

[Lord_Jaroh]

A useless system announced. Based on everything they announced today, I really hope that it flops big. The gaming industry needs one of the big ones to fail in order for it to truly recover, and actually start making games for gamers again.

I'll pass.

 

[Innegativeion]

So to recap; our only real "new features" are a built-in game recording system (really cool, but something that can be accomplished with 3rd party software fairly easily already), and the ability to play games pre-download. Basically only rudimentary software enhancements... that could probably have been conducted by updating PS3 software. I suppose maybe they made the processing upgrades necessary. Maybe.

That, and a new controller which... oh come on, who made this swollen, hornet-stung thing? Crab people?

And yeah let's just get this out of the way;

-A touchscreen with only visual feedback is difficult to make engaging, a touchpad with NO feedback is virtually impossible to make engaging.

-Nobody liked the facebook button on that one HTC phone. I don't see why people will like this one any more.

*snip*

To further support your point, eliminating a company's biggest competitor would not "push the nextbox to be even better" as that guy you're quoting suggests.

If anything Microsoft would be less motivated than ever to give 2 shits about hardware quality if Sony were out of their way.

It's why monopolies are generally frowned upon in government regulation.

 

[Fireprufe15]

Why would they put a netbook CPU in a gaming console? This makes no sense at all.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

I'm just waiting for info to confirm or disconfirm the "Used-Game-Blocking" rumors. Because if Playstation doesn't do it, there's no way in hell XBox WILL do it unless they want to send players flocking to their biggest competetor in droves.

I know I'll sure as hell be picking up whichever one doesn't block used games (assuming that one does and one doesn't).

Yeah... I went into this article hoping to hear about used-game-locking and backwards-compatibility.

Oh well... We'll find out eventually.

 

[Alistair_Darkheart]

8Gb of DDR5 RAM? That's INSANE!

you mean 8 gb of GDDR5 ram on the graphics card. still quite powerful but not uncommon.
the radeon hd 4870 series has GDDR5.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDDR5

Nope. Not GPU RAM. System RAM.

Your both right and your both wrong, its shared ram, used by the CPU/GPU

Hang on, they cannot both be right. DDR and GDDR are different in more ways than simply where they are soldered, voltages, timings, frequencies and such are different between them.

"GDDR5 is based on DDR3 SDRAM."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDDR5

Additionally, I am not sure that DDR5 ram exists, despite the existence of DDR3 based GDDR5.
I haven't even heard of DDR4 being released yet.

Edit additional: I am glad that they have increased the total level of ram in their system. We hopefully might begin to see continuous environments in bethsoft games.

Edit additional: DDR4 ram isn't finished yet, and its expected to be released for use in 2015, which makes the claims that PS4 uses DDR5 SDRAM pretty suspicious to me, its more likely they use GDDR5 which is modified DDR3 SDRAM.

Quoting for Truth.

Adam Jensen said something in regards to it being more powerful then computers at the moment... total and utter rubbish, for system memory, timing is far more important and considering GDDR5 (seeing as DDR5 isn't out) has rubbish timings at the moment, I'd certainly be avoiding it.

Al.

 

[RESURRECTION21]

Well, this was a huge surprise. Everyone already knew this was what it would be didn't they?

Now we have shinier graphics... Say hello to an era of games costing even more to develop, causing developers to only release the absolute blandest safest games in a never ending bid to still make money on the quest for completely unnecessary photo realism. Oh wait...

i know right why are some gamers looking foward to paying $10 or $20 more for a game that looks a tad bit better but plays the same as a game they can get now?

 

[el_kabong]

The gaming industry needs one of the big ones to fail in order for it to truly recover, and actually start making games for gamers again.

So, what about the PS4 presentation made you think that this is anything but an attempted improvement for a core gamer audience? I didn't see any family-friendly commercials of a family with two kids, both parents, and at least one grandparent playing in an extremely white room. Maybe I missed something.

What I saw was a bold vision about the development of their console. Much of the stuff about the PS4 (at least, the first hour or so) was extremely impressive to me. There are several ideas that they have that are explicitly trying to improve the experience for core gamers and the gamer community. Do you think non-gamers love putting up and watching Let's Plays or walkthroughs? Why would non-gamers care that several developers from outside Sony had early and real input to make sure that they can have solid 3P support from both major and indy game developers? Casual gamers aren't the ones meant to be won over by their talk of streaming demos for every game or the ability to have automatic or instant game saves just by setting down the controller (by pressing the PS button, I think).

Those things are for gamers and if you can't see that they would be an improvement over current systems, you probably didn't watch the presentation (it's easy to misinterpret things when you only read highlights).

OT: So, clearly, I was impressed with Sony's bits about the new console. When I look at their PS4 rhetoric alongside the development of Playstation Plus and a recent promotional event (here's $10 free for being a customer), Sony is quickly setting themselves apart from their peers in terms of consumer/gamer service. Seriously, how awesome is it that a company wants to offer streaming demos for ALL games in their store and tells us that we should only "buy what we love"? This type of statement goes a long way in building my confidence that Sony is looking out for itself by looking out for customers (similar to how Amazon.com's business runs), though I would suspect 3P developer friction over this (like how DRM-style codes go against one of Sony's new PS4 tenants).

At the end of the day, though, I have to take it for what it is... undelivered promises. Sony seems to be in the right mindset to seriously improve the gaming situation for the community, but how these will meet with AAA developers like EA or Activision (and their continued war on our wallets/customer rights) remain to be seen.

PS - Man, the 3P Developer section was largely worthless (I say mostly because engine demos are always nice to see). Square Enix came out, showed a pre-rendered cinematic that they've previously released (as far as I know), and announced that at E3 they'll be announcing the next Final Fantasy game. Pointless.

 

[MorganL4]

Also, can someone tell me if Unified Memory is better then whatever kind of Memory the WiiU has? Cause if it isn't any better, then the WiiU has more Memory then the PS4!

Flash memory is not RAM.

My bad. I'm not too well with Computer/Console Components.

Bascially the flash memory that the Wii U has is more akin to the Hard Drive space on the PS4 ( as far as type of memory)

There are two kinds of memory, RAM ( Random Access Memory) and ROM (Read Only Memory).... Flash falls in the ROM category. As does a hard drive.

There is really a lot to the topic but for basic knowledge RAM is effectively used to store the data you are currently viewing. Whereas ROM is where everything gets saved to when you click the save button, it is also where the Operating System ( XP Win 7 or Mac OSX etc...) is stored.

That is the bare bones basics.. So if you open up a picture of Batman off of google images that will be stored in RAM, if you save that picture of batman to your computer that will be ROM.

I hope that helps.

 

[RedDeadFred]

I was honestly not expecting that! GDDR5 RAM is stupidly quick! Assuming that they have a good CPU and a northbridge chip that can push such high speeds from RAM to CPU then we might actually see something that can match and possibly even BEAT a high-end PC!

Keep in mind though, all those social gimmicks like taking video footage, screenshots etc. consumes RAM. Question is, how much. And how much will developers have left to use for actual games when they have to account for all those things in advance when making the game?

How is being able to record any game you are playing at any time a gimmick? That's awesome! Taking over someone's game on PSN doesn't seem like something I would ever do though. Or very rarely anyway.

 

[xDarc]

"Sharing" and "Social" is all about highschool/peer pressure/feeling left out if you dont have the latest DLC that all your friends are playing, or games they are sharing.

I'm not a console player though, when I was, consoles were children's toys. I'm 30 now and it seems like for the most part nobody wants my money, which I have lots of. I only play on PC and only buy about 3 games a year. Very disenchanted with gaming industry in general since it started going down hill around 2006.

If next gen is about "social"- I mean come on; why not just release the 360Xablet or PSPhone and just give everyone a gamer hat and get it over with. All the industry seems to care about is more market share. How we can get senior citizens to become gamers? How can we get single mothers to become gamers?

It's really disgusting to see them basically pretend that the core group of folks who put them in any sort of position in the market in the first place don't exist any more.

But that's cool, I'll be over here, continuing to stick to PC, buying maybe 3 titles a year- and all the money I don't spend will continue to pile up in my bank account. Pay no attention to me. @Industry: Idiots.

 

[elilupe]

Now we have shinier graphics... Say hello to an era of games costing even more to develop, causing developers to only release the absolute blandest safest games in a never ending bid to still make money on the quest for completely unnecessary photo realism. Oh wait...

This, exactly this. The reason the PS2 is still one of the greatest consoles ever is because it went on for so long and it had that perfect balance of ease to develop and graphics capability. I am not excited at all for a new console generation with crappy launch titles, higher development costs, new, confusing design structure, and, most likely, no backwards compatibility.
We are at the point where we absolutely do not need better graphics on consoles. But of course, better graphics equals higher sales, which means that's all console developers are going to go after...

 

[I.Muir]

Will it be backwards compatible
Will it require constant internet connection
Are they going to be sued for implementing the possible one game on one console only scheme
Will they charge us Australians 3x the price
Do I have to sign up to too many things?

 

[Strazdas]

This.... actually doesnt look bad. ok color me interested. not the i want to buy interested, the i want to see how ti ends up interested.

Playing as you download - game assets does not work this way. they have to invent different way to store all assets for each level seperately, which puts A LOT of work on developers. then again they somewhat have to do that in part with discs model since the disck readers arent as fast as HDDs so they cant handle a "4gb dump of assets with need to read random parts all the time" so well.

8Gb of DDR5 RAM? That's INSANE!

Yeah, that's almost as good as my computer! Wait...

That's better than any computer. PC's only have DDR3 RAM. Only GPU's have DDR5 memory.

Does not matter much really. this is more of a future gaming thing. DDR5 gives you more ram speed, but DDR3 gives you enough for any game currently in existence already. sure, in future we may need faster than DDR3, but currently we dont. so id rather have 16 gb of ddr3 than 8 gb of ddr5. and the good thing with PCs, i can easily and cheaply put the ddr5 when the need comes. though kudos to SOny for looking at the future, but then they should have started with 16gb of it too. well, its better than 512 right?

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Does not matter much really. this is more of a future gaming thing.

I know it doesn't matter much when it comes to performance. Anyway, I made a mistake. I was excited because I thought it was DDR5, not GDDR5. Apples and oranges.

 

[VoidWanderer]

The only thing I care about for the PS4 is if it backwards compatible.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

The only thing I care about for the PS4 is if it backwards compatible.

It isn't. And it's better that way because it will be cheaper, and you can use PS3 to play PS3 games. Why are people so obsessed with backwards compatibility? No one is taking your PS3 away from you when you purchase a PS4.

Adam Jensen said something in regards to it being more powerful then computers at the moment... total and utter rubbish, for system memory, timing is far more important and considering GDDR5 (seeing as DDR5 isn't out) has rubbish timings at the moment, I'd certainly be avoiding it.

I was totally caught up in the moment. I thought the guy said DDR5 which made me excited like a schoolgirl.

 

[Strazdas]

Does not matter much really. this is more of a future gaming thing.

I know it doesn't matter much when it comes to performance. Anyway, I made a mistake. I was excited because I thought it was DDR5, not GDDR5. Apples and oranges.

yeah, it seems that way, i was fooled for a bit there as well.

 

[TJC]

Will it be backwards compatible
Will it require constant internet connection
Are they going to be sued for implementing the possible one game on one console only scheme
Will they charge us Australians 3x the price
Do I have to sign up to too many things?

No
Yes
Unlikely
Very likely
And definitely yes

OT:
So far, not impressed. The only thing that scares me is that games will become another 10 bucks more expensive and that we have basically two options: paying an arm and a leg for the console, or making Sony pay an arm and a leg so that the console is even remotely affordable by poor sods like me. I believe it'll be somewhere in the middle with a cost of about $499 which obviously will translate 1:1 in pounds and euros because international companies roll that way >:C

and apparently, playing single player games will be continued to be frowned upon because now we have to share our entire play time with the world. and I think we now know how Sony will enforce their "no used games" strategy. By watching us play big brother style /paranoid

Seriously, though, games so far? meh

 

[Evil Smurf]

I'd get one then hack it and install linux.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

I might seriously consider PlayStation 4 being my console of choice next generation over my previously coveted Xbox 360... unless of course Microsoft pull something incredible out of the hat.

8Gb of DDR5 RAM? That's INSANE!

I'm surprised they named it the playstation 4. I wonder if it's going to be released as something else in Japan.

I don't see why it's surprising. I mean look at their console history...

PlayStation
PlayStation 2
PlayStation 3

Kinda fits quite well if you ask me I honestly prefer the tried and trusted numbering system; it just makes everything so much easier when talking about generations.

Colour me jaded but I give zero effs about sharing and videos and blah blah blah; I just want to play my damn game.

Oh god, this! I'm much more interested in my core gaming experience being improved. I want a more comfortable controller and better GUI, both of which seem to have been improved. The social aspects of gaming hold no interest with me.