Ps4

[RizZy]

So, the PS4 was announced yesterday, from what I read they didn't really answer any of the questions people wanted answering & didn't even unveil the new console itself.

So I ask you this, do we care at all?

[TheDvEight]

I Don't I Love my PC

[T-Bag]

I Don't Love my PC

Buy one you do love then...


As for the PS4. Rumoured specs aren't really anything special for something supposed to last years.The 360 and PS3 both had fairly impressive specs for the time, whereas there are already a lot of us on this forum with better systems than those suspected of being used in the PS4. Before long the smartphone will be able to play a PS2/PS3 standard game...and why would you want a console when your phone can play decent games on something you essentially get given free (and then stream to your TV whilst you're at home), or if you already need a PC (most households still do although with tablets and cheap android boxes for webbrowsing it's far from certain to always be the case) then in a few years it will be cheaper to put gaming grade components in that than to buy a PS4.

I don't see it as being hugely revolutionary. Certainly not compared to say the Ouya which will provide cheap yearly upgraded versions of the console rather than waiting 7+ years in between...that could be a game changer.

[smilodon]

If Sony and Microsoft don't start making consoles with plugin upgrades soon they will be fighting for control of a diminishing market and that will be their death knell. As T-Bag says new phones/tablets come out all the time and consumers are at most locked into a mobile hardware spec for two years at most. If we don't see some form of regular update to the Xbox and Play Station they'll be sidelined and eventually obsoleted. The Wii might have a future as it's a fun living room accessory for non gamer families to play on together and so maybe not in such direct competition as a tablet.

[ArithonUK]

Both SONY and Microsoft have said that they intend to DRM games for their "next gen" consoles, to make them "single seat" (like PC games) so there goes game resale and rental! (If Blockbuster and GAME hadn't already gone to the wall, they'd be worried)

The PS4 specifications are basically a mid-range AMD gaming PC with low memory. So the "next gen" console is a meagre PC. Since the hardware is x86, I smell a emulator somewhere...

When games could be traded back for £20, a £40+ price point was bearable, but since the majority of console gamers are in the under 25 age group (and not earning) the whole "you can't sell it or borrow it" angle will KILL the interest in these new platforms.

No matter how much you can touch and waggle the controller....

Talk is the cheapest thing there is. And that's basically what Sony did  today: It espoused a philosophy, said the names of a lot of popular  games, but didn't give us any real, concrete information in an age where  it's more important than ever.

Most exciting is the share button. The PS4, we're told, will sneakily  and transparently monitor and buffer our last 15 minutes of gameplay.  This will be a boon to all those who think there is not enough inane  video drivel on YouTube.

As the hours of demos and introductions dragged on, it became  increasingly obvious that we weren't actually going to see the  PlayStation 4. Sony either isn't ready for primetime, or Sony thinks the  best way to get us interested is to play hard to get.

The PS4 looks like it's long on promises and big-picture dreaming, but  currently short on clear, concrete reasons why anyone would be tempted  to buy one.

Many were bemused that the one thing missing from the PS4's launch was  the console itself. But others were intrigued by the firm's latest  gaming innovations.

[suicidal_monkey]

Like the share button comment

The next gen consoles do sound kind of underwhelming. Good old PS3 at least had a defined purpose as a media centre of sorts as well as being a pretty powerful device in its day. It is still doing nicely for all my blue ray, BBC iPlayer, other streaming, and occasional gt5 session needs. However other than adding the streaming apps Sony have been very lax at improving the media centre image they sold it under. The audio player is still almost useless after years of "development" and "updates". It isn't that hard to update an interface!

[ArithonUK]

They found someone who can't even play a console game to demo it. They then get all creepy ("can I hold it?") with the controller (which looks like MOVE is now built in) then play the game, badly.

The funny thing is, since the PS4 hardware doesn't exist yet, they're most likely running on a PC using the development SDK, so all the "ooh" and "ah" over how great the console is, becomes doubly laughable!

[video=youtube;rGlu3e9kdks]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rGlu3e9kdks[/video]

It has 8GB of RAM!
Wow! How much is that?
About 16 times what the PS3 had!
Wow! That's a lot!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a gaming PC from three years ago... Tada!

This Christmas you can snag a PS4 and party like it's 2010!!

Your move Microsoft. Will the XBOX 720 be a "last generation" PC too?

[vladic]

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/392535/full-specs-ps4-dualshock-4-playstation-4-eye/

Full spec details there for viewing

[Chaosphere]

The only thing that excites me for the next gen of consoles is that it will move game development forward. Say what you will, but the console market is without a doubt the dominant force in the industry for now, and will stay that way for a long time. A new console with improved hardware means developers can start to make bigger bolder games, which benefits us as PC gamers too.

And although the system specs for the PS4 aren't incredible (comparable to a 7850 for GPU, IIRC), they are a massive, massive leap ahead of the PS3 / 360, which used a GPU built when nVidia still used 4 numbers to name their cards.

[T-Bag]

The only thing that excites me for the next gen of consoles is that it will move game development forward. Say what you will, but the console market is without a doubt the dominant force in the industry for now, and will stay that way for a long time. A new console with improved hardware means developers can start to make bigger bolder games, which benefits us as PC gamers too.

I'm more optimistic about developers embracing the PC as the primary platform and then optimising for the PS4 and 720 from there. In the last 7 years PCs have come on a long way, several iterations of DirectX and other jumps, but backwards compatibility has been maintained. You can generally buy a brand new game and run it in DX9 mode still, if porting a game will become as simple as turning down some settings and running some optimisation routines it'll make a great deal of sense to make the PC the primary platform.

There will still likely be "Developer kit" costs to consider and exclusive deals, so I don't imagine the whole staged release for PC changing. You might still have to wait 6 months for some games to come out, whilst a developer makes as much from the console gamers who are happy paying £40-50 a game. However when it does hit, it should be more than just a quick and dirty console port that we PC gamers loathe so much.

I don't predict the same giant leap in terms of graphics coming out of games that you do. There are some visually stunning games coming out already. What I do expect though is the volume of games with ultra high graphics will increase, which means there should be more pretty games for the PC available. Lazy developers of series like Call of Duty will get a kick up the backside, the same stale 6 year old engine will not be good enough anymore and you can expect a big leap in the average graphics, simply because people will be expecting more so ugly games won't sell. So the constant stream of ugly PC port will dry up (hopefully). I don't expect the next Call of Duty to even beat Crysis 2 or Far Cry 3 in terms of graphics (both are very pretty on high graphics settings), but it'll make the jump to Battlefield 3 levels or similar just to stay in the game, and if a game has that level graphics and good gameplay I'll be happy to play it.

So overall I think the next gen consoles are very positive news even though I've not got the slightest intention of buying one.

[Chaosphere]

It would be great to have PC as the main development benchmark, and maybe that will be the case. As the tech has just come on leaps and bounds in the last 10 years or so, we really haven't been at this situation before. Sure we have had new consoles and better PCs before, but with this console generation gaming seems to really have some momentum and is actually becoming a big part of our culture. So either way it should be exciting to see where we go from here.

And when I was talking about bigger and bolder games, I didn't just mean the graphics. Of course it will be nice to see them catch up to games like battlefield, yes, but I more welcome the horsepower of the machines just to see what devs can do with it in a more creative sense. The only worry is that as gaming gets bigger, it also gets more streamlined, with fewer companies taking risks and being really creative, instead sticking to the yearly CoD and so on. But still, we will have to see! Fingers crossed.

I may actually buy a PS4 eventually, as I love some of the games that platform has to offer as exclusives. Things like Uncharted, Killzone, and so on. Some really great games there. Not enough to make me pay a lot for it, but I can easily see myself getting one down the road when prices drop.

[Chaosphere]

Just gonna bump this for the simple hilarity that was the E3 press conferences. Microsoft looked to be doing pretty well, until Sony came in and said -

1) Used games still work just fine,
2 Doesn't have to be always connected to the internet,
3) Costs $100 less then the Xbox One.

Erm, Microsoft, I think you just got beat.....

[Snokio]

This is how you share games on PS4:

[video=youtube;kWSIFh8ICaA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kWSIFh8ICaA[/video]

"It's going to be region free, requires no online connection to play and games can be sold and shared with ease." (They are leaving it to the developers to choose rather than themselves)

[Chaosphere]

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/06/11/e3-2013-ps4-used-game-restrictions-up-to-publishers

The video in that link is hilarious. Its the part of the Sony talk where they just got up and said 'yeah we're doing the opposite of all the things people hated about the xbox one'. So funny. Sony really seems to be hitting the mark with this so far...

[Tutonic]

Sony at least seem to be listening to their customers and their developers... the same cannot be easily said for Microsoft :-/

The PS3 was always hamstrung because of it's weird architecture, apparently it was a complete sod to write code for - especially if you wanted to port to/from another platform. Now they're on x86-64 (along with the new Xbox), it should be much more attractive to develop for - plus it should make porting to the PC a whole lot easier.