The Pee-Ess Four: It's a PC FFS.

[murdoc]

Blizzard what?

[Abelian75]

wtf, a wild metzen appears.

[Fabricated]

Diablo 3 prolly. Or first shot at Titan.

[Ard]

Wait, wut.  Welp, here's the surprise of the announcement.

[Fabricated]

Or their DOTA. Or WoW on consoles. Whatever. It'll prolly be disappointing.

[murdoc]

Diablo whoopty shit.

[Abelian75]

Well, that was anticlimactic.

[Fabricated]

Yerp, D3.

[Segoris]

 

[Ard]

Yeah, not that interesting, but still kinda out of left field.

[Fabricated]

Ahahah who fucking cares

Yeah, not that interesting, but still kinda out of left field.

Nah not really. They hired a bunch of people to develop a console title a while back.

[Ard]

I more meant that they bothered to bring anyone on stage for a year old port.

[murdoc]

Halo references at a Sony announcement is sorta weird.

[Fabricated]

Soooo here's what didn't happen:

-No hardware shown.
-No price.
-Pretty much nothing anyone didn't expect.

[murdoc]

I did like that they showed two games saying 'over-conectivity is bad' on the most connected platform EVER.

Also:

‏@majornelson
Announce a console without actually showing a console? That's one approach

Ha ha.

[Stormwaltz]

I guess I'm not the only one who noticed:

At Sony’s interminable live conference revealing the PS4, it was announced that it’s built on an x86 CPU, includes an “enhanced PC GPU”, along with a local hard drive (although no mention of SSD). And it comes with 8GB of GDDR5 memory. Also announced are other features that have that nagging sense of familiarity, including live streaming of games, and the ability to stream yourself playing games. It’s a PC!

So, we say welcome Sony! Glad you’ve decided to join us.

- Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[jakonovski]

The car porn guy was funny.

[MisterNoisy]

‏@majornelson
Announce a console without actually showing a console? That's one approach

Ha ha.

No kidding - no pricing, no actual hardware aside from the new controller and no details on what PSN will look like/cost.  New Watch Dogs footage and the MediaMolecule presentation saved it tho.

[Fabricated]

[Trippy]

Based on the specs I've seen, it's internally equivalent to the middle-of-the-road PC I bought in 2009. 

You might have had 8 GB of RAM in that PC but you were only using fraction of it for games cause of Windows 32-bit limitations so 8 GB is pretty impressive even in 2013. My relatively new GeForce 670 has 4 GB of VRAM but I'm typically only using up to 2 GB of system RAM for my games (i.e. compiled for 32-bit) so that's less than what the PS4 offers.

[Ginaz]

If its not backwards compatible then they can fuck right off.

[Samwise]

Isn't their typical pattern to make the first release of a console backwards compatible with the one before it, and then drop backwards compatibility in the cheaper/smaller version a few years down the line once nobody cares any more?

I just realized that I'm still using the first model of the PS3 that I bought several years ago on eBay.  Never even got around to swapping out the 20G HD.  Pretty impressive that it still gets so much use (mostly as a Netflix player) and hasn't died yet.

[Ingmar]

Mmm, this isn't really like the waning days of the PS2 where it already felt 'old'. New PS3 stuff still looks good. Not being PS3 compatible would be a really bad idea, I think.

[Stormwaltz]

You might have had 8 GB of RAM in that PC but you were only using fraction of it for games cause of Windows 32-bit limitations

I had Vista-64. Which doesn't mean that many games were designed to use more than ~3GB, but I could multitask pretty much at will.

[Tale]

[Trippy]

If its not backwards compatible then they can fuck right off.

It's not. Someday you might be able to stream PS3 games over it. Someday.

[Yegolev]

Being a console gamer used to be the easy road.

[Ingmar]

If its not backwards compatible then they can fuck right off.

It's not. Someday you might be able to stream PS3 games over it. Someday.

I see myself staying out of the Sony pool then. I missed a few important games not having a PS3, if I could go back and play those on it, it would make a much stronger argument to buy in this generation.

[Margalis]

Man, really underwhelming.

Why in the hell would you kick off your presentation with some goofy third-rate mascot platformer thing? Is that really how you choose to lead out a presentation designed for salivating tech-heads?

A new Killzone! A new Infamous! Not only are these mid-tier franchises and not particularly exciting, but both Sucker Punch and Guerrilla were rumored to be showing new IP and Sucker Punch was supposedly done with Infamous entirely. So showing two sequels from those companies is below the lowest expectations.

Use the Vita that you don't own as a laggy Wii U tablet! No thanks!

A sim racing game that looks like every sim racing game! Diablo 3! The Witness! Rolling out the hits!

The Capcom Dark Souls plus Monster Hunter game looked like the worst sort of  "cinematic experience." Hopefully it was all fake, because I don't want to play a game where my character does 5 seconds of custom animation every time a dragon breathes fire at him.

The amount of RAM is nice. Everything else was just man...I was really hoping the next gen would introduce some new IP and some new ideas but it looks to be continuing this death march of endless sequels and awful, step-backwards cinematic schlock. There was literally nothing even remotely exciting about this.

Everyone who said the next gen would just be this gen plus looks dead on right now. Absolutely nothing interesting at all. At this point it's the same games with bumped up effects and lighting.

[Lakov_Sanite]

If its not backwards compatible then they can fuck right off.

It's not. Someday you might be able to stream PS3 games over it. Someday.

Is the based on anything besides speculation?

[Samwise]

Really, no backwards compatibility out of the gate?  That surprises me.  If the new system has a bluray reader (and I can't imagine why it wouldn't, those haven't gone away yet) you'd think emulating a PS3 would be easy with all that horsepower they have to spare.

Porting the old PS3 games by wrapping an emulation layer around them and letting you convert your old disc to a free activation in their online thingy a la Steam would be the next best thing, and I assume it's the way they're going, but it seems like more work, and if it's not ready at release then they look like clowns regardless.

Didn't they say (either Sony or the rumor mill) that the PS3 wasn't going to have PS2 compatibility, and then the first release ended up having it?

[Trippy]

If its not backwards compatible then they can fuck right off.

It's not. Someday you might be able to stream PS3 games over it. Someday.

Is the based on anything besides speculation?

Yes it's based on the Gaikai part of the presentation where he talked about eventually, maybe, streaming older PS games (1-3) over their service and the fact that the CPU is x86 and not Cell based.

[Trippy]

Really, no backwards compatibility out of the gate?  That surprises me.  If the new system has a bluray reader (and I can't imagine why it wouldn't, those haven't gone away yet) you'd think emulating a PS3 would be easy with all that horsepower they have to spare.

Porting the old PS3 games by wrapping an emulation layer around them and letting you convert your old disc to a free activation in their online thingy a la Steam would be the next best thing, and I assume it's the way they're going, but it seems like more work, and if it's not ready at release then they look like clowns regardless.

Didn't they say (either Sony or the rumor mill) that the PS3 wasn't going to have PS2 compatibility, and then the first release ended up having it?

The original PS3 solved the backwards compatibility problem by literally sticking a PS2 chipset inside. Later they ditched the chipset and tried software emulation which didn't work so well and eventually dropped it all together. The Cell processor is far more complex than the PS2 MIPS CPU they were trying to emulate through the Cell CPU. Even with a top-of-the-line x86 CPU right now it would be an incredibly difficult thing to do.

[Samwise]

In this modern age where I can run a console emulator in a JVM in a Linux Virtualbox in a Windows VMware on OSX it's surprising to me that this would be a hard nut to crack, but I guess it's the pecularities of the hardware itself that make things difficult?  Maybe they'll end up caving at the last second and sticking an old chip in there like they did last time, then.  Not being able to play old games just makes them look dumb.

The likely compromise is going to be porting the 20 most popular PS3 games so they can placate 80% of the whining.

[Margalis]

The Cell architecture is pretty specialized and also super powerful at what it does. There's no way it could be emulated without including the original hardware.

I wonder if this will make people think twice about digital purchases now. I think the expectation based on precedence is that physical media may not work on new machines but digital content will.