Throughout the entirety of Sony’s two-hour PlayStation 4 event Wednesday night, everyone from gaming luminaries to publishing executives plugged the system’s many features, from its social integration to its primary focus on player experience that spans the living room and mobile devices.
The one thing we didn’t get was a look at the console itself.
We did get a glimpse of the controller, which seemed to confirm the leaked images that surfaced late last week. It seems that Sony is content with making everyone wait to see what the console will actually look like with an unveiling perhaps at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo in June. The PS4 will hit shelves this holiday season, Sony said.
Sony did touch on nearly everything else media outlets were furiously speculating over. The PS4 will support full social media integration with Facebook, and will connect with Ustream to utilize an already much-discussed streaming feature that lets players view the screens of other players, communicate with them in real time and even jump in and take control of the game to help them out.
The new controller will sport a share button that will help instantaneous connections with social media channels, as well as a touchpad and a light bar that interacts with a bundled stereo camera. To show off the share button, developer Guerilla Games posted its new trailer right to Facebook during the event.
The system will not natively support PS3 games, though Sony did announce that it is working on a cloud-based system to allow the playing of titles from various past PlayStation platforms to be playable on both the PS4 and the Vita.
As for the specs, the PS4 will have an X86 CPU and 8GB of memory, as well as a “highly enhanced PC GPU,” which is coming from AMD, according to earlier reports. The system will boot up instantly, and you’ll be able to start playing games while they are still downloading. System memory is still being backed by local storage, and may likely be the reason behind the two differently priced models Kotaku says will hit shelves at launch.
Bringing Out The Superstars
Sony flooded the event with superstars from the industry, like Jonathan Blow, the acclaimed creator of Braid, who unveiled a trailer of his new game The Witness in which players can explore a tightly compacted island full of puzzles. David Cage, founder of French developer Quantic Dream and director of the hauntingly life-like and emotional Heavy Rain, also made an appearance to demo the capabilities of the new console when it comes to showing character emotion in unprecedented depth and detail.
Among the other games demoed were four confirmed titles. The first was Mark Cerny’s Knack, a cartoony platforming game, while the second and third were new installments to the Killzone and Infamous series (Killzone Shadow Fall and Infamous: Second Son). The fourth was a new team-based driving game called Driveclub from Evolution Studios, which will mix excruciatingly executed supercar renderings with international, challenge-oriented competition.
Other highlights were a new Watch Dogs demo from Ubisoft and the confirmation that the open-world game will be a next-gen title available on the PS4, as well as the announcement that Blizzard Entertainment is bringing Diablo 3 to both the PS3 and PS4.
Capcom’s Yoshinori Ono showed off the company’s Panta Rhei game engine, with a fantasy game with the working title Deep Down. Following that was Square Enix’s demo of its new Luminous engine, with a surprise announcement from Final Fantasy Brand Director Shinji Hashimoto that the RPG series will be unveiling a fresh installment at this year’s E3.
The event ended with Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg introducing part of the Bungie team to speak about the 10-year effort to create Destiny, a massive first-person shooter that is now confirmed for the PS4.
