Tendo City

So, did anyone else watch the conference a few days ago? I did, of course (watch it as it aired, that is). Overall, it was your average Sony conference -- somewhat boring, way too long, heavy on the shooting games, but okay overall. It was quite notable that they didn't show what the system looks like, or say what the price is going to be, though... we'll have to see, about those two things.

As for the system itself, they did at least show some games, and also the controller. The controller looks a lot like the usual Sony controller, except with the Vita's d-pad, a slightly different-looking analog stick (with a ring mark on it, Wii-style, instead of the texturing Sony has had in the past) that also apparently is slightly more accurate than Sony's past analog sticks -- and this is a good thing, since the past Sony analog stick (from the DS1/2/3) was pretty bad, with a huge deadzone, and of course a touch pad in the center. It's not a touchscreen though, just a pad, like that thing on the back of the Vita. Also the Start and Select buttons are gone. Instead, there's an Options button on one side, replacing Start, and a Share button, to upload pictures/video of your gameplay to the internet, on the other side. Select never had much of a function anyway, getting rid of it isn't bad. The PS4 will not be compatible with PS3 DS3 or Sixaxis controllers, but will work with the PS3 Move controller for games that use that. Oh, and the regular PS4 controller also has a "lightbar" and sensor camera bar thing, so I guess even the regular controller has some Wiimote functionality.

The system's pretty powerful, and on sites like GAF, that the PS4's going to have 8GB of GDDR5 RAM is a big deal. Apparently this is really fast RAM, even faster than that available on PCs now, and that's certainly a lot of it; the new MS system is rumored to only be using GDDR3. However, there will be absolutely no PS3 backwards compatibility, for either disc or PSN games. You'll need a PS3 for those. That's unfortunate. They did say that they are aiming to make all PS4 games also play on the Vita, though (aka "crossplay"). Interesting, I wonder how they'll downscale all the games' graphics... I mean, the Vita is not exactly equal to the PS4 in power, for sure, and it has several fewer buttons too. Touchpad for L2/L3/R2/R3? How fun!

As for games, Sony showed the fourth Killzone game, which is a pretty but extremely generic and boring-looking (in terms of gameplay) cover-based FPS, Drive Club, a realistic (read: boring, in my opinion) racing game from some ex-Criterion people with a big focus on social interaction stuff, Knack, a traditional-style console action game aimed at a kids/family market that looked like it could be decent fun (they showed this game playing on Vita too, to show the crossplay functionality), Infamous: Second Son, another game in this series from Sucker Punch, and a few other things, such as a 3d modeling/animation toy from what I think was the Little Big Planet people, and a very detailed face animation from David Cage (Indigo Prophecy/Heavy Rain).

They also showed some third-party games, including Johnathan Blow's The Witness, which is a first-person 3d puzzle adventure game (and will be PS4 exclusive on consoles during the launch window period, or something; there were some qualifiers mentioned, and the PC/Mac versions are definitely still coming), "Deep Down" from Capcom, a realistic fantasy action game (probably; there was no gameplay, just moving-camera cutscene stuff) which appears to be a sequel or spinoff of Dragon's Dogma and probably had the best graphics of any of the stuff shown during the conference, a rerun of Square-Enix's next-gen techdemo (and a promise that they'd be announcing a Final Fantasy game later this year, probably at E3, that will have a PS4 version), a little bit on Bungie's upcoming always-online shooter Destiny, and also the announcement that Diablo 3 will be coming to consoles on the PS3 and PS4 only. Yeah, that last one isn't surprising, at least as far as Diablo 3 coming to consoles is concerned... the game looks like it was designed for consoles from the start, unfortunately, and Blizzard was hiring for a console lead a year ago. So no surprise there, except for the "Sony only" thing.

I think there were one or two other games also shown, but that's most of it. So yeah, overall, it was Sony being Sony -- high-end tech, good graphics, tediously long presentations, and an overall average, somewhat boring, but not bad presentation.

Hardcore gamers seem mostly pleased, though the games shown don't convince most people to run out and preorder PS4s today, for sure, and Killzone's extremely bland gameplay and "PS3 but with more polygons and shinier" in-battle look was definitely noticed, but the mainstream media... well, the New York Times published an article that basically said that Sony doesn't get it because they're still making consoles, not tablets and phones, and thus are a hopeless dinosaur. Gah, I hate this media obsession with "phones/tablets are the only future, everything else is doomed" so much... yes, there are some struggles right now for games, and with the excessive bloat so many budgets have some of that is probably deserved, but the idea that phones and tablets are the future and anything else is doomed is just stupid. Those cannot do the kind of experience that you get on a console, they just can't.

My thoughts:

Oh, guess it's time to upgrade my GPU.

PS4 won't have backwards compatibility to lose, so I won't be "forced" to buy the first model on some sort of time limit like I ended up doing with my PS3. Since the system is using an x86 based processor, it is essentially a PC. The only difference is the OS. Porting games should be far easier because of this, but they will still need to be ported. If Sony were smart, they'd make the PS4 OS Linux based and cash in on Steam's recent port to that OS to have a ton of games right out of the gate.

The other big news is that touch screen right in the middle of the controller. While Start and Select no longer exist as independent buttons, I suspect pressing the touch screen equivalents shouldn't prove too difficult compared to having a touch based d-pad and face buttons.

The OTHER other big news is that the PS4 is totes linked all up on to the social metasphere, my digdoggers. Eh. I mean, yeah you can now "comment" on things on some sort of "wall" or whatever, but this still means that Sony's "social" solution lacks that basic thing Nintendo recognized, a "society". Just linking into the various walled gardens on Facebook really isn't enough. On Facebook, as everywhere else, people only ever see the people they approve of, reinforcing their own echo chambers of ideas.

Nintendo's solution essentially forces everyone together, which in the long run makes for a much more productive society. The social interaction on the Wii U is still doing great so far. That said, the Wii U had a TERRIBLE January. They KILLED November and December, but dropped to a level lower than has been seen since 2005 in January. Nintendo will need to pull something desperate in order to reverse that. The odd thing is going from Wii level sales all the way down to Dreamcast level in the order of one month. Normally if January lull is going to be that low, one would be able to predict it from holiday sales, but not this time.

I know I talked about it in the post, but seriously, if you haven't seen this...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/techno...ry.html?hp

Quote: These and other new features cannot hide the fact that PlayStation 4 is still a console, a way of playing games on compact discs that was cool when cellphones were not smart.

NY Times, that's got to be one of your stupider statements in some time.

They aren't the only ones on the "cell phones have made game handhelds and maybe even consoles pointless" bandwagon. A legitimate argument might be made for handhelds, I suppose, if one could get around the fact that affording one basically requires leasing your soul for 3 years at a stretch, or the lack of proper controls without some sort of 3rd party addon which may or may not ever get wide support. Consoles are a much tougher sale. Apparently the argument takes the form of "The TV is so far away, WAAAY over there, and so it isn't personal like a tablet, and everyone uses a tablet, no one uses TVs, well I don't, do you? Loser...". While the substance of that argument is pretty dang shallow and sounds like pure guessing, there's no arguing against the fact that phones have basically taken over where the Wii once held sway. Casual gamers now have the most easy to whip out game device of all time... in their pants. Um, I could have put that better. Point is, the days when consoles could ever claim to appeal to casual gamers is now past us, and THAT seems to be the point here. All these newspapers and magazines seem to be arguing that if you aren't able to grab the casual market like the Wii once did (and the Gameboy before that), then you owe it to your investors to stop bothering with consoles and just start pumping out the cell phone games, where the "real profit" is. It is an argument about financial viability. In a sense, they may actually have a point, but there IS a hardcore audience, a group that likes to play games as a hobby, not simply as a way to kill time now and again, and consoles and handhelds, and juiced up home PCs, are needed to really grab that market. Without it, all those hobbyists will eventually just start collecting systems from the past and lamenting the good old days. I mean I do that anyway, but I also get modern stuff now and again.

More to the point, the "savvy investor" advice from non hobbyist reviewers is almost always entirely off the mark if you consider the long view. These are the same sorts who said any bank that isn't part of the credit swapping "ecosystem" is "stuck in the past" and needs to catch up if they are going to be competitive, then the housing bubble burst, and the only banks that were unaffected were those who stuck with a higher standard for giving loans and stayed out of the bundled future derivative flipping the table outside the box synergistic nonsense everyone else was doing.

In the long run, we don't have enough information to really know what will happen. Remember that once upon a time, 2 or 3 years ago, all the investors and writers were convinced that "social network games" were a "must" or your game company would fail. Now the only company who's entire business model seemed to be based on "find the most easily distracted audience you can find, give them a free game designed around that, then keep them playing for years and years", Zynga, has failed because everyone simply lost interest. Fancy that. There is still an ecosystem for these things on the Facebook, but every game is basically just a passing fancy.

Phone games, even at their finest, still end up playing casual. An attempt is being made to port the classics to phones, but they all control terribly. Even the RPGs aren't really being retooled from the ground up, and a game like Chrono Trigger has enough action in it (such as hiding behind trees when the wind blows while climbing a certain mountain) that touch controls simply fail. SOME games are going to play great on a phone. Sony recently had a team port Lemmings to it, a game that seems destined for a touch screen. Unfortunately, the port job was embarrassingly shoddy, showing that they just aren't as willing to invest the time and effort into games that'll sell for a pittance. Future phones may change this. Future shell designs may be made of some sort of shape memory allow that can "grow" buttons into place one day, and maybe a strong ecosystem of really high quality games will spring up, but until that day, cell phones seem destined for more casual games, and the occasional touch RPG spinoff of a popular main console series.

Yeah, the example of Facebook ("social") games really is a good one. Just a few years ago Zynga was going to take over the industry, but now they are struggling and people are jumping ship, and investors have moved on to bashing console game publishers for not being in on the smartphone gaming thing, instead of the social game thing. Will smartphone/tablet gaming prove lasting, though? Is there enough of a market there actually willing to spend money on games to support any kind of development infrastructure? So far, the signs are certainly iffy at best. Most phone games don't make money, they have to sell for either $1 or free to be successful and then you have to monetize them somehow through cash shops, etc... but is this stuff going to last, or is it going to fade, like all the other casual-focused game formats have? I'm sure it will continue to be important, but the investors', and casual medias', focus on "phones and tablets are the future!" definitely ignores the history of how these things go.

And meanwhile, there is a proven base of some number of millions of people who ARE willing to spend money on games. They're gamers, and they are not going to be satisfied with just phones and tablets. Are there enough of them to keep the industry going with budgets as out of control as they often are now, though? That I don't know, but I certainly do think that serious gamers are not going to say "all I need is a phone and tablet, no actual console is needed".

Now, that's where the doubters probably mention, say, Ouya, Steam Box, maybe "well streaming will take over in coming yeras", and stuff like that. But for now, most people don't have internet service good enough to allow decent streaming, so that's out, and will be for the foreseeable future. It uses up way too much data, and requires way too much bandwidth to get a decent picture quality, and internet connections on that level are either expensive or simply unavailable for most, particularly in North America.

As for TV boxes like the Steam Box or phone-to-TV things like Ouya, we'll see. Steam Box could be interesting, we'll have to see how it goes once it comes out... could be interesting. As for the phone-to-TV things though, I doubt that those will catch on big. I mean, it could happen, but I wouldn't guess it.


Finally, on another note, if Microsoft really does go through with the rumors and implement a used games ban -- ie, cd-keys or something along those lines, with each key tied to a specific account, or maybe even a specific console, as with the latest version of MS Office, which is locked to one single PC, I think that it really will hurt them. Now, Sony hasn't said clearly "we will allow used games for free and there will be no catches", but they have said that used games will be allowed in some way. I really hope that there are no catches, and that they don't implement some "but you must buy a license to play it" tricks, but you will be able to play used games on the PS4. But if the rumors about that not being allowed at all on the next Xbox are true... sure, maybe MS can get over that and be successful anyway, but I really do think that it'd hurt them with a lot of consumers. I know MS Is liable to make stupid decisions sometimes, unfortunately, but that'd be a big one... and almost all the rumors head straight towards it being true. We'll see for sure in a few months once MS says something.

Dark Jaguar Wrote:PS4 won't have backwards compatibility to lose, so I won't be "forced" to buy the first model on some sort of time limit like I ended up doing with my PS3. Since the system is using an x86 based processor, it is essentially a PC. The only difference is the OS. Porting games should be far easier because of this, but they will still need to be ported. If Sony were smart, they'd make the PS4 OS Linux based and cash in on Steam's recent port to that OS to have a ton of games right out of the gate.

True, at least this time they can't cut something they didn't include in the first place.

Quote:The other big news is that touch screen right in the middle of the controller. While Start and Select no longer exist as independent buttons, I suspect pressing the touch screen equivalents shouldn't prove too difficult compared to having a touch based d-pad and face buttons.

Actually, I think that Options button replaces Start and Select, but we'll have to see; games using that touchpad in menus does seem likely.

Quote:The OTHER other big news is that the PS4 is totes linked all up on to the social metasphere, my digdoggers. Eh. I mean, yeah you can now "comment" on things on some sort of "wall" or whatever, but this still means that Sony's "social" solution lacks that basic thing Nintendo recognized, a "society". Just linking into the various walled gardens on Facebook really isn't enough. On Facebook, as everywhere else, people only ever see the people they approve of, reinforcing their own echo chambers of ideas.

On a related note, I really noticed the irony about how two of the games being shown at Sony's conference were about how people can control things via connected networks (Watch Dogs, Infamous: Second Son)... in announcements for a console with a connected network that records footage of your games as you play them and allows you to upload that to the internet with the push of a button. That's pretty ironic. :)

Quote:Nintendo's solution essentially forces everyone together, which in the long run makes for a much more productive society. The social interaction on the Wii U is still doing great so far. That said, the Wii U had a TERRIBLE January. They KILLED November and December, but dropped to a level lower than has been seen since 2005 in January. Nintendo will need to pull something desperate in order to reverse that. The odd thing is going from Wii level sales all the way down to Dreamcast level in the order of one month. Normally if January lull is going to be that low, one would be able to predict it from holiday sales, but not this time.

It's hard to convince many people to buy Wii Us when no games are being released for the thing, and so far this year there's been almost nothing. On that note, I think there were no Wii U releases at all in February, at least in the US. I expect Feb. to be even worse than Jan. was, sales-wise. Things should improve once Nintendo actually releases some games for it, though. Nintendo said that they were going to learn their lesson after the poor 3DS launch, but they don't seem to have, at all... once again, we're dealing with a thin first party release list, minimal third party support, and fading sales. I know that the big upcoming titles will help, but right now, they're quite a ways off, and Nintendo looks like it's wasting way too much of its yearlong lead over the competition. It's quite unfortunate. Why did Nintendo think that this time things would be different and magically they'd get good third party support THIS time, or something? They should have known that it wouldn't happen!