Playstation 4

[Andy Turnbull]

So, for those of us who have consoles, or are simply interested in the way the tech moves.

What do you think of the PS4 announcement yesterday.  I thought it was a bit underwhelming myself, and does seem like they are just making a pc in a box.

Andy

[Stomski]

Haven't watched the announcement, but read up on the key features.

Controller is meh. I'm glad they've kept the shape as I love the PS controller design, but considering the Wii U tablet and what Kinect v2 is promising it seems a little behind the times. I guess Sony will bring something out in the future as an add on for extra revenue or the think Android/PSVita integration will be the logical step to compete with the Wii U.

The idea of streaming old games is interesting now that bandwidth in some places is good enough to encompass Video/Controls data - it seems as if they'll run the game in a VM in the cloud which will then allow the exact state to be saved. However, for a lot of games, the responsiveness will still be killed. Racing, shooting, fighting games will all be nerfed with this. So I'm still more in favour of local content.

Did it have 4k resolution? I still don't see much of a point in this unless you have a 60" TV, surely the human eye just isn't good enough? And it will be put a lot of pressure on developers to meet graphical standards rather than game quality, boosting development time/costs unnecessarily.

But I was sceptical of the PS3 as well when it came out and now I'm a big fan, but I only purchased when the first slim model came out.

[kayevcee]

Feb 22, 2013 10:26:18 GMT Stomski said:

Did it have 4k resolution? I still don't see much of a point in this unless you have a 60" TV, surely the human eye just isn't good enough? And it will be put a lot of pressure on developers to meet graphical standards rather than game quality, boosting development time/costs unnecessarily.

When I installed my new graphics card last year I stuck on Mass Effect and was able to run something at 1920x1080 for the first time. It looked astonishing. Later I played Fallout New Vegas at the recommended resolution of 1280x720 and I honestly couldn't see any difference at all. I have a fairly big monitor and I probably sit closer to it than an optician would recommend.

Pushing for higher and higher resolution seems like a way of justifying the massive hike in processing power that is already more than most coding teams can fully utilise. The success of the Wii and the rise of smartphone and tablet games says to me that most people just want to play fun games with interesting mechanics and the only people who care about graphical resolution are the visual equivalent of people who spend £200 on high fidelity speaker cables.

-Nick

[Marc Graham]

Meh.... Light on specifics, touch screen on the hideous controller? Like ps3 six-axis copied wii they copy wii-u. Sony have little original ideas.

I loathe the ergonomics of their controller, no backwards compatibility also meh, not that I have many ps3 games, anything multi platform I have is 360 bound.

They need to do a lot more to make me consider this as a purchase...

[The Doctor]

As a deeply lapsed gamer I had a look at the announcement out of curiosity, saw that no price was mentioned nor even a picture of the device and thought: "A very silly way to announce something." Then I had a packet of crisps. They were chilli flavoured and very nice.

-Ralph

[legios]

I am interested by the fact that Sony seem to be moving away from the whole proprietary architecture model, which has very much defined the way they have operated for a long time. I have to say that as launches go it was somewhat underwhelming. It felt like a "there is going to be a thing, but it isn't ready yet so here is the test card for the moment".

Like the inevitable X-Box 360 replacement I find myself asking why I would actually upgrade, and coming up with very few convincing reasons. All that seems to be happening is that graphics are getting "better", but my ability to be wowed by my games machines capacity to animate pretty pictures has long since evaporated. We don't need more powerful hardware to give us better gameplay, and so I can't really get enthused.

Karl

[jameso]

Not interested in Playstation 4, but posting here to rant that I'm really not interested in uprgading my Xbox 360 anytime soon either. With all the differences between what the 360 did when it came out and what it can do now (Kinect, inbuilt wireless, massive harddrive, interent browser functionality) it feels like a new console anyway.
I'm sure there would be lots of improvements and this will make me sound very ignorant but it would seem the only thing the 720 (or whatever) could do would be faster processing, better graphics, not really worth £400 to me anytime soon.

[Andy Turnbull]

The ever more powerful hardware paradigm is a bizarre one to me. Whatever happened to getting the best out of the machine?
Andy

[Dave]

Last year my thought was I probably wouldn't buy a console for the eighth generation - at least not during its lifetime, due to cost and less free time. In the end I got a Wii U at launch due to a pricing error that let me get it £100 cheaper than it should have been, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. The various presentations prior to launch left me underwhelmed - just like the Playstation 4.

OK the PS4 sounds like an impressive bit of kit but the games just don't interest me. The selling points seems to be "look how pretty it is" and "here are some social features no one wants".

There will be some good games out this generation, but with my laptop, iThing, 3DS and now Wii U (not to mention various older systems that still get played) I really can't justify buying another console.