Sony Reveals the PlayStation 4

playstation 4 controller

It’s Stop the Presses Thursday, and boy do we have something for you!

Last night at a press event in Manhattan, Sony unveiled the PlayStation 4, officially ushering in the next generation of consoles. The press conference showcased the system’s architecture, which is designed to be simple in response to the criticisms of the PlayStation 3 being too complex to develop on, the controller, the new social aspect of the PS4, and of course, the games.

The PlayStation 4 is running on an x86-64 8-core CPU, just like our wise Bearded One hypothesized two weeks ago during the podcast. It has a next-gen Radeon GPU along with 8gb of GDDR5 RAM and all of the other bells and whistles you’d expect: Blu-ray, an internal hard-drive of an unspecified size, USB 3.0, all that kind of stuff.

The leaked controller from a few weeks back turned out to be completely legitimate. As you can see in the image above, it features a touchscreen similar to the one of the back of PS Vita along with a giant blue bar that performs a Move-type function. The controller also has upgraded Sixaxis and rumble and, thankfully, the shoulder buttons and the analog sticks have been modified. It now has a headphone jack and the all-important, brand spanking new Share button.

With the Share button, you can connect to a wide variety of social networks like Facebook and UStream, all while you’re connected to the PSN. You can upload gameplay footage to UStream and continue playing, and you can use the PlayStation Network to browse your friends’ videos.

Sony also brought out the CEO of Gaikai, the streaming service they acquired last year, to talk about what cloud functionality the PS4 will have. Using Gaikai’s service, you can try demos of games without downloading them, or, if you do decide to purchase a game on the PSN Store, you can play it while you’re downloading it. This cloud is what will enable the aforementioned sharing of gameplay videos. Although the PS4 is not backwards compatible, Sony hopes to be able to offer games from older generations through this service.

The PS Vita was called the “ultimate companion device” to the PS4 last night, with the spotlight shining on a feature called “Remote Play”. Using this system, gamers can transfer games from their PS4 to the Vita and play it on the go. Whether this is done via the cloud or some other means wasn’t specified, but I’m fairly confident the system ships with a tiny wizard to make this happen. This announcement also breathed a little life back into the Vita, and I’m sure a few units will be sold based on this.

Last but not least, we have the games. Here’s a quick rundown of the videos with YouTube links embedded.

Knack
Killzone: Shadow Fall
The Witness
InFamous: Second Son
Driveclub
Watch Dogs
Destiny: A Bungie Joint

Diablo 3 was also announced as an upcoming PS4 game as well as a PS3 release.

So, what do you guys think of Sony’s big announcement? Thoughts on the system? Bummed we didn’t see the box? What do you think about the games? The streaming? The controller? Any guesses on price? Go!

Written by

mitch@gamersushi.com Twitter: @mi7ch Gamertag: Lubeius PSN ID: Lubeius SteamID: Mister_L Origin/EA:Lube182 Currently Playing: PUBG, Rainbow 6: Siege, Assassin's Creed: Origins, Total War: Warhammer 2

8 thoughts on “Sony Reveals the PlayStation 4”

  1. I thought it was a good showing, thought I feel like Square was a vague kick below the belt. The social features they talked about seemed pretty neat and I’m glad to see some new IPs in the mix. Very excited about Watch Dogs and The Witness looks very intuitive. Reminded me of Myst with the puzzle solving. Killzone: Shawdow Fall looked decent too and I think Destiny would have been a little bit more impressive had they revealed a tad bit more, but that’s just my opinion. What about the rest of you Sushians? What’d you think?

  2. Regarding the PS4’s lack of backwards compatibility, Sony totally screwed themselves with the Cell processors in the PS3. That architecture was a pain to develop for, so there were a lot of problems porting third-party releases *cough* Skyrim *cough*. So, of course, repenting and going back to an x86 architecture locks out PS3 games, so the only way to play those is to use Gaikai and pay them again for those games.

    It irks me enough to where I probably won’t be buying a PS4 anytime in the foreseeable future.

  3. I never have used backwards compatibility on any console ever. I always want it, never use it.

    I am usually all about games, but the social features Sony showed off impressed me far more than the game trailers did.

    I never buy a console at launch and I will wait and see on this one, too, but I am highly interested.

  4. Having known about this for a little while now I can still say honestly I’m very impressed. Sony have been very honest about what they did wrong with the PS3 and showed how they were putting it right in that presentation.

    I’m like you Anthony, I’m normally only interested in the games but I found the trailers rather underwhelming compared to the social aspects (which I doubt I will ever use). Most of the trailers seemed to be “Look at all the junk and particle effects we can fit in” while impressive I still hope they are holding something back for E3.

    Looking forward to more info for sure, my wallet is ready.

  5. Very strong first showing, much better than the Wii U. I’m more of an Xbox guy so I’ll wait to hear from MS until I get too excited for next gen, although I’ll end up eventually getting both the next Xbox and PS4.

  6. Until every platform has a touch pad of some kind (which I can’t see happening), there won’t be any real gameplay mechanic for it besides in exclusive titles. What are the SteamBox / PC users going to do when the game prompts “WIPE FINGERS FURIOUSLY ON TOUCHPAD TO HANG ON TO LEDGE”.

    I just want to know the price. If it’s cheap enough, I’m sure the house would replace my roomates dying first-gen PS3 as the media center.

  7. I think it was a pretty good showing, though I wont be buying it anytime soon it seemed to strike a good balance between upgrade and familiarity. on the topic of the lack of backwards compatibility, the only PS2 games I played on my PS3 were remastered to run on the PS3 so it is a moot point for me.

    as impressive as many of the games were I can guarantee that it was not all in engine. The character models could all be in engine but a number of the particle effects shown off were pre-rendered. I cannot say that I have absolute proof other than the fact that some of the flame effects were identical to the particle effects I used in Maya that literally took me 24 hours to render on the render farm that DigiPen has.

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