I am both an XBOX 360 and PS3 owner. I may eventually get both since some of my favorite games only come out on one or the other. But Christmas is coming and I’m being asked for ideas.
Which one is looking better now? Which has the better looking games at launch or soon after? Which one are you getting? In the past I would be better informed but its been a busy few months.
Don’t tell me to get a gaming PC or I’ll throw you out of the thread (in my head at least).
Going purely by launch lineup/games released soon after, the PS4 is looking like the clear winner right now. The launch lineup exclusives are less-than-stellar sounding, but here’s what will be available in early/mid 2014:
N++
InFamous: Second Son
The Order: 1886
Outlast
Transistor
Secret Ponchos
I’ve played Transistor and Secret Ponchos and if you like your action games isometric, they should definitely be on your radar. Then there’s all your CoDs and your Watch Dogs and your NFSs that the Xbox One will get too. And, of course, it’s $100 cheaper.
Personally, I’m planning to get a PS4 (eventually, when I save up the extra $$$).
I have an Xbox 360 but I really only play games that are also available for PS3, and I feel like I’m missing out on certain games that are Playstation exclusive.
I mean, if you don’t care about Halo (which I don’t), what is the Xbox’s advantage, as far as games go? I enjoyed Fable 2, but it’s not a series that I’m going to continue to follow. What else is there that I can’t get on PS3/4?
I’d get an Xbox One because the television integration looks good and XBL is the best multiplayer system on the market. Both consoles are going to have the same games that play identically, so you should buy based on those seemingly ancillary features.
I am a big proponent of consoles, so long as they have games you want, but buying one at launch is pretty much ALWAYS a catastrophic waste of money. You’ll be getting a tiny selection of games that will inevitably be amoung the weaker offerings on the system, and you’ll be paying an absolute premium price for them. You’ll also get the worst version of the hardware. And if the ‘side’ you pick ends up ‘losing’ the war, you’re still stuck with them.
Stay on the fence. Finish some of the games in your backlog. Buy a new console for Christmas 2014 at the earliest. Do yourself a favor.
I am getting a PS4 because :
[ul]
[li]Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with the launch announcement of the XBONE, even though they walked back most of the odious crap.[/li][li]I never had a PS3 - still have a PS2. It’s Sony’s turn.[/li][/ul]
I’m getting an Xbox One, mostly because my friends (including a couple of EA developers) are getting them.
But personally, I would probably lean Xbone anyway due to Sony’s sketchy record with the Playstation Network. After that outage in 2011, and more importantly, the 77 million compromised accounts (with personal info!) I’m leery of trusting Sony with that kind of thing.
I realize both networks go down with some regularity, but thus far, Microsoft hasn’t managed to have a massive security breach as part of one.
Sony hasn’t shown me anything to make me think they’ve fixed their UI problems. Online multiplayer works well enough on both, but the fact that it took Sony until 2013 to bundle a headset with their console is just mind-boggling.
This Ars Technica article is pretty much the definitive hardware comparo.
The tl;dr version? The two systems are essentially the same except for different approaches to optimizing the GPU performance and memory bandwidth. The PS4 is probably marginally more future proof, but that was true of the last generation and it’s not like the Xbox 360 aged badly. The XBOne uses a more sophisticated method of deploying memory which less rigorous developers may not choose to optimize for, which might have the PS4 a bit more consistent from game to game.
Stepping away from hardware, the XBOne pretty easily trounces the PS4 in most service offerings and MS innovates faster the Sony on that front, so Sony very likely isn’t catching up any time soon.
I’d say the people saying the difference is marginal are idiots or have some sort of agenda.
Developing for the Xbone will take more time and money, and will not achieve the same results as on the PS4’s more powerful, easier to code for hardware.
The same thing was NEVER the case with the PS3. People, again, who didn’t knwo what they were talking about, said the PS3 was more powerful… but the cell was a very specialized piece of hardware. It WAS more powerful, but only at certain specific tasks. Many developers later went on the record saying the hardware was difficult to optimize for and was lacking in certain important aspects of game development.
Expect inferior multi-plats, and expect Sony exclusives to run and look better than most Xbone games.
IF that matters to you, it’s certainly something to consider. If it’s not, then the games are really the only other factor that matters, IMHO.