I think all we know is 2006. I imagine it won’t be too much past mid-year, especially if Halo 3 gets a release date Sony can disrupt.
As far as price is concerned, well let’s just thank Sony and Microsoft for fighting so hard for out attention. I imagine they’ll both be around the same price point, probably $300 to $400. Closer to $400 at first to screw the I MUST HAVE IT NOW crowd (yes, I’m often in that crowd). No one’s going to show their cards regarding pricing this early though.
And oh yeah, I guess I better figure another $1000 in for a HD TV. :smack:
I really hope that they reconsider those awful looking controllers. The entire reason I chose the XBox over the PS2 back in the day was due to how uncomfortable and clumsy the old PS2 controllers were. Looks like they are making the same mistake here. Is it just that Japanese testers have smaller hands and like tightly spaced buttons? A little help for full sized men with baseball mitt sized hands please!
Also, wonder what the likelyhood that MS is sand-bagging here. Probably pretty slim, but if they are it’d be sheer brilliance. Watch them roll out a press clipping come October asserting that they’ll up the GPU’s power, go HD-DVD support and backwards compatibility at $100 cheaper than Sony available by X-mas.
If they don’t up the offerening or go alot cheaper they will be sunk.
Couple of things: Bill Gates already said he plans to release Halo3 to coincide with the PS3 release. He thinks that it’ll completely screw Sony over. I would have agreed with him before, but looking at the PS3 now, I’m doubting it’ll make too much of a difference. I believe the current release date is supposed to be Spring '06, but it’s Sony, so I’d take that to mean “sometime next year.”
I highly doubt Microsoft is underplaying their capabilities. It’s not just a few percentage point difference; the PS3 is twice as powerful as the Xbox 360. They’d really have to up their ante a bit to compete. Honestly, I don’t think they really need to. Both machines are so far above the current generation that the raw power isn’t going to be a deal breaker for people. In the end I think it’ll come down to games. Microsoft has some big supporters, especially since they’re finally getting the Japanese companies to sign on. But Sony is known for a more diverse gaming library. Plus it confirmed backwards compatibility, something Microsoft has yet to do.
Sigh… maybe HDTVs will drop in price next year. I doubt it though.
What kind of gorrilla hams do you have hanging off your wrists, man? Nobody’s ever accused me of having small hands, but the PS/PS2 controllers fit nicely.
The only controller I’ve ever had trouble with is the n64 (although I’ve never played the Cube, so I don’t know if Nintendo improved their controllers).
I agree that the PS3 controller looks uncomfortable, but for the opposite reason - there’s too much to the ‘horns’. And the buttons and a-sticks look positioned awkwardly relative to eachother and the horns.
Yep. The only thing we did in post-production was add the sound. If you watch the footage of the Unreal demo from the press conference they actually freeze their movie and fly the camera around to show that they really are doing it in real time.
I’ve heard it’s easier as well. But I’m just the designer … I don’t actually have to deal with the hardware.
No way. The E3 rollouts are as much about getting third-party developers on board as they are about impressing the public. Developers want to know that a system is a winner before they commit to developing on it. Microsoft would be crazy to low-ball their performance figures.
Let’s just say that I thought the original XBox controllers were functional, but the new S-controllers are downright dainty.
I wish you could see a better look at the underside of the new controllers, the grip/trigger layout is usually the most important part, second only to the placement of the analog joysticks.
I really like the assymetrical layout of the analogs on the Xbox controller, something they kept on the 360. Looks like Sony doesn’t plan on adopting it as they stick with their outdated four-way pad dominated layout.
Heh, one of the major complaints of a lot of my friends is how big and clunky the X-Box controller feels compared to the PS2 controller. Maybe we need a couple different sizes of official controller or something - I don’t think that anyone would argue that there’s a fairly large distribution of hand sizes… is it enough to be profitable though? The PS3 one is a little funny-looking, to be sure, but you can’t really know 'till you can hold it.
(note - that was an entire paragraph about controllers, including the new PS3 one with the… phallic… sides, as well as hand size, and it had NOTHING TO DO with sexual references!)
I really hated the GameCube controller, even more so than the N64 controller, due mostly to the distribution of buttons on the right side of the controller. Made it a real pain to do some button combinations, which most Cube-only games kept in mind, but out-on-everything games (Soul Calibur 2, for example) didn’t necessarily.
Honestly, my nomination for best controller design would probably be the original PSOne controller, but I don’t really like the whole analog craze. That said, if you’re going to put the analog on there, and there are going to be games where the analog works and the d-pad doesn’t (as was the case for many PS2 games), the analog HAS to be in the logical place on the left side where the d-pad currently is.
I managed to get through the entire last generation of systems without buying one of them, but I’m probably going to have to get this, especially since it can play the PS2 games I’ve picked up (since my housemates had a PS2) as well as all my old PSOne games. Mmmmmm.
The only thing that stopped me from saying “Oh my GOD” at those videos was because I’m an atheist. :eek: Holy lack of god.
All I care about is its abilities as a game console. If the final games can deliver visuals like that (in HD, no less), I’ll have to start selling internal organs[sup]*[/sup] to get one.
Don’t get your hopes up–it’s just a demo they put together to show off what the machine can do. However, there was talk a while back of updating FF7-9 for the PS2, but obviously that never happened. Maybe it will this time…
I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far from this system.
I must be the only one here who isn’t wowed by the graphics. Sure, they’re amazing, but they’re not nearly the leap we saw between previous generations. Compare the leap from “Super Mario World” to “Mario 64,” or from “Goldeneye” to “Halo”… in each case, technology had improved between generations to the point that you saw as much enhancement in gameplay mechanics as in graphics. Comparing the AI, number of enemies onscreen at a time, and level size between “Goldeneye” and “Halo,” you see massive improvements on all fronts. That justified my shelling out a couple hundred bucks for the Xbox back in 2001; it’s going to take similar improvements beyond just pretty graphics for me to consider either the Xbox 360 or the PS3 now.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen “Warhawk” yet- those “thousands of airplanes” sound like something that could easily change my mind.
And the PS4 will be an even smaller leap, diminishing returns and all. And even with greater technology, is it financially worthwhile for programmers to continue representing more details as techonology allows? Doubt it.
I strongly disagree.
The difference between the Playstation and the PS2 was not really that shocking.
The resolution was a lot higher, but that was about it.
Now we are reaching photo-realism which is an enormous step forward.
Please check out the demos of “Motorstorm” and “KillZone”.
They will blow you away.
There’s a reason why I didn’t bother with the PS2, and that was it.
(Minor disclaimer: The following is based entirely on what few games I’ve seen of the various E3 previews, which is a fairly small sampling of what’s on show, and does not yet include original properties like Warhawk.)
I looked at Killzone, and while the detail of the models and the realism imbued by the new lighting tricks certainly looks fantastic, I don’t see anything that will enhance the gameplay experience. Will Killzone feature signficantly more advanced AI? Vast levels featuring destructible environments? These are things that screenshots cannot demonstrate, and are IMO far important to a “good” game than shiny shaders.
I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth, but it seems to me like the gaming press, at least, is far too focused on pretty graphics over advances in gameplay. It’s games like Wil Wright’s “Spore,” which promises true innovation in game design, and “Psychonauts,” which combines inventive art design with brilliant writing (and neither of which are “next-gen console games,” incidentally), that excite me.
The games come first. Hardware and graphics are merely means to an end.
True, but the hardware isn’t responsible for AI or destructible environments, so I am not sure what your point is.
That is the job of the developer, and as consoles get more powerfull they will have more resources to spend on things like tweaking the AI.
Dude… .I played the first Warhawk ages ago. Killer!
Actually, what impressed me most was the difference in launch announcements. The 360 pissed me off, because of the Spike TV like launch party. That, and nobody saw the darn games, just stills.
The PS3 shows actual differences. Not a fan of the controllers, but there will be aftermarket ones, undoubtedly. And I suspect my USB PS2/PC controller will work just fine.
I think PS3 is going to blow Xbox 360 out of the water graphically, but the Xbox 360’s CPU looks like it is higher powered so it may be able to process better physics, AI and gaming engines. It may also come down to the networking, Live looks like it is going to be great on the 360. What does Sony plan to do there?
I am hoping one comes out noticeably ahead, I cannot afford both systems
I also have to give kudos to Microsoft for the development of Xbox Live.
It looks like Sony will make a direct rip-off of it, which would be pretty cool.
One of the developers talked about the new network which would have exactly the same functionality as Xbox Live has.
I do worry a bit about them saying that the PS3 would be an on-line machine, which would always be connected to the Internet.
I hope they don’t mean that you have to be connected all the time, or it won’t work.
This would be pretty smart to keep the mod’s out and the illegally copied games, but I don’t want to connect to the Internet the whole time.
