PS4 to be announced Feb 20th - Your predictions

Sony officially announced the unveiling of the next PlayStation console - now officially to be called PS4 for Feb 20th.

What are your predictions about the system and what do you want to see?

My own:

  • Not backwards compatible. Something I predicted a long time ago and was told I was crazy for believing - but it looks like the next gen consoles are all going though a major architectural shift towards almost off-the shelf PC parts. So I’m almost completely sure there will not be any backwards compatibility for the console.

  • The “on paper” hardware performance of a mid range modern gaming PC. Regardless of the silly notion of consoles shipping with GTX 680’s or even more ridiculous, with high end GPU’s in SLI/X-fire configurations, the most recent rumors of a something like a high end mobile GPU are a lot more likely to be true. So I’m expecting something with a performance of a mid range GPU, and a low end CPU - but with a lot of cores. Probably 6 to 8. Of course devs should be able to squeeze out another 10-40% out of those specs say, 3-4 years down the line.

  • No used games? I predicted this a long time ago as well, and was also told I was crazy for thinking it. But rumors have been strong that Sony (and possible MS) will phase out used games. Sony, specifically, was seeing patenting a system that would work, even without an online connection. I’m still not 100% convinced, but I I’d wager that the odds are better than 60% that Sony will not allow used games on their system, at least not without some serious drawbacks- and if they do it, MS will follow suit.

  • No tablet controller - but motion will come standard. I don’t think Sony will launch with a tablet like controller, even though some seem to think they will. Instead, the system will come stock with some new version of the move.

  • Still Blu-ray, better home entertainment apps. This will also be true of the nextbox. They are trying to get everyone to hook up one of these things to their TV - and unless Apple/Steam really push, and do so early - I think they have a good chance of dominating the living room space.

I’ll probably take a pass. Our PS3 gets turned on about once every 6 months. The last time when GT5 announced a free download of the new Corvette. 45 minutes after powering it on I still couldn’t play, due to all of the software updates that ‘couldn’t be downloaded in the background’.

I don’t dislike the PS3…I bought it when I had a little more money than usual and wanted to complete the console set (I bought two of the original Xboxes, then the Wii on release day, then an Xbox360 a year or so after debut), and it very occasionally saw use as a blue ray playe, but it seems like if the goal is watching media, I default to the AppleTV and everything else…the 360 gets turned on first.

I’m frankly skeptical that there’ll be much of an improvement in game quality, simply because the display is still capped at 1080p…We’ll get more water, and more fog, and more shiny, but that’s about it.

ETA: Since you wanted predictions…Sony’s gesture system always seemed like a non-starter…my kinect sure doesn’t see a whole lotta use. I suspect because our couch and coffee table are about 2 feet too close to the screen. It’s an interesting gimmick, but it’s still early in gestures as input.

Actually - here’s another prediction: Most next gen console games will be 720p # 30 FPS. No different than this gen.

What will change will be lighting effects which will be fully modern, texture resolution which will be much larger, draw distances, shadowing, and AA + AF will be much better than they are today.

This will be enough to showcase a more rich graphical environment - but if you want 1080p at 60 FPS PC will again, be the only place to go.

The exception will be games that look pretty much like current gen games. The new console hardware should be able to render games like that at 1080p 60 FPS.

I’d say that the interface would (should) include a keyboard as it’s meant to be the ultimate multimedia device and integrates Hulu and Netflix and maybe even a DVR.

The new PS4 might follow Vita’s lead and do away with games on Blu-Ray and have the games on proprietary chips to prevent piracy. (A BR disc player would still be included as it’s Sony’s baby).

I’d be surprised if they used physical media at all, though in thinking about it, a 32 Gb flash card, MSRP, is $20 or less, so it’s not like they couldn’t store a Blu-Ray’s worth of data on something relatively cheap.

Who’s bettin’ it’d be proprietary? :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh well, at least by the time it actually comes out, I’ll finally have finished playing all my PS2 games. :frowning:
I’ll refuse to buy it if it has a motion controller.

No way in heck are they doing away with either used games or physical media. It’s just not going to happen. Gamestop has made a business out of selling what are essentially physical copies of download only games. You can buy STEAM dollars there, for heck’s sake. There is, clearly, a massive market for people who either don’t trust digital purchases, still like having physical objects, or who just lack the ability to make digital purchases easily. (how many 16 or 17 year olds have a credit card they can use to buy things online?)

Used games are integrally tied into everything and if Sony decides to cut them loose, they’ll basically just cede the field to Microsoft.

I’m also not convinced that the PS4 will field motion controls. The Move has pretty much vanished from popular consciousness, and doesn’t seem to be seeing a lot of play even in “gamer” circles. While it’s clear that Microsoft is still pushing Kinect (which, to be fair, has at least had some success with dance type games, which is more than you can say for the Move) I don’t think the PS4 will be anything more than Move(Equivalent?)-compatible. All that said, I don’t expect it to pack a keyboard either.

Backwards compatibility will probably not go in either, because the PS3 would be a beast to emulate, and still probably costs a good chunk of change to put in hardware for. I expect the next Xbox to feature some backwards compatibility of some sort, but it’s going to be hard for Sony to pull off - especially considering that they really can’t afford to launch another console that sells at a loss and is still too expensive for the average person’s budget.

As for specs, on the one hand, I find it humorous, verging on the absurd that anyone would imply that “game quality” cannot improve because we’re capped at 1080P. I know you PROBABLY meant “graphical quality” but c’mon. For serious. Most games today don’t even run at 1080P and in most living rooms, no one can tell the difference between 1080P and better anyway. Viewing distances are much bigger in the living room, and you just don’t need all that resolution to make your game look good. I think Kinthalis is pretty close to right with his prediction that we’ll still be in ~720P, though I actually expect that we’ll EITHER see better framerates OR higher resolutions in newer games (probably a mix, varying from game to game.) along with the other improvements he suggests.

No, I’m pretty sure I mean game quality.

The current generation has games that are pretty, have amazingly large maps (or amazingly short load times), and really long playtimes (Skyrim), or have settled on 10-15 hours for the average non-enthusiast.

8 times the processing power will net you MORE things flying about, but I don’t think it’ll translate, necessarily, to BETTER gameplay.

Xbox brought a Hard disk to every console, the PS3/360 brought HD, The Wii brought alternative game inputs…what will physically happen in the next generation to push gameplay forward?

This is not remotely what you said in your previous post, which FIRMLY implies that “if only we could do better than 1080p, we’d get better games!” which is…frankly, hilarious, and not at all what you are saying in THIS post. NOTHING “necessarily translates to better gameplay.”

Also, if you believe the PC Gaming Cult, consoles have been holding us back on ALL of what you described above, and the improved processing power of the next generation will finally allow us to move closer to…uh…something that think we are missing.

But in the case of the PC Hegemony, the consoles will still be stuck at 1080p, leaving them something to feel smug about. I can say both: the graphics will be slightly improved, I’m not so sure the gameplay will necessarily be improved. I guess I’m getting jaded as the amount of time I’ve spent playing ANYTHING has really dropped off lately, and the game I spend the most time on is Minecraft. Which won’t be improved with a bazillion graphics pipelines…nor will Angry birds: The Return of the Piggies

Yeah; That’s kinda the point. We’re not being held back from making “better games” by the resolution of our screens. :slight_smile:

And no technological advances are going to meaningfully improve Minecraft or Angry Birds. :wink:

Speaking of graphics, I wonder if the PS4 will support 3D tvs and 3D games. We haven’t seen a home console that has done that yet.

Better graphics and therefore more immersive worlds? More interactive worlds? More expansive worlds? smarter AI? More fluid animations and more of them?

The more tools available to the designers/programmers/artists, the more possibilities there are.

That does without saying. The PS3 supports 3D blurays

ETA: I expect our reaction will be much the same as with 3d in the movies and the Nintendo 3DS…it’s cool, but not a requirement.

You don’t know that.

More complex physics could certainly change the way you interact with the world in a game like minecraft.

And I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see some fully tessellated angry birds. :stuck_out_tongue:

Uh, actually the PS3 already does this. It doesn’t do it very well and nobody CARES, but it does it.

3D is a dead end technology. Various industries have tried to sell it to us several times throughout history, and it keeps not working. I think the Oculus Rift is a far more interesting technology than any 3DTV.

More complex physics would, yes, probably “change” the way you interact with Minecraft, but I would argue they wouldn’t make it BETTER. Sometimes, simple is better.

Honestly? At this point I feel that better graphics and more impressive technologies are actually LIMITING us. Because the shinier you make things, the more they cost and the more they cost, the harder it is to make “lots” of them, in the sense of making worlds that feel BIG. Compare, for example, the size of a level in Doom to a level in Call of Duty. Similarly, we’ve basically lost the degree of branching paths we used to have available to us because it costs too much and takes too long to record dialogue for stuff that only a fraction of players are going to see. The more impressive (and therefore expensive) we make content, the more restricted our game experiences become. Yes, eventually this levels out - I’m sure Legend of Grimrock would’ve been visually impressive some years ago, and that was done with a small team, but it’s not on the scale of what gamers “expect” from even current gen console titles.

Smarter AI? Better animations? I’d love to see both, but I’m not at all convinced that more processing power is going to give them to us. More RAM maybe, yes, but better graphics cards? Faster CPUs? Not so much.

I don’t think I have any predictions for the PS4 other than that Sony will try to do something bold and new. I wouldn’t be surprised to see no used games, and full motion-gesture-whatever integration like the Wii/Wii U.

Smarter AI - Ai that interacts and responds to the world in more believable ways, as well as poses more of a challenge - that is definitely going to require more processing power.

Animations are mostly a limit of RAM, but more, and faster RAM is part of the package of “new” hardware.

Poor comparison. There’s no true tunnels or levels in Doom. Nothing can move under anything else. Nothing can share the same X,Y coordinates by being in different Z locations.

I’d rather play in a realistic three level building with a relatively small “footprint” than a sprawling area three times as “large” and crippled in dimensions.

Here’s a map of Pripyat from Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. Besides being huge in footprint, many of those buildings allow you to go inside and travel on multiple floors (real floors), on rooftops, through tunnels, etc. Blows any Doom map away.

Is that a Laura Croft joke?