PS4 to be announced Feb 20th - Your predictions

The Game Room
21

Not really. Ai today is limited by the interst and work of the prgramming team; hardware isn’t holding it back at all.

Likewise wrong for the same reason. Animation techniques simply take immense time, which is one reason Bethesda has basically been using the sase crappy movement model since frickin’ Morrowind. And why most games have surprisingly few movements or animation, and spend almost all their effort on the most critical few. And why many RPG’s have weird, spastic repetitions of character motions in dialogue.

I suppose there’s a hypothetical limit where you could try creating an active program which models everything on a multilayer pass of bone, muscle, and flesh and create complex but randomized movements on the fly. You’d have to model everything. (Everything.) But console hardware isn’t keeping us from doing that. Human sanity and a lack of several millions man hours keeps us from doing that.

22

There’s really no way they’d ditch physical media. The US might arguably be ready for it, but Japan really isn’t.

And Sony always does proprietary.

23

I’m interested in hearing what comes out. I mostly play PC games but if this is amazing, and I have money (the latter being the major, and not very likely to occur, factor) I’d just might pick it up. I rarely play my PS3 now (I use it to play what I call “couch” games. Games I can play while my wife sits next to me reading or on her laptop. Games like Saints Row, Assassin’s Creed, GTA, etc allow me to play but still talk, whereas BF3 requires me to have headphones and full-attention.

One thing I do like about my PS3 is the media aspect of it. We use it all the time for Netflix, Blu-ray, and Amazon Instant Watch.

24

There is some of that, but it baffles me that you think more spare CPU cycles aren’t going to help improve things like more accurate collision detection, physics based interaction, path finding and AI decision making.

You’re doing it again. Looking at only one side of the coin. Yes, more complex, more fluid animations will take more time to be created, but that is NOT the limiting factor right now. The MAIN reason Bethesda and the likes of Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 had issues with animations and a occasionally had to remove certain animations at specific times, was because they were being limited by RAM.

This is straight from the developer’s mouth.

25

First of all, Sony hasn’t “officially” announced anything. The extent of their announcement was a YouTube video titled “See the future” that promoted the Twitter hashtag #PlayStation2013. That’s it. For all we know, this could be nothing more than Sony announcing their PAX East presence.

That said, I would put it at 99% that this is a PS4 announcement.

As for 720p vs 1080p, a good portion of Wii U games (and a handful of PS3/Xbox 360 games) run in 1080p, so I think the higher resolution is a given for the PS4.

And as for a used games lockout, you’re insane if you believe Sony would pull something like that. If they did, all MS has to do is announce that the Xbox 720 will allow used games and the PS4 will tank hard. It would tank so hard that it would make the Dreamcast look like a long-lived console. If you were able to see into a thousand different universes Sony wouldn’t add a used games lockout to the PS4 in any of them.

26

Why would they patent a system to lock out used game copies, if they didn’t plan on rolling out such a thing?

Anyway, like I said I’m not sure it’ll happen, but the rumors are there.

I don’t think the higher resolution is a given. Not by a long shot.

27

Because they’ve done it before.

There is no chance this happens. None. Zero. MS and Nintendo would swallow them whole. The PS4 would fail so hard it would probably pull the entire company done with it.

1080p for most games is also a sure thing. If the Wii U can do it, the PS4 should be able to do it.

28

The WiiU is doing it on Super Mario Brothers games. I’m tlaking about games with modern lighting, AA, and all the other visual and computational goodies we’re expecting out of the next gen fo games.

Star Wars 1313, Watch Dogs, etc. These games, if they look anything like their E3 Demos (which were running on PC’s), I don’t think will be running at 1080p on consoles.

Unless you subscribe to the fringe faction that thinks consoles will be runnign GTX 680’s in SLI or something…

29

All of this “having more ram and cpu power and graphics power doesn’t actually empower the game developers” shit is comical. It’s a weird mix of snobbishness (“I care about gameplay, only simpletons care about graphics!” as if you had a slider bar and in order to have more of one you have to have less of the other) and partisanship (my preferred choice is inferior this way, therefore I will pretend that it doesn’t matter).

Game development has always been driven by technology. Now there are games which don’t rely on this, but it’s not as if having better technology available somehow excludes them. I’ve been playing FTL alongside Planetside 2. FTL could’ve been made in 1994. Planetside 2 has hundreds of players and vehicles running around in a constant battle and would never work on current generation consoles. Does PC gaming hardware being awesome enough to huge, technically cutting edge games somehow block me from playing and enjoying FTL? If I were some sort of gameplay over graphics snob, I’d say yes, because, of course, I’d be a fucking idiot.

More power gives flexibility. Want to create huge, diverse worlds with tons of detail? Want to create realistic games that need to accurately simulate the physical world? Want games to have an epic scale where hundreds of people can be involved simultaneously? Want your game to look as close to the real world as we can to increase immersiveness? Want your AI to have more options available to them? All of this shit requires technology. Being against, or downplaying the importance in the advancement of gaming technology is stupid.

Besides, when you guys aren’t playing your particular ridiculous partisan games on this board (and we do have a lot of PC gamers on this board. We also have more people who watch Breaking Bad instead of reality shows, we have people who read actual good books instead of tabloid magazines, etc - the culture here is more refined than average) you’re probably off on other boards talking about how awesome the next generation of consoles are going to be.

I see the stupid fights on gaming boards where they’re like “oh, the xbox has this infinitesimal advantage in this game!” “oh yeah? well the detail in this ps3 title is slightly better!” and then someone comes in and says “lol you argue over miniscule differences between it while PC is massively better than either” and suddenly the argument changes to “yeah well I play for gameplay over graphics”

Similarly, you guys are all going to say to your friends “Oh man look how Gears of Retardery 19 looks on this new ps4! Look at the level of detail! It’s incredible!” but on this boards you’ve been pushing the “oh technology doesn’t actually help anything and besides if you like technically advanced games you are a plebian distracted by shiny things” so you won’t be talking about how great having modern technology instead of decade old technology on here.

As for development costs - we were unlucky to have the last generation of consoles come right before the DX10 revolution. “What DX10 revolution” you’ll probably ask, which is exactly the point. DX9 was a smattering of various kludged together standards we developed as we created new hardware that we had to develop software before. It became a confusing, inefficient mess. DX10 was intended to start fresh, knowing what we now know about technology, and refine the whole process. It makes games run faster and look better at the same time, and also makes them easier and cheaper to make. So we’ve got people complaining about how keeping up with new technology is so expensive, and it’s ironic because we’d have had cheaper, better, smoother games for almost a decade now if the stupid current gen of consoles hadn’t locked us in at dx9.

And yes, some people may say “but I’ve tried a dx10 game and there was nothing special about it” - a few games added a few dx10 features on top of a dx9 renderer as a marketing gimmick. The whole point of creating DX10 games was that you completely rid yourself of dx9 legacy code, it’s not a bunch of new whiz bang features on top of it. There only real pure DX10 game I’m ware of is Shattered Horizon, and there are a few games that are mostly DX10 but still weighed down by legacy concerns like Just Cause 2 and Battlefield 3, but it’s no coincidence that those games are some of the best looking, smoothest-running games ever made.

We’re going to have a huge generational leap all at once. Modern PC hardware is, depending on how you want to compare it, 10-60x more powerful than current gen hardware. Now the next gen consoles won’t be as powerful as current-day PCs (it’s a myth that at the time of release, consoles are better than PCs - no, they’re equivelant to contemporary lower middle end PCs). But we’re suddenly going to see the benefits of both DX10 and DX11, and we’re going to have hardware capabilities increased by at least a factor of 10 (I would hope), and the people of this thread think that’ll be no big deal.

At least I’ll be able to enjoy it for a year or two, as the multiplatform games briefly catch up to the current level of technology, before a few years down the road we’ll have the same stupid problem, I’ll be sitting on amazing 2020 hardware playing 2013-level games. Oh well. Beats playing on 2004-level games.

I hope they do ban used game selling on consoles, by the way. Every dollar that gamestop makes is a dollar not going to someone involved in actually making the game. And if it helps people realize how overpriced console games are compared to PC games, and how locked down Sony and Microsoft can make the whole process, great.

30

I can tell you, Sir Beef, that on other boards I’m not talking about ANY games. As someone that owns all pre-WiiU consoles, I’m gamed out. The machine that gets used the most, however, is the 360. It’s stickier than the ps3 and Wii.

This thread reminded me that the TV in our bedroom is 1080p (the family room tv’s a 720p DLP), so I moved the ps3 upstairs to give it a whirl.

I sincerely hope the PS4 solves all the freeking loading issues of the 3…wait after wait after wait. Not a fan.

But I’m pretty well consoled out…and have minecraft for the Mac.

31

Well, to be fair, not turning it on for 6 months was the main source of that problem. :stuck_out_tongue:

But one thing I hope Sony does is get better with their online/server stuff. One of the reasons those downloads took you 45 minutes (in addition to just needing 6 months worth of them,) is because Sony’s servers are slow as shit. On top of that, the PS3 has built-in wireless, but it’s almost like it punishes you for using it. Mine is a few feet from the wireless router, and if I’m downloading a large game, I’ll plug it in to a hard-wired connection and it goes almost twice as fast, when in theory they speeds should be near identical (by comparison, the 360 shows no significant increase in speed in wired vs wireless.)

I’d leave it plugged in all the time, but I don’t want to go out and buy a thirty foot ethernet cord to run along the baseboards and such, and the current one just being draped across the middle of the floor looks ghetto.

I also hope they fix all the little tiny issues with the software. Something that’s connected to the internet 24/7 shouldn’t have any trouble with Daylight Saving Time. And I don’t know about anyone else, but mine typically “forgets” that my TV can do 1080p and sometimes when I boot up I get a blank screen. I have to plug in the composite video cable, do a hard-reset power on, and then go back into settings to disable 1080p, then reboot with the HDMI cable in 720p, and then have it re-run the auto detect feature to “re-learn” that yes, my TV can do 1080p.

I suppose since there’s all of one game I play that can do 1080p, I could just leave it in 720p, but I also use it for Blu-Rays and I’m not sure if the PS3 being “hard set” at 720p means they won’t play at 1080p.

32

Good one Beef; I’m glad you’re stalking me on other forums so you know what I’m arguing about.

I have never participated in an “this title looks better on system X” argument. EVER. In my ENTIRE LIFE.

I don’t give a shit. Stop assuming things.

33

It wasn’t the source of the Slow to start BluRay player or the Playstation Home ‘load a small environment - select a new environment - wait to load another small environment’ I was experiencing.

I’ll accept that some of it was the time it’s been off, but the OVERALL feeling is that this is not a device you turn on to play a quick game.

34

The PS3 interface is atrocious, and it irritates me pretty much every time I turn it on. Unfortunately, it’s also the only way to play Tokyo Jungle.

35

Which is wierd, because it doesn’t have to be. It’s a PRETTY interface with lots of PRETTY stuff (the Playstation Home, for all the load time, with really cool looking)

But you add it on top of the other aspects of Sony and it just leaves me cold. ETA: OF course, I say this, knowing that my a57 DSLR is the best camera I’ve ever owned.

36

I wish I could be this disbelieving that the next-gen console won’t disallow used games, but I won’t be surprised if they don’t. Sony doesn’t give a crap about Gamestop - in fact, game manufacturers have been long making noise about how much they hate used game sales because they don’t see a dime of it. That’s why you have current games coming with access codes to play online - so anyone buying a used version of the game can’t play it online.

I think you guys make a good point that one thing standing in the way of it is the “no, you go first” nature of it, and Microsoft might well decide that allowing used games to capitalize on the good will over Sony is worth any potential losses from people buying used games instead of new games. On the other hand, they might not. Or maybe that shift will come years down the line instead of after the launch. But I think used games are definitely on the decline, as the technology catches up and makes it more and more possible.

37

GameStop sells more used games every year. They’re not going away. They’ll never go away.

That said, Nintendo has already launched a next generation console without any kind of used game lockout (shut up, the Wii U is awesome!). So Sony has already been cockblocked in the used game arena by Nintendo. They could make their move now, but it would just push gamers towards a system that is already on the shelves and an Xbox 720 that (rumor has it) will be on the shelves before the PS4.

38

Gamestop is around because they’re in an environment which permits them to exist. It’s not like they’re so powerful that they can set policy. If the console makers colluded to lock them out, they’d be done pretty quickly.

It’s probably more likely that you’re going to have to pay to unlock new games on your machine, sort of like what some current games are doing now if you want access to multiplayer. You can buy the disc used, but if you want to get full access you have to pay $10 digitally.

39

More than that, Gamestop has evolved to choke out the used market. It really isn’t a good value anymore. Buy a game for $60, get next to no value out of it, and used game sales are pretty close to the ‘platinum’ versions of the games that come out 8-10 months later. The only games that are cheap are the ones that aren’t any good.

40

Except, they haven’t. Again, Nintendo has already released a next-gen system without a used games lockout. It’s over, Sony can’t do it and still remain competitive for the next decade.