I last played console video games regularly in the SNES era. My sister got a Nintendo 64 when it came out, but she only ever had 1 game for it and I didn’t play it regularly.
I’m thinking about getting a Playstation 4. There’s been a lot of change in the way video game consoles work that I’ve missed, I’m sure.
One thing I noticed is that they all have sizable hard drives. The PS4 comes with a 500 GB hard drive. What’s it need all that space for? I’m guessing some of it is used for game saves (which was accomplished by the cartridge having battery-powered RAM back when I last played video games.) But no matter how large your game library, saved games can’t possibly take up 500 GB. So what’s the rest of the space for?
Don’t think of a PS4 as a console in the same way the SNES was a console. The PS4 is a computer. Every game you buy will have installation files that take up room. Sometimes you might elect to purchase a game digitally and simply download it to your PS4 directly. That takes up quite a bit more space. Some people us a PS4 or xBox as a media center store music, photos, and other such things on it.
So, instead of reading the game off the DVD/Blu-Ray disc, like the earlier Playstations, the system installs it onto the hard drive, just like PC games? Does that mean once you’ve installed your games, you no longer need to pop discs in and out to play different games?
Another thing I’ve noticed about the latest systems–they all have wireless controllers. Isn’t battery life a problem? What if you want to have a marathon gaming session; do you have no choice but to stop for a few hours and let your controller recharge? What if the battery dies when you’re in the middle of a vital sequence of the game?
I don’t have a PS4 but I can buy games for my wii u electronically. There is no disc in the first place.
You have to buy multiple controllers and alternate. If the battery dies, the game usually automatically pauses and says “Lost Connection with Device - Please Check Battery” or something.
They typically still require you to have the disc, primarily to verify that you still own it. Digital distribution is probably the wave of the future, so a large HD is needed. Game updates, system updates, all get stored on the HD as well.
The PS4 controller runs out of juice faster than the PS3 controllers did; it still lasts quite a long time, but not all day long. Nice thing about the PS4 is that it will charge the controller even with the system in rest mode, and you do get a warning that the charge is getting low so its not likely to die on you suddenly without you knowing. If you have a long enough charge cable you can continue playing while plugged in, but I think its a good idea to have a second controller on hand. They do charge up pretty quickly, IMO.
One of the main draws for the Playstation Plus subscription is the “free” games they offer every month. You can download and play them for as long as you have a subscription but this of course requires the entire game file to sit on your hard drive. In fact, if someone is an avid user of the PS+ games, they may want to spring for a larger hard drive than the one that comes stock.
Yes, absolutely. Some of the free digital download games are over 30 GB, it fills up quickly. I’m already doing the delete/reinstall shuffle with games after only a year of having the PS4. There are some really good games for free on PS+ that I never would have noticed otherwise, definitely worth playing.
Even if you buy all of your games on disc and “install” as little as possible (Games vary in just how much of themselves they want to copy to the hard drive, and some allow you to install basically the whole thing to speed up loads) you’ll still be acquiring digital content, as likely as not. The most unavoidable these days is patches/updates, but Downloadable Content of various forms, whether its maps, costumes, entire new characters, or whatever, all adds up as well.
The idea of thinking about the machine as a computer rather than a “console” is really a good one, because the PS4 has way more in common with a PC running windows than it does with an SNES.
All PS4 and Xbox One games install everything onto the hard drive. After the installation the only thing the system does with the disc is verify that it’s there for DRM purposes.
You can charge the controller while playing if you sit close enough that the cord reaches. When plugged in, there’s no difference to regular old timey controllers.
I’ll be shocked if the next generation of consoles even has optical drives. They’ve been unnecessary on PCs for years; you buy your games on Steam or another service and download them. Yeah, it leaves people with 1 Mb/s connections out in the cold, but that’s an increasingly shrinking market. Physical media is dead. Obviously this means that you’ll want a large hard drive on the system; some games are >50 GB and so even 500 GB can feel tight. But hard drives are cheap.
sort of. game assets (artwork, textures, etc.) are getting so big that the transfer rate of even a Blu-Ray drive (36-72 Mb/s) would cause such long load times that people would be more than slightly irritated.
you still need the disc. most likely to “prove” you own the game, otherwise you could install the game to your console’s hard drive and give the disc to someone else. Plus, in order to ensure that I believe the code for the game’s engine (which isn’t a terribly large amount of code) is still loaded from the disc.
you’re screwed, I guess. that said, the PS4’s controller can be recharged from pretty much any USB port on any device. my laptop stays on the coffee table, so if I get a “low battery” notification I just plug the controller into a port on the laptop and keep playing.
Stores? What is this, the 90’s? But yeah, why not? I’ve already bought games that, alongside the disc, had a Steam code. I entered the code, downloaded the game, and never touched the disc. Next logical step is to get rid of the disc, and the box too for that matter. Make it like a gift card: a piece of cardboard with the key under a scratchable box.
Not only that but since the game requires Steam, you have to use the activation code and the only function the disc serves is to download less stuff and to make the purchaser feel like they bought something. As you said, it could have just as easily been sold as a key on a scratch-off card or a within cardboard sleeve if you want more space for cover art.
I hope you’re using Mb literally and mean megabit, not megabyte. Because 1 megabyte per second is what I currently get, and if that’s inadequate, I’d hate to think I’m going to have to start paying Time Warner more than $35 per month just for the privilege of being able to buy video games.
I always correctly distinguish between bits and bytes :). But it wasn’t meant as a hard cutoff, just an indicator of patience. At 1 MB/s, a 50 GB game will take 14 hours to download. A bit slow but not too bad. At 1 Mb/s, it takes 4.6 days. Pretty rough.
How viable is it to use a modern console like PS4 without an internet connection? Just play games out of the box with no updates, patches, etc?
I have satellite internet with lousy download speeds at home, so online gaming really isn’t possible unless I take the machine to my office, which has cable access…