On Wednesday, February 20, 2013, Sony finally revealed their next videogame console: the PlayStation 4. While there had been a lot of speculation leading up to the event, it’s nice to finally have some details confirmed and, after seven years, we can look forward to a new console gaming generation this fall.
Here’s a brief rundown of the system: The PS4’s new controller will feature a touch pad, a light bar which can indicate character health as well as act as work in tandem with PlayStation Eye (similar to PS Motion), has redesigned analogue sticks with concave grips, and a new “social” button which opens up a social menu. The PlayStation Eye has also been vastly improved and now features two cameras with 1200 x 800 resolution–the two cameras allow depth recognition.
The system itself is equipped with a “powerful custom chip that contains eight x86-64 cores and a state of the art graphics processor.” The PS4 also has 8 gigs of GDDR5 memory allowing 176GB per second bandwidth and higher graphic fidelity.
Games announced for the PlayStation 4 include a new title in the inFamous series titled Second Son, Killzone: Shadow Fall, Bungie’s Destiny with exclusive content, The Witcher 3, Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs (which was announced at E3 2012), Diablo III (which will also make an appearance on the PS3 for the eager, console-bound dungeon adventurers), among others. The upcoming content seems to be a strong lineup, but there’s little new content to entice potential buyers at this early stage–E3 is likely to bring more exciting news on the next PlayStation.
It’s also worth noting that the PS4 will play used games, contradicting past rumors that the system would block the use of pre-owned titles. The PS4 will not, however, be backwards compatible and past PSN purchases on previous platforms will not be accessible on the new system. While Sony plans to circumvent the backwards compatibility issue with a streaming service, the lack of any native support for older titles is discouraging.
Nevertheless, the PlayStation 4 looks to be a powerful gaming machine and it’s certainly exciting to move on to a new generation of console gaming hardware this holiday season.
CD Projekt RED has announced the third installment of its The Witcher franchise. The developer claims that the game will be the largest modern RPG and will be 30x larger than The Witcher 2. This next installment will use CD Projekt’s new engine REDengine 3 and will be the first game to utilize said engine. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be an open world game said to be 20% larger than the world in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim–the map will take over 30 minutes to cross on horseback!
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