Even if you didn’t watch Sony’s PS4 presentation on Wednesday evening, chances are by now you’ve heard all the relevant talking points. You didn’t really miss much otherwise. It was, as expected, stuffed to the brim with hyperbole and promises, and actually very little concrete commitment.
A lot of what they’re planning to do actually sounds pretty neat… but there’s a pretty large gap between imagining it and making it happen on the scale they want. Being able to capture and upload video, spectate eachother’s games, even virtually pass the controller all sound awesome… and completely possible, since all of those mechanics exist already. However can they happen fluidly, and without causing more frustration than they relieve? Or is it just going to be a laggy mess for the first six months after launch?
The games they showed were hit or miss for me. I don’t really care about Killzone, no matter how flashy it looks, and Knack just looked… eh. Deep Down, on the other hand, looked fantastic. I’d love for that to be revealed as the Dragon’s Dogma sequel we’re supposed to be getting, but I’m pretty sure they said it was a new franchise. Oh well.
And then towards the end of the show, they brought out Chriss Metzen from Blizzard, and that actually made me sit up and pay attention. I thought maybe they were going to announce a new Lost Vikings, or maybe even the resurrection of Starcraft: Ghost. Nope. They go on to announce that they’re porting Diablo 3 to the PS4.
That’s the kind of announcement you’d generally want to start the show with, while you’re building up to the good stuff. You don’t show a ton of flashy tech demos and new games, and then at the climax say “And also this shitty game from last year that pretty much everyone hates!” while throwing out jazz hands.
Ultimately though, we don’t have much to go on in regards to the PS4, and pretty much anything and everything they talked about could change between now and the release date. It sounds cool, I like where they’re heading, but the proof is in the pudding. I’ll care more once some stuff is chiseled in stone.