NEW YORK — After filing into the Hammerstein Ballroom and shaking off the brittle chill of the Manhattan winter, we sit in quiet expectation. Every five minutes, an Englishwoman with a soothing voice encourages us take our seats and updates us on just how much time we had before the presentation began. Shockingly, it starts exactly on time.
Lights flash and music blasts at us as a series of marketing slogans appears on the screen, one after another, in succession so rapid that they are rendered almost meaningless. Sony is at war with something or other. It’s all very serious. When the strobing stops, Andrew House, Sony Computer Entertainment’s Group CEO, takes the stage and welcomes us for a long time, making no mention of a new console. For a moment, it seems that perhaps the joke that was circulating on Twitter all day was true — maybe this was just an elaborate ruse, maybe we weren’t going to see a new console after all.
But then the letters appear on the screen, PS4, and the room relaxes, though perhaps too soon.
There is a certain tolerance for sleight of hand at a press event like PlayStation Meeting. There will be fancy light shows and slogans and corny jokes, a bit of prestige meant to entertain and distract from the fact that, over the course of hours, only a few nuggets of genuine information will be presented to the public. The job of the marketing people at Sony is to use that time to sell an idea; it is far too long until launch to be selling a physical product. The job of the audience is to dig through all the lip service to find the substance underneath.
Even so, considering this was the presentation of Sony’s vision of the future of gaming, a first step in a journey into the next generation that will likely last years, there was surprisingly little substance for the audience to find. Rather, after the dog and pony show, we were most interested in what was absent.
Namely, the console itself. While the architecture of the system was sketched out in broad strokes, the box itself did not make an appearance. Is it flat? Is it tall? Is it black? Is it white? Will it look sexy and sleek next to my flatscreen TV? These questions, seemingly integral for an event announcing a new piece of consumer hardware, were left to be answered on another day.
In fact, the vast majority of the presentation was concerned with things we had already seen. The lone piece of hardware on display, the redesigned DualShock 4 controller, made the rounds in the gaming press last week. The new touch pad, an admittedly intriguing addition, was mentioned in passing but not elaborated on. None of the game demos showed us how it could be used.
The new games that were introduced felt similarly familiar. We learned that Diablo III, a game that came out for PC in 2012, would be coming to PlayStation, the same for Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, a game that was revealed last year at E3 and widely thought to be a next-gen title. We saw the tech demo of Unreal Engine 4, a version of which has been circulating in the industry since March of last year, and “Agni’s Prophecy” from Square Enix, which surfaced for the first time last summer.
Even what was new was old. Killzone will be getting another sequel in Shadow Fall, a game that, by the series’ established standards, is refreshingly vibrant (this one has colors other than gray and red in it) but, in the end, looks like just another sci-fi first-person shooter. The Infamous franchise will also be getting another installment with Second Son, which looks rather like the last Infamous game but with more particle effects.
There were new titles on display as well, of course. Mark Cerny, the console’s lead system architect, showed off Knack, a charming enough brawler with a Pixar vibe. DriveClub, an obsessively detailed team racing game, took a page from Gran Turismo. Capcom’s demo for Deep Down also looked promising in a way reminiscent of Dark Souls and Dragon’s Dogma. And there was Bungie’s spiritual successor to Halo, called Destiny, which looks very Haloey indeed.
None of these things, new or old, felt very like a bold new generation. The feeling of sameness, of deja vu, ran very deep over the course of the program. And, again, what was absent was what was most conspicuous. Long time tent pole series like God of War and Uncharted went without mention and, while Journey was proudly referenced on several occasions, no one from thatgamecompany took to the stage.
Sure, there was grand talk of integrated social initiatives, most of which boiled down to the new controller having a Share button. Much was made of the idea of accessing games from any of your other high tech devices, something that seems like a cousin of Microsoft’s SmartGlass. And the struggling Vita got a boost, thanks to the implication that it could be used for remote play –- a promise that has been made and broken before.
At least in regards to the remote play, Shuhei Yoshida, head of Sony’s game development studios, gave a concrete clarification during a roundtable interview. “Remote play will work. Virtually every PS4 game will be playable on PSP Vita via remote play. It is a great experience. We have tried it already,” he says. “I will be heartbroken if it [isn’t available] day one.”
The most exciting thing discussed during the presentation was Sony’s commitment to immediacy. No more infinite updates. No more long install times. With a separate chip dedicated to background downloads, you’ll be able to fire up your PlayStation 4 and play games without delay. But when reducing load times is an undisputed highlight, trouble might be looming.
After the presentation, we adjourn to the lounge. It is a chic space with low light, an open bar and waiters serving hors d’oeuvres, the kind of place meant to foster conversations and positive opinions. Yet the atmosphere runs from ambivalent to confused. Harold Goldberg, author of the gaming history book All Your Base Are Belong to Us, said it best: “Well, it was vague.”
Over and over, the same question was being asked: “Why now?” With no prototype console on display, with no hands-on opportunities after the presentation, with nothing but assurances that more details would come later in the year, why not wait until later in the year to introduce the system? Why bring 1,200 journalists and fans from all over the country to New York in the dead of winter to show a video that was livestreamed around the world?
Yoshida tried to clear up some of those mysteries. He apologized directly for not showing the actual hardware during the event, explaining that from now until launch, Sony has a lot of information to communicate to consumers. Last night’s priority, he said, was on the philosophy behind the system. Yoshida also noted the final console is “not finished. We are still making tweaks.”
He also offered some assurances that the console’s price will not be as high as the PS3′s, which launched at $600. “The architecture choice that we have made this time around allows us to not have to create dedicated factories,” he explains. “That helps us provide an affordable price to consumers.”
A final bit of good news: Yoshida said that PlayStation 4 will not outright block the play of games bought second-hand. “When you purchase disc-based games for PS4, they will work on any hardware,” Yoshida says. As for online registration of games, he noted that was a decision for publishers to make.
For every clarification, however, there seemed to be a hydra of topics Yoshida wasn’t willing to talk about yet. The real answer is likely that, having been late to market with the PlayStation 3, Sony is looking for an early edge in mindshare this time around. But with so many elaborate promises and so few details, what was meant to be a head start might really have been jumping the gun.
