With Sony recently announcing the highly anticipated fourth generation PlayStation, and Microsoft heavily rumored to be working on its own next generation Xbox, all the talk if the town right now is very much centered on what the new game consoles will be able to offer to not just games, but also game developers.
Unless you've been in hiding for the past fortnight, you will have caught Sony's announcement of the PlayStation 4 last week, and since the big unveiling left quite a few elements to the imagination (namely, what the console actually looks like), chins have been wagging in gaming circles ever since. Shortly following the event, we heard of the interesting development that while it would not apply to games, the PlayStation 4 would support 4K video playback, and today, that has been confirmed by the Japanese company's COO Phil Molyneux.
If you have been following the recent announcements on Sony’s new console, the PlayStation 4, you are likely aware of how much emphasis the Korean company is placing on game titles downloaded over the “cloud”. If there were any more doubts to be had about Sony’s intentions for the new console, one important figure within the company has confirmed that all games for the upcoming PlayStation 4 console will indeed be available in digital form.
The PlayStation 4 event earlier this week threw up as many questions as it answered, notably pertaining to what it looks like, how much it will cost, and when it will be available. We have no real idea of what form the console will take, its price, or any real details on ETA except "in time for the holidays," yet many retailers have deemed this information enough to begin taking pre-orders and running competitions as they try and take advantage of the PS4 Mania.
Well well well, it seems that all the rumors and general consensus were indeed true - Sony has been working on the PlayStation 4 for the last five years according to Lead system architect Mark Cerny. That's probably round two years after they realized the PS3 wasn't going to cut it, then.
The announcement of the PlayStation 4 may have passed, but plenty of questions pertaining to the upcoming console remain unanswered. New details are emerging by the hour, and Joystiq has learned that while the PS4 will offer 4K output for video, the same cannot be said for games. This has its pros and cons, of course, notably that while you're not going to be forced to spend big bucks on a gleaming new 4K TV, it also means you're not going to be seeing games run at that incredibly high resolution, at least not yet.
New York City played host to yesterday's special event from Sony in which it finally launched the PlayStation 4, and as fans attempt to dissect and digest all the information revealed at the event, the Japanese company has released a trailer which offers an abridged take on proceedings. The trailer features a we words from key players in the console's development, sneak previews at some of the hardware and peripherals, as well as a glimpse of those all-important games. Check it out after the break!
Finally, after all the fanfare, Sony put all of the PS4 rumors to rest with the official announcement a short while ago, and if you're looking for the when, where, and what, we'll be clarifying all of the available key details in the following post. With so many new features and implementations, it is a lot to digest, but stay tuned for the full round-up after the break.
If there's one downside to picking up a shiny new game console, it's throwing out all of your old games because you've just not got the room to keep everything set up. That's where backwards compatibility comes in - letting gamers play the previous generation of games on the latest tech. The problem is that if the new machine's different enough to the old one, that may not be possible.
Following on from a report yesterday, in which Destructoid offered a supposed first look at what it claimed was the controller for Sony's PlayStation 4, a second photo has today emerged depicting the same peripheral. Today's image is a lot closer, and taken at a different angle - one which also reveals a 3.5mm jack on the underside of the controller, and from this perspective, the handles also look a certain degree longer.
