PUSH SQUARE
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GEEK WIRE
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We've been here before, haven't we? I remember the halcyon days of 2013, when a less jaded Sammy and a much smaller Push Square quivered with anticipation as Sony announced the PlayStation Meeting which would later play host to the PlayStation 4. The event was revealed days after a cunning Kaz Hirai had told a business broadsheet that it would let its competitor go first. The company took the entire industry by surprise.
But who needs the glitz and glamour of strobe lights and stage make-up when you can just send a tech journalist to Foster City and have Mark Cerny spill the beans? It's a strange way to announce a new console, but in this social media age, the PlayStation maker has ensured that everyone knows what it's up to – and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters, isn't it? The best news of all: the PS5 genuinely sounds superb.
In fact, I don't think there's a single thing I'm worried about after milking that Wired article for all that it's worth. I suppose the console does sound pretty costly, but I don't think there's any chance of a PlayStation 3 reprise here – the manufacturer knows that it needs to be under $500 at the very least. Personally, I think we're probably looking at somewhere in the region of $449.99, which is slightly more than the PS4 but reasonable for early adopters.
For me, there are two things that the PS5 needed to do: it needed to leverage the success of the PS4 and simultaneously evolve it. Those two requirements may sound precariously close to a paradox, but I think that's what Sony is actually promising. Here we have a piece of hardware that's built upon the very same foundations as its predecessor: it's backwards compatible, it's developer friendly, and it's consumer-focused. But the manufacturer isn't resting on its laurels.
No, the people at PlayStation are eager to evolve what gaming can be – and that's absolutely how it should be. The drastically superior hardware specifications, with ray tracing functionality, will obviously improve visual fidelity – but features like 3D audio and faster loading will help with immersion in ways that are simply impossible on the PS4 right now. This is what a next-gen system should be aiming to deliver, and I'm glad Sony recognises that.
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GEEK WIRE
Sony lifted the hood on its next PlayStation console in a Wired story today featuring an interview with Mark Cerny, the lead architect of the PlayStation 4. To summarize briefly, the new model won't arrive this year, will feature ray-tracing capability that provides a greater degree of visual realism by allowing even better simulation of light and sound, and most importantly, will ship with a solid-state drive.
The addition of a solid-state drive is notable, given that big-budget games at the moment tend to involve big, open worlds for the player to explore, which means the game has to load an entire, miles-wide map when you fire the game up. A solid-state drive would allow nearly seamless transitions for console games.
But overall, Cerny makes it sound like the PlayStation 5 (which isn't officially named that yet, but let's stick with it for now) is based around a few quality-of-life changes, rather than marking a seismic transition between console generations. The PS5 isn't the stalking horse for a new media brand, as the PlayStation 2 was for DVDs or the PS3 was for Blu-Ray discs; it'll at least be backwards compatible with your PS4 library; and you'll still be able to buy discs for it.
It's just a new, more powerful, more versatile PlayStation.
However, it's also coming up to bat in a video game industry that's in a greater state of flux than normal. Google's streaming service Stadia promises to put serious marketing and programming muscle behind cloud-based gaming in a way that can't help but change the landscape around it. Microsoft already has a streaming service of its own, as well as new initiatives such as the Xbox One All-Digital Edition, the All Access program, and bringing the Xbox Live experience to its competitors' platforms.
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