Sony Press Conference (4th June in LA/5th June in Europe))

[Agent Gibbs]

So i have just got up and read, is it worth watching the conference? from all your reactions nothing much happened bt wa\s slightly better than MS (but that's like saying a car crash is better than falling off a building)

 

SO did they even announce a Vita price drop? just COD and Assasin's Creed game wise? no jRPG's? (the jap market will need them)

 

I best watch this, it can't be that bad....

[Daft]

Mmmm, yes, the Vita is really dead now. Honestly, how melodramatic do people want to be. Shock, horror, it's dazzybee and Zechs coming up with this taut rhetoric.

 

The presentation was dull (painfully dull) but content wise I'm not sure you could ask for much more in the year preceding a new console. I mean, really, it's pretty phenomenal actually (and in that respect Microsoft was too). At least these two consoles have a pretty full ending year unlike the Wii which dead the longest death.

Edited June 5, 2012 by Daft

[Mokong]

Ok just finished watching it, though admitidly got bored and starting skipping through it, prolly watch it all in about 40mins

 

Though I did have to rewind to make sure I wasn't seeing things when they started the Far Cry 3 gameplay and instantly saw an ugly pop up occur

 

The WonderBook? I was just WonderWhy?

I can't see it becoming the next "big thing" even with a Potter related game/story and they spent why too much time on it, which to me said they were just trying to drag the conference out to make it seem like that did more. More so I can't see it being that well supported by devs either.

 

Was funny though when they were trying to "open the gate" and the womans spell wasn't registering properly and she had to do like 10 times. I was half expecting them to just move on and skip it but they just kept going

[Ganepark32]

Mmmm, yes, the Vita is really dead now. Honestly, how melodramatic do people want to be. Shock, horror, it's dazzybee and Zechs coming up with this taut rhetoric.

 

Ridiculous, isn't it. It's only been out since March (I think, forgotten when it was released :/) so it's still very much early days for a handheld which has a huge amount of potential yet people already want to put the final nail in its coffin.

 

It's in a similar position to where the 3DS was in it's first few months (although admittedly, Sony have done better in having a stronger launch window lineup of games than Nintendo did) and that bounced back and it'll happen with the Vita. I just find it baffling that if a console doesn't nail it out of the gate, it's some how dead in the water, despite the fact that we're in a recession amongst other economic issues. Quite a sad endictment of the mentality of gamers unfortunately, and one which extends over the entirety of E3 where people see it as a competition rather than a coming together of brands to show what gaming has to offer everyone

 

Anyway, haven't had a chance to look over the news from Sony's conference yet so will do so later. But I know as soon as I see gameplay of The Last of Us I'll just get annoyed at my lack of PS3 since it got a YLOD

[Cube]

Did we all just watch the same conference? How did Vita get nothing when it got CoD, smash bros, Assassin's Creed, PS1 classics... CoD by itself will lift it.

 

The problem with the CoD and Assassin's Creed games is that they'll probably end up getting released at the same time as the main console games, when they should leave them until next summer.

 

And Smash Bros (along with Sly) are also on PS3.

[Agent Gibbs]

the 3DS bounced back due to a price drop, have sony announced that? (i'm still watching the conference), so i'd guess people are expecting it to not bounce back like the 3DS did and just continue to have dwindling sales.

 

JESUS the last of us looks awesome

 

Edit: so i've finished watching it now, I see why people are worried about the Vita, not a lot of games have been announced for it have they, and quite a few were ones we already knew of.

 

Given the high price scaring people off, and lack of games, its certainly feeling very much like how they handled the PSP, Its a damn shame because the Vita should be awesome.

 

I don't think its the death of the Vita, but it doesn't look good, Sony need to actually focus on it more now, other wise it will be PSP round 2 and it will end up becoming a joke like the PSP.

 

Still not enough out to make me want to pay £220 for one yet, even with a COD and Assassin game, i really was expecting some jRPG's to get the Jap market on track

Edited June 5, 2012 by Agent Gibbs

[Rowan]

Well I watched the conference when I woke up this morning and thought it was alright! Didn't really know much about games like Far Cry going into the conference but it along with The Last of Us and Assassins Creed has certainly interested me. I was surprised they didn't push more the Cross-controller functionality.

[dwarf]

Thing is, neither CoD nor Assassin's Creed were possible on the PSP. They're pretty much the two biggest franchises out there at the moment, and they're both on Vita. The system will be fine.

I just don't want those experiences myself. New IPs and more things like Gravity Rush, even if it wasn't the gem it was hyped to be. Needs a system seller.

 

@Rowan - Far Cry is dross, there's so much choice this year that it would baffle me if anyone clued into the industry actually bought it.

[Hero-of-Time]

 

 

Edge rates Sony's conference.

 

If you own a Vita, you have our sympathy. Sony's E3 2012 conference was expected to focus heavily on its ailing handheld; there would be announcement after announcement, surely, in a bid to revive the fortunes of a console which, in its native Japan, is regularly outsold by its predecessor PSP. Instead Sony announced a fighting game we knew about last month, outed a spinoff already revealed by Game Informer, and slapped a subtitle on the Call Of Duty game they announced last year.

 

To be fair, SCEA president Jack Tretton went a little further than that. Vita will soon play host to the PSone classics that have been available on PSP for years, while a DLC update will let you use its touch controls on PS3's LittleBigPlanet 2. "The Vita portfolio is growing every day," Tretton insisted, "to offer something to every gamer." Okay then.

 

Speaking of false promises, David Cage was there, announcing Beyond for PS3. "Over the past 15 years Quantic Dream has developed unique games based on interactive storytelling and emotions," he said. "With Heavy Rain and Kara we showed how realtime 3D could be used to create even more emotional experiences." Beyond has some interesting ideas, anyway, with players controlling Jodie Holmes, played by Ellen Page, in a tale which spans 15 years. "We will lead the life of a character," Cage said, "growing with her through happy and difficult times to help her become who she is." He praised her "stunning performance" ahead of a realtime demo in which she sat stock still and said four words. It's a step up from Heavy Rain in visual terms, with full performance capture, but as always with Cage's work we just want to see how interactive it is. Pressing X to Juno won't cut it.

 

Then came PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale, now confirmed for Vita, with cross-platform play and two new characters: BioShock's Big Daddy, and Uncharted's Nathan Drake. It's easy to scoff at the game, but developer SuperBot Entertainment has packed its staff with competitive fighting game players and clearly knows what it's doing. At this stage, though, it's hard to shake the impression that this is Sony Smash Bros with super combos.

 

Tretton said Battle Royale's cross-platform play was a unique feature that could only be done on "the industry's best online network," which is apparently now an acceptable way to describe PSN. He hailed the fact that 80 per cent of PS3s and Vitas are connected to PSN, which we were sure was rebranded as SEN a few months back, but it seems Sony has given up on that as well.

 

One thing Sony hasn't given up on is indie gaming, and the rapturous applause for the merest mention of Journey was more than justified. Dyad, Papa & Yo and The Unfinished Swan are on the way, all on PSN, which Tretton said will host more than 200 downloadable new releases over the coming 12 months. PlayStation Plus is on the up, too: there was no mention of the reported cloud gaming deal which would bring streaming backwards compatibility to PS3 and Vita, but there will be 12 free games for US subscribers on the store today, including LittleBigPlanet 2, Infamous 2, and Saints Row 2. More games will be added all the time, Tretton said, but Europe tends to get short shrift on this stuff, as a thousand angry PlayStation Blog commentors will attest.

 

Then came the big guns, or at least, what should have been the big guns, starting with Call Of Duty on Vita. "A triple-A, firstperson multiplayer shooter in the palm of your hands, with dual analogue sticks and seamless online connectivity," parped Tretton, revealing a name - Call Of Duty Black Ops: Declassified - and little else. Assassin's Creed Liberation certainly looks the part, and giving the starring role to an Afro-French female assassin is a brave and welcome move from Ubisoft, but both games reinforced the feeling that Vita was headed the same was as PSP, with endless spin-offs from blockbuster franchises farmed out to B-teams. The required avalanche of firstparty software support was simply nowhere to be seen, and it speaks volumes that Liberation will be bundled with the new crystal white Vita. Sony has nothing else.

 

Attention then turned to PS3, and time seemed to slow to a crawl as we were subjected to extended gameplay demos, starting with Far Cry 3's co-op mode. Four players stood, with heads bowed and feet shoulder-width apart, for ten minutes, looking like an animatronic boy band whose batteries had run out. Assassin's Creed III's nautical battle scene looked great, but like Far Cry 3 it's a multiplatform game, its inclusion here justified by some exclusive DLC and, in Creed's case, another hardware bundle. How unexpected that Ubisoft, following its own event that closed with the intriguing Watch Dogs, would be not only the star of the show so far but also of Sony's conference.

 

Andrew House seemed to have drawn the short straw backstage when he appeared to talk first about a smartphone deal with HTC - best read as a tacit admission that Sony Ericsson's handsets are terrible - and PlayStation Move. Wonderbook, though, is a decent idea that should do well thanks to a deal with JK Rowling, whose Book Of Spells will be first on shelves. The PlayStation Eye seemed as flakey on stage as it does in the living room, sadly, making for an awkward demo, but we're not the target audience. Is setting fire to a book, putting out the flames with your hands and wiping soot from its pages fun? We're not sure, but the volley of on-screen disclaimers hardly engendered confidence. Hats off to Sony London Studios' Dave Ranyard for dropping the evening's finest truism, expressing his surprise that the increasingly leaky Sony had managed to keep a lid on it all.

 

Then came God Of War: Ascension, which began in earnest Sony's psychological experiment to see just what a room full of people will rapturously applaud if you keep them sat there for long enough. There was no footage of the series-first multiplayer mode, with game director Todd Pappy instead playing through another ten minutes or so of God Of War's decade-old square-square-triangle combat. The same as ever, then, with the bonus niggling sense that they'd stripped back the HUD for the demo and there'll be many, many more QTEs in the final game. Applause.

 

Then, at last, came The Last Of Us, which at first glance appears to be as profoundly linear as Naughty Dog's Uncharted games but does things a little differently, with improvised weaponry and genuine tension as the two protagonists inched through a derelict house packed with bandits. Joel slammed an enemy's face into a sideboard, to troublingly rapturous applause. At the demo's end, he took a foe's head clean off with a shotgun, and the crowd went wild. Tretton: "There's another mindblowing example of the incredible talent at Naughty Dog."

 

And that was your lot. No true surprises, no grand new announcements, no disruptive cloud gaming deal. Just more of the same as Sony, like Microsoft, sought to paper over the cracks as it builds up to next gen. At least the focus was on games. "PlayStation continues to be the epicenter of gaming," Tretton said. "The journey has been fun but I promise: the best is yet to come."

 

House went even further: "At PlayStation we're always thinking about the future. We understand the way we game is changing: the way we play and interact, the way content is delivered to you. We're going to lead that future. I hope you're as excited as we are about the future." We would be, Andy, but for the moment we're wondering why we spent £220 on a controller for LittleBigPlanet 2.

[Cube]

Thing is, neither CoD nor Assassin's Creed were possible on the PSP. They're pretty much the two biggest franchises out there at the moment, and they're both on Vita.

 

And stuff like that happening was my biggest worry about the Vita.

[dwarf]

Yeah, it's why I didn't buy one, but they'll be popular.

[Daft]

I hate Edge so fucking much.

[dazzybee]

Mmmm, yes, the Vita is really dead now. Honestly, how melodramatic do people want to be. Shock, horror, it's dazzybee and Zechs coming up with this taut rhetoric.

 

The presentation was dull (painfully dull) but content wise I'm not sure you could ask for much more in the year preceding a new console. I mean, really, it's pretty phenomenal actually (and in that respect Microsoft wasn't either). At least these two consoles have a pretty full ending year unlike the Wii which dead the longest death.

 

Why is it impossible to have a fucking opinion about Sony that isn't positive without you pulling the same old shit out every time? Seines times it's possible to have a normal conversation with you and sometimes you get all "you're a fanboy" if someone doesn't agree. Do you honestly not think the vita is in a disastrous position? It is selling awfully, it is too expensive, it barely has any games and nt a lot of new ones have been announced. I think this is disastrous personally. I can't believe most people don't think the same (though looking around the Internet it seems most people do agree).

 

The other problem and its the same problem Sony have always had, is that there are no handheld games. All of the games announced are home console games moved down to handheld. It's nice to have these game as well, but they need to start understanding what handheld games are about.

 

You're happy with what's out and coming out on the vita, fine, I'm not.

 

Ridiculous, isn't it. It's only been out since March (I think, forgotten when it was released :/) so it's still very much early days for a handheld which has a huge amount of potential yet people already want to put the final nail in its coffin.

 

It's in a similar position to where the 3DS was in it's first few months (although admittedly, Sony have done better in having a stronger launch window lineup of games than Nintendo did) and that bounced back and it'll happen with the Vita. I just find it baffling that if a console doesn't nail it out of the gate, it's some how dead in the water, despite the fact that we're in a recession amongst other economic issues. Quite a sad endictment of the mentality of gamers unfortunately, and one which extends over the entirety of E3 where people see it as a competition rather than a coming together of brands to show what gaming has to offer everyone

 

Anyway, haven't had a chance to look over the news from Sony's conference yet so will do so later. But I know as soon as I see gameplay of The Last of Us I'll just get annoyed at my lack of PS3 since it got a YLOD

 

See above. The difference with the 3DS is that is cut its price, offered an insane reward for early adopters and then actually released lots of high quality games. I just don't see that with vita. It's not about having a poor start and putting the nail in, it's about e3 presents its future and that simply not being good enough.

 

And I don't particularly appreciate the "mental powers of gamers" and the implication I see it as a flame war. I own the vita. It's not about slagging Sony, it's about not being happy with what they showed and worrying about its future.

[Daft]

"The Vita is finished." Quoted verbatim. Is that not melodramatic?

[ReZourceman]

Why is it impossible to have a fucking opinion about Sony that isn't positive without you pulling the same old shit out every time? Seines times it's possible to have a normal conversation with you and sometimes you get all "you're a fanboy" if someone doesn't agree.

 

Well what I picked up on (because we are arch-enemies, obviously) was Zechs coming in here to thank all the negative posts (and not post himself), it just seems very sad, pathetic and immature, which is Zechs all over, of course.

 

So I chose to take Daft's post as 99% aimed at Zechs.

 

-------------

 

I don't see the negative reaction to be honest.

 

- PS Plus gets epic free games.

- Vita gets awesome PS1 classics...I've never played FFVII and cannot wait to now.

- Vita gets AAA titles. Sure they should have announced more specific things for it, and they could have shown more videos of it, but...it will come. Its early days, and there has already been so much content and great games for it. It came out a couple of months ago!

- Solid titles from existing franchises.

- Beyond, awesome.

- Smash Bros was a bit silly, but lol....I guess it could be fun.

- Wonderbook; it isn't for everyone/core gamers, of course, but I thought this was a great showing. At least Sony are actually pushing things, actual innovation rather than just stuff with added voice recognition. (although ironically, voice recognition would have been good for a Potter spell book heh), and come on....the Potter license/JK Rowling on board, that is a huge deal. Its good news for the industry and PS even if you don't care about it.

- The Last Of Us. Obviously the fucking icing on the cake....stunning game, never seen anything like it from a visual design standpoint, coupled with the absolutely sublime graphics that blow any other console game out of the water, and what seems to be an INCREDIBLY tense and tactical gameplay component....a true survival game.

 

Its was very good, but not without its minor unfulfilment.

 

Add in Watch Dogs and it was amazing though. LAWL.

[Jamba]

"The Vita is finished." Quoted verbatim. Is that not melodramatic?

 

Quoted from where?

 

I think people might need to just chill and stop reacting to each other's opinions. They are other people's personal thoughts, treat them as such.

[Cube]

The thing I kept thinking throughout the Wonderbook presentation was "You know what....this is one game that actually would be BETTER WITH KINECT".

[ReZourceman]

If we can't react to each others opinions, then I don't know what we are all doing here.

[dazzybee]

Oh I just did a mega post and the site crashed briefly... Dammit.

 

Basically I said I did say something like what daft said, but I genuinely believe if is is all the vita has it won't be enough for gamers and that come 2013 it will lose developer/publisher faith. We'llbe treated to the occasional great game rather than a platform full of them.

 

And how much I was looking forward to last of us more than any ther game.

 

Though my original post was much more intelligent and absolutely hilarious too...

[Retro_Link]

Where can I watch the conference guys?... I can't seem to see it up on Gametrailers?

[Rowan]

@Retro_Link

 

e3.gamespot.com/press-conference/sony-e3/

[Agent Gibbs]

I saw someone point something out on a comments section on Gamespot about the PSone Classics....

gonna paraphrase this since i've already forgot their exact quote

**

They are launching it with Tomb Raider and FF7....surely they should just activate the emulation function via a firmware update and then all the psone classics up on psn should work? this suggests the psone classics are being remade for Vita, which isn't really good considering how long they take to release them for the ps3/psp as it is

***

 

That actually is something i'd not noticed and so far can't find any more information/elaboration on it from sony.

 

surely you could just transfer any you have from your ps3...

 

This is why they should have spent more time on the Vita and not glossing over bits, now everyone is speculating and not positivly

[ReZourceman]

They didn't say they were launching with Tomb Raider and FFVII, those were just the only two examples they gave as most wanted classics.

 

Unless I missed some further confirmation.

[Agent Gibbs]

They didn't say they were launching with Tomb Raider and FFVII, those were just the only two examples they gave as most wanted classics.

 

Unless I missed some further confirmation.

 

Watching it again on Gamespot......

yeah your right he said have access to including tomb raider and FFVII

 

there was a reason i didn't notice him say launching with because he didn't say that the person on gamespot was talking bollocks, ergo i was talking bollocks

so i'll shut up

[Daft]

Did they say when we could play FFVII on the Vita? Because I've never played it (or any Final Fantasy) and have been sitting on it for a while.