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Playstation 5 Console Discussion


Dcubed

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1 hour ago, Mandalore said:

After reading that, the SSD seems by far the most exciting announcement. About time consoles ditched old mechanical hard drives.

It's also the part that gives me the most pause though... That's gonna really rachet up the price... especially if it's an NVME SSD like what it apparantly has...

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5 hours ago, Dcubed said:

It's also the part that gives me the most pause though... That's gonna really rachet up the price... especially if it's an NVME SSD like what it apparantly has...

Its suppossedly faster. NVMe against SATA offer minimal benefits in pc gaming at a higher cost.

Obviously there is something going on here. It could with Zen 2, AMD debut new PCI Express options and a new NVME successor.

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  • 5 months later...

https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-playstation-5/

 

New details!

 

Quote

Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan is still ready to answer it. The console, he tells me, will be called PlayStation 5. "It's nice to be able to say it," he says. "Like a giant burden has been lifted from my shoulders."

So. There you go. PlayStation 5, holidays 2020.

Before they do, Cerny wants to clarify something. When we last discussed the forthcoming console, he spoke about its ability to support ray-tracing, a technique that can enable complex lighting and sound effects in 3D environments. Given the many questions he’s received since, he fears he may have been ambiguous about how the PS5 would accomplish this—and confirms that it’s not a software-level fix, which some had feared. “There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware,” he says, “which I believe is the statement that people were looking for.”

 

About UI and game installation:

However, game installation (which is mandatory, given the speed difference between the SSD and the optical drive) will be a bit different than in the PS4. This time around, aided in part by the simplified game data possible with the SSD, Sony is changing its approach to storage, making for a more configurable installation—and removal—process. "Rather than treating games like a big block of data," Cerny says, "we're allowing finer-grained access to the data." That could mean the ability to install just a game's multiplayer campaign, leaving the single-player campaign for another time, or just installing the whole thing and then deleting the single-player campaign once you've finished it.

Regardless of what parts of a game you choose to install and play, you'll be able to stay abreast of it via a completely revamped user interface. The PS4's bare-bones home screen at times feels frozen in amber; you can see what your friends have recently done, or even what game title they might be playing at the moment, but without launching an individual title, there's no way to tell what single-player missions you could do or what multiplayer matches you can join. The PS5 will change that. "Even though it will be fairly fast to boot games, we don't want the player to have to boot the game, see what's up, boot the game, see what's up," Cerny says. "Multiplayer game servers will provide the console with the set of joinable activities in real time. Single-player games will provide information like what missions you could do and what rewards you might receive for completing them—and all of those choices will be visible in the UI. As a player you just jump right into whatever you like."

 

On the controller:

He says this like he says many other things: knowing he'll fend off any follow-up question that ventures beyond what he wants to talk about. Like, What does the UI actually look like? Or, How big will the SSD be? Or even, Is that a microphone? Which is exactly what I ask when Cerny hands me a prototype of the next-generation controller, an unlabeled matte-black doohickey that looks an awful lot like the PS4's DualShock 4. After all, there's a little hole on it, and a recently published patent points to Sony developing a voice-driven AI assistant for the PlayStation. But all I get from Cerny is, "We'll talk more about it another time." ("We file patents on a regular basis," a spokesperson tells me later, "and like many companies, some of those patents end up in our products, and some don’t.")

The controller (which history suggests will one day be called the DualShock 5, though Cerny just says "it doesn't have a name yet") does have some features Cerny's more interested in acknowledging. One is "adaptive triggers" that can offer varying levels of resistance to make shooting a bow and arrow feel like the real thing—the tension increasing as you pull the arrow back—or make a machine gun feel far different from a shotgun. It also boasts haptic feedback far more capable than the rumble motor console gamers are used to, with highly programmable voice-coil actuators located in the left and right grips of the controller.

Combined with an improved speaker on the controller, the haptics can enable some astonishing effects. First, I play through a series of short demos, courtesy of the same Japan Studio team that designed PlayStation VR's Astro Bot Rescue Mission. In the most impressive, I ran a character through a platform level featuring a number of different surfaces, all of which gave distinct—and surprisingly immersive—tactile experiences. Sand felt slow and sloggy; mud felt slow and soggy. On ice, a high-frequency response made the thumbsticks really feel like my character was gliding. Jumping into a pool, I got a sense of the resistance of the water; on a wooden bridge, a bouncy sensation.

Next, a version of Gran Turismo Sport that Sony had ported over to a PS5 devkit—a devkit that on quick glance looks a lot like the one Gizmodo reported on last week. (The company refused to comment on questions about how the devkit's form factor might compare to what's being considered for the consumer product.) Driving on the border between the track and the dirt, I could feel both surfaces. Doing the same thing on the same track using a DualShock 4 on a PS4, that sensation disappeared entirely. It wasn't that the old style rumble feedback paled in comparison, it was that there was no feedback at all. User tests found that rumble feedback was too tiring to use continuously, so the released version of GT Sport simply didn't use it.

That difference has been a long time coming. Product manager Toshi Aoki says the controller team has been working on haptic feedback since the DualShock 4 was in development. They even could have included it in PS4 Pro, the mid-cycle refresh—though doing so would have created a "split experience" for gamers, so the feature suite was held for the next generation. There are some other small improvements over the DualShock 4. The next-gen controller uses a USB Type-C connector for charging (and you can play through the cable as well). Its larger-capacity battery and haptics motors make the new controller a bit heavier than the DualShock 4, but Aoki says it will still come in a bit lighter than the current Xbox controller "with batteries in it."

Bluepoint are working on a PS5 title:

 

"We're working on a big one right now," says Marco Thrush, president of Bluepoint Games, which most recently worked on last year's PS4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus. "I'll let you figure out the rest."

That doesn't mean they're not exploring. "The SSD has me really excited," Thrush says. "You don't need to do gameplay hacks anymore to artificially slow players down—lock them behind doors, anything like that. Back in the cartridge days, games used to load instantly; we're kind of going back to what consoles used to be."

Laura Miele, chief studio officer for EA comment:

 

 

"I could be really specific and talk about experimenting with ambient occlusion techniques, or the examination of ray-traced shadows," says Laura Miele, chief studio officer for EA. "More generally, we’re seeing the GPU be able to power machine learning for all sorts of really interesting advancements in the gameplay and other tools." Above all, Miele adds, it's the speed of everything that will define the next crop of consoles. "We're stepping into the generation of immediacy. In mobile games, we expect a game to download in moments, and to be just a few taps from jumping right in. Now we’re able to tackle that in a big way."

Knew it.  Knew that Sony would rip off HD Rumble.


Sony Does What Nintendoes.  As usual :p 

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19 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-playstation-5/

 

New details!

 

Knew it.  Knew that Sony would rip off HD Rumble.


Sony Does What Nintendoes.  As usual :p 

:laughing: They really don't care.

To be fair the adaptive triggers sound pretty cool. Genuine innovation from Sony there, good to see.

I was surprised to see the PS4 UI be described as barebones, to me it's totally bloated and chugs constantly because of all the bloat. Hopefully the PS5 one will be nice and snappy for people who don't care about multiplayer gaming. Though with Layden unceremoniously leaving Playstation without so much as a press release, I'm worried the single player first party focus might not be around for long over there...

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18 minutes ago, Goafer said:

To be fair, it's adding fidelity to an existing technology. By that standard, everyone else ripped off HD graphics from whoever did it first.

At least it means that more developers will start putting in effort with it.  HD Rumble is awesome! And more developers making proper use of it is only going to be a good thing :) 

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54 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-playstation-5/

 

New details!

 

Knew it.  Knew that Sony would rip off HD Rumble.


Sony Does What Nintendoes.  As usual :p 

You post an interesting article and that is your only comment? Do we really have to resort to that immediately? If you think HD rumble is good then why wouldnt you want variations of it elsewhere as well?

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11 minutes ago, Happenstance said:

You post an interesting article and that is your only comment? Do we really have to resort to that immediately? If you think HD rumble is good then why wouldnt you want variations of it elsewhere as well?

To be honest, that's the only truly new piece of information that came out of this article; the rest we already really knew (and Bluepoint working on a PS5 game is basically Water-Is-Wet terrirory); the UI stuff is also nothing we haven't seen before.  It was always going to be called "Playstation 5", it was always going to release in November 2020 and we already knew about the SSD the Raytracing stuff. That's all nothing really new.

 

The controller is the really new part... and it basically is a complete ripoff of HD Rumble (its even being implemented in the same way, with the linear-resonance-actuators being placed across the left and right side of the controller).  Potentially including a microphone is interesting, but there's nothing confirmed here, so there's nothing to discuss.

 

And yes, I am happy to see HD Rumble becoming the standard; means more support from more developers.  But let's call a spade a spade here :p 

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4 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

And yes, I am happy to see HD Rumble becoming the standard; means more support from more developers.  But let's call a spade a spade here :p 

My problem is that we know this happens all the time. Technologies that prove to be successful get folded into other products in every industry. The only time it really gets mentioned though is when someone wants to make a snide comment or in a stupid game of one upmanship that we sadly get on this forum way too often. I doubt you were trying to make anything more than a joke but we've had so many shitty arguments over the years that I'd rather not start that again.

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The best news out of all of that info for me is the confirmation that you'll be able to use the controllers with it over a wired connection.

Though if the only new thing in the controllers is HD rumble, then I'd appreciate the option to use exisiting DS4 and licensed third-party PS4 controllers on it.

I want to get more use out of my Nacon Revolution Pro Controller. :p

I also hope that the patented A.I assistant either doesn't make the cut, is scrapped entirely or can be disabled/make the microphone optional otherwise that could be a deal-breaker for me.

That kind of technology is invasive enough without it being in the next-generation of consoles as well. ::shrug:

But it's just another patent so I'm not too concerned at this point, a digital assistant is the last thing needed in a console, just give us a quick and responsive user interface. :peace:

Edited by S.C.G
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I care not for all this rumble talk. It's a feature that I don't use on the Switch and all it does is drive up the cost of a controller. It will no doubt be used a handful of times, mainly by first party teams, and then be forgotten about, leaving the consumer still having to pay a premium for the device.

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9 minutes ago, Hero-of-Time said:

Oh, as for Bluepoint, gotta imagine it's a Demon Souls remake. That rumour refuses to go away and it would make for a killer launch title for a lot of people.

I agree.  It's by far, the most obvious candidate for their next title.

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20 minutes ago, Kav said:

I saw this and thought “ooooh new console time”... then remembered that I’ll have neither the money nor time to ever play it. :cry:

Home-owning has been a right fucking money-drain!

Especially since this console is gonna be mega expensive...

 

Very possible that we will see the return of $599.99; I really don't see it selling for less than $499.99 as the absolute minimum.  Not with that NVMe M2 SSD onboard.

 

Hell even $699.99 doesn't seem impossible.  Will be very interesting to see how Sony go about pricing this thing and if they might be thinking about multiple console tiers again...

Edited by Dcubed
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11 minutes ago, Dcubed said:

Especially since this console is gonna be mega expensive...

 

Very possible that we will see the return of $599.99; I really don't see it selling for less than $499.99 as the absolute minimum.  Not with that NVMe M2 SSD onboard.

 

Hell even $699.99 doesn't seem impossible.  Will be very interesting to see how Sony go about pricing this thing and if they might be thinking about multiple console tiers again...

I do wonder if the gaming community just has an unrealistic expectation for the price of gaming consoles these days. They are willing to pay £1000 for ipads and phones etc but a console that has a lot of tech in it should still be cheaper for some reason.

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5 minutes ago, Happenstance said:

I do wonder if the gaming community just has an unrealistic expectation for the price of gaming consoles these days. They are willing to pay £1000 for ipads and phones etc but a console that has a lot of tech in it should still be cheaper for some reason.

Agreed.  The value proposition of a console is outrageously fantastic compared to almost every other electronics device... but that's only because they can use the Razor & Blades model of sale, thanks to the ability to make money back on software and accessories.

 

The proliferation of smartphones (and the recent upward surge in average pricing) will probably work in Sony's favour in this case; as they've helped to desensitise people to the extreme sticker shock...

 

... but then again, most people buy phones on contract and pay in monthly installments... Microsoft have experimented with this approach before, but I wonder if the two of them might be looking at doing something like this as the standard this time around to make the inevitably huge price tag more pallitable...

Edited by Dcubed
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Over priced phones and tablets, sure. Use that as a base for an over priced console.

But for a reasonably priced console, maybe look more at the £100-300 range for sensibly priced phones and tablets. Sure they aren't cutting edge, but they do the job.

 

End of the day, it depends on what they think the market is happy to pay, if they can only make 100 consoles a day, there's no point putting a price where 1000 people would buy one, better to put the price point at a place where only 110-120 people would happily buy it. Basically let it be a premium product until component prices drop and the hype/sales start to slow down, then price drop it a bit.

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1 minute ago, Dcubed said:

... but then again, most people buy phones on contract and pay in monthly installments... Microsoft have experimented with this approach before, but I wonder if the two of them might be looking at doing something like this as the standard this time around to make the inevitably huge price tag more pallitable...

That's a good point. I never remember that because I never used my phone enough to justify changing from Pay As You Go.

A full on console subscription could work. Rolling in both PS+ and PS Now to give the users the extras they'd need. Have you basically pay off your console and then the option to resub to those services afterwards. I'd consider something like that.

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16 minutes ago, Pestneb said:

Over priced phones and tablets, sure. Use that as a base for an over priced console.

But for a reasonably priced console, maybe look more at the £100-300 range for sensibly priced phones and tablets. Sure they aren't cutting edge, but they do the job.

 

End of the day, it depends on what they think the market is happy to pay, if they can only make 100 consoles a day, there's no point putting a price where 1000 people would buy one, better to put the price point at a place where only 110-120 people would happily buy it. Basically let it be a premium product until component prices drop and the hype/sales start to slow down, then price drop it a bit.

The SSD alone guarantees that this is impossible.  $499.99 is the floor.  $599.99-$699.99 is realistic.  For reference, the Xbox One X is still $499.99 RRP at retail.

 

14 minutes ago, Happenstance said:

That's a good point. I never remember that because I never used my phone enough to justify changing from Pay As You Go.

A full on console subscription could work. Rolling in both PS+ and PS Now to give the users the extras they'd need. Have you basically pay off your console and then the option to resub to those services afterwards. I'd consider something like that.

Yeah, including their online subscription services in as a package deal along with hardware monthly installments might well be the approach that both Sony and Microsoft take I reckon.  Microsoft in particular already have a killer app in that regard with Game Pass; so they're well poised to make it the standard I reckon.

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