By now everyone knows that Sony had their press event last night and there were a lot of things about the future of Playstation brought up. Spoiler warning…It’s about the PS4.

For anyone that missed the stream or doesn’t want to watch the whole thing here is a summary of all the announcements that came up last night.

To start off Andrew House came onto the stage saying “The living room is no longer the center of the Playstation ecosystem, the gamer is.” He also announced that “togay” (no that is not a typo he really said it) they would be showing a glimpse into the future of play.

He then talks about what they were looking for in the next generation and says, “A reimagination of the gaming experience that has been developer led, consumer inspired, and thoughtfully engineered by Sony Computer Entertainment.”

This then flashes to the screen behind him showing PS4. From here it is going to be bullet points of what happened for the rest of the event.

Mark Cerny – Lead Architect of PS4 Console
·         Started working on PS4 five years ago.
What was needed in the PS4
·         Nothing between you and the game.
·         What developers want.
·         By game creators, for game creators.

Informed System Architecture.
·         Supercharged PC Architecture.
·         X86 CPU
·         Highly Enhanced PC GPU
·         8GB High Speed Unified Memory
·         Local Storage (Hard Drive)

Dualshock 4 Controller Shown
New features:
·         Enhance feel of the joy stick and trigger buttons. Giving a tighter set of control over in game actions.
·         Enhanced Rumble Capability
·         Touch Pad – Giving a new form of input.
·         Share Button and headphone jack. To give enhanced social interaction.
·         Light bar – simpler way to identify players.
Designed with a second peripheral

The Stereo Camera
·         Can sense the depth of the environment in front of the controller and track the 3d position of the controller via its light bar.
Unreal Engine 4 was then showed as a tech demo.
System memory is GDDR5
·         This gives the PS4 176GB/s of bandwidth.
·         Provides a further boost to the GPU performance.
Tech demo of Havok’s million objects physics simulation.

The revealing of the game Knack.
After this is the talk about the next design task for the team was  to make a large user experience using five key principles.
Simple, Immediate, Social, Integrated, and Personalized.
Simple
·         Consumer Oriented
·         Functionality
·         Ease of Use
Simplicity meaning “That powerful functionality needed to be just a button press away.”
Immediate
·         Suspend / Resume gameplay by pressing the start button; games reserved in RAM
·         Secondary custom chip to manage uploads and downloads in the background or with the power off.
·         Play games even as they are being downloaded.
Social
·         Hardware added into the PS4 to support social.
·         Always on video compression and decompression hardware.
Showing of the new user interface.
·         Sharing videos while you play.
·         Browse a live video of a friend playing a game.
·         See a friend is in trouble and take over the controller and assist them in a difficult section in a game.
Integrated
·         Seamlessly interconnected across the network to the full Playstation ecosystem as well as to third party devices and services.
Personalization
·         Button press away from your game titles or interactions with friends.
·         As the system learns your likes or dislikes you can discover content preloaded and ready to go on your console. (By favorite creator or genre)

Next up was David Perry – Co-founder of Gakai

He starts off talking about the social side of PS4 like:
·         Streaming games
·         Talking with friends
·         Having comments pop up on the screen.
·         Friends taking over controls to help get through a level.
·         Friends dropping in items to be used during the game.
Then he goes into remote play with PS4 using the PS Vita.
·         Showing Knack being played via remote play
·         Reduce transition time to make it more responsive using Gakai technology
Speaking of Gakai technology he goes into the cloud.
·         PS4 to be able to play PS1, PS2, PS3, and PS mobile games
·         Everything everywhere using the cloud
·         Cloud services will come out in phases.

Next is a showing of a video with a lot a people from development studios talking about Playstation and the promise.

Michael Denny comes out next for announcing the games and developers working with the PS4
·         Hermen Hulst – Guerrilla Games – Shows off Kill Zone Shadow Fall
·         Matt Southern – Evolution Studios – Showing Drive Club
·         Sucker Punch Productions – inFamous Second Son
·         Jonathan Blow – The Witness
·         David Cage – Showing off facial animation and talks about character polygon numbers through the years.
1999 – 350
2005 – 1,500
2010 – 15,000
2012 – 20,000
2013 – 30,000

·         Alex Evans – Media Molecule –Showing creative exploration, sculpting, and set creation all using move.
·         Yoshinori Ono – Capcom – Showing Deep Down using the Panta Rhei engine.
·         Yoshihisa Hashimoto – Square Enix – Showing off their engine for the PS4
Then he brings out:
·         Shinji Hashimoto to announce Final Fantasy at E3 2013
·         Yves Guillemat – Ubisoft – Talking about Watch Dogs
·         Jonathan Morah – Ubisoft – Showing off Watch Dogs
·         Chris Metzen – Blizzard – Announcing Sony and Blizzard to take over the world, oh and that Diablo 3 will be coming to PS4
·         Eric Hershberg – Activision – Introducing Bungie and their new game Destiny.
·         Ending the conference with a compilation video and a PS4 coming holiday 2013.

Now that was a ton of stuff announced in that two hour event and there are going to be some interesting things coming from Sony. What are your thoughts from this event; are you now excited for PS4, what are your thoughts on their new controller, how about the games showed off?