So Sony had their big "PS4" event tonight at Pier 36 in New York, 6pm their time, streamed live, and I stayed up watching it with a bag of pretzels and my laptop propped on a pillow like an idiot because my actual desk chair is still broken (yes, still, three months later, I know). And the thing that's been bugging me since the stream ended isn't the CPU or the RAM numbers everyone's already tweeting about. Its that they never once showed us the console.
Not a glimpse. Andrew House came out, did the exec-speak intro, then handed it to Mark Cerny who spent a genuinely long stretch of stage time talking system architecture: x86 processor, 8GB of unified GDDR5 memory, all the stuff that matters to about four percent of the people watching and matters a LOT to that four percent. I respect it honestly. But you keep waiting for the moment where they turn around and there's a black box on a pedestal, and it just doesn't come. Instead you get a slide. A logo. That's it.
What they did put in your hands, at least conceptually, was the new controller, and honestly that's the part I can't stop thinking about. The DualShock 4 has a touchpad on the face of it now, a light bar on top (presumably for the camera to track, à la Move), and a dedicated Share button. Not start, not select: Share. You press it and you're supposed to be able to broadcast your gameplay or clip the last few minutes and post it, right from the controller, no capture card, no separate software running on your PC. If that actually works the way they're describing it, that's a bigger deal to how people play games day to day than another few gigahertz ever will be. My PS3 controller currently holds a charge for maybe ninety minutes before it starts flashing at me mid-match, so forgive me if my bar for "improvement" is generously low, but this felt like the actual headline of the night and I don't think most of the liveblogs are going to frame it that way.
Games-wise: Killzone Shadow Fall looked genuinely next-gen in a way that made me sit up, Guerrilla clearly used the extra horsepower on lighting and scale. Cerny himself came back out later to show off Knack, which is his own project, and it's this weird toy-box brawler thing where the character grows by absorbing junk (cute, not sure it's a system seller). Sucker Punch teased inFAMOUS: Second Son with about fifteen seconds of not much. Blizzard confirmed Diablo III is coming to the platform, which got a real cheer from the room. And then Bungie showed up to talk about something called Destiny that I genuinely can't tell you much about yet because the trailer was mostly mood and no gameplay.
No price. No release date beyond "holiday 2013," which, fine, that's still ten months out, plenty of time for that number to leak forty different ways before an actual announcement. My Twitter feed basically turned into one long joke format the second the stream ended — everybody doing some variation of "here's the actual console" over a picture of literally nothing. It was funny for about the first twenty tweets and then it wasn't, the way these things always go.
I keep comparing this in my head to the Wii U reveal, which I wrote about back when that whole mess happened, where nobody could even figure out if the tablet thing WAS the console or just a controller for it. This was the opposite problem — totally clear messaging, confident presentation, just an odd choice to leave the hardware itself as a mystery box. Maybe there's a supply chain reason, maybe they're not happy with the final industrial design yet and didn't want it locked into every screenshot before it ships. Or maybe, and I think this is probably it, they wanted the story to be the software and the social stuff, not a photo of a rectangle. Mobile World Congress is next week in Barcelona and there's going to be no shortage of actual hardware to look at there, so maybe Sony just decided that's not the fight they wanted to have tonight.
Either way I'm in. Just wanted to actually see the thing.