 Hello and welcome to the Polygon and Verge PlayStation 4 After Party. I'm Christopher Grandadder, in chief of Polygon. And I'm Ross Miller, senior editor of The Verge. Coming up on tonight's show, we'll take a deeper dive into the Sony's PlayStation 4 announcement. A little bit of relevance, mostly irreverence, and we'll have a special guest or two or three or maybe even five to actually give out hard information. Right now we're just going to be a couple of complete idiots and give a quick rundown of the highlights of the event. So it was a big event. There were some big surprises tonight. I think a lot of people were really surprised to see the PlayStation 4. So much speculation, whispers, rabble rousing, other nonsense, and they actually finally did it. I thought it was going to be a Vita. Yeah, I thought it was going to be some new maps for Little Blake Planet Carding. Little Blake Planet Blarding. Love television folks. So no, they did announce the PlayStation 4 with a quote, supercharged CPU, x86, eight cores. They didn't play it up like they did the PlayStation 3. It's not Cell, there's no special name behind it. It's just a very powerful system. I think our own Russ Pitt said something like it sounds like they're addressing step by step all the complaints of the PlayStation 3. It's hard to develop for. They're like, well, we've got Mark Cerny. He's a developer. He helped us design it. He's going to make this easy. And they did tone down, I should say, tone down I think is appropriate, tone down some of the tech mumbo jumbo. It was still somewhat tech heavy. I was surprised. It was a two hour show, and the first thing they come out of the gate is not a graphically impressive show, at least not on the live stream. Not a graphically impressive game, and then a lot of technical talk. It wasn't as bad as PlayStation 3, but that was 2006. It was like an integrated development pipeline, and they're focused on the first game they showed off. So the first game that they showed was called Knack. That was Cerny's game. Mark Cerny, if you don't know, has a long history in games. He's something of a kind of demigod to game developers. He started Atari. You might recognize him from games like Marble Madness way back in the day. But he's also really well known for really knowing hands on how these things work architecturally. So he worked with Sony to design the PlayStation 4. You'll recall when this was somebody talking about the PlayStation 3 and their architecture behind it was Ken Kutaragi, who was one of Sony's lead engineers back in the day. The PlayStation 3 ended up being an albatross around his neck, and a lot of the technical focus of it. So this seemed like a very clear course correction for the unveiling of the PlayStation 4. So we had that. It was actually interesting because it was a very North American event. It was obviously held in New York. Mark Cerny demonstrated architecture. And then the other big announcement, probably the biggest surprise or the biggest feature for the PlayStation 4 is the cloud gaming, the streaming. That came from Dave Perry. At Gaikai. Gaikai, the West Coast former studio. We also had Andrew House from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. He was the one who was hosting the event. It wasn't... I kind of thought it would be Jack... Not Jack Trenton. Kaz Harai. Right. Kaz Harai was formerly the head of PlayStation in America and now is the CEO of all of Sony. And I kind of thought it would be nice to see the CEO of Sony hosting a PlayStation event. Because it's kind of a big deal for the company. It's their entertainment box. It's how they're going to get their message across, how to get their content. It's going to make the Bravias look great, hopefully. Maybe we'll see. Maybe we'll see. But also, Kaz Harai, he was at the PlayStation 3 launch event and there were so many memes. Before memes were even a huge thing, there was Ridge Racer. Him screaming it. I don't know, he was traumatized. He just does not want to do one of those things again. There's giant enemy crowds. And maybe he doesn't eat shellfish to this day because of that event. The more we talk about the PlayStation 3 event, the happier I am at this one. It was two hours long. We were warned it was going to be a long event. But it wasn't as embarrassing. There wasn't like, none of those meme things we're going to see later. Nothing ridiculous. Let's talk about another area where they, I think, hit it. And it's not that exciting, but it is competent relative to the PlayStation 3 event. That is the controller. So with PlayStation 3, they had the Boomerang controller. Right. They never launched with it. They never launched it. They showed it off. They showed it. And it was goofy and strange. Because when they launched with the controller, it didn't have rumble. And so they had all these hiccups on their way to getting a decent controller at the door. When PlayStation 3 even launched, it didn't have rumble in it. So it was like, we're going back a step from the DualShock 2. If you remember, there were legal issues. They were in a lawsuit about rumble technology and patents, which is a big thing in tech always. But then they try to convince people, just don't need rumble. It's not a big deal. And then months later, they made a new controller with rumble. And then everyone was like, that's a good controller. I like that controller. So they talked about how with this controller, they worked with developers and designers to get the buttons to feel better. And if you saw the leaked images that showed up and the images that they showed tonight during the live log, certain things look familiar if you're used to an Xbox 360 controller. It doesn't have asymmetrical thumbsticks. But it does have concavity to the thumbsticks. So the way that the PS3 DualShock 3 works is that they are convex. And your thumbs sort of sit on top of these. You just want to visualize it. It's this. It's this. It's this. So if you're, that's, you remember cave because a cave is like you go into a cave. Well, thank you. Thank you for explaining that. Yeah. So this is left. When you hold up your finger, the L is left. I think I have a couple other memory devices. So the controller, they did talk about how they tried to make it feel more comfortable with the triggers and with the things. You also have, they said they worked on rumble, making rumble better. They worked on lowering latency for the controller. They have a light on top. A lot of people thought that was going to be for move and he said it was for identifying controllers. Oh, and also it works with this here 3D camera that we made. Yeah, of course. The 3D camera does depth, not entirely dissimilar to the Kinect, which honestly I'm happy for. It also looks a lot like a Kinect. Yes. Like if you've seen a Kinect, you pretty much know what this looks like. It looks identical to the PrimeSense sensor, which is, you know, Kinect's technology and probably the same, you know, probably the same company. I would not be surprised. So it uses a 3D sensor, a depth camera. It uses a controller that has a light on the front of it so you can kind of get the 3D sensing plus the accuracy of the move. And then they have, you know, rumble and lower latency and all sorts of other great new controller benefits. But the thing is it looks like a controller that any gamer could pick up on day one and be comfortable and happy with. Because it's the same, it's the same control with a few extra things. It's a nice evolution. It's the same thing as the one with the Vita. They're throwing every interface, a classic interface you have possible into this thing. There's a front touch pad. There's buttons everywhere, buttons you always know about. It's got a share button. It's a share button and a headphone jack. Well, the headphone jack, again, recalls the Xbox 360 controller. Headphone jack on the bottom. So I think they're taking a lot of notes. I think they're addressing a lot of the criticism of... Here's a big question. I wonder if it has an infrared port. Just saying, if we're addressing criticism of the PlayStation 3, you can, like, check a couple things off the list. Like your controller strategy was a little clumsy to start. Do we have something like an infrared port? I don't know. We'll find out. But that's the thing. We always see every generation, there's two or three consoles. They always try a few different things, the Kinect sensor, a headphone jack, or a certain network structure. And then the generation after, everyone just uses them. We start, reset, and we've got the same features. And then there's a couple new tricks. And Sony's new trick this year is the Gaikai streaming, which I think is actually... I think it's really cool with one huge conditioning caveat. What's cool about it, let's not worry about that stuff. In a perfect world, you can stream the games that you play immediately, the full games, while you're downloading it. You can remote play. A friend can actually take your controller and help you beat a level. You can stream it with Facebook and Ustream integration. And that all sounds great. But if you ever used OnLive or used Gaikai, there is a bandwidth requirement that scares me for this. It's significant. Right. You need to have really low latency. You need to have a fast connection. We know a lot of people in America don't have broadband or don't have broadband with that type of latency. I think it's neat, but I also wonder, is this going to find a mainstream audience even with PlayStation 3? OnLive has been out. You could get it. And I don't think people were really wowed by the fact that they could watch somebody else playing a game. Well, I don't think it's watching someone else. I think it's being able to play a game without having to wait for the download. But I also don't think OnLive was really advertised that well or marketed at all. Sony is obviously going to put a lot behind it. That was a big thing for this event. It was like, you can do all this. But what they never talked about was internet connection. Even in big cities like New York, you always have high latency. You're going to get screwed by this. It almost makes more sense in places like Japan and Tokyo and South Korea, places that have... Well, South Korea is not a big console gaming country, but they have super fast internet. In America, we don't have, at least we can't expect to have, super reliable, super fast internet everywhere. Right. But it's interesting. And there's the catch. The catch that they kind of talked about. PlayStation Europe actually tweeted about it. I'm not sure it was very clear on stage. It does not support PlayStation 3, 2, or 1 natively. What that means is your discs won't go in. You won't be able to play it. There's no cell architecture. However, you can use the cloud and you can stream it. You are never going to play Ninja Gaiden again. It's like this cloud stuff to me. I know. Yeah, but like, so, yeah, for some games, it's like, that's okay. Other games, like, that doesn't work. No. And here's what's interesting to me about it. They bought Gaikai in July. Right. That's not that long ago. Well, I mean, the thing is, it's just cloud. I mean, if they're just using their servers, like, they figure out how to stream games, just look up a PlayStation on the other end, I guess. I don't know if it's like... But even then, how do you do it? Like, are you, if you're looking at PlayStation on the other end, they have an abstracted PlayStation architecture. So are you literally ripping open a bunch of Playstations, putting motherboards on a wall and then loading discs in or streaming some kind of disc image to them? There's a center with like a wall of cells. Seriously? Highlighted. I mean, I'm thinking the architecture that they built for the Playstations that they built for Starhawk. No, for Warhawk. They had like this whole network center full of PlayStation 3s that were rack mounted. They probably are going to reuse that. They're like, hey, we have these Warhawk rack mounted PS3s. But that doesn't play PlayStation 2 games. So there's another server sitting there if you want to do a PS2. Well, they have original 60 gig PlayStation 3s that play PS2 games. Oh, with the PS2 architecture built in. So it's all the chips. Chips everywhere. The PlayStation 1 is software abstracted. So I don't see why the PlayStation 4 couldn't play PlayStation 1 games just fine through software emulation because it works on Vita and it works on, you know. I just don't think they care. Who has PS1 games handy anymore? Can somebody bring me my Vita? I've got a bunch of PS1 games on it. Your Vita, which is now way more relevant because of today. But it's over there. So they also talked about the cloud, piping, digi blasting game levels. Digi blasting? Yeah, that was one of their, I didn't make that, that's their term. It's okay. You can make that up if you want to. Look, they're e-delivering game data through the cloud to your Vita. Done. Yeah. All right. So we saw that. We saw the controller, saw a bunch of special features. We did not see the PlayStation 4 itself, which again, it's just a box. I know people like bummed about it. I know we saw some comments and tweets like, who cares? Guys, I have a source. It's going to have a disk drive. It's going to have a disk drive. It's going to have a power button. It's going to have ports in the back. The ports will be, in a big change, the ports are going to be in the back of the device, not the front of the device. I think they've got some really, really good ideas here. I'm looking forward to that black or white glossier matte box that I'll put to the side or in front of my TV in a drawer hidden from view with some glass in front so the wireless actually kind of sort of works. Yeah. I'm excited to find out what it looks like. Hopefully the C3. It'll be exciting. Maybe. What if they bring it out and it's actually like massive? What if they brought it out and it's like the size of like a power rack? We realize people do not care the size of these boxes. They hide them anyway. So we made a cube. We spent a lot of time and engineering effort scaling this device down. We said, you know what? It's $99, but it's the size of a Toyota. They did want to try, like they want to say, treat it like a server when you're streaming to Vita. They just built a server. It's rack mountable. It's a special feature. As in it's a rack. It's a rack. It's racks on racks on racks. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Video games. Here's the thing. The box plays video games. Yes. They showed off some. One of the things that was interesting to me and one of the things I was hoping to hear more about was the sort of ecosystem play. And they, like you said, kind of confusingly alluded to the way PlayStation 1, 2, and 3 games would work. They did not talk about PlayStation Mobile at all being something that would work on PlayStation 4. At one point they said it was an open system. And then they compared it to the PlayStation 3 being an open system. And their example was that we have Indies like Witness and Jonathan Blow, which isn't really being an open system. Not really. No. Actually, speaking of Witness, I want to get back to video games later. We have a bunch of special guests who can talk about it. But speaking of Witness, we actually have the trailer. We want to show that. And when we come back, David Pierce from The Verge, who was actually at the event, he just ran over. He's literally in the studio. He's half a block from the event. We were smart when we leased this a year ago. We knew this was going to happen. Look, we had a good source. So when we come back, David Pierce will be here. But first, let's take a look at the Witness.<|fr|><|translate|> BAhen, BAha. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. And we're back here. We're joined by Mr. David Pearson, your reviews editor for The Verge. And he is going to tell us about some of the hardware in the PlayStation 4. Well so, the most obvious thing was that there wasn't any. We kept, like they would show us games and they brought out the controller at one point and like, but most of what we saw was just sort of this cool blue light coming off of the controller as somebody stood in the dark on stage and played games. But the one thing I thought was interesting was as they kind of led with, you know, 18 seconds of hardware discussion before moving on to just showing us pretty games. And they were talking about, they kind of talked down the hardware in some sense. You know, they talked a lot about the memory and they talked about some of the new stuff, but a lot of what they talked about was almost how they didn't need to build a supercomputer this time. I remember the last time it came out it was huge and this time they're kind of dumbing down expectations. Well, I think it's twofold. I think first time, yes, the event they did originally was just bad. The PS3 event, like they made a mistake. Second like, hardware plateau, we're looking at this, I think you or Neal in the live blog said like, the graphics look good, but not like substantially better. Yeah. I think we're just seeing feature creep at this point. A lot of that, like the payoff is not as good. Yeah. I mean, and this is part of kind of what I'd left the event wondering is like, a lot of the games they were talking about are going to come out for the PS4 and the PS3. And so for, especially at the beginning, like what's the, what's going to be the huge reason to jump and what we saw, you know, may not have been indicative and that disembodied head thing that was on the screen was like the most insane thing I've ever seen in my entire life. It was a human. I don't care what anybody says. That was a person. Like we saw a stream, like, but it's just a screen. Like how big was it compared to you? The screen was probably, I don't know, I'm guessing 15 feet diagonal. It was huge. And just like ridiculously detailed, like little reflections in eyes and like tiny emotions on the face and wrinkles. It was crazy. So they clearly, whatever hardware they have can power some really incredible things. But at least from what they've said and what we've seen, I don't, I don't get the sense that this is some like next level thing that changes everything. I mean, I think the jump we have here, right, it's HD to HD. We don't have this SD to HD evolution. We don't, I mean, we have, we have consoles now that have, you know, custom interfaces and all this stuff. It's like, you know, in a large way, like the major jump was last time. But even during that last generation, we'll leave a lot of people, you know, for the launch games and, you know, why is this so much different than what I had before? Sure. I think you hear that a lot. And, you know, looking at these games, you know, that return that we get on actual graphical fidelity is going to get lower and lower and you're going to get more and more detail, but it's going to be harder and harder to identify. You know, some of the stuff we're seeing on these PlayStation 4 videos were crazy particle effects, great smoke effects, real time lighting. And it looks great and it makes it feel more realistic, but, you know, it doesn't look, you know, immediately noticeable. It's not immediately noticeable as a major improvement. You know, Watch Dogs is a great example. It's a game that it's going to come to, you know, PS3, but, you know, it's going to look different. The version that they're showing you is the PS4 version. And when you see the PS3 version, I think you're going to be able to tell like, oh, I get it now. Yeah. I'm actually really curious about that. I mean, I think they had done that to be like, here's our game coming out. Here's what it looks like on what we have now. Yeah, but that's pretty good. But that would be something saying our system that you can still buy that we want to sell you some more of. Look, it's kind of junk for like 10 more months or whatever. But if you go back, I mean, look at another Ubisoft game between Xbox and Xbox 360, Splinter Cell. I think it was Double Agent. You look at the, it was two different games. It was not even the same game. The like the stuff looked different. They had different assets. They had different levels or different different architecture. So but I mean, the thing is, I still feel like the Xbox Xbox 360 jump, which is so much more noticeable when they're showing off the Xbox 360. You were like, wow, that is a big, big difference. But we're not we're not seeing it as much this time. I think you're right. It's a subtle. It's these particle effects. And it could be just the bad stream. You seem like you had a little bit better of an impression than we did. Yeah, I mean, I think the everything we saw looked fantastic. I mean, I was the the watchdogs demo was amazing. And every every time they had it up there, you know, actually a guy on stage playing the game. I was considerably more impressed than I actually thought I was going to be just notable that was going to explain the game. Yeah, well, yeah. And he's it's there. It's, you know, displaying up on eight screens at a time. They had I couldn't really capture it sitting in the third row. But there was like screens 180 degrees in front of us. And for some of the games, mostly just with videos, but a couple where he was actually, you know, playing the game on stage. They're projecting it up on all these different screens. And it looked amazing, and there was no lag and it was, you know, there's clearly something pretty serious. So you got in trouble talking about it being a kind of course correction from the PlayStation three launch is was target renders. They showed off Killzone two and it never ended up looking like that show of Motorstorm never ended up looking like that. And so now for Killzone shadow monsters, shadow fortress, I don't know what it was called. They like shadow monsters. If that's not the game. Can we change it? Can we make another game that shadow monster guys? It's murder area death zone monsters. And also in a helicopter going over city state with a machine gun turned somewhere around and then everybody dies. But it's not what they had somebody playing it. So it was like, this is real. Like we're not, we're not pulling your leg this time. We hope. Okay. I mean, there could have been pantomime. I didn't play it. I mean, that would be, that would be a pretty, I mean, they like pointed to the guy and were like, they named him and they were like, he's playing this game. He's controlling it. He's got a controller in his hand. It'd be a bold move to be like, just get it. Guys, we did just have a situation with aliens calling marines where they showed us a demo and then they released a different game. So like, there was precedence for showing something completely fabricated. But you know, I think it's, they very much seem to be taking a different tack. Speaking of tack, Knack. Knack was the first game they showed off and it was a stylized, a character driven action game. It felt to me like one of those kind of mid nineties games where we were making tack in the power of juju or making like blinks the time cat. Or like any one of these kind of generic, you know, character driven platformers or action games. And Knack felt like that to me, it was kind of like almost a throwback. And it's like, you're going to show off the PlayStation four, you know, instead of showing, you know, the biggest, best graphics, you're showing off Knack. Well there were, that was, it felt like a running theme almost. And everybody would come out and enjoy their games. And it wasn't about like, you know, it wasn't this Michael Bay race where it's like, look how big my explosions are. Where like we've created this incredibly like immersive world that you're going to feel like you're part of. And I feel like that's kind of what you're saying with the difference between like PS3 and PS4 where it's now going to, it just feels bigger and more real and more like you're actually looking around in this universe as opposed to like, there should be smoke there and there's not. I think you're being fooled by the fact that you saw three screens all around you. I'm like, that's my next TV. Like Sony needs to make that as a television and put it in my home right now. It's a 4k television. And to that point. For $1 million. Look, I had a bet. I've lost my jacket over the bit, obviously. But I swear I thought they're going to say it's a 4k like delivery system. Well, so that's speaking of hardware. They just didn't talk about that at all. I assumed it had to be that. Partly because it just seems like the next thing. And partly because they've made such a big deal out of 4k otherwise. They talked about it constantly at CES. And like it's possible it's there and they're just not talking about it. But it was an odd thing to say. They're also not showing the box. They're also not, you know, like there's a lot of things that they are leaving vague on purpose. And from a corporate strategy, Blu-ray was their, you know, brute force, was their muscle. I mean, they really pioneered it with the PS3. PS3 got Blu-ray in the house and won them that console war. You know, I think compared to the DVD console or a platform where it wasn't the best win in the world. But, you know, it got them in. So I think with 4k, like that vertical integration strategy that Sony uses to get its products, to get its products organized, I think it's very, you can very easily see them slamming 4k into the PS4. That's how you get 4k. You slam it. It's a slamming process. You smash it. And then you bang it. It's a smang. It's a smang. You're smanging 4k onto the home television set. Once they smang the 4k into the PS3 and then they get you to buy a 4k television now that they've effectively kind of pushed that standard and also you need a new TV. Is it the smanging? Your TV probably only smashes or bangs. It does not do both. Thank you Sony. Guys, this is, look, technical terms, I'm sorry for getting into the sort of word soup of tech coverage. But I mean, so the thing is like, they said PlayStation 3 was a 10 year console cycle, right? PlayStation 4 is probably the same way. 4k is coming out this year. I would be very surprised if it was not 4k. If it was, like if it somehow is not, that's the biggest mistake they're going to make. Guys, do you know, like in 10 years, we'll have pet robots. Think about that for a second. They'll play my PS4 for me. They'll get all the trophies. I'll just watch. Like, they'll actually hand place pixels on my 4k screen. You know, it's like Sneakernet. It's sometimes faster to just put data on an airplane. We'll have robot dogs that deliver these videos to us. They'll board planes, they'll go through TSA, they'll do pre-check. So the share button does. Just kidding. Because your Sony Aibo comes and takes your video and runs it down the street. Can we talk about the share button? Like I understand wanting to promote things, but I really don't want an extra button on my controller. That's just tweet. Put this on the internet. To go to the tech world, ACC did a Facebook phone. The special deal, there was a Facebook button. Yeah, and that went super well for ACC. I really just don't want a button that goes, share. You're doing something fun? Just share. What if I dropped the controller? I'm so angry. I did the dumbest move. Like I'm not creative dumb, like just dumb. I accidentally hit the share button. There. My Twitter, my Facebook, my YouTube. It's everywhere. You streamed all my failures. Okay, no, that's not actually going to happen. I kind of like that actually. I'm going to follow you on that. I kind of hope that happens. Maybe that's why it's there. What's going to be interesting though is like we need a curation process here. And it can be your friends. One of the things I really like that they said is that your friends list now can be almost indexed with your social networks. So that it'll put real names up there. Hey guys, why has nobody thought about this for this whole console generation? If I want to play with Ross, I have to go down to W, find Wild Rider 69 and play with Ross. Wait, wait, wait. I changed it. It's now tilde tilde equal sign star star Wild Rider 69 and a half. Half is the actual half symbol. 420 x x x. 420 x x star star equal equal tilde tilde because it's got to be symmetrical. Yeah. I just friended you. So we're good now. Okay. With your magical. Yeah, I have one right here. Dude, that's a transparent phone. This is a PS4. This is actually what it looks like. I think the big thing, I'm speaking of the Facebook phone. I think the hardware thing, what Sony seemed to be emphasizing was clouds. We're clouding our, we're cloudifying our console and they want you to think of everything as being virtualized. You can play your games before they're done being downloaded. You can stream them to your Vita. Your friends can watch you play a game and then they can actually jump in and take over. It seems to be abstracting some of that experience, kind of putting it out there. Yeah, I think so. And I think the Vita thing was actually what was maybe the most interesting thing and sort of the most out there and surprising thing Sony talked about tonight. Because that feels like a big knife to the back of the Wii U. Yes. Where it's like, oh, we have these two things that work independently and they're awesome together. Cool job, Nintendo. But I mean, I think, yeah, the cloud is really interesting. And I think that partly goes back to the 4K stuff because I think Sony in that, if they're going to lean way towards streaming games and stuff, they have to lean away from these giant resolutions that they're going to try to make you play. And I wonder if they're going to do, I mean, they're obviously going to do discs of some kind. Plus streaming. Right. So it's like, if you want to have, like, or do you buy these discs that look amazing and then you stream and it doesn't look nearly as good. Like that, it just seems like, I don't know how Sony gets around that either way. Like they're either missing 4K or they're going to have this weird sort of disjointed experience. But Black Magic. Yeah. And science. Lots of science. But I think the cloud streaming, like, it almost doesn't make sense to me how you can stream a game. But if it works, like, that's pretty wild. I know so many people who actually, my roommate, like, three weeks ago was like, I want to download the original portal and started downloading it on the 360 and it was done like a day and a half later because my internet's super slow. Wait, wait. How big is that game? It's like four gigs. It's not that big a game. It's like four gigs. It's really slow. Like I cannot emphasize that enough. I want everyone to make a note of this that if people in New York have a lot of night, they got nice restaurants, they can see Broadway shows. I mean, just any day you can just go and see one, just whatever. Spider-Man, off the dark. Just go. We got tickets after this. But the thing you can't get in New York, no matter how fancy, you can't get good internet. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I have friends. There are rumors. There are rumors that Fios is good somewhere. I've never used it. I've never had it. I've never used it. Is it? It's great in Connecticut. If you can get Fios where you live, but if you have Time Warner in New York, you're like, all this cool PS4 stuff is like, you can't use that. I mean, that's also like, let's go outside of cities. There's a lot of places in the Midwest. You mean the Badlands? The Badlands. The Badlands, the Wastelands. If you go to the Badlands, the Wastelands, you just can't get good internet right there. That's actually more of a southern accent. I don't know where that came from. I'm really sorry, guys. I'm sorry to the world at large. Sorry to anybody who has an accent that sounds like that. No one has an accent that sounds like that. I think one guy was like, what are you talking about? Of course I do. I'm going to call it, come on, I can play. What? Come on, I can play. Do you think the cloud stuff is going to be big and revolutionary and everybody's going to jump on and only play games that way? I think you're going to have to show me some really cool applications. Like what? What would blow your mind? If I could play a game and have my friend take over my... whoa. I think like, I don't know. I have it all live at home. It's neat. It's fine. I think some of the stuff that they could do as people started talking about the Gaikai integration rumor and then now announcement. One of the things people talk about is like, why don't we get PS4 demos on PS3s? You have a PS3, why don't you just play Watch Dogs? Download a Gaikai app on your PS3, stream Watch Dogs to it and play Watch Dogs and say like, you can only play the first level, but that's a PS4 game. Don't you want it? You're like, that is, I want a PS4 now. I do. Actually, you know what? One of the funny, what was it? I think one of our writers, Josh Copstein, just tweeted like, and the big surprise reveal, it's actually the PS3 box. They're just streaming all the cool new stuff. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it stands to reason, right? It can do it. Well, here's the problem. Here's the catch. My PS3 is PS1 backwards compatible. This isn't. Clearly different hardware. Yeah. That's the catch. But- That's true. Let's talk actual streaming. We have Sean Hollister on the line. Sean Hollister covered OnLive and Gaikai extensively for us. He's been to their offices. He saw the good, the bad, and obviously now bought Gaikai, who's making this a really cool event tonight. Sean, are you with us? Yes, I am. Can we stream Sean to us? Sean. You look so excited. Go USA. Team USA. So Sean, why don't you tell us a little bit about your reading on all this cloud, the clouds today, the Sony Cloud? Well, I'd have a little bit more to read if they told us a little bit more about what it's going to do. Well, what we did hear about is that we'll have Gaikai giving us this lovely functionality to let us start streaming a game while we're downloading it. So you can start playing games while you're downloading them and not have to wait for that to begin. It also sounds like Gaikai is going to give you this trial ability. If you find something on the PlayStation Store that you like, you can give it a try right away immediately. This is something they've been doing on PC for a while, something they were trying to do with a variety of game developers with PC titles, letting you just try things without having to download any content at all. That sounds like it would be very useful to find out if you're willing to spend an amount of money on a game, giving it a try first. But we don't know which games they're talking about here. They said, you know, PS3, PS2, PS1 titles eventually. But are we going to be playing PS4 games over Gaikai? They didn't actually say that. Go ahead. And this is a strategy, this demo strategy that Gaikai did on the PC that was sort of what made them unique versus online. They were partnering with publishers as like a white label service so you could have an ad for Mass Effect 3 and then boom, play Mass Effect 3 right away. Yeah, yeah. And when I sat down with David Perry at the Gaikai headquarters, he told me he wanted that. That was his entire vision behind the service was that it was supposed to reduce the friction in all kinds of places. You could send an email link with a link to a Gaikai game in it. You just press the button and you'd be playing a game. In your Facebook page, you could have an embedded Gaikai demo. And they actually did a few of those. You can even try them now, I think. There still are, for instance, demos I think of Mass Effect 2 and so on where you can just start playing it immediately in your Facebook window. But now that Sony has the company, now that Sony bought them for $380 million, I'm guessing they're going to lock it down in some way. They can make you pay for it or make sure it's only PlayStation games or something like that. They didn't go into a lot of the details to that. So what do you think? Are you... Do you think this is officially exciting? It almost seems like old tech now, even though it's still sort of like magic. But I don't know. We've all seen on live and on live sort of crashed and burned. And now we have Gaikai going. Do you think that has a chance of real mainstream success being tied into a box like PlayStation? I think that when people try things that are streaming, when they have that immediacy of being able to flip on their Netflix and immediately have movies in front of them, even if they aren't necessarily the exact movies they were thinking of watching in any moment, it's just so easy that people love it. They want to do it. They start looking for that experience. So if Microsoft doesn't have anything like that and Sony does, and that this is the box where it's just easier to pick up something and immediately get into the game without having to wait for the download, having to wait for patches, which has been a problem with a lot of the PlayStation systems. You always have to get a new patch for your PlayStation Portable before you load up a new game through Vita, through PS3. And then you have to patch the game. If you cut all of that out of the equation, I think that's... That is exciting. Well, that's not in a mundane way, but it's exciting. Well, Sean, you're talking about this dream scenario, though. You're talking about if we have the bandwidth, we can make this work. You've used it at Gaika headquarters. You've used the streaming technology at OnLive headquarters. I've used it at home, too. You use it at home, too. Are you able to play these twitchy first person shooters? Are you able to actually play these action games with low enough latency to make it effective? Yes, you can. It is not... Now, mind you, it depends on your connection. Everything depends on your connection. So if you have a connection that will drop all the time, or if you have a connection that's very spiky, where you'll get by speed and all of a sudden they'll be gone, then you do have these instances where all of a sudden, crap, what happened? Where am I? Your game starts glitching out with these streaming services. That can be a problem. But if this is still limited to the demo experience that Gaika is talking about, where you just try something out, see if you like it, it was definitely good enough to give me an idea whether I wanted to buy the game or not. Whether it was a twitch shooter, whether it was a fighting game. And I pulled off an ultra combo in Street Fighter IV with Gaika's service once. And this is something that... From where? From where? This was with a device that was connected to a physical ethernet cable. Okay. Which wasn't, you know, over wireless or anything like that. But it's something you can do. Something you can do. He's dropping a mic. I do not think it's good enough that everybody can play streaming games right now. Well, I mean, not everybody can do an ultra combo. I mean, I'm just saying. Yeah, that was like a little sly Street Fighter humble brag right there. I happened to beat a world champion. You know? Using ga... I mean, hey, no big deal. I'm pairing with the best of them, man. I was playing Primal Rage with a dude, and I got all the combos. Sean, we'll let you go in just a second. But real quick, so you've seen this. We have not seen what Microsoft is going to offer. We have a pretty good idea they're going to do something this year. What do you think? Is this something like you're definitely going to get? Are you sold on the PlayStation 4? I can't say I'm sold on the PlayStation 4 yet. It's just so vague. I haven't seen what the console looks like yet. I haven't seen what many of the games look like yet. It's just there's so much up in the air right now. I could not even consider buying one until they give me some solid details. Or how about an image of it or a release date? Also a price? Yeah, I'd like to know what it looks like. Maybe its price. If it's, you know, $800, and probably I can pick one up. Yeah, it's very early. Great. Alright, Sean, thank you so much. You bet. Thanks for having me. Can you explain the Team USA jersey that was behind him? I've never known him as a sports ball fanatic. Do you remember the Miracle on Ice in 1980? I remember the Miracle on 34th Street. Yeah, that's the one I know. It's almost exactly the same thing. Did they do the Flying V and had the hat trick and like there's a yellow card and the star goes out of the game, but Air Bud comes in and saves it? You said you didn't know the story. I don't understand. Okay, I thought I'd seen it. I was like, this is TNT, really tired. That's fair. Watching on a plane. No, because let's talk a little about games. Obviously, we're tech writers, but you saw them more immersive. You saw Watch Dogs. You saw the new Infamous. What was exciting to you there? What did you see that actually you will want to play? So I have to say I somehow missed seeing much of any Watch Dogs. Somehow I don't know. Where were you? They've been talking about it for forever and somehow I kept like not seeing. I would see them talk about it for hours and then would miss the trailer. You saw it today though. Yeah, I saw it today. I just hadn't seen it up until now. I thought you fell asleep during the event. So kind of all I knew about it was that everybody was excited, but I hadn't seen that much footage of it. The game looks amazing. It's incredibly detailed. Just watching these moments where there was one where he's scaling the fence and then kind of leaps on top of it and perches for a second and the whole thing went into slow motion. It was just this wild, like you could see the steam coming out of pipes coming slowly and you could see the smaller pieces of it and he's pulling the data on the people as they're walking by and it was wild. It felt like I was sitting there watching a movie that some dude over there was controlling. Those are details I really wish that I'd seen on the stream. Maybe we just had a bad connection. It's the most unfortunate way of seeing the new generation. I hope that between Sony they could maybe use Gaikai to stream it to us. Between Sony and Ubisoft, I spent a lot of money on it, they want to get the best quality out there. They want a piece of high res HD stream or capture, direct capture of it soon enough. The nice thing about Watch Dogs to me, out of all of the AAA or maybe quadruple A, that's my term I'm using that starting it now, games that were at the event, Watch Dogs was a new IP. They're showing us a new Killzone game. They're showing us a new infamous game. It was nice to see, even though we'd already seen Watch Dogs at E3 last year, starting a new generation with new IPs is exciting. It's where we got Assassin's Creed from. It's where we got the first Infamous from. I feel like one of the things for me that was missing in the games here was that they didn't show off a lot, but they had a big focus on action games from the last generation. If you're going to show me another infamous game, it's like I've played infamous games. Killzone was like, there's been three and they're still not letting the world on fire and you're making another Killzone game. So it was nice to see Watch Dogs. And then there was the most epic tease of all time where the guy comes out, he's like, we're making Final Fantasy and then just pieces out on the stage. There's Watch Dog right here. I want to watch this again. God, this looks so good. I remember seeing this at E3, but even then when I saw it at E3, it was like, I'm like, God, this is so beautiful. It's Chicago. I can see Neilai back there pointing out, I can see my house from here. So Neilai is actually also in the back. This is actually 3D in real life. This is the power of the PlayStation. Got Neilai right behind us. That's augmented reality. God, this looks so good. That's Chris Ziegler. You're playing as him. Man, Chris is looking good. So there's one thing. So they said this one was PS3 and PS4? Yes. Okay. When we saw it at E3, it was way too gorgeous for a PS3 title. They're showing you the PS4 version. And they've been showing that since June. Oh yeah. I mean, it's the same like Destiny, right? They're showing off their optimized dev kit build, which is going to be PS4 720. But it's also coming to 360 and PS3. But they're not going to show you that version. That version, when it comes out, they're barely showing us anything from Destiny. Dude, I love this game system. But they're going to show us the best looking version available. It's like for Unreal Engine games, they're always going to show you the Xbox version of the PS3 version. Unreal Engine looks better on Xbox. So here's a question while we're talking about hardware. And I actually don't know the answer to this. So like when the PS4 comes out, do we and Sony expect PS3s to just completely stop selling? Like nobody will ever buy another one again? Like what's happened before? Did the Xbox keep selling when the 360 came out? Well, Xbox was different. Microsoft was losing money on the Xbox. So they wanted to pull Xboxes off store shelves. And they forget it ever happened. For the PS2, where Sony owned all the Silicon, they dropped the price. The PS2 continues to sell like hotcakes. They got it down to $99. Sold like crazy. I think I bought one after the PS3 came out, yeah. For PS3, I imagine they're not going to be able to get it down to $99 right away. But they will drop the price and continue to push it as a budget system. And then PS4 will be $999. That's my guess. I'm just making that up. That's why they didn't mention it. But I mean, also, you've got the 10-year life cycle for the PS3. So it's got to go down again a couple times. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's like that 10-year life cycle, people are like, how are you announcing a PS4? You know, it's only seven years old or it will be seven years old. It's like, well, there's three more years left in it as a $199 box, then a $149 box, then a $99 box. And then what? The PS2 only just got completely discontinued. Yeah, like recently. So I mean, we've got a lot more time. We've got a greater than 10-year life cycle left for the PS3. David, thank you so much. You look very antsy. You look very tired. I know we don't like late night events. Let's look at you out here. When we come back, we'll have Chris Plant from Polygon to talk games and all fun stuff. Before that, though, let's watch a trailer from Sucker Punch's New Infamous. It's a sequel. It looks awesome. It looks so good. I know. I cannot wait. The guy introing it was terrifying. Yeah, it just really freaked me out. The world is ending on positive. I have no idea what we're going to do. All right, let's watch this, and then we'll come back with Chris Plant. Awesome. Your safety is our top priority. The DUV is in control. The DUV is in control. G6 status. G6 clear. G7 status. G7 clear. G7 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. G8 status. What the hell? What was that? I don't know. B2 status. What should we do? B2 repeat status. On me. Keep your eyes peeled. The DUV is in control of the situation. I'm down. We're gonna hit him. We're gonna hit him. We lost B2. Check in B5. B5. Over there. Go, go. Go. Over me. All никz. I want him alive. Stop right there. On the ground. Now. B2 is in control of the situation. Over me. Check in B5. B5. Over here. We got a tiger. Suppress your anger. Serve you right. Over here. Give you the first order. You will lose. I do not know what to do. Stop. B2. B2. B2. B2. B2. B2. B2. B2. B2. You are not in control. All right, we are back with Chris Plitt and you brought gifts. I did. This is a real life press badge for the Sony PlayStation event. And you know what? You can take that home with you. Great. This will totally make up for the jacket I just lost in the first half. Guys, can somebody get us a quick check on what that's going for on eBay right now? I think it's a Waffington's. Hold on. You can pull it out. I'm unboxing it. So what have I missed, guys? I missed the live show. Has it been more exciting than what I just came from? We were watching it on a laptop screen and taking notes. I'm imagining that it was softer. It wasn't blasting your ears and shaking your bones. No, but it was in like SD with a few hiccups. Nice. Which I guess you can name this. In a way, that's kind of like the screen that I watched it on because they decided to use an OK monitor and project it onto a really bad screen that had crease marks in the middle of it. So it's like you can go to an art house in a small town and they're like, I guess this is kind of what Any Hall was supposed to look like. So this may be redundant now, but I was going to ask, how was the event for you? The event? Not as great from a production standpoint. No, you know what? It was a really interesting event. It was long. And I felt like I heard a lot. And then when I stopped afterwards and kind of reviewed the notes, I also felt like I didn't actually learn that much. I felt like there weren't a lot of specifics. Did you know that Square is making a new game? They're making a Final Fantasy. Did you expect that? Really? Again? Whoa. I'm wondering, have you guys talked about E3, how it feels like maybe they're going to lean into E3 with the major announcements? No, we haven't talked about that. Yeah, I think that's what this event read to me like. We want to get out there and front. Well, Square explicitly said, come to E3. But not showing the system, not setting the price point, it felt like Sony was getting in front of whatever else might be announced this year. Well, keep in mind, this is Microsoft's strategy 2005. They started off with the MTV event and then they went to E3 afterwards with more detail. It felt like they were borrowing from a lot of playbooks tonight. If you just look at how they did the hardware, we talked about this earlier today, the magic effect. And it felt like they were kind of leaning, not leaning, learning from Apple's playbook of, yeah, there's a GPU and a CPU and those are funny words, but they work in a magical way. And it produces these great things. And just trust us, it's super powered. Like I almost wanted super powered to be up on the screen like they would do an Apple thing. They said turbocharged. Turbocharged. Turbocharged. PC architecture. Is this the only time turbocharged and architecture have you been in the same sentence? You know, I will say I miss the turbocharged button. Like all the old Super Nintendo controllers. They were just like tap super fast. That's what the share button is. That's how I do super combos. The share button doubles as a turbo button. I wonder how this entire conference would have gone over without the share button. Because that to me was like the thing of the night that got me excited. Really? Yeah. I mean the games are a game, it's sequels to things we already have played that look slightly better. And then one of my favorite studios with one of my favorite series, Evolution with MotorStorm, is just making a racing game. I thought it was strange that they went through the same racing game porn that every studio had. Doesn't Sony have enough of those? It's their bona fides, right? Where they have to be like, we modeled the prisming of the light through the buffed plastic. Guys, I wanted to reach through the screen and like beat the... Yeah. But the games I get, the more I think about the... I'm the less... I'm enthused. But oddly enough, the hardware, which is not what I expected from Sony, is what has me at least the most interested. I don't know if I buy all of it yet. I wrote an article today about my skepticism about promises that Sony makes regarding its hardware in the past. I thought it was notable though for a couple of things, right? So they had two of the games that you put out in your article, Killzone and MotorStorm. They had Killzone 3 on stage with a guy with a controller. Very much saying like, this is real. They had Evolution, not with MotorStorm, but with DriveClub? Yeah, technically that's Killzone 4. Let's not forget there was a Killzone 3 that you didn't play. Sony, stop with the Killzone. Just don't do Killzone again. To get back to the hardware though, Mark's irony is brilliant. It's something I said in the live log and cannot emphasize. He is just one of those minds that when you hear him talk, you get the sense that he really does know where. In some ways, he was their big gun. Video games are going and he was definitely their big gun tonight. And when he came out, he took the very complex stuff and he put it in a relatively simple way. He got a little lost in acronyms. He kind of got in the weeds. Did you know there's eight gigabytes of integrated DRAM? Yeah. But like I said, he's the big guns and he's there to set the tone. We all know he's a brilliant guy. Well, we all do. You do, I do. But for whom was he there for? I think what he had to say, I think that share button thing, I think is big. I think being able to test a game with one button, my inner 10-year-old just blew up because I can remember the original PlayStation and that demo disc that came with it with like extreme sports and Crash Bandicoot and just ruining that disc from playing it so much. And the idea that I could do that now, that I, as someone who doesn't spend a lot on games, can go and just kind of taste test everything with my free time, that sounds really, really appealing to me. I think that's, I don't know, that's table stakes in today's video game market, right? Like you've got an iPad, like you can go get, I'm trying to let you guys know I have an iPad. It's pretty cool. You don't mean generic tablet on table that we covered up in Sydney F4 just to make sure we didn't look like we're being biased toward any company. Point is, if you have a smartphone or a tablet now, like your table stakes is getting games for free, being able to try them for free, get a quick download and jump right in and play it. And so I think in some ways, you know, maybe that's the quadruple A analog of that, right? Being able to like... Yeah. I mean, I don't want to blush at that. It's been, what, seven years, probably eight years since they started work on the last system, maybe even more. So all that's changed between then and now is significant for this market, especially things like the iPad and its store. At least they're recognizing it is what I would say. There was a possibility, I would think maybe a couple of years ago, where I think they would have been bullish enough not to put the table stakes in, to just completely ignore it. So that they are doing that with $60 games, with these big expensive games, I still think is significant. I should mention, we presume $60 games, we don't know. Yeah. Well, we don't know a lot. We don't know what the price is. I mean... Or what it looks like. Yeah. There's also, I want to jump in and say we do have someone on the line who will not have these answers, but can also disagree and agree with us equally. Griffin, Griffin McElroy. I know so much more than we will ever understand. That face. You look so happy. Hey, guys. What up? What's up, handsome? Long time, listen, first time caller. Let's talk about those first party games. Yeah. Oh, man. So many sequels, so many numbers. Tell us about Attack and the Power of Juju. That was the first game they showed off. Oh, man, that looks super good. Yeah. Do you guys know how many first party games they showed off? Six, right? Oh, first party? Four. Four. There were four. Not including the Medium Molecule tech demo, which actually looked like something they would ostensibly release someday. And possibly the coolest first party thing. Did it also look kind of like the Kinect demos back where they're like, no, this will totally work. Just, you just move like this and then the puppets will do everything. In their defense though, Medium Molecule, I think is the only company, especially in the context of Sony, that has ever shown off a tech demo at E3 or something like that and then released a product that was actually cooler than that. That is true. The original tech demo for LittleBigPlanet looked like, okay, you can build your own levels. I guess it makes sense. And then the actual game had a lot more content to it than that. But I guess we could start with the Medium Molecule thing. It's kind of working backwards. It wasn't a game so much as really the only mention of PlayStation Move in the entire event. Although, you guys were there and I was super busy during the feed. Did they actually reference the fact that the new controller is kind of like a movie? Here's how they threw that away. They were like, there's a touch pad on the front and also it glows so you can know who's playing. So you can know who's playing. See, it's like, ah yes. But while one of the guys was playing Killzone, it went from orange to green and I was like, I've lost it. Who's playing? I extract orange joint green. And they also just breezed right by the fact that they have this 3D depth camera, which I'm guessing fills the same role that the eye fills in seeing where the ball is in 3D space and then detecting it. But also being a Kinect. Right. Like, that's the thing. It's also a 3D depth sensing camera. It's a Kinect. So yeah, they did gloss over that bit with the controller. But then with the Medium Molecule thing, they were using actual move controllers. They were. They were using real move controllers to sculpt things in 3D space and then turn those things into puppets. And they sort of hinted at the fact that those objects could be used by players who don't have an artistic touch to populate the background of an environment for a game or in this instance, sort of a live puppetry demonstration where the move controller lets you control the characters that you were doing. And I really do think I am, those are my dudes. Like, I'm a huge Medium Molecule fan. But I really do think if it had been any other developer doing that tech demo, I would have been like, get out of town. Like, this doesn't look. I just want to set up Griffin's credibility here. Griffin spent maybe 500 hours making one of the world's great Little Big Planet 2 levels where you played as a little chicken man who gets abducted into a spaceship that is making chicken meat. You have to get out of it. I got Pixar option that one. I made a cool 3.5 mil on that one. So thanks, Medium Molecule. But yeah, that looked super neat. So yeah, the first game they showed off was Knack, which I mean, it looks, the aesthetic is neat. And like, I would trust Mark Cerny with my unborn child. But it really did look like Blink's The Time Sweeper a little bit. That's fine that if they didn't show off Knack, then I feel like anybody watching that whole press conference who wasn't into dudes shooting other dudes or throwing fire at them or fighting dragons, they would have been a little ostracized. And I get that. It just seemed like a weird way to start out the show is, here's our cartoony character-driven platformer. Welcome to 1995. Yeah, a little bit. Introducing Crash Bandicoot. Wait, no. Wrong game. Yeah. I feel like it's hard for me to talk about any of the games that they didn't show. Something at least emulating real-time footage or gameplay. But I mean, I guess you can get in trouble. Like the Killzone, what is it? Killzone Shadow Fall. Like it looked really, really good. It looked like a shooter. A shooter. Yeah. With an on-rails movie where at the end of it you pressed square. Yeah. But like, it looked dope. Like that was one of the few parts of the show where I was watching him hang from the back of the thing while shooting the pilot. I was like, okay, that's kind of neat. But at the same time, the Killzone 2 trailer that they showed in E3 2005 is probably the worst instance of a trailer being completely fake. That game did not come out looking anything like that. So like, I don't know. Until I see something final in that game, I'm just not going to be able to take it on credit. My biggest disappointment with these first party games is I didn't see anything that looked like it would play like a next generation game. Maybe Watch Dogs had some moments where I was like, how did they do that? How did the people in this world know to react that way? Or the machines? A lot of guests were like, well yeah, this is a hallway in which I shoot things. It's a really pretty hallway, but it's still a hallway. I mean, it gets into part of the problem. One of the things I would have liked to have seen, and part of this has to do with seeing games like Infamous and Killzone, we've already seen these games in these franchises before, some of them for a long time. There's the helicopter shot. Look, you're in a helicopter. Always a helicopter shot. But I would have liked to have seen, if their big thing is a share button, if their big thing is sharing video or letting other players jump into your game, I would have liked to see a game that used any of that at all. It seems like it missed the mark a little bit. I think the only game that really did do that was Evolution's new racer, the Drive Club. But at the same time, a lot of that functionality that they were showing off, that was some of the only time that we got to see the mechanical functions of the social network instead of just, hey, check out this video and hey, check out these pictures. It was showing how people played together. But at the same time, I don't know, maybe it just left a sour taste in my mouth because in the context of a racing game, those social features have been nailed before. There are games that have gotten that so right, most notably and most recently was Need for Speed Most Wanted. I don't know. I guess I just didn't see the difference between the challenges that they were putting forward between the clubs in that game and the auto log challenges that you can post to players with Need for Speed. I don't know. It just didn't seem that crazy. Can I ask you? I have a question for you. With driving games, how happy are you that driving games have finally taken on the same naming construct as shooters in which we have Drive Club and Bullet Storm and Warfighter? I cannot wait for Wheel Road. Yes, Tire. Yeah, no, it's hard to figure out, is it two words? Is it one word? Is it inter-capped? Because I think we've seen it three different ways already in official PR from them. I just want to make sure everyone knows these are the vagaries of video game journalism. This is really getting into the weirds. Where's the in-cap? It's, hey, how do we inter-cap this one? Is it two? I think it's one word. I'm really going to say that. I will say... Oh, go on, Griffin. What's surprising to me is, yeah, it seems like one of the two ways that they could have really hit first party games really well is show off a handful of games that really hit what the console can do, apart from just the dopest graphics. Because it's like, Crysis 3 came out this week and on a PC, it turned all the way up. That already looks next gen. I don't think that that is going to be super impressive to people, especially over a choppy Ustream feed. But I think the other way that they could have gone with it is just have a dozen games saying, you know all those first party Sony franchises, those PlayStation franchises that you at least have heard of, here they are. Because really all that you got was Killzone and you got Infamous. I'm as psyched as anybody else for Infamous. I love that franchise. But it's just like a CGI trailer of Infamous and that's the only first party franchise that you're bringing back. There's no... Drop the Crash Bandicoot is what I'm saying. Where's the Dax Shepard? All right, Griffin McElroy and Chris Plant, thanks for joining us. We're going to cut to a video and when we come back, we will have Mr. Nilay Patel, who just got here from Watch Dogs in Chicago. The one and only, very angry, Nilay Patel. Our industry, the past 10 years, has seen so many trends come and go. At times people are like, you have to do social, you have to do casual, you have to do hardcore, you have to do this, you have to do that. But as much as it's been changing, all of those different trends have been supporting each other. What I love about this console is that I think it's the first time that these trends are going to really be brought together. This is where the promise of what we can do is bigger than just one genre. This time Sony came around to us and they came to our office and they said, here's what we're thinking, what are you guys thinking? What have you been held back by and what would you do if you didn't have any technical limitations? That they gave us the possibility to provide feedback and to adapt based on the feedback they received from developers was for me a very important message. All these developers had a hand in actually helping form what the PlayStation 4 would eventually turn out to be. We took all that into consideration to create the system that just works. When we think about the word simple, we've chosen to interpret that with a comparable word, elegance. And to us that means this balance between how complex the simulation or the options or the interfaces are with how deep the experience you can get from it. The more elegant a design is, then the more simple and easy it is to get incredible depth. Where you can have a deeper experience that's still not really complicated, but it's much richer and much more immersive. Everyone has to some degree some instinctive craft. They want to make something their own. They want to make it a representation of themselves to other people who know them. Through personalization, there can be a relationship between the kind of content that I'm interested in and how the options are presented to me. So this system actually is very much aware of the player and what's going on in the room at any given point. So for example, when I go to the PlayStation Store, right now I see advertisements and commercials for a lot of games that I'm frankly not interested in. Having a good way to present you the games that you're interested in is very important for us. If we want everyone to be engaged in gaming and love it and understand it, we just got to make it easy for everyone to get into that and not waste everyone's time. That doesn't involve three minutes of boot up and disk shuffling and sort of all of these things that are just like a nuisance between the impulse to play a game. So immediacy becomes an important goal. I want to make the decision to experience something or to access something and I want it right now. There isn't any more waiting time, there isn't any more startup. I literally walk in, pick up the controller, hit the start button, it just goes. It's a huge win for gamers. You're able to download the first bit of the game and start playing it before the next 20 gigs download. One button press away and you get what you want. We're back. Cheers. Sorry about that, we really all need drinks. Dude, I need a drink. Well, you've been talking about the PlayStation for a long time. And you want to. You really want to. You were just storming. I'm bursting with information. Not really information. You couldn't be at home, but Neil was just stomping the whole time. Just anger. Pacing, I think that's the word. Yeah. Hello, I'm Eli. Managing editor of The Verge. Nice to see you, boss. Yeah, how are things? How's the stream? I'm fine. How's the internet? Hello, internet. I'm full of disappointed and rage. Okay. So, tell us, what was the event like for you? So I would say we were live logging it. It was interminable. About halfway through, I realized that in order to maintain my own sanity, I needed to disconnect from reality and just write whatever I felt was happening in my mind. But you do that at every event after the 45-minute mark. That's a long enough to be. And this was two hours. It was really long, right? Like we brought backup batteries. It was all like, it was very stressful on the ground because you didn't know if Sony would ever stop. They would keep going. You didn't know if it was going to keep going, right? And now another developer to discuss their game engine, but not their game. Like over and over and over. Breaking scene in the news. Everyone in Sony's first event still being held hostage. Sony is still going. There are more chips to talk about. We are pooing in bags. It's not a crew platter. It was at that level. We'll see you then. No, here's the thing that I thought was very strange. It was they open with all this developer stuff. This is great for developers. We basically built a PC. We don't have to talk about the cell processor or blast processing. Who do they have? There's Blizzard. They're going to port Diablo, which runs on Windows XP and the MacBook Air. But we built the best gaming system ever and it runs Diablo 3 because they're a PC company and we made it easy for PC gamers to do this. So it's basically the best game console. Great. Got developers. And then they're like, but check out all these developers that we've already convinced. And all this high end IP that's already going to be here because we already did the work. And it was like, so who are you talking to? Who is your audience for this event? Is it other developers? Are they going to feel left out because you already talked to these developers? Is it consumers? Because you haven't shown them one thing that is valuable about the PlayStation 4 yet. You haven't shown them anything other than the most impressive thing, which I actually like said, oh shit, in our live log because it was so awesome. And now, oh shit, on the air. Yeah. It was a creepy, it was an old man's human, it was a rendered human head of a decrepit old man. How tall was that in real life? That wasn't rendered. That was a human head. It wasn't actually. I mean, that was like, okay, that is legitimately, like, I was blown away. It looked real. It was terrifying. I don't know why they went with old man. He looked like a wizard. Like a dying wizard. You could have picked beautiful woman. You could have picked handsome younger man. Beautiful women have smooth skin. Old crinkly men, that's more to render. I understand. It's one of those wrinkles in real time. Think about it. Yeah. The PlayStation 3 can wrinkle smooth skin. Literally the emotion engine. Terrifying. Wait, how tall was it in real life? Like a rugged younger man. How tall was that head? You know, like a craggy, kind of like, I lived in, I will take you on an adventure kind of guy. You were saying it was like Iggy Pop's stomach. Yeah. It looked like it was a man made of Iggy Pop's stomach. Yeah. Covered in peanut butter. Guys, give me five minutes. I'm just going to go take care of this. Why was that the most impressive thing that they showed? And then what's funny is that that was the high point. They talked about how they rendered it and they spent all this time. They can do translucency in skin. And then everybody else came out and showed progressively worse graphics after that. Here's the question. Right? What, going in, what were your expectations and preconceptions? What did you want Sony to show? What did you think Sony was going to show? What I thought Sony needed to do was explain to the world why the PS4 should be the central point for a Sony ecosystem in your life. Right? So you buy this box, it gets Sony, you know, one Sony, right? So you have, you buy this box and you make.believe with the box. You make.believe. And it, you know, it has Sony content. Sony owns a movie studio and a music company, right? It connects to other Sony devices like phones. You know, they kept on talking about how you're going to play games on the Vita. No you're not. You know why? Because nobody has a Vita. Like they don't. You know, one of the things that was interesting to me is like they, they will now, obviously. They've, what about Sony's phones? They just announced a phone. They passed over. Well, I asked before, like where was PlayStation mobile? They passed over the apps, right? There are, we'll have Netflix and Hulu, but you know, everyone's got that and they've kind of passed over it. And then they talked about big triple A retail games that look like big triple A retail games today, but with better graphics. There was nothing to me that felt new. And you know, one of the things that's exciting to me about PlayStation mobile is that games don't look the best, but they're a dollar or they're five dollars and they work on your Vita and also your Android phone and then maybe also your PS4 and it's the same game and you just buy it and you get it. What I didn't understand, I mean like over and over again, they kept on saying you're going to play this on the Vita. I'm like, nobody has, like literally they put it in the live log over, nobody has one of those. I've got one. Well, we're us. Yeah, I know. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, do you have one? Of course, it's the Android and the polygon. But I don't have one. You're right, sales do not do well on that. Actually, I want to go back to the point you talked about because it did feel standalone. Kaz Marai, the new CEO of Sony, the former PlayStation exec, has been pushing this one Sony initiative the whole time. This should be like for the war for TV, this should be their big player. And we haven't heard about 4K, which is a big initiative. I remember like, they didn't even say Blu-ray. Did they ever mention Blu-ray? Also, no, they didn't. But also, where was Kaz Marai? Yeah, nowhere to be found. I thought it was strange that Andrew House was presenting it. I was excited to see Kaz Marai, who sort of, I feel like in a way, this certain kinship, he started in gaming from PlayStation 1 to 2 to 3, and now he's the head of the company. It seemed like it would have been a great show of support for the CEO of the company to come and introduce. And that was never appropriate for Howard Stringer to do. And now you can have your CEO kick off a PS4 event because you're like, what's up? Kaz Marai, like. Right. And you can say, like, this is where Sony begins and ends in your home. There's a lot for them to do with the PS4. And all they talked about. So I'm getting a lot of tweets now because I've been complaining about this thing. I wrote this very snarky live vlog. And everyone's like, just wait for E3. This was set up to beat Microsoft to the punch, so they showed whatever they could show. They just wanted to get the name out there. They didn't show the console. They didn't show the. The name being PlayStation 4. Surprise. They didn't show, well, you know, they didn't show the PS4 at the PS4 event. Like, you've got to save something for E3. I will say this. I think what you save for E3 is the games. I think what you show off today is your console and all these ideas you have about it. Just compare it to the 2005 event, though, all sources indicate, all signs indicate that we'll see a 2013 release for PS4. There was literally a huge sign. Oh. At the event. The last, the huge last slide was holiday 2013. Oh, did it? We missed that in the vlog. We got cut off on that thing. So if we have 2013, like the PS3 was announced over a year before it was released. There was an announcement at E3 2005 and then it came out November 2006. And what they showed off there, they showed off a console that wasn't the console that they released. It had two HDMI ports, et cetera. So I think they're in some ways being more conservative. We're going to slow it. We're going to have a shorter delta between announce and release and we're going to kind of pace ourselves throughout that. I think, you know, I'm sure they have a box to show it. They just didn't want to. What I'm disappointed by is I didn't, I'm not leaving this. You know, I think the cloud stuff was their biggest idea by far based on a purchase from July. You know, it's like, well maybe they made the purchase because they weren't done in time. Maybe they were like, we're not, we have this idea. We've been working on it for four years. We're not getting there. We're not getting there. Yeah. Maybe, maybe. You never know. I mean, the guy stuff they could have spent forever talking about it and they didn't. It was the exciting thing though. There's a thing I don't know about. Like if you're going to show me literally a giant long demo of Killzone, like I. You know what Killzone looked like? A video game. I mean like, they looked more beautiful than a video game that I play now, but the motion, the physics, all that stuff, video game. Hanging off of a helicopter and shooting a dude with red eyes. Yeah. That was the entire line. It was shooting game, punching game with super powers. It was granted bottle luck. It was a driver. It was a racer. It's everything we've seen. So every game, all the, what were the two games? It was Killzone, Watch Dogs, and there was another one. Infamous. Infamous. And they all had the same plot, which is like the government is taking over. We put it out. They're watching you. We put out like lesson taken from today's Sony event. Developers are really paranoid. They got like, they look like a really. Yeah, but like, yeah, they're super paranoid. Like the government is definitely out to get you and is watching you and limit surveillance state and what will happen when they're like the walls come with that. How about this? We're really paranoid. They're like, oh, I can watch the game you're playing on your, I was like, you know, this, the thing is watching you like we are like the PS4 is such a manifestation of the consumer culture that it literally tracks your purchases and pre downloads what it thinks you might want to buy. So you're not remotely inconvenienced. We call it Sony now. I mean, come on. Like how do you not see the general hypocrisy of what you're building here? I mean, that's like whatever, like they can make the games and I understand it, but it was, it was just like, it was that level of tone deaf. Let's talk about, right after you talked about social and network and like all the stuff you can do and like you immediately press the, you put a share button on the remote so that you can monitor yourself on the internet. One of the things, um, the way I use chat roulette to monitor myself, that's the service that I use. Oh my God. It's my pain. Dude, I don't want to snapchat roulette. I don't want us to think about this later. Let's get rich. Let's not prescribe any behavior. They talked a little bit about, you know, these, your experience extends, you know, through the cloud, all these different devices. And then I guess right after the event they announced a PlayStation app or a PlayStation. Oh yeah. Buried in a Japanese press release. Yeah. That, uh, like it was not an ever announced. Well that's the, look guys, uh, this is video game journalism tip, pro tip from me to you. That's the way you get the good news. Don't put it in English, put it in the bottom of the press release in Japan. Don't tell anybody about it. So the news, I just saw this. The news is there, there are an app for iOS and Android for the iPhone, the iPad and Android devices that is essentially a smart glass. It's a second screen. So it's a second screen. So you're playing the game and you see the map or whatever on your iPad and you can like interact with the console in some way, which is great, but not quite the cloud integration they're talking about. And even the, uh, what was the drive club? Is that the, I mean that's fine. Dead space is actually what it is. Dead space. No, drive club looks like an interesting game. Uh, and then they're like, and then we can extend it to tablets. And I was like, that would be awesome. Like you're in this, like you're in a club, you're driving with your friends. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Driving with your friends, being in a club. Being in a club. Being in a club. Obviously. Brilliant. But then they're like, but, but what, you get the tablet and you put it in your hands and what you do is you pick a car and you pick a track and then you decide how fast other people should go and challenge them to go that fast. And that does not sound fun. No. Like in no way am I like, man, can you go, can you make that faster than three minutes? I bet when you go get home, you're going to find out. And then my tablet will let me know if that happened. Like how does that seem fun at all? Honey, happy anniversary. Hold on a second. I got a alert. I'm buzzing. Let me, uh, what is this? Oh man. Billy just beat my time. I gotta go to the club. I gotta drive. I mean, shouldn't you be able to play the game on this device? Wouldn't that be cool? You can stream it. You know, driving games on phones are like interesting. Stream it. We need to, we need to wrap this up and go, but I do want to ask you a question. Is there anything Sony could do in the next however many months, pre-holiday to convince you this is something you want to get? How about before E3? Do you think that? I don't think they'll do anything before E3. This is it for E3. I think, well, I think everything now will happen at E3. That seems to be the obvious thing. I think what they need to do is explain to me how this will actually be more interesting than having a PS3, right? And I don't know that that's happened. I don't like, I'm not a social gamer, right? Like I play, I come home, I play video games for four hours and I pass out and like it's a very solitary experience because it's the end of my day, right? It's I don't, we got to get your copy of dead space three. You and I will play bro up. I don't want to do any of that stuff. He'll take your controller and play remotely. You can watch me play. You know, when they were doing the drive club stuff, they're like, this is all about driving with your friends. I'm thinking they're like sitting there going, I don't want to do that. What I want to do is I want to play video games, right? This is like all the, it's all very interesting. And I understand that they were far behind in online play and they were far behind in all the social stuff that made Xbox live, destroy them this generation. And they they're catching up and they're doing some interesting new things and the cloud gaming take control of the controller is all very interesting, but they didn't make the required network effects that that needs to be valuable is like not built in. It's like I have to get a PS4 and then everybody else I know has to get a PS4 and then we have to decide that this is how we actually want to interact with each other. And I'm a lot of steps away from that. I just think, you know, with this increased competition from what I've been calling the other next gen, right? Which is your phone and your tablet and video shield. What disappointed me was I just wanted something that I hadn't thought of before and I thought of a better kill zone. Yeah. Did it have more guns and helicopters? It was real time. That's the big thing. Also, what are you supposed to use that touch screen on the remote for or the touch pad? I imagine there'll be some kind of Vita compatible. I don't know. How do you reach it? You use your... You're here and then... How much should Microsoft pay you to say this? I'm just saying. All these, like they're sitting there, they're standing in front of me with these controllers and they're not showing me the things I want to know. They didn't show anything with the touch pad, did they? No. At one point one guy looked around, but he literally took his other hand off and like brought it over the top of the controller. It was very much a different input. Yeah. I can imagine for certain games for a puzzle. All right. We're reaching. Hopefully we'll find out by E3. I haven't answered your question. I don't know what they could do between now and E3 because I think they need to show me a console. I think they need to show me how they're going to put games on the console, which is mysterious. Dude, clouds. They use cartridges, they said. Oh yeah. Single serving. CDs. Five CDs. I just feel like... Floppy. I feel like... Magnetic Media guys, it's awesome. I feel like they have... I don't know. I think this was meant to whet your appetite and kind of show, hey, 2005 was the year when we kind of messed up core gaming a little bit. We didn't quite nail it. Yeah. We got it this time. And we'll talk to you about the interesting stuff later. I kind of get that impression. I think maybe they should have given us a little bit more of a tease. My sense of this whole event, I don't know if David mentioned this to you. When we got there, it was very hurriedly put together. It was obvious. I mean, they put out the invites for only a couple of weeks ago. I don't think they've ever done an event at this venue before. I don't know if anybody's ever done an event at this venue before. Very convenient though, guys. You should really think about it. Just write down the street from the studio. Please share more. Please. But people are just standing outside in the cold for like an hour and a half. They hired New York bouncers to be there. They're like, excuse me. You can't come in yet. I mean, they're doing some stuff. We're the press. You guys understand that this is... We don't... You guys go to tech events and they're all very well run and they do it all the time. This is like really nicely done and nicely held for games. This is like pretty good. I mean, it was like seriously Lord of the Flies. I will bring you... That is a step up. Guys, you're talking about high end. At one point, Dave was holding up a coffee and a CNBC cameraman walked by, smacked the coffee out of his hand with his tripod and said, oh, is that mine? And Mike walked inside. And then he said, who has the conch shell now? Obviously you, piggy. He had a pig slice his throat, spill his blood. It was extremely confusing. No, that wasn't yours. It was never in your possession. I don't know. We've got a trailer and then I think Chris Plant wants to come back. Angry that you took his seed. I'm sorry, Chris. He was still... Do we have a beef? Yeah. Is there a beef going on? There is a beef. All right, so let's take a look at Deep Down and then we'll be right back. I'm going to get my useless magic and heavy porky loins in the old market for one tenth of the hassle of your empty venture. Why were you following him anyway? Let's find this bloody third gate. I'm going to get my useless magic and heavy porky loins in the old market for one tenth of the hassle of your empty venture. I'm going to get my useless magic and heavy porky loins in the old market for one tenth of the hassle of your empty venture. I'm going to get my useless magic and heavy porky loins in the old market for one tenth of the hassle of your empty venture. I'm going to get my useless magic and heavy porky loins in the old market for one tenth of the hassle of your empty venture. I'm going to get my useless magic and heavy porky loins in the old market for one tenth of the hassle of your empty venture. Is it a big number? It's a big number with lots of GGDERs. But the other thing that I want to talk about with this is the recurring turn of phrase inside of the press release, which is it's SCEI's long-term vision to make the most of the PS4, which is plugged at the end of sentences about some pretty big things, like the Vita playing PS4 games over cross play. It's their long-term vision to get that to work for every Vita game. Getting the... Jerry, you didn't get a PS4 game. To get the PS4 games to run on cross play on Vita. It's the long-term vision to get demos to run instantaneously. It's the long-term vision to make it so you don't have to wait when you download. There's a lot of very careful wording about how much of this will actually work when the system launches, but then the best part is there's that, and then there are footnotes. So it's like, it's our long-term vision to get the PS4 games to run on your Vita. Also, they probably won't work outside. Depending on network environment or titles, users may not be able to play games outside comfortably. Between the temperature of 40 and 60 degrees Celsius, you may not get a good experience. They also cushion it with, for games that can cross play from PS4 to Vita, we hope to get all those games to work. Footnote, except games that require peripherals such as PlayStation 4i. So if you've got peripherals involved, even though there is a video camera on the front... There's a camera. And if you're still playing in the living room, the eye's still watching you. It's always watching. It's just really interesting what... It seems like they're already kind of bracing for, don't hold us too strictly. The entire press conference was, caveat, we don't promise nothing. A lot of the streaming stuff was, again, I mean, I, you know, Neil's point, we don't know when they started it. Maybe they started development on their own and then bought Gikai to expedite it, but they bought that company in July. So it's like a lot of these things are like, oh, this is a cool idea we could do and our long-term vision is going to be to do this. I also liked, I know that I'm going to eat so much crap for this in the comments because it's going to stir a fan war, but how much they borrowed from Microsoft. The UI on the app is like, oh yeah, cool. I remember Metro too. I guess Microsoft wasn't using it, so you can take it. And then the connect looking bar, and this was in the press release too. There's this app that they're releasing. That's just the smart glass. They say what it actually does. They're like, yeah, it'll be able to help you download games, check on your social status, and maybe you can use a map during an adventure game. You'll have like a map that can guide you places. That's their long-term vision for the app. That's a long ways from that. But they also, and remember the last thing too, the biggest thing they stole from Microsoft, headphone jack and the controller. Headphone jack and the controller. Oh my gosh. What an interesting, interesting event this really was. We're being all jerks. Tracy Lynn is on the line. Maybe not be as much of a jerk as we are. Say some of our names. Tracy, are you there? Hello. Hi, how's it going? Hey. Good. How's America? It's all right. I'm actually sitting outside at the moment, so if I get shot- Well, you can't use your Vita. That's your fault. Okay. So for people who don't know, Tracy Lynn is our senior reporter, formerly in Australia, but as of last week in San Francisco, she moved here. Welcome to America. Thank you. Hasn't been shot yet, so I think we're on a good path. So Tracy, tell us about the event. What did you think? There was a lot that wasn't revealed. Like for example, I was expecting to hear something about the PlayStation Network, but they didn't say anything about it. Like prior to the event, there were rumors swirling that there would be a new kind of PlayStation Network for the PS4. There were rumors that there would be like a three-tiered system, like you could get different types of membership. And that all sounded really exciting, but none of it was mentioned at all. So that was a bit disappointing. Do you think that like, you know, obviously the networks that they did talk about, and Dave Perry sort of talked about Gaikai as being the backbone behind part of this new PlayStation Network. You know, to go back to those rumors that they might actually charge for some of these services, it would be interesting if they treated some of these streaming services as some kind of premium membership, you know, something that was not available to every PS4 owner. Like I'm not sure, like if you're buying into the console, you would expect that it would come with those services, I feel. Like when PS3 launched in Australia, it was almost a pain, but you sort of expect to have the whole package with it. And so with the PS4, I'm assuming it's going to be quite expensive. So you know, to expect people to have to buy into another level, like to have to pay extra for the streaming, I'm not sure if people would really be up for that. I think the logic is usually that it works for Microsoft. And Microsoft is able to not only sell a box that's competitively priced with the PS3, but also charge you $50 or $60 a year for Xbox Live. And people pay it willingly because it's a good service. You know, what's going to be curious to me is if this new PSN service is actually competitive with Xbox Live and provides a lot of the same functionality. And if they were to provide it for free, would Microsoft be able to charge for Xbox Live anymore? Or inversely, if they provide a service that's as good as Xbox Live, why don't they just charge for it since they know consumers will pay for it? Yeah, and the other thing with Xbox Live is it's had a long time to kind of build an audience. And it's got a really strong reputation. Whereas with, you know, if there is a new PlayStation network and they're charging money for it, it ultimately depends on how it's priced. Because if it's quite expensive, people might just say, well, you know, I already have an Xbox and Xbox Live works just fine. So why am I paying all this extra money for this PSN when I already have to fork out all this money for the console itself? Yeah, so this is interesting, Tracy. You're coming from Australia. And Australia has a certain relationship with internet because internet is relatively limited there. The way you get it and the access to it and the cost of it and the bandwidth that's available to you and the kind of speed and latency of it. So something like all this streaming video stuff, unless it was really local to Australia, wouldn't work, correct? Yeah, like we didn't have Netflix, for example. I experienced Netflix for the first time this week. And I was told that, you know, this is all streaming as we're watching it. And for me, that was like black magic. I was like, how is that possible? How is it not buffering or lagging? You know, like internet in Australia is pretty slow. And we have monthly caps. And if you go to your cap, then your speed, download speed pretty much goes down to like dial up internet. So this whole guy, Kai, you're online, Netflix, all that stuff. It definitely sounds like black magic to me. And it doesn't seem real. I can imagine also the data caps. Like if you're doing this like in Australia or any place that has data caps, like you're screwed like five days after playing five hours after playing it, you hit your cap for the month. Or one second after playing a 4k game. A 4k game that's never going to happen. So yeah, it just gets back to the point where even in America, you know, there are places, there's people who don't have broadband, there are people who do have broadband but don't have decent broadband. But then you look at other countries and Australia has only got whatever, 25 million people or so, but it's a whole country that doesn't have 22 million people. Sorry. Don't want to presume. That's the sign that she was double checking her statistics, so she would just get really mad at you. Which is about the size of the state of New York, I think. But you know, you don't have the internet down there to do it. So if this is a major part of the PS4 platform and PS4 strategy, you're already talking about carving off Australia and saying, well, not for you guys. It's a big part of the strategy for everyone else. Yeah, and the other thing is pricing because in Australia, consoles are so much more expensive than they are in the US. So I wouldn't be surprised if the PlayStation fought with something to the effect of $900 because that's how much the PlayStation three was when it released. It was nine hundred and ninety nine dollars at launch. And so if you're charging that much and then you want to charge for a service that may or may not work in Australia, that's a bit weird. Like I'm not really sure what to think of that. I have to ask you a question, Tracy. Were there any games that you liked? Was there any moment where you were like, games? I love it. Did that happen during the show for you? A lot of people did it at the show. There was a guy in front of me when the guy kid came on, he went, yeah. And then when Blizzard came on, he went, Lost Vikings! And then everybody was like, whoa. I mean, with the Lost Vikings, I was right there with him. That guy was me. Yeah, Tracy, go ahead. Sorry. We're having fun. No, not really. We should talk about third party games with Lex, it'll be coming up soon. Tracy, thank you so much. People at home, we are starving for degradation in call quality. It's our long term vision to fix that and we will do so soon. Not outside though, not outside. All right, we have a trailer to make everyone happy. It's the Watchdog trailer, which we've been super excited about. But we can't do that just yet, unfortunately. I've been told by the man upstairs. Do you want to talk about the good games? I'd like to talk about some of the good games. Talk about the games. You know, I try to be a little optimistic about this because when I was there, I was in the moment and I was feeling it with the share button, which I obviously liked. And you know, some of it does look certainly... Oh my God! It's not working! He tried. He tried. Okay, so I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it. Hold on, I'm going to do it. I thought it was interesting that The Witness was coming out as a PS4 timed exclusive. Some of the language that they used to introduce it was strange where they said, you know, we have the most open platform, which is why we get games like The Witness, which was strange because they of course did not get Jonathan Blow's previous game, Braid, which was for Xbox Live Arcade. But you know, the fact that they are getting The Witness as a timed exclusive, it seems interesting to me because that game hasn't... He's been very coy about what it would be released on and for a long time it seemed like it was almost being built directly for tablets. This is going to be a tablet game. You're doing almost everything you can. You move by pointing at an area just like tablet first person games do. Oh, I found a touchpad. You used your touchpad, baby. I found a useful... I'm a genius. You know, it's interesting to see somebody like him on stage even when he came on and said... Kind of made a dig at all the explosions and was like, sorry, I don't have explosions for you. All right. Now the man upstairs. We have these earpieces. These earpieces just say wonderful things all the time. They're also telling us to protect the president. Protect the president. We're ready. Hold on. We're not ready. Wait. Now we're ready again. Can I say one thing about it really quick? Yes, do it. I was in the Ubisoft studio in Montreal for this story about Alice, which you should look up on Polygon. It's a great story about the studio that's kind of trying to change how they do storytelling. But we got to be in the room where they record sound. And on screen, what we couldn't show was that subway stopping on the High Line. And they had... I guess they didn't end up using it, but they had like 15 employees doing yells that happened from inside of the car when this passing. Ah! But it was great because a lot of them were just like a group of white people hanging out in Montreal, but they're trying to do Chicago accent. So they're like, oh darn it, my cell phone's broke. I've got to tweet it. And I was like... But like 15 of these all at once. And when I was watching that, I was like, I know why they cut that sound. It works so much better without the Montreal person trying to do Chicago accent about how cool Twitter is. Oh, wee wee, you're so wrong. Okay, with that, let's watch the Watch Dogs trailer together. People haven't changed, but now everybody's broadcasting. And once you've seen it, all of it, how do you look away? Yeah, no kidding. Okay. I want to talk to you. I'll call the police. I swear I will. I'm not going to let you get away with it. Don't touch me. I'm warning you. You don't get to ignore me. Let me go! You think you're so special, huh? Fuck off! Leave me alone! 911, please state your emergency. Please, you have to get the cops out here. Just man to pull that gun and start shooting. Police! Police! T2S can't authorize initial advances for arrest right now. Get away from me! Squash, suspect back in view. We are on him. Over. Police! Hands on your head! Oh no, he did not. No. Alright, we are back. We have Alexa Ray Korea with us. Reporter at Polygon. And you were at the event. I was. I was there. You also have a well-known affection for the Final Fantasy series. I do. I do have a well-documented... You were probably really excited about the Final Fantasy game that they showed off. I wish I knew what it was. I'd probably be more excited if we knew. It was definitely a... It was definitely a... It was definitely... It used an engine that they're making. There was an engine. Maybe Androgyn's protagonist leveling up. Yeah, I don't know. Using potions. So tell us about what Square Enix was there to show. Well, what they showed was the Agnes Philosophy demo, which they showed last year at E3, just running on a PlayStation 4. And honestly, it looked the same to me. On a PlayStation 3 last year. Yeah, it was on PlayStation 3 last year, and now it's on PlayStation 4. There wasn't anything new. There weren't any new scenes. And it was just sort of something that we've been looking at already for about half a year. So I'm not really sure... And this is the luminous engine, they call it. So they did come out on stage afterwards and say, Hey, come check us out at E3. I think you'll like it. They're the only ones that actually said E3. I mean, we all knew they were coming back to E3. But they're the only ones that acknowledged it. I think it's interesting also, that there's a Japanese company here. And Sony, notwithstanding. And then Capcom. But still, other than that, where was Tecmo Koe? Where was Namco Bandai? There wasn't really a big presence outside of the Western developers. And usually we see a lot of RPGs and stuff like that. And I'm really sort of surprised. And to get to that point, Keckron's also a very Western-focused company. They can be. They can equivocate. I feel like at that kind of Western focus, we had Mark Cerny out on stage talking about hardware. Not Ken Kudoragi. We had Andrew House on stage hosting the event. Not Kaz Harai. It did seem very Western-focused. Some of the big games they showed off were infamous. From Sucker Punch in Seattle. It was Killzone from Guerrilla in the Netherlands. And so, it definitely seemed to have that focus. But they did have some Japanese games. The non-Final Fantasy announcement, as you pointed out. But also, Capcom had Deep Down. Which wasn't just a game from Capcom, who are Japanese. They had a lot of other games. But it wasn't just a game from Capcom, who are Japanese developers slash publisher. But it also seemed very much like Dark Souls. Which is another Japanese game. It's really interesting. I was going to say it looks a lot like Dark Souls. And sort of like Skyrim-y. I feel like a lot of people are sort of jumping on that train. Like people said it's the year of the bow. It might as well be the decade of the dragon fighting. And what not. So, it'll be really interesting to see where they take that. Like what direction they go in. As opposed to where everyone else has already gone. I don't know. You know, it's a... I look at Capcom. And they also did Dragon's Dogma last year. Which also seemed, in a way, to be very much like Dark Souls. So, they have a sequel to that coming out. It's an expansion. But it seems like they've got this other sort of project. Which is sort of, you know, similar. And then there's Dragon's Dogma. And Deep Down. They both have this double D alliteration. I don't... I want to stop real quick. Because I know someone else wants to talk about this. Phil Koehler is online. Hey, hey guys. There he is. I'm here. So, Phil. Did you hear about the PlayStation 4? No, what's this? Sorry, you should have been caught up before you got on with this. I thought we were just calling to talk. I apologize. So, how was your day? It was great. Great. How are you guys? Couldn't complain. I want to talk about this Capcom game. Because I like the line that you were going down there, Chris Grant. I think that this probably is something related to Dragon's Dogma. You think it is. You think it's... Dark Awakening is the expansion. Dark Arisen. Sorry. I'm not professional. So, Deep Down might be the actual real next gen sequel. Yeah, I think the 2D thing is too much of a coincidence. I know Capcom specifically called it out as a new IP. But that coincidence seems too big. And also, it looks exactly like Dragon's Dogma. Like what Dragon's Dogma was. Right, right. In a lot of ways, Dragon's Dogma was very much like Dark Souls. It had that same kind of aesthetic, if you will. This obviously looks a lot nicer. So, what did you think in general about the software that we saw at the event? I thought there was some okay, cool looking stuff. I think I would have loved to have seen more new games. More stuff that we weren't expecting. Obviously, Watch Dogs looks awesome. But if Ubisoft had something new and original to announce there, that would have been more exciting. I thought it was interesting that so many of these games that we remembered from before. Maybe that's part of the reason that Capcom didn't want to tie Deep Down to Dragon's Dogma. Because it sounds a lot nicer as a new IP coming out on a new console generation. But I was expecting more games and more new games. Maybe that's just not the right event to do it at. I also worry that because games are getting so much more expensive to make, that a lot of these companies used the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generations as a chance to launch new IPs. Maybe this generation won't get that same benefit because it's too expensive to launch a new IP. So, they're just going to keep reusing them. Sure, yeah. That could definitely be an issue. Obviously, we saw even something like Diablo 3 coming to consoles is really exciting. But the way it was presented here was maybe not the ideal way to present it. Because it's just kind of like, okay, a game that we already played, or a lot of people already played a year ago, and it's also coming to PS3. Right. Destiny, I think, and Watch Dogs were very similar where they said, oh, it's coming to PS4. And it's like, yeah, no duh. I think they expected a certain level of surprise. You know, like, ta-da, PS4 for Watch Dogs. And it's like, yeah, obviously. I'm still disappointed that Last of Us is not going to be on PS4. One of the things I was expecting was Star Wars 1313. Everyone knows that that is a next-gen game. They could have brought that out and shown it. Maybe it's the Microsoft exclusive. They did do Connect Star Wars. There is a dance section on every new Star Wars game. It's in the contract. Yeah, we're going to have Han Solo dancing in Star Wars 1313. I think not seeing that here is probably a good sign that we'll see it at a Microsoft event. Whether that Microsoft event is in E3 or E4. And obviously it's worth keeping in mind, like, for third-party stuff, they announced a lot of publishers and developers who are working on third-party stuff on PS4 that has not been shown yet. They had that huge, huge list with all sorts of people from like, Atlus to EA to Platinum Games. Like, everybody was on there. So, you know, there's obviously lots more coming that is going to be shown. I'm sure to some degree Sony wants to spread out some of the reveals and the announcements to keep the buzz building to whenever the actual launch is. And some big publishers are notably absent. EA, not here at all. There was a rumor that Battlefield 4 would show up, but EA wasn't even present. I guess Activision was there with Destiny. But Phil, Alexa, I think that's going to do it for us. We have a surprise. What's the surprise? I can't tell you yet, but it's coming. The surprise is happening. But first I have to thank Phil, and Phil has to go. Phil, I love you, but you gotta go away. Good. He's gone. He's gone. They just hung up on us. What do you expect? Like a sound effect? Like a drop the beast? No, no, that doesn't happen. But we have someone to take his place. Justin McElroy. Whoa. What up? Finally. Justin, have they kept you locked in there this whole time? I like your outfit. Yeah. That's awesome. Guys, this is not a frozen stream. He's just really good at staying still. Do not be alarmed. Perfect. I wish there was somebody downstairs like, what was the mode on Clyde to get it timed on the perfect thing? Surprise, guys. That was... The powers that be are going to try to bring him back from the stasis. Surprise is kind of over now. Justin's the person I would want to talk to about deep down. Hey, Justin. Yeah, you mean Dragon's Dogma 2. The Deuce. Back to the depths. Back in the well. I have been... Can I curse? What's that? What's the story there? Yes. I've been so fucking irritated. Doesn't anybody like video games? Doesn't anybody like video games ever? Sorry it doesn't print shit, Verge bros. Jesus Christ. Are you mad? I like video games. There's a new video game console. Why is no one excited about it? Oh, it's killing me. It's a new console. You can shoot things and you can drive in a club. Bye. What? Who cares what it looks like? Spoiler alert. It fits on a shelf and it's probably black. It plays video games. We haven't had a new video game console... Sorry, were you? In like eight years. Why is no one excited about it? It's killing me. Guys, I want you to know I'm going to translate Justin's enthusiasm. What's going on? What's happening? I don't know. I know Justin really well. Justin's favorite game last year, he was the one person in the world, his favorite game was Dragon's Dogma. Nobody else... Most people didn't even play it. Dragon's Dogma was a good game. It's a good game. I agree with you. So I'm saying I think Justin felt like they made a video game press conference for him. They made Dragon's Dogma 2 and put it on stage. I'm not disappointed they didn't call it out. If you want to talk about real failings, they didn't call it Dragon's Dogma. Yes, that was a failing of the press conference. I agree with you there. But like, kidding aside, half kidding aside, we will find out... I've heard people on the show say, I'm not convinced I'm going to buy one yet. Who gives a shit? You can't do that for nine months anyway. Who cares what it looks like or what it costs? None of that is germane to your buying decision because you can't make one yet. They're talking about, in broad strokes, these are the things we're talking about. We're talking about creativity and we're talking about sharing and social and stuff. Yeah, they're talking in broad strokes about it and they're not going to get down to the nitty gritty yet. First off, they want at least something for E3. They want to get some of those headlines too. They don't want Uncle Bill Gates to have all the fun up in Redmond. But I thought, as far as broad strokes, it's really exciting. They're sticking with some of their franchises. Let's just be excited in this economy they're making a PlayStation for. Giving jobs to those people not in the nerds. Somebody thought closed. Justin, I think we should all take a little bit of your enthusiasm away from the event today. I'm 32. Why do I have to be enthusiastic about anything? This is supposed to be the young people that are rising up. You can be mad. I'm surrounded by people who... You guys are in your 20s, right? Yeah. Yeah, so they've hit 20. Wow. But I'm with you. I don't know. You've been down on this event too the whole time, Chris. I want to be surprised. Yeah, but you have also been. I don't understand why... I'm just not taking all the blame here. Although it was a pretty bad event. Justin, I just want to be surprised. That's all. I just don't understand why seeing a picture of a box is what's going to make your buying decision. What does it matter? The box doesn't matter, but why make an event if you have just this little to show? Why wait until you have something else to show? You've got to get out there first. I don't think they had little to show. I saw at least 10 games that were announced for it nine months before the thing is going to be available. So I think that's pretty good. I think that you want to... People are dying. I don't know if you can think of an industry that needs a shot in the arm like this more than video gaming. I would love to know it because this industry has been in stagnation for two years. I welcome a breath of fresh air. I welcome some new information. Is it as detailed as I'm going to want to have before I make a buying decision? Well, no, but I don't have to do that for nine months. I'm just happy that someone is putting some investment into this industry and not closing studios. And I frankly am so frustrated that people who love video games, supposedly love video games, aren't thrilled by that. We finally have good news and we're all like, I'm not for me. What's the box look like, dude? Come on. PlayStation 4, $200. Catch it. November 20th, Hyper 60, maybe. My sources are unclear. I like how he thinks that if we saw a box or a price figure, we actually would be any happier. That would have changed any perception of this. If they showed me Oculus Rift on it, that would get me. Yeah, but it's pretty hard to hear Neelight come on and say, well, they're games. Yeah, it's a box that plays games. I don't know what... What do you want? It's got to be... I mean, I think there's a lot of boxes that my PlayStation 3 plays games. I think that you... You want it to stream a massive movie library? Do you have the art to make it stream massive libraries? So Chris Coler at Wired wrote a great article called The Minecraft Test, and his whole point was that if Minecraft couldn't have been developed on your platform, you can't win. And the whole point was that... Yeah, it's an interesting point. Minecraft couldn't have been made on Xbox or PS3. It could only have been made on an open platform or even a semi-open platform like iOS. And so that's what I'm... What I'm disappointed by is that we're leaving this event, and I don't feel like they have acknowledged the fact that game development and that consumer expectations of the way games work, I don't feel like that's changed. For me, the most exciting launch game on Xbox 360 was Geometry Wars. It's true. No, no, I'm with you 100% on this one. It was a $5 downloadable game, and it was the best game on that platform launch. You don't think the promise of being able to push the button and sample games instantly is in some way, like, nodding in that general direction? I mentioned before that I think it's table stakes. I think they're like... They've got some of that in there, but I want to hear... I want to see how it passes the Minecraft test. Can I release a half-finished game and let users decide whether they want to purchase it or not and let the kind of marketplace determine whether that game's a success? That game right now is the most popular game for a whole entire demographic, and it is made by one guy. It's also the most popular on 360 where it's on a closed platform. But after it was already built, after it was already given the investment on an open platform and allowed to get to a certain point. Could not have been... Could not have been started there. But, like, PC is always going to be the vanguard of that. Or iOS. Why is iOS the vanguard of that now? Why is iOS working on it? Well, I mean, like, those games all look like Farmville. I want to play real video games. Maybe that's just me. I don't know. This is upsetting me because he came on so happy and enthusiastic and all you have done is bring this man down to a cynical level. You made him sad. Ain't nothing gonna break my stride. This is a man who taught me 50 Cent was one of the best games of all time. It's true. Blood on the Sand is such a great game. He does love Blood on the Sand. Justin, thanks for... Thanks for joining us. On that lovely, lovely, wonderful... No, just keep going. Fo sho on that lovely note. Let's wrap this up. Just like this. Justin McElroy, manager at Polygon, thank you. Alexa Ray Korea, reporter for Polygon, thank you. It's this! He's still there. We haven't cut him off yet. It's this! We're just gonna leave. Let's thank everyone else who has come on. David Pierce. We got Neil A. Patel, both from The Verge, Verge.com. It's a website we love ourselves. We love you guys more. Polygon.com. We got Chris Plant. We've got Phil Kohler. We've got Tracy Lean. What else were we forgetting here? Probably quite a few people. Probably a lot of people. I'm sorry. What did you think? Brian Crescenti, who couldn't make it. Rush Frushtick, who was working the sound booth. Griffin McElroy. Oh, Griffin McElroy. He was there. He wasn't as happy, good, lucky, angry at us as Justin, his brother. He was doing good. We're talking about punching people. Chris Plant, dancing over there. I'd give yours a four and him an A. I'm sorry. That is it. I'm going to thank Ross Miller, my co-host. Everyone, I want to thank you for watching. Let us know what you think in the comments. We'll keep covering PlayStation 4. Comments, grumbles, gripes, moans, complaints. Just jump on. Just do it. That's it, everyone. Go to bed. I love games! I love games!