E3 2014 - Sony's Victory over Microsoft

In my 2013 E3 recap I chose the PS4 as my favourite of the next gen consoles - and a year later nothing has changed.

Look, I get that E3 conferences are more about marketing and hype building than an actual conference, but come on Microsoft tell me something to get excited about your console! Phil Spencer basically came on stage and said 'we don't have any thing to tell ya... so instead here's a bunch of games that you'll be able to buy... eventually'. And most of those games were sequels and/or new trailers for games that have already been announced. 

Phil Spencer announcing that Microsoft has nothing to say about Xbox

I like hearing about games, and getting on-board with hype and all that. But I would have really liked to see some news about the direction the hardware is going. How they are going to bridge the gap between the Xbox and PS4? Anything on cloud computing and bumping up the power of the machine remotely? Backwards compatibility? An update on DirectX 12 and the impact the new API will have on the Xbox? Nope... They didn't even mention that the Xbox now comes with a Kinect free bundle, or that developers now have access to the 10% of GPU power that the Xbox One previously reserved just for the Kinect. A statement of how that pushes the Xbox's performance closer to the PS4, or how this will benefit games going forward would be nice. And on that note, how about an indication of how Microsoft plans to keep Kinect relevant? Anything to tell me that they are actually trying to compete against Sony.

And how about Microsoft's other properties? Development tools for Surface and Windows Phone 8? Remote play or integration with Surface tablets or Windows 8 PCs? Not even a mention. I get that this was specifically an Xbox conference, but at this stage remote play or a PlayStation Now equivalent for playing Xbox games on Windows 8 PCs and laptops or Surface tablets seems like a no-brainer - giving a potential boost to those struggling platforms, and more options to gamers potentially resulting in more software sales. An all-round win for Microsoft.

The launch of the Xbox One has been very very shaky with its reversals of constant online DRM, restriction on pre-owned games, mandatory Kinect, and being underpowered compared to PS4. I really thought Microsoft would have a hard hitting conference with new features for the machine and new IP's. But instead it felt very lack luster.

Back when developers didn't mind you sharing your games

The Sony conference on the other hand had a little more going for it. Sony came out hard hitting with jabs at Microsoft about the power of the PS4 and the PS4 camera being an optional extra. But Sony also announced some really interesting features. Full Youtube and Twitch integration for updating and live streaming is awesome, providing they don't do a Nintendo with it. The PS4 exclusive feature of Far Cry 4 that will allow your friends to play the game with you co-op for free without owning the game themselves is very interesting. It reminds me very much of the old Blizzard games allowing multiplayer only 'spawn' versions of the games to be installed on multiple computers from one disk, or the Age of Empires games which allowed multiple PC's (I think up to 5) to participate in multiplayer games as long as one person had a CD In the drive. Hopefully this is a direction that more developers will go. 

And PlayStation TV.... Pure awesome to see this being released out side of Japan. At US$99 the specs are awesome for the price. But with remote play, PlayStation Now, PSN, and compatibility with vita carts this machine will absolutely come into it's own as a companion console to the PS4. I could see me picking up a couple of these in future to put in the bedroom or the kids room as a cheap alternative to buying several PS4's to meet my families growing gaming needs (and my desire to play GTA in bed). It'll be a great, cheap, family console that I could see a lot of people buying for their kids if marketed right. - Children watching TV, but you wanna use the PS4? Use PlayStation TV to stream your game to another TV anywhere in your house! 6 year old wants to play games, but you don't want to lay down $600 on a second console? PlayStation TV! - That's if it ever comes comes out in New Zealand that is... 

But the biggest announcement was easily the upcoming beta of PlayStation Now, which will not only allow some backwards compatibility with PS3 titles but will also allow PS3 and PS4 games on other Sony devices like TV's and PlayStation TV without a PS4 console. But they still didn't give any real details at all on how it will work, bandwidth requirements, etc.... And given that New Zealand only got a handful of the available PS Classics titles during the PS3 era (which did not include my favourite PS1 game - Blood Omen) I'm still skeptical that NZ will get a full version of the service. My concerns about PlayStation Now that I had last year still stand - buy hey, at least we learned more about Sony's plans for cloud computing than we did from Microsoft.

I came away from the two press conferences feeling like Microsoft has only been playing catch up from it's initial launch problems, while Sony has actually been in development making the PS4 and it's devices better. Microsoft really needs to up it's game. My thoughts towards Nintendo? No change...

But it's really about the games right? There are still plenty of games on show that I'm looking forward too. Project Spark, Bloodborne, The Order 1886, Dead Island 2, The Witcher 3. And I'm really happy that both Sony and Microsoft are taking indie developers seriously. NoMan's Sky looks freaking amazing, but then it will no doubt see a PC release. In fact many of indie games shown are already available, or will be available, on other platforms. I've been playing BroForce for about 6 weeks. Plague Inc. has been on my tablet for about a year and Plague Inc. Evolved is already on Steam Early Access. Same as last year there were no exclusive games shown that get me excited enough to buy either console right now. I'm just not interested in Halo, Fable, and uncharted. Most games that caught my attention will likely have a PC release, and there aren't enough exclusives that I want to warrant putting the money down on an Xbox or PlayStation. Or at least with the current information provided - if Bloodborn or The Order 1886 turn out to be a must have titles then that and the PlayStation TV may be enough to push me into getting a PS4. The PS4 did have the most exclusives that took my interest by far.

But my favourite part of the show? The Doom 4 (or should that be just DOOM) teaser trailer. Yea it was CG, and it don't show any gameplay, and game had already been announced. But Doom is one of my favourite franchises. I play though Doom and Doom 2 maybe once a year. I finished my first play through of Doom with the Brutal Doom mod a few months ago (which is freaking awesome by the way), and I'm half way though Doom 2. And I really liked Doom 3. I'm one of a handful of people who felt that the flashlight was a great gameplay mechanic, and loved gloomy dark the atmosphere and metal soundtrack. In fact Doom 3 was the first game for which I upgraded my own computer to play, and got me into building my own rigs. 

Here's looking forward to QuakeCon, Doom beta key in hand!

E3 2013 - A PC Gamers Perspective

So, with the Microsoft and Sony E3 keynotes over am I, as a primarily PC gamer, any closer to picking up either of these consoles at launch? No. Not really. I can see the value of these machines, kind of, and I'm certainly not a member of the PC MASTER RACE. Well not a hugely active member anyway - I own a PS3, Wii, PS2, original Xbox, DS, and PSP, with dozens of games for each system. 

But I just wasn't blown away by what was on show by Microsoft or Sony this E3.

Microsoft and Sony press conferences E3 2013.

NON GAMING CONTENT

At the moment for the next gen consoles I'm not really seeing anything on the non-gaming front that my PC doesn't already do much much better. See, my desktop is already hooked up to my 40inch Samsung flat panel, and is equipped with a TV capture card and Windows 7 media centre. It works well - record two channels at once while watching a DVD or playing games. Our watch TV while playing games with picture in picture. So for me the DVR functions of the Xbox One are straight out redundant.

Well, that is to say that they would be if I actually had the opportunity to use them - the live TV specific content is not available outside the US at launch. At all. So, for me anyway, those functions of the Xbox may as well not even exist. NFL content, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video, etc are also not available in New Zealand. And things like youtube, Twitch TV, Facebook, Skype, email and web browsing are available on pretty much everything. To be honest I'd be very surprised if either console gives me a better web browsing experience than my PC. 

Will the consoles let me play my DVD collection that I've ripped to .mkv format without needing my PC to act as a server? Can I access my iTunes content? Can I install Firefox and my favourite extensions? Probably not. 

The non-gaming features just don't offer anything to pull me away from my media PC. There is nothing here to make me sit up and take notice.

THE PRICE

The prices of the two consoles aren't exactly grabbing me. 

The Xbox is releasing in New Zealand for a massive $749 ($748 if you buy it on the ebgames online store... yay savings!). The PS4 will be a slightly nicer $649 - but then the PS4 isn't shipping with the PlayStation eye as a pack in which will bump the price up to around $749 anyway. But to be clear that price isn't actually too much different to what people are paying in the States. Unlike the US, retail prices in NZ are quoted as sales tax inclusive. In New Zealand we pay a goods and services tax of 15% on all transactions, which means of that $749 price tag $112.35 is taxes - which we can't pin on Microsoft or Sony. Without taxes we're looking at NZ$636.65. With the current exchange rate NZ$636.65 = US$505.37. That's pretty good considering the Xbox One costs $499 in the States.

ebgames.co.nz

The thing is $749 is simply a hell of a lot of money for something that (for me anyway) only plays games. At $749 we’re getting into budget PC territory. Looking around my favourite online retailers right now for about $900 I could build a mid range gaming PC with equal, or in the case of the CPU much better, specs as the Xbox One. Given the nature of PC components that price is likely to fall in the 5-6 months before the consoles release. 

And that computer will be able to do all the extra computing stuff that the consoles can't; home office, audio and video editing, coding my own games, editing this blog, etc etc. It will also give me choice in my entertainment providers - which web browser I want to use, who I want to buy content from, what codec’s and players I want to use, and the formats I want to use - including playing my freaking .mkv files without needing another machine to convert them on the fly! It will also give me choice in which controller I want to use, mouse and keyboard or Xbox/Playstation controller - which for me is a huge advantage (I hate playing FPS with analogue sticks!).

Dosbox - The words greatest emulator

This mid range PC will almost certainly be able to play all the cross platform releases that will come out for PC for the next 2-3 years. Maybe not at the highest graphics quality available to the high end PCs, but they will run at the same level as the console. But thanks to DOSbox and virtualisation, this machine will also have access to the massive back catalogue of PC games that stretches back nearly 30 years. The Xbox One and PS4 won't even be backwards compatible with their own predecessors. It will also have pure awesome levels of cross platform compatibility through emulation. Want to play Sega Master System, SNES, PSone, ZX Spectrum games? No problem - this one machine will do it all.

Something else I need to consider is the price of actual games. New console titles release to retail in New Zealand at around $120. The same titles for PC release at around $80-$100. And then after that PC titles will begin declining in price. A year after release PC games cost around $30-$60, or less. Console titles have a tenancy to remain at a high price until the discount version comes out (classics collection, etc). If a classics version comes out at all that is.... Popular Nintendo titles seem to never drop in price.  But that is retail, if we head to Steam the discounts on PC games are huge. Entire franchises for as little as $10. New titles come out on Steam at about $70 as opposed to full retail on PSN. And New titles will quickly go on sale a few weeks after launch, with sometimes up to 50% off. Then consider the on going costs of console gaming; years of Xbox Live gold and (now with the PS4) PlayStation plus subscriptions.

$79.90 for Watchdogs on PC (mightyape.co.nz)                 $119.00 for Watchdogs on PS4 (mightyape.co.nz)

Console gaming just seems to keep getting more expensive, while the cost of PC gaming continues to decrease. At this price point there just isn't much justification for me to purchase a console. Not when a mid range PC will play many of the same games while also having access to all the PC exclusives, will have the ability to do far more stuff than the consoles, and ultimately (in NZ anyway) could work out to be a far cheaper option in the long run.

Rome 2: Total War - not on consoles.

DRM

PC has had DRM restrictions for years. Worse than those suggested by Microsoft for the Xbox One. It completely sucks. The current DRM systems employed by the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U are a huge advantage that the consoles have over the PC. For me consoles are a secondary gaming device, and as a secondary device I want them to be as hassle free as possible. Not being able to trade games to friends? Restricting pre-owned games to 'participating' retailers? Mandatory 24 hourly check ins? No thanks. I already get enough DRM headaches from my desktop. So with that the PS4 has an obvious advantage. Well, at this stage it has an advantage anyway - Sony isn't putting restrictions on what DRM systems 3rd party published are allowed to use, so we could still see Xbox style DRM appear on the PS4. 

I think I'm going to wait to see how this one pays out before passing judgement.

But at least New Zealand is on Microsoft's 'ok to play' list. NZ must be considered one of the cool kids. But what the hell is up with Microsoft's region locking anyway?

THE CLOUD

Both consoles are going to be using the magic of the great and mystical cloud to supplement the systems. The PS4 is using the recently Sony acquired Gaikai network to provide some (limited) PS3 backwards compatibility. The Xbox One is using a remote server to augment the processing capability of the console, 'remotely upgrading' the system. To be honest I'm not sure how well these streaming systems are going to work.

I have 2 concerns;

1) It seems like this will require quite a bit of broadband data to transfer information to and from the console and the server. This could prove problematic in New Zealand where 40GB data caps are common. 

OnLive - will similar success grace the
Xbox and PS4 streaming services?

2) It seems that bandwidth it's a critical part of the equation. Thanks to government policies which saw telecommunications monopolized by one company for about 20 years, New Zealand's broadband sucks. I'm on asynchronous ADSL - downloads max out at about 8mbps and uploads are capped at 1mbps. Is that enough to use a streaming service like what's being advertised by Microsoft and Sony? It's not enough to watch 1080p video on YouTube.... And how much controller lag am I going to get when my button presses are being sent to a remote server on a 1mbps connection? What about PlayStation eye games or the Kinect - am I anywhere near able to stream games that need these controls? 

It seems more than likely that similar to OnLive (a streaming service which didn't exactly do very well on PC) these services will be more of a bare bones kind of affair to maximise the number of people who can access it.

That is if they come to New Zealand at all. I don't see Microsoft rushing to build local servers here. And Sony's track record for this sort of thing isn't exactly great. They couldn't be bothered to get most of the PlayStation classic titles re-classified so they could be released here over the PSN, and so our library of these titles is woefully small. I will be surprised if they release many streaming PS3 titles in this part of the world.

Blood Omen - one of the many PSone Classic titles that Sony never released to the New Zealand PSN.

But then they really haven't told us much of anything about these services. What exactly will be available? How will they be charging for the service? Will there be Xbox games that actually need this 'remote upgrading' in order to function? I think this is something else that I will reserve judgment on until release.

THE TECH

Parallel computing man! The PC has had CPUs with 4, 6, and 8 cores for ages, but most games are single or dual threaded and don't make full use of the processing power available. The Jaguar APU inside the Xbox One and PS4 are low powered, but with the consoles moving onto an x86-64 multithreaded platform we may finally see titles optimised for multithreaded CPUs arrive for PC. And optimised for AMD systems none the less. Those ultra cheap Piledriver chips which have poor single thread performance but kick ass multithreaded performance may start coming into their own, and providing some much needed competition to the Intel Core series. Ultimately we're looking at cheaper PC gaming and better PC ports.

The AMD FX series... just waiting to become relevant.

 

The Xbox kinect? Not interested. Gesture and speech controls don't do anything for me at all. To be honest I would rather not have my console watching and listening for me to say 'Xbox on'. Plus, while Microsoft has said that the kinect won't spy on you, Microsoft (and game publishers in general) haven't exactly been completely up front about these things in the past. I'd rather just not have to worry about it.

THE GAMES

Games, games games. At the end of the day that's what it’s all about. And E3 had plenty of games that look really cool. The Order: 1886 (PS4 exclusive), Project Spark (Xbox and PC), Infamous: Second Son (PS4 exclusive), South Park: TheStick of Truth (cross platform), Xcom: The Bureau (cross platform), Wolfenstein: The New Order (cross platform), Murdered: Soul Suspect (cross platform), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (cross platform), Thief 4 (cross platform) and Watch Dogs (cross platform) look great.

Most of the games that caught my attention are going to be released on PC, so the game line up isn't really pulling me towards either console at this stage.

The Witcher 3 - I really want to play this.

The heavy hitting exclusive franchises for both systems don't really do anything for me. I've never really enjoyed JRPGs and Final Fantasy just didn't interest me. Halo... Ok, I played Halo: Combat Evolved when it came out on PC back in 2003. I just didn't understand the hype. Dumb AI and repetitive boring level design (The Library - half a dozen floors of droning monotonous similarity). As a result I never bothered with the sequels. Yea, that's probably my fault for not giving the series a fair go. But it still isn't a console seller for me.

The PC has a massive indie game scene, which I like a lot. Half the games I play are indie titles. So both consoles taking indie a little more seriously is great. But then Microsoft's big reveal for indie was Minecraft... one of the most successful PC titles of recent years, and hardly what I would call a standard indie title. I would really have liked more information on what tools will be made available to indie's, pricing, gameplay or subject restrictions etc... But still, encouraging indie devs to the consoles can only be a good thing.

I'm still disappointed by the lack of some genres that I really like at E3. Turn based and real time strategy titles are a no show. And space combat simulators. Honestly why do we still not have an HD remake or sequel to Tie Fighter! I get that the audience has change a little bit, but genre variety is something that is quickly being drained from the industry.

Star Wars Tie Fighter: I really want to play this too!

Oh yea, the Oculus Rift is still cool!

So, that's E3 2013. Lots of good games, but no compelling arguments to buy either console. But if I was going to buy a console at launch? PS4. Without hesitation. It's cheaper (if you don't need the PlayStation eye), slightly more powerful, and without the crazier of the DRM strategies that Microsoft is implementing. Maybe if you are a diehard Halo fan you would go Microsoft? Otherwise I just can't see why you would buy an Xbox One.

I've been very happy with my PS3, and more than likely I will pick up a PS4 at some stage. But for me I'll still be waiting until the price drops and cheaper pre-owned games start appearing in stores.

Its a joke, calm down fan boys