So it’s finally going to be here – On Wednesday night at 23.15 GMT Sony officially announced the Playstation 4 which will be available “holiday season 2013”.

In a live online broadcast viewed by over 16 million Sony Computer Entertainment president and group CEO Andrew House took to the stage at the Hammerstein Ballroom at Manhattan Center Studios in New York to reveal the name of Sony’s next-generation console.

The exec said Sony’s “most powerful platform ever” will allow “worlds to come alive with greater fidelity and intensity than ever before”.

House also noted that “ease of access regardless of location or device has been a priority” in the system’s development”.

“Our vision for the future is consumer centric and developer inspired,” he added, stressing that Sony is keen to enable developers to utilise “new business models that enable more flexibility including episodic and free-to-play”.

Lead PS4 system architect Mark Cerny was up on stage next. “We wanted to make sure nothing would come between the player, the platform and play,” he said. “Our main goal was to architect the system so as to support a breadth of experiences.”

Boasting 8GB of unified system memory, PS4 houses a “highly enhanced” PC GPU “containing a unified array of 18 compute units, which collectively generate 1.84 Teraflops of processing power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two”.

It is also “centred around a powerful custom chip that contains eight x86-64 cores and a state of the art graphics processor”.

Cerny then showed off the new Dual Shock 4 which will include many new features such as enhanced rumble, a touchpad, a headphone jack and a new Share button, which will allow players to record gameplay or screenshots and share them instantly. “Our goal is to make the sharing of video on PS4 as popular as the sharing of screenshots is today,” he said. PS4 will also support cross-game chat.

Then came the games. Games of note included Killzone: Shadow Fall was first; a First Person shooter which showed the main character in an epic shoot out in what seemed to be a shopping mall only to leap on to a wire being dragged along by a helicopter matrix style shooting out both adversaries on the ground and in the copter only to land on a building where the action cut and the share button was used.

This was followed Sucker Punch’s Infamous: Second Son. The demo showed a heavily-militarised city where citizens are closely monitored. However, people have started developing superpowers and revolting against big brother. There was no sign of series protagonist Cole.

Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono appeared on stage to demo Capcom’s new engine, Panta Rhei, which is being used to develop a new IP for the PS4 called Deep Down. There was raw response though when he said he was not there to talk about the next Street-Fighter game or the eagerly awaited Tekken vs Streetfigher – Missed opportunity I thought!

Unfortunately in the whole event the actual machine was not shown which lead to speculation that there would not be a physical machine at all as the majority of the software would be accessible via cloud gaming platform Gaikai. However since the launch this has been dismissed as the console’s actual specs have been announced.

This is really exciting news I think, if games players are truly honest games have been getting stale – although there have been original ideas and the PS3 has had a terrific run, it simply needs more power open to developers. You can always tell after a while because games tend to look the same across the genre.

Every life cycle of the Playstation has brought something new – for the PS1 it was games on CDs – its amazing to think now that a measly 700mb could power a game but it was the case back then and Ridge Racer was one such favourite. With PS2 it was games on DVDs. It is arguable now that the PS2 brought DVD media into the family home. Then we had the PS3 and with it not only did Blue Ray Dual layer Discs enter the home but HD TVs and gaming. They didn’t just arrive but was there to stay because now with the right TV you could watch HD Films and play the games without forking out on the expensive players. It doing so it beat the Microsoft brand in establishing itself as the High Definition disc brand of choice. Lets not also forget about 3D gaming that really the PS3 became a reason to don the specs outside of the frankly rubbish channels and over-expensive Blue-Ray players and 3D movies available.

I for one am really excited about what is yet to come. The price of the new console has been placed £400 (cheaper than the PS3 at launch but more expensive than the PS2 was). Even without a physical machine to view, it is already on pre-order from most stockists. Have a look at the trailers and view for yourself. I think the leap in technology is not as shocking as the transition from PS1 to PS2 but if you look closely the devil is in the detail. Not only that but as every gamer knows, it takes time for the best games to surface and it is still very early days yet.

Enjoy!

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