Even though Sony officially announced the PlayStation 4 last month, there are many details we still don't know about yet. With the 2013 Game Developers conference currently underway in San Francisco, the senior staff engineer of Sony Computer Entertainment America, Chris Norden, took the opportunity to explain many of the PS4's features to eager game developers.
With the PlayStation 4, Sony is eager to corral as many developers as it possibly can before the system's launch, scheduled for this coming holiday season. The company has emphasized the PS4's power and ease with which creators can develop for it, and now Sony is going into a lot more detail about the system's capabilities.
The only piece of hardware that Sony actually showed off at its PS4 event in February was the controller, and Norden detailed the piece's new design.
"The analogue sticks have been tightened up, they feel a lot more precise than they did on the DualShock 3," Norden said, according to Eurogamer. "There's a motion sensor... accelerometers, there's a six-axis accelerometer and gyroscope in there. It's better than the one in the PS3, it's better than the one in the PS Vita. You got dual vibration like in DualShock 3 except it's been enhanced. One of the cool features - we've got a touchpad, it's a dual simultaneous touch-point..."
Unlike with the PS3, Norden revealed that the PS4 will be shipping with a headset bundled in with the console.
"Everybody has asked about it, it definitely helps out with voice chat, multiplayer games and everything so we decided to go ahead and do that," Norden said. "It's got 32KHz stereo output for two players ... frequency will only be reduced slightly when you start cranking up the number of players just because of the bandwidth of the wireless. And there's a 16KHz microphone port as well. The speaker is the same high-quality output as the headset. It streams directly from the PS4 at runtime."
Moving on to the PS4's highly-touted instant play feature, Norden went into Sony's intent behind its idea of not waiting to play. The PS4 will allow users to start playing games as soon as they purchase them digitally, meaning most of the game will download as they make their way through the title's first few stages.
"We're going to encourage developers to create their games to have a bare minimum set of data in that first chunk," he said. "They download that, they start getting the user into the game so maybe there's intro movies, maybe there's character creation, maybe there's back story happening. So other chunks are downloading in the background and we can minimise the amount of time we're looking at loading screens. Nobody wants to stare at those, it's just not fun."
There's a whole lot more that Sony went into, including the PS4's motion-tracking Eye, which will allow for Kinect-like gameplay, frame rates, and more. Read more at Eurogamer.
