What are you currently playing? [3]

[Stryker]

I got both Age of Empires III with all the expansion packs, as well as Alpha Protocol.

I haven't had a chance with AP, but AoEIII is such a blast, especially playing JP nation.

[child of Lilith]

^^Ok.

[Tankred]

JP nation.

Weeaboooooo.


I miss AoE.

[Lavinius]

I got both Age of Empires III with all the expansion packs, as well as Alpha Protocol.

I haven't had a chance with AP, but AoEIII is such a blast, especially playing JP nation.

Improvement Mod improves. I love that game.

[Stryker]

(A weaboo is) Someone who is obsessed with Japan/Japanese Culture/Anime, etc. and attempts to act as if they were Japanese, even though they're far from it.

[CJD]

I haven't had a chance with AP, but AoEIII is such a blast, especially playing JP nation.

AoE2 was better. RIP Ensemble

[Monk Ed]

Well there goes the hope of the PS4 saving the day...

Care to explain what so turned you off about the announcement?

[Rodeo]

Shit next gen.

I thought they had a very strong showing.

[liquidus118]

That conference was better than the last 3 Sony E3 conferences combined. Heck it was probably better than the last 3 Sony and Microsoft conferences combined. This is the first step in the right direction we've had in many, many years.

No non-game bullshit. No wasting time with sports partnerships or spending half the conference having kids and non-gamers faffing around with shit that isn't really video games. Constant reference to games and how it's about the games. The people they brought on were real developers, real publishers and almost all of them seemed genuinely invested in what they were making. That Drive Club speaker was clearly loving every second of it. That was a man gushing about his favourite topic, not a man reading marketing bullshit dispassionately.

No stupid motion control bullshit. Motion controls were shown and used, sure, but they were integrated properly. No Wii Sports knock offs, no lazy 'kiddy' games that are just cheap and cynical attempts at grabbing the family buck, no spending literally half or more of the conference going on about passing fad motion control games that nobody wants or bought. One game used them, and used them in an actually interesting way.

In fact, they were aiming this conference at gamers. The previous conferences aimed their content at almost anything but gamers. From families to kids to people who don't really play games but might pick one up if you make it enough like Nintendo's stuff to kids who are too lazy to read a book.

Push towards making the architecture far more accessible to devs so that the PS4 can have good ports and good third party support, third party support being the reason the PS2 was so damn good. This shows they aren't going in with the same arrogance and over-inflated egos they did when making the PS3.

They finally figured out how to do social gaming instead of just throwing the word around to appeal to more casual audiences. The social aspect is grounded in the games, designed to improve the games, and isn't just fluff on the side.

The streaming and online connectivity they're pushing sounds like a huge step forwards, though I'm not too hot on the focus on your real life identity. Being able to watch your friends and join in and help them and all that stuff sounds like something the PS3 was sorely lacking. Particularly cross game chat.

The games they showed didn't rely on set pieces. Whilst they did certainly use them, what we saw was mostly plain old gameplay being played by someone on stage. Compare this to, say, Uncharted showcases or CoD reveals. The focus on showing us game mechanics over exciting set pieces (without getting rid of them completely) bodes well in my opinion.

The console actually has some RAM for once, meaning proper textures, larger scale environments and multitasking.

A focus not just on big budget shooters, but an equal weighting was placed on indie developers and creative titles.

Heck, even Killzone looks like it's moving away from grim-dark settings so the good graphics will actually be interesting to look at.

In fact, developers aren't just chasing the most realistic graphics any more. Developers are experimenting more and more with artistic styles rather than just realism if this conference is any indication. We may start to get more visually interesting and varied titles this generation.

Overall this sounds like a huge step forwards over what the PS3 was and the direction Sony were going later into this generation.

[CJD]

That conference was better than the last 3 Sony E3 conferences combined.

Wait what? Did we watch the same Sony E3's the last two years? I pretty clearly recall them being almost exclusively focused on the games, games, and more games. The only downside was the time spent on move and 3DTV two years ago and that hilariously bad Wonderbook presentation last year. Other than that they were great.

No stupid motion control bullshit. Motion controls were shown and used, sure, but they were integrated properly. No Wii Sports knock offs, no lazy 'kiddy' games that are just cheap and cynical attempts at grabbing the family buck, no spending literally half or more of the conference going on about passing fad motion control games that nobody wants or bought. One game used them, and used them in an actually interesting way.

Could have done without all the focus on the "Share" stuff, afaic that's of the same value.

Overall this sounds like a huge step forwards over what the PS3 was and the direction Sony were going later into this generation.

Hubbiddawhabiddahhuh? But... the last 3 years of Sony have been a vast improvement over the first few years of PS3, and have utterly blown Microsoft out of the water. Hell, I don't even own a PS3, only a 360, and I wish Microsoft had been half as dedicated to actual video games over the last three years as Sony has. Every E3 it's the bloody same: New Halo, New Forza, New Fable, New Gears of War. Meanwhile Sony brought back Twisted Metal, Sly Cooper, plus new IP's like The Last of Us and Beyond.

[Tankred]

[quote="Stryker":2ao2rgl9][/quote:2ao2rgl9]

Urban Dictionary a shit. Weeaboo, play a real mans game like Shogun 2. Though really, AoE III is pretty fun, not as magnificent as AoEII but whatever.

I guess I'm overreacting to the PS4 launch due to the negativity from my friends, but we'll see how this shit goes. That social sharing stuff is still bullshit though.

[Rodeo]

Yesterday's event was first and foremost a hardware unveiling so it's natural that a great deal of focus was spent on services which are such an integral part of today's technology, the 360 had a clear edge over the PS3 in this regard. Assuming all the stuff they talked about actually works as planned, Sony has set the bar pretty damn high this time around.
The games they showed were admittedly not all that exciting (apart from Capcom's Deep Down, which was pretty wow) but I'm not worried about that, this isn't Nintendo we're talking about, the games will come.

[riffraff11235]

Sony's probably saving its heavy hitters, such as Uncharted, for E3 in June/July. Heck, I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that The Last Guardian will be a PS4 release. Did they mention anything about backwards compatibility?

[Rodeo]

^No native PS3 support since Sony decided to drop the Cell processor, but they suggested that it would eventually be achieved through streaming somewhere down the line.

[arkiel]

So now that both platforms have gone Intel, this is basically just a hardware platform to sell 3D cameras and proprietary game controllers, right? And there's now minimal reason to not port games over to the PC-PC, rather than cabin them to the XBOX-PC or PS4-PC, right?

[CJD]

So now that both platforms have gone Intel, this is basically just a hardware platform to sell 3D cameras and proprietary game controllers, right? And there's now minimal reason to not port games over to the PC-PC, rather than cabin them to the XBOX-PC or PS4-PC, right?

No guarantee that the 720 will be on Intel yet, unless you're referring to the abandonment of the Cell tech in which case yea, I doubt Microsoft is going to use it. As for ports... well there's less of a reason to not port them, yes, but typically the reason you'll get exclusives is because Microsoft or Sony will pay for exclusivity. That's likely not to change, and I expect Microsoft to put more money into exclusives again with the launch of the 720. While their victory this generation can largely be attributed to Sony's bumbling of the PS3 launch it'd be naive to not account for the fact that for the first few years the 360 just had more appealing (to the west) exclusives. For all their talk about social media and entertainment systems people still buy consoles primarily for one reason: to play games on them, and when Microsoft had the games and Sony didn't the choice was easy for consumers. After that it just snowballed. Gonna buy a new console? What do your friends have? All of them have a 360 and only a few have a PS3? You're gonna buy a 360. After that though Microsoft stopped paying for exclusives because they didn't need them, they already had dominant market share and the momentum was on their side, no point wasting the money.

tl;dr I expect more console exclusives over the next few years, not less, though I could be wrong if Microsoft fucks up and underestimates the role exclusives played in their success (and overestimates the roll Sony's mishandling played). Honestly, after these last few years I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft announces all games on the 720 will be F2P or some bullshit.

[arkiel]

Well, the leaked stuff (which as far as Sony, was confirmed yesterday) suggests strongly equivalent systems with x86 chips. Doesn't seem likely the next XBOX would be non-Intel, anyway.

[MAGI_01]

So now that both platforms have gone Intel.

An AMD APU to be exact. Gotta be a custom chip as no APU in AMD's lineup has 8 cores or that much GPU power.

The next Xbox I think will be using another modified PowerPC CPU with an AMD GPU. But of course we wont know anything until they reveal it.

[Stryker]

play a real mans game like Shogun 2.

I do, you rube.

[Monk Ed]

A pity about that Share button on the PS4. It's probably going to drive me nuts until I get used to it, because its mere existence is going to make me want to press it, even though I don't really want people watching me gaming or seeing my screenshots or anything like that. One of the things I liked about console gaming was the intimacy of the act, the privacy, the solitude, the log-cabin-in-the-woodsiness of it, just me and the game, and now there's an entire button on the controller dedicated to ruining that, always there, constantly tempting me to shatter that peace.