One small step for gaming or one giant leap? | Jonathan Soltan

Last week, we speculated as to what we thought would happen. Now, Jonathan Soltan brings you the facts.The journey to the next generation has begun! For those of you who somehow missed the internet exploding on the February 20th, Sony has finally formally announced the Playstation 4. In this piece I'll be giving you an extremely abridged version of the two hour press event. I highly recommend looking on the internet for more information, trailers and, in the case of Killzone and Watch Dogs, actual gameplay footage.Sony opened the event with one of their trademark sizzle reels. This particular one had footage ranging from the new Sly Cooper game (which isn't even available for us European peasants yet) to the original Crash Bandicoot games on PS1. It did its job of getting me far too excited. Things then slowed down, with CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, Andrew House, coming out to give a brief history of the Playstation brand as a whole. After what seemed like an eternity, the real show began. House introduced Mark Cerny (a grizzled veteran of the industry from the days when Atari was king), who revealed that he was the lead system architect on the new system. Information then began flowing hot and fast: 8 cores, AMD X86 CPU, GDDR5, 8Gb of unified RAM. What does it all mean? In essence: your PS3 is old and busted. Say hello to the new hotness of the PS4.But all this new power is nothing without a controller to use it with. And while they didn't show what the PS4 actually looks like (disappointing, right?) the new controller was shown. The Dualshock 4 is probably the biggest redesign of a Playstation controller since analog sticks were added onto the original Playstation controller way back in 1997. The changes are immediately noticeable. Start and Select are nowhere to be found. Their functions have now been combined into one Options button. A touchpad now dominates the centre. A blue light bar can be seen on the top of the controller, probably to facilitate motion controls. While we don't know the specifics of how these will be utilised, we do know about the new button to left of the touchpad. A frightening new button called “Share”.It's with the Share button that the PS4 really starts showing off some of its new tricks. Due to the way in which the system uses its RAM, the PS4 can record footage of your game as you're playing it. Sony didn't reveal exactly how far back it will record, but rumours put the number at around 15 minutes. Not only that, but the system will even be able to broadcast your gameplay onto the internet in real time using Gaikai. This will be a huge boon to gamers who've always wanted to show people their skills but didn't want to deal with the hassle of finding a suitable capture card, hooking it up correctly, and making sure it was working then transferring the footage to a computer etc. Now all that will be as easy as pushing a button. Once you push the Share button, you can then look back through your footage, select a section and upload that directly to Youtube. Not only that, but while it's uploading, you can continue to play your game. In a similar vein, the PS4 will also have a power save mode which will let you put it in a low power state, while retaining your game as it. Thus letting you jump right back into the action when you get back.Gaikai is a company that was founded in 2008 with the purpose of streaming games. They were bought by Sony last year for the princely sum of $380M. As soon as this happened, rumours started flying about what this meant for the next generation of consoles. According to company founder and CEO David Perry, Gaikai will be a very important part of the PS4's functionality. As discussed earlier, it will allow you to broadcast your game in real time. Not only that though; people can leave comments as you play, leave helpful items in designated spots during the game and even (apparently) take control of your game to get you through tough spots. What was more exciting though, in my opinion, is that through Gaikai the PS4 will eventually be able to stream every PS1, PS2 and PS3 game in addition to PS4 games. What's important to note is that Perry stated that this was their “end goal”, meaning that we may not see this for many years.Now onto the most important part: the games. There was certainly no shortage of them at this event. Sony started off by showing a totally new IP from Japan Studio called Knack. This game follows the protagonist Knack who has the ability to change size using relics. He uses this power to help humans fight a war against goblins. The graphics looked as good as a Pixar movie and the game looks to be fun for all ages.The next game shown was Guerilla's new game, Killzone: Shadowfall. It looks as good as you would expect a next-gen Killzone game to look. That is to say: beautiful. The story takes place 30 years after the events of Killzone 3 in a city divided by a gigantic wall with the Helghast on one side and the ISA on the other. Sounds cosy. Look for this game on launch day (whenever that is).Next, Evolution got to show off their new game called Driveclub. It's a first-person driving simulator with a focus on clubs and team events. We saw very little, but what we did see looked amazing. Apparently the lenses of the headlights refract light. I bet you never even knew that you wanted that in your driving games.Then came what was, for me, the highlight of the show; inFamous: Second Son and it takes place 7 years after the events of inFamous 2. It follows 24 year-old Delsin Rowe who lives in a police state where humans with superpowers are lovingly referred to as “bio-terrorists”. Needless to say, he doesn't agree.The last big game that we saw actual footage of was Ubisoft's Watch Dogs. This is a game we saw back at E3 but it's now confirmed as a PS4 launch title and looking better than ever. You play as Aiden Pearce. A man who seems to operate as some kind of vigilante, using the fully connected world of the future to his advantage, hacking into anything and everything to dish out his own brand of justice.Other developers in attendance were Bungie with their new shooter Destiny, Blizzard confirming that Diablo 3 will be coming to both PS3 and PS4, John Blow with his interesting new puzzle game The Witness, Capcom showing off a trailer for a game currently with the working title “Deep Down” and Media Molecule showing a Playstation Move tech demo (yep, Move is still a thing).After all this excitement, it hardly need reiterating that all eyes are now on Microsoft to see if they can deliver the goods with the reveal of their new Xbox. Will their new console be as powerful as the PS4? Or even more so - will they have something to rival the streaming technology of Gaikai? Whatever the case, it will almost certainly be a huge step up from the current generation of consoles... and the Wii U.