Geek Culture
Ten Years After the PlayStation Meeting, Fans and the Media Reflect
It has been ten years since Sony formally unveiled the PS4 generation on stage at a PlayStation Meeting in New York City’s Hammerstein Ballroom. The company unveiled the kinds of experiences one could look forward to over the next seven or so years without even revealing the console (that beat came at E3 2013). It was the showcase that signaled the start of Sony’s hegemony over the previous console generation.
Numerous new PS4 titles have been released, including Killzone: Shadow Fall, DriveClub, inFAMOUS: Second Son, The Witness, Dreams, and Destiny. It was also the first and last time we saw Deep Down from Capcom, which is amusing. Sony made its keynote all about the games along with the waffle from executives you don’t really get in gaming conferences anymore, while Microsoft focused on TV.
As a result, spectators and media professionals who were present that day have been thinking back on what happened and what it meant at the time. Following Sony’s decision to not show the physical console, mainstream journalists were “losing their minds,” according to VGC editor Andy Robinson, as they had no image to use in their newspaper. Attendees were “stunned” to learn the briefing would last two hours.
10 years(!) ago today, I flew to New York City to see the new PlayStation revealed. This was Sony at the peak of its power. pic.twitter.com/qIlzPygP4N
— Andy Robinson (@AndyPlaytonic) February 20, 2023
In the meantime, fans have been posting their conference-related memories in a ResetEra thread. said Temascos: “They demonstrated what they had learned from the PS3, and even though some things didn’t work out as planned, such as the system downloading games for you to try out (which, if it had actually happened, would have turned off a lot of people), it was the console that was required at the time. This and E3 2013 were key factors in Sony’s early success in that generation. So many wonderful times.”
Silent recalls who he was “I was college tutoring a class during the presentation, so I checked GAF frequently to see any updates. It was absurd to see 8 GB of GDDR5; from what I can recall, nobody anticipated it would be that high. The Killzone money shot follows. That was enjoyable.” Lastly, Rob Zombie remarked: “Although the PS4 had very conservative hardware, I still believe that it performed admirably in terms of visuals. It was great to watch Killzone and Infamous in those early last generation years. I was absolutely blown away by the lighting, particle effects, and character models.”
It’s also entertaining to browse the Push Square archives to see how editor Sammy Barker covered the program back then. He said prior to the conference: “I’m a mixture of eagerness, apprehension, dread, and desperation. I kind of want it all to end. Although the build-up has been relatively short, it seems like a decade has passed since Sony first promised to give us a glimpse of the future.” The Last Guardian, Star Wars 1313, and Watch Dogs were his next three movie requests. At least he received the former. Before The Last Guardian made a comeback at E3, Star Wars 1313 had been canceled.
What do you recall about the PlayStation Meeting in 2013?
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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