Nyko is ready to give your PS4 controller the battery life it deserves
Although the PlayStation 4 is a fine gaming console, it has a definite Achilles’ heel — the very, very short battery life of the bundled DualShock 4 controller. It’s a good thing, then, that Nyko has at last shipped the PowerPak add-on that it promised back in January. Shelling out $20 gives you a 1,000mAh lithium-ion battery that roughly doubles the longevity of Sony’s official gamepad. That’s not saying much when the DualShock normally gets just a few hours of play time per charge, but the extra capacity should be good enough to handle a marathon Destiny session.
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Sony
Via: IGN
Source: Nyko (TriplePoint)
Sky Go streaming no longer free on Xbox 360 from July 29th
Sky has begun to inform Xbox 360 owners who watch TV on their console via the Sky Go app that come the end of July, they’ll need to start paying for the privilege. Sky Go is free to anyone with a subscription to the satellite TV service, and allows you to use your smartphone, tablet, computer or console (for the next month, anyway) to watch TV when you’re out of set-top box range. Sky Go Extra is a paid version that also lets you download content for offline viewing, as well as upping the number of devices you can use to four instead of two. It’s this Extra tier that Xbox 360 users will need to pony up £5 per month for (after an introductory price of half that) if they wish to continue using Sky Go on their console after July 29th. This only affects the 360 currently, and ironically it comes just after Microsoft cut the requirement for a paid Xbox Live Gold account to use video streaming apps. With Sky Go coming to the PS3 and PS4 later this summer, however, it feels very much like Sky is making a calculated move to turn a free service into a paid one just before a bunch more people get access.
[Image credit: Alfred Hermida/Flickr]
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, Internet
Via: Digital Spy
Source: Sky Community forum
These are the biggest third-party games at E3 2014
Sure, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft all have their own internally-developed games but there’s so much more to E3 than what The Big Three show off for their respective platforms. Even better, almost every game from the likes of Activision and Electronic Arts will appear on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One so there’s almost no need to choose which platform to buy if you want to play a specific title, either. Let’s get down to business, shall we?
THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT
Polish developer CD Projekt Red does one thing and one thing only: role-playing games. This year was The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt‘s second E3 and it still faces the same problems that it did in 2013. Namely, the game looks like a ton of fun when it’s condensed to short snippets onstage at Microsoft’s media briefing, but otherwise what makes the game special like story-affecting choices and scouring the map’s nooks and crannies just doesn’t demo well. I saw an uninterrupted 45 minutes of game-play during a private demo and witnessed monster-hunter-for-hire Geralt exterminate harpies, undead swamp people, werewolves and demonic tree roots (seriously), and while that was cool, he was mostly an errand boy in between battles. To me, this robbed him of any narrative weight or importance.
Tracking a gigantic, bleeding griffin through the forest using supernatural forensics, however, and then delivering a killing blow and carrying its head into town on the side of your horse looks unbelievably bad-ass. You’ll be able to check the game out for yourself come next February 24th.
METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
“Let the legend come back to life.” At some point in the extended gameplay demo for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, those words are uttered in Big Boss’ direction… and then a horse shits. That’s just a partial taste of how Hideo Kojima has colored this new, open world of MGS.
MGS V: The Phantom Pain picks up nine years after Big Boss has fallen into a coma and shows the character severely scarred and brandishing a curious bit of horn-shaped shrapnel sticking out of his head. The gameplay doesn’t vary from the series’ typical blend of action and stealth, but thanks to Kojima’s Fox Engine, the environments (said to be roughly “200x the size of Ground Zeroes“) and character models are much more detailed. In fact, Konami reps said that a key game dynamic — the ability to fast forward time with a Phantom Cigar (e-cig) — is entirely possible because of this new engine. The resulting effect is not unlike that of hi-speed cinematography, where a static landscape is shown passing from day into night and back again. MGS V also throws in an entirely new element for long-time fans: the ability to visit a dynamically expanding Mother Base populated with all the characters, materials and artillery you’ve Fulton’d back. And yes, that even includes livestock.
DESTINY
I’ve gone on record saying that I was very much disinterested in Destiny, but that was until I actually got to play developer Bungie’s latest. Going hands-on with the former Halo studio’s game felt like a welcome trip home; damn near everything about the game just feels right for me as a Halo fan. Gunplay is tight and strikes a solid balance between the heft of a Killzone or Battlefield versus Titanfall‘s or, say, Call of Duty‘s feather-light locomotion. The environments I’ve seen are gorgeous, feeling lived-in and appropriately desolate and even in the early state I’ve played, the game feels incredibly polished.
Everywhere I turned, it seemed like I was seeing an idea that Bungie had wanted to put in its next game for the past 10 or so years. Whether the studio couldn’t due to hardware limitations or because its next game was always Halo-related, though, isn’t clear. Things like summoning vehicles on-demand to help get across the game’s vast expanses of geography, for instance are more than welcome. Or, even better, the way voice-chat audio subtly reflects your current environment (in a metallic tunnel, it sounded like my co-op buddy’s voice was echoing off the steel walls) was super neat. Tricks like this make me keep wanting to go back. I’m just worried that I’m not the only one who initially wrote it off as Just Another Shooter.
BATTLEFIELD: HARDLINE
It’s surreal to play a first-person shooter that’s based in the same city I’m currently visiting. In Battlefield: Hardline, I played cops-and-robbers on the battle-scarred streets of downtown Los Angeles. Since it was a war zone, no civilians were around to get in the way. I was one of the robbers wandering around parking structures, stairwells, hotels and office buildings, searching for loot and evading law enforcement with the rest of my team. Saying that the round was chaotic would be a gross understatement; cars and helicopters alike flew around corners, and thanks to the tech running the game, rubble, shrapnel and destroyed buildings were everywhere. If being a bad guy isn’t your style, you can also play as a cop that’s trying to prevent the opposition from snatching the booty.
While the game’s extreme levels of action are pretty awesome, this is a Battlefield game by name only. Seemingly, the sole aspect that ties the title to its namesake are the tools developer Visceral Games used to make the game and what you use to wreak havoc on the ground. Hardline is essentially a re-skinned Battlefield 4: cops kill the robbers, and robbers, well, they kill cops. Each side is essentially the same, despite their respective vocations, and are soldiers fighting a virtual war. And you’d be justified to remain cautious about whether the game will work as advertised at launch based on series history. There’s a beta test happening right now, well ahead of the fall release, should you be (morbidly) curious about how the game plays.
ALIEN: ISOLATION
Let me get this out of the way up front: Alien: Isolation is difficult. The developers at Creative Assembly not only nailed the atmosphere of director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece, but they ensured that I respected just how fragile life in deep space is when the hulking monstrosity pictured above is out to murder you every chance it gets. My demo tasked me with few objectives, but most related directly to me making it toward the next area in one piece. That didn’t happen. However, with each successive go at it, I made considerably more progress toward my goal. On my first attempt, I tried sprinting down a desolate corridor with the intent to make it through the doors I imagined were at the other side. No dice; the xenomorph noticed me before I even knew it was there and the next thing I knew, its double mouth punched another hole in my face.
The next attempt I made it a little further, grabbing a flame-thrower before I exited the first room and figuring out how to use my motion tracker — the latter of which caused me to fail an optional objective. When I rounded the first corner and the alien spotted me, I darted back and jumped into a storage locker, figuring I’d be safe. Nope. The alien ripped me from my haven and murdered me. On my third try, I noticed a series of air vents big enough to crawl through. Huddling down, I crouched and made my way into the first one that I’d spotted. Hooray! Progress! That was short-lived. I got cocky and thought that I could traverse to the next one without paying attention to where the xeno was. I’d heard the thundering footsteps behind me but figured I’d be safe as the vent closed behind me. Not so much: the alien reached through and ripped me out of there, making my face a see-through in the process. I loved it.
BLOODBORNE
You’re a fan of the tough-as-nails Dark Souls series, yeah? Then you’ll likely feel right at home in its mastermind’s latest, the PlayStation 4 exclusive Bloodborne. Atmosphere and mood aren’t the only things the game is dripping with. As the title implies, there’s also a lot of blood. Buckets of it. Set in a 19th century gothic city, your task is to eliminate the blight plaguing it by any means necessary, be it with a giant straight razor or a hand cannon, and well, trying to not die too much in the process. As combat proceeds, the player character becomes covered in progressively more blood, and it never faded away during my hands-off demo. Getting a sense for how difficult the game is wasn’t particularly easy since the presentation had an invincibility mode turned on (staring at loading screens and repeatedly falling at the hands of nightmare creatures and undead townspeople isn’t exactly exciting), but I was assured that the game doesn’t stray far form its roots in terms of just how hard it is. This supposedly makes each victory that much more satisfying. You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.
HOMEFRONT: THE REVOLUTION
What would America feel like under North Korean occupation? That’s the question Homefront: The Revolution wants to answer. You might remember Homefront from a few years back as a hokey, underwhelming shooter from the now-defunct publisher THQ. From what I saw during a presentation, new developer Crytek London took what was good about that game (the concept of an invaded United States), married it with a sense of dread and hopelessness, and added a dash of fancy graphics. The brief demo I caught followed a citizen making his way through the streets of an open-world Philadelphia, passing brothers and sisters in arms who were figuring out how to ration off enough necessities to survive planning an uprising. The sequence reminded me an awful lot of the intro to Half-life 2, Metro 2033 and Resistance 3; the sense of despondency was palpable, thanks in large part to solid voice acting and environmental design. Once the combat started toward the end, Crytek’s other strength showed through: gunplay and weapon design, with the latter sporting an upgrade system with part-by-part modifications akin to the Crysis series. We’re still a year or more off from this game releasing, but it already looks and feels killer.
MORTAL KOMBAT X
I’ve got bad news for you: I don’t play fighting games. The last Mortal Kombat game I played with any sincerity was for PlayStation 2/Xbox, and even then I wasn’t that good at it. So what can I tell you about Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat fan? This game focuses on a gaggle of new characters — somewhat expected given the fatality-laden ending of the last MK game — and Netherrealm Studios had three such new characters available to play at E3 2014. We got a look at all three, as well as returning favorites Scorpion and Sub-zero.
Here’s the good news: Mortal Kombat is still hella fun. Even with my vast ignorance of fighting games, it was a blast leaping around in that world once more, trying my best to avoid Cassie Cage’s utterly revolting “X-ray” move. Like the last MK, “X-ray moves” are back in Mortal Kombat X; one such move has Cassie pulling an homage to her father’s iconic split attack. Not clear enough? She does a split and punches her opponent in the genitals, which I watched explode in X-ray mode. It was the only demo at E3 where I turned to the demo assistant and said, “Really?” Even he, a Netherrealm Studios employee, was a bit bashful about it. Anyway, the other new characters I tried were neat as well, with Ferra/Torr standing out as a highlight (dude throws a person at you to attack — pretty serious!). The game is way early at this point, but it looks to be shaping up really well already.
Ben Gilbert, Brad Molen and Joseph Volpe contributed to this report
[Image credit: AFP/Getty Images]
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
You can preload all your new PS4 games starting next week
One of the roadblocks to really enjoying an all-digital game collection is that it’s a lot faster to drive to the store and buy a new PlayStation 4 release at midnight than it is to snag it off of the PSN Store. Sony’s been prepping a fix for this for awhile now, but we thought it wouldn’t be starting until this fall. That changes today, with a post on the PlayStation Blog stating that any purchases made on or after May 20th this year will take advantage of the games automatically downloading and installing in advance, and the first big title to do so is next week’s Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark. Next up after that is the DLC pack for Infamous: Second Son, dubbed First Light, and then holiday season heavy hitters like LittleBigPlanet 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Curiously missing, however, is the remastered version of The Last of Us due out next month. This feature is coming to digital preorders made on the PS3 too, in case you haven’t upgraded just yet, too. Pretty handy, right?
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Sony
Source: PlayStation Blog
‘No Man’s Sky’: the game that ‘won’ E3 2014
Ever heard of Joe Danger? That’s okay, you’re not alone — most folks haven’t heard of the motocross-based platformer, despite it receiving glowing praise from critics and earning healthy sales from gamers. That said, if you followed last week’s annual game industry trade show, E3, you’ve likely heard of No Man’s Sky. The same small team of scrappy Brits that created the cartoony Danger series, Hello Games, is applying its years of game industry experience to a much more ambitious project in No Man’s Sky. This is how Hello Games lead Sean Murray described the game at Sony’s E3 2014 press conference:
“We’ve created a procedural universe. It’s infinite, and it’s one that everyone can share. We’re gonna start every player on a different planet so no two people will have the same experience. This universe we’ve created…it’s so vast, it’s so boundless, it’s actually infinite, and we don’t even know what’s out there.”
So, how in the world did a team of four game developers transition from indie hit makers to triple-A rogues? We asked Hello Games just that, late last week in an evening demo session for No Man’s Sky.
” I couldn’t picture myself turning around and working on a game that’s the same scale of Joe Danger.”
The last time I saw Sean Murray and David Ream, they weren’t quite so serious. The previous games from their 10-person studio, Hello Games, are great in their own way, but not anywhere near the scope or scale of No Man’s Sky. Not by a long shot. Let’s run a quick comparison, just so you’re clear. Here’s Joe Danger for PlayStation 3:
Here’s No Man’s Sky for PlayStation 4:
Pretty major difference, no? Murray says it was an intentional move to go bigger, but not their only intention. “We were really pleased with the success and stuff, but our ambitions were much bigger, I think. I couldn’t picture myself turning around and working on a game that’s the same scale of Joe Danger,” Murray says.
Beyond that, Murray and co. wanted to break out of the game-development formula. They were tired of beginning development by asking, “What type of game are we making?” and going from there. “You start to have conversations like, ‘We’ll make a platformer next! We’ll make a point-and-click adventure,’ or something like that. And you’re not pushing yourself as a developer. We wanted to try and do something really landmark,” Murray says.
Sound arrogant? That’s a measure of text not conveying tone. Every time Murray made a statement like that during our half-hour meeting, he’d couch it with a statement like, “But we didn’t talk about it [in] that kind of arrogant way or cocky way,” abashedly looking away. Even in his statements above, he can’t help but add caveats like, “I think,” as he goes (I’ve cut out most, for your sake). This is a man with grand ambitions and, thankfully, a sense of self-awareness.
I begin our piece on No Man’s Sky with this profile of Murray and co. for good reason: There’s pedigree, heart and passion backing up the seemingly too grand plans for the space-exploration game. It’s important to understand not just the background of the team in terms of resume — Criterion, Kuju, Sumo Digital — but also the people that make it up. These are the kind of guys who appear on a podcast late at night after a long day of showing their game on a loud conventional hall show floor. It’s for all these reasons I have tremendous faith in their ability to pull off No Man’s Sky as they describe it.
“Can I see myself doing this on that indie circuit? Going to PAX every year and killing myself on something that long-term isn’t … am I gonna look back on it? Will they all blur into one?”
Hello Games is an indie studio. There are 10 staffers. Four of them went dark internally to concept No Man’s Sky (including Murray and Ream), and even now, the four-person team that initially created the project works closely together. They’re not scaling up for No Man’s Sky, either; the game was built around the concept of a small team creating a massive project. It’s procedurally generated and it’s made of voxels. But what does that mean?
For one, it means that the usual army of artists required to create the artwork of a massive game aren’t required. Murray explains: “Our artist, just like on any normal game, builds something like this: a tree. And he would have to build dozens, or maybe a hundred of these, to create a forest. And then if you had another forest with a different type, then you have to build a different type of tree. Another several dozen.”
All of those trees take time and money! While third-party solutions like SpeedTree exist (which creates a whole bunch of virtual trees), small teams aren’t exactly flush with cash for extra software. So, instead of the standard operating procedure for game development, Hello Games built a system to create all that time-intensive stuff — known as “assets” — for them. Even better, that system creates on the fly, based on a variety of parameters, meaning no two planets/creatures/ships/trees are exactly the same. The system solves two problems at once: producing all the assets of the game (music included) and making the game infinitely explorable.
If no two planets are the same, then the world is infinite — there’s no reason to stop exploring, which is exactly what Murray wants. There aren’t defined goals or conflict in the game just yet, nor a quest log or some form of points/scoring. He’s only vaguely hinted at the gameplay of No Man’s Sky beyond exploration; your ship has a weapon to fire, and the dinosaur-like creatures in the E3 demo could absolutely stamp you out with a single step. There are resources to gather, and Murray sent out a pulse to scan for said resources in the demo we were shown. What you’ll do with those resources is another question; there are many, many questions about the game of No Man’s Sky, though we’ve got a pretty clear picture of what its world will be.
“If you play it, I want you to play it not because you’re interested in indie games. I want you to play it because you prefer it to Call of Duty, not because it’s more ‘legitimate’ or ‘credible’ or something like that, but because it’s more entertaining.”
No one I spoke to at E3 2014 said, “No Man’s Sky looks pretty great for an indie game.” They all just said, “That game looks crazy!” This is an important distinction, and one that Hello Games says it’s glad to hear. This was also intentional. “That’s really meaningful to me,” Murray says. “I wanted to make games, and have spent a long time being ‘the indie dev.’”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Indie devs make great games, and even some of the world’s most popular. Minecraft was created by a single man. Rovio was a small studio when it stumbled on a hit with Angry Birds. Hell, Oculus VR mostly exists from Palmer Luckey tooling around in his spare time.
But there’s still a separation. The three aforementioned indies all broke out of that world into the mainstream, and Murray’s aiming to repeat that success for Hello Games. It’s not the only goal, of course, but it is a concern to Murray personally with No Man’s Sky. “We don’t actually want the story to be, ‘Oh they made it with a handful of people,’ or whatever. We just want it to be good.”
The good news for Murray and co. is that all of us — the folks who play games — also “just want it to be good.” With an unannounced release date and only PC and PlayStation 4 platforms named thus far, Hello has the flexibility with expectations to impress us all. Now all they have to do is do it.
Playdate: Engadget plays the ‘Battlefield: Hardline’ beta on PS4!
Welcome, ladygeeks and gentlenerds, to the new era of gaming. The one where you get to watch, and comment, as other people livestream gameplay from next-gen consoles. Because games! They’re fun!
A large-scale game of cops and robbers seems like a natural fit for the Battlefield franchise, right? Like it or not, that’s what we have with the series’ latest entry, Battlefield: Hardline. Developer Visceral Games’ (Dead Space series, Dante’s Inferno) Steve Papoutsis came out during Electronic Arts’ press conference at E3 last week and announced that if you wanted to try Hardline out ahead of its launch this fall, you could download a beta that very day on the PlayStation 4. Well, that slammed the PS4 and EA servers, and actually getting the game was a hassle for some. That’s where we come in. Curious if the game lives up to the heat or if it’s more of a dog day afternoon for the series? Well, tune into the stream below at 7 pm Eastern/4 pm Pacific and find out as we make a run for the cash on Sony’s latest console.
Watch live video from Engadget on www.twitch.tv
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Playdate: Engadget plays the Destiny alpha on PS4!
Welcome, ladygeeks and gentlenerds, to the new era of gaming. The one where you get to watch, and comment, as other people livestream gameplay from next-gen consoles. Because games! They’re fun!
PlayStation’s Adam Boyes dropped a bomb during Sony’s E3 media briefing this week: PlayStation Plus members would get to check out a test-version of Bungie’s newest shooter, Destiny. Don’t have a PS4 or can’t otherwise jump in? Join us here at 7 pm Eastern / 4 pm Pacific as we explore a ruined Russia, drive speeder bikes and shoot lots and lots of aliens.
Watch live video from Engadget on www.twitch.tv
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD
Source: Twitch
Can Electronic Arts make a ‘Battlefield’ game that works?
I stopped playing Battlefield this year. Why did I stop playing the massively popular first-person shooter? Because it never works when it launches. For those who haven’t experienced the promise and defeat of a Battlefield launch, it goes as such:
- A multiplayer beta precedes the launch, often by a slim few months, which is chocked up to server testing.
- Players enjoy the beta, which is sometimes buggy, but often stable enough. And hey, it’s a beta.
- The game launches; millions of players splash into online servers; and it becomes unplayable for days, weeks and often months at a time.
Battlefield games come out every year. This was not always the case, but in the past four years, we’ve seen three Battlefield games. Zero of those three worked at launch (I actually wrote about this back when Battlefield 3 came out, at our sister site Joystiq). Battlefield 4 launched last October; it just started operating consistently. At E3 2014, EA announced this year’s entry in the series: Battlefield Hardline. It’s with this tremendous amount of baggage that I approached our interview with Battlefield studio head Karl Magnus Troedsson.
“You man up to the problems you’ve had, and you fix it.”
Troedsson knows my plight well. Aside from having heard as much from me in the past, my issues with Battlefield are far from unique. One look at the Battlefield help site demonstrates how widespread the issues are. In so many words, he hears complaints about Battlefield 4 quite often these days. As such, he’s prepared a characteristically positive response. Troedsson asks me, “I hear you. I hear you absolutely. But have you played Battlefield 4 lately?”
I haven’t. After several months of major issues — buggy gameplay, being kicked mid-game from online servers, unbalanced weapons, straight-up glitches — I quit. And I’m not alone. Around 150,000 people are actively playing the game across five game platforms: Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PC. Estimates put sales of Battlefield 4 in the range of 7 million. It’s pretty stark. How many of those folks will come back this holiday when the next game, Battlefield Hardline, launches?
Troedsson says the only thing he can do is be much more vocal with the community and create a great game. He says the studio culture has changed as a result of the last several years of botched launches. He says evidence already exists of that change.
“It’s a cultural thing of how we engage with the community. It’s a hardening experience to launch these kind of games, especially when we have challenges at the launch. The easiest way of going about something like that is becoming more closed off. As a company, as teams, it’s basically a human reaction to something like this. We’ve decided to opt the other way — to open up the kimono and say, ‘You know what? You know why it’s hard to make these games? Because it’s very complicated.’ That’s not an excuse!”
Except that it is an excuse. And Troedsson knows it, because he said, “That’s not an excuse!” before I could point out that customers who pay $60 for a broken product aren’t assuaged when the product maker says, “Making this product is really tough.” It absolutely is complicated making games, especially ones as sprawling as Battlefield 4. That, of course, doesn’t excuse DICE from making a working product.
So, will Battlefield Hardline function when it comes out this year? I truly doubt it, but — for what it’s worth — DICE is introducing a beta earlier than ever. Troedsson called it a “true beta.” Keep in mind that the last several Battlefield games all had beta periods ahead of launch. What’s a “true” beta, then? That remains unclear. It’s not that I didn’t ask, but this is what I was told when I did:
“The Battlefield 4 beta for instance; that was pretty close to the actual launch. That was more for the actual backend system. Because from that perspective, it is a true beta. The actual clients that people are playing on are very near final, but the backend is about doing the beta testing on those kind of systems.”
Regardless, considering Battlefield 4 only just recently started working, why in the world is EA releasing another Battlefield game this year? It’s hard to not see it as a naked cash-in on a franchise being milked for all it’s worth. Troedsson defends EA’s decision.
“We’re shipping another Battlefield game a year after, which some people feel is too close. But there is a commitment here from us that we’re gonna keep taking care of the products much more in a parallel way. People shouldn’t think of this as a serial exercise of dropping games; as soon as one is dropped, the other one dies. Naturally, unless people really scream for it, we perhaps won’t continue building a lot of paid DLC for BF4 after Hardline comes out, but will we still take care of the experience? Absolutely. If new problems occur, will we take care of them? Absolutely.”
Here’s the thing: Troedsson’s missing the whole point. It’s not just that fans who bought the past several games feel burned because they worry the game they bought will stop receiving support. The issue is that EA is asking them for money hardly a year after selling them a broken product. And the new product looks an awful lot like the broken one from last year.
Troedsson and I spoke for almost 20 minutes about mostly this. I’ve included the full audio below, which longtime Battlefield fans may be interested to hear. Troedsson is sympathetic to the plight of spurned fans, no doubt, and it’s worth hearing his tone. Though I might not agree with all his answers, he’s at least trying. Check it out for yourself below.
An interview with DICE head Karl Magnus Troedsson
Getting sweaty with the future of Sony’s virtual reality
The private room, elevated above the crazed throngs of E3 attendees, was dark and oppressively stuffy. Inside, Conan O’Brien lay on a beanbag in front of Sony’s newest virtual reality demo for its Project Morpheus headset: Street Luge. And he was surrounded by two Nintendo booth babes — an awkward collision of rival gaming worlds that wasn’t lost on Sony PR. Conan was finishing up a shoot for a spoof segment on Morpheus and I had to wait for the celebrity fanfare to stop.
I mention Conan not to drop a bold-faced name, but because his interest and involvement in Sony’s Project Morpheus at E3 represents a visible tipping point for VR. The technology is about to go mainstream; it’s very nearly ready for prime time. Soon, non-gamers will be donning VR helmets and exploring simulated worlds. It’s the reason why Facebook purchased Oculus VR for $2 billion and also why movie studios are currently in talks with Sony to create VR experiences. A cultural shift is coming and Sony wants to be right out in front riding that wave. It just won’t be doing that in 2014.
“We’re still just at this point able to say it’s not this year,” said Richard Marks, Sony’s senior director of research and development. “We don’t have quite the number of experiences that we feel would be a good value for people to buy some special hardware for it.” That may be true, but it’s not for a lack of effort on Sony’s part. Marks said that a number of studios, both third-party and internal, are hard at work on titles or demos for Morpheus. So far, though, Sony’s only opted to show demos — the aforementioned Street Luge simulator and Castle — created by its London Studio since “they’ve been working with [Morpheus] the most.”
For E3, Sony made slight tweaks to the Castle demo it debuted alongside Morpheus at the Game Developers Conference earlier this year. Anton Mikhailov, one of the principle engineers working on Morpheus, said slight improvements to the graphics, like antialiasing, were made, along with the inclusion of a new weapon: the mace. Castle is by far the most comfortable Morpheus experience to demo as there’s not much movement required on the player’s part. The experience centers mostly on manipulating and damaging a suit of armor with your hands, a control scheme made possible by a pair of the PlayStation’s Move controllers. It’s impressive stuff, especially when a dragon pops in to tower over and terrify you. I may have even let out a small squeal in excitement when it happened.
But it was Street Luge, Sony’s new racing sim, that really drove home the physical effects Morpheus can have on players. I was sweaty and slightly nauseous when the demo had come to end; an aftereffect I found to be partly thrilling and partly alarming. But first, let me explain how I got to that point.
“We don’t have quite the number of experiences that we feel would be a good value for people to buy some special hardware for it.”
To play Street Luge, I lay down on the very same beanbag that Conan had nestled into earlier and strapped on Morpheus. Steering controls were handled only by the left and right movements of my head and nothing more. I couldn’t stop or slow my luge as it plummeted down a road through winding cliffs and tunnels and straight into oncoming traffic. And all of it was fine, really, thanks to improvements made to Morpheus’ tracking. The speed was brisk enough so that I could admire the fleeting scenery, but not quite fast enough to make me want to break contact with the virtual world. That is, until I hit a steep downhill drop that caused my stomach to lurch and that indescribable butterfly nausea to creep into my chest. It was exactly as exhilarating as plunging down an actual hill in a car or on a roller coaster, except this was VR; this wasn’t real. But as Mikhailov pointed out, it was definitely done on purpose.
Mikhailov elaborated on that particular element of the demo, saying that its inclusion and the resulting discomfort was intentional. The Morpheus team is using these E3 demos as a sort of real-world lab and the press and general public attendees as guinea pigs. Mikhailov’s aware that this kind of visceral experience could diminish over repeated playtime, especially as gamers become acclimated to VR. But what he’s most interested in is whether or not gamers want that nervous sensation to stick around with each playthrough. Does VR become less real when we can no longer physically feel it? That’s the question Mikhailov is seeking to answer with Street Luge — the question of standards. It’s something Sony plans to address not only as a cooperative effort with other VR firms, but also for its own Morpheus gaming platform.
Street Luge doesn’t require any physical controller, just the headset and PlayStation Camera. Which makes it the exact type of VR experience Sony wants to lead with when it eventually launches a consumer model of Morpheus. As Marks explained, “Actually, Street Luge is great because you just put [the headset] on and there’s no controller or anything … I don’t think it’ll be that complicated for those first experiences. But then when you really want to get fully immersed and do things with the controller, Move or two Moves — that probably won’t be the first thing you try. But Street Luge is actually a great one to be first.”
The speed was brisk enough so that I could admire the fleeting scenery, but not quite fast enough to make me want to break contact with the virtual world. That is, until I hit a steep downhill drop that caused my stomach to lurch.
The Morpheus of today likely won’t resemble the Morpheus that launches at retail. Marks said Sony’s consumer electronics division is working to refine its design and form factor for better ergonomics and weight. It’ll even ship with “very short headphones” packed in the box, although Sony wants gamers to have the option to use the headset of their choice. But one thing that’s sure to remain consistent from now until the release of the first consumer model is its wired connection. “Wireless is challenging,” Marks said. “There’s a lot of data. All of the visual data that’s being transmitted to the displays — sending that wirelessly is challenging. It’s something we’re looking at, but it’s a very tricky engineering problem.”
As for hands-free gesture input, Marks said that it’s something his team is “looking at for the long-term future,” but that teaching a gesture language presents problems for ease of use. But there’s also another issue holding up development on that end: the PlayStation Camera. “It has the ability to create a depth map and then analyze the depth map,” he said, adding that, “It’s tricky to do that at the same time as you’re tracking the colored lights because we have specialized exposure settings and things in the camera to match the lights. And so then the rest of the image gets a little bit dark.” Because of that, the Move controllers are Sony’s preferable input choice.
Right now, there’s no magic bullet for Morpheus or VR in general. “No one’s really found the killer genre yet,” said Jeff Stafford, Sony’s other lead engineer working on Morpheus. “It’s too early. There’s not enough development yet.” To that end, Stafford explained that Sony is encouraging developers to “go crazy and explore all different things” and not restricting dev time to any particular genre.
One genre that Sony is actively avoiding for Morpheus game development, though, is the first-person shooter. Stafford elaborated: “Everyone assumes the most natural genre is the first-person shooter. Actually, we find that first-person shooter, because of the TV screen and the way that they’ve evolved; you’re running around at very unnatural speeds — that’s not so great for VR.”
“No one’s really found the killer genre yet. It’s too early. There’s not enough development yet.”
Genres for VR may, mostly, be wide open for studios to experiment with, but that also goes hand in hand with the amount of time gamers spend immersed in VR. None of the current Morpheus demos extend beyond five minutes, but that’s not because Sony thinks extended sessions are harmful to gamers. In fact, Stafford, who spends countless hours hooked up to Morpheus each day, said that he “could see people playing in VR for maybe two hours” at a time, realistically.
Though Sony acknowledges Morpheus will eventually branch out beyond gaming, for now its efforts are focused squarely on the PlayStation 4. Marks said this is because the PS4 is a known quantity for developers and consumers, and also because of its rapidly growing install base. “We have a known box, which has very known graphical capabilities … We have known controllers … So that’s our focus; to have this really known experience that we can share with people. And it could be shared across all those millions of PlayStation 4s.”
Sony also has one other focus for Morpheus, or whatever it ends up calling the headset when it’s released, and that’s on approachability and ease of use. It’s the key to making VR a mainstream product and a profit driver for the company. As Marks explained, Sony’s vision for the consumer model is simple: “[You] just basically hook it up, plug it in, put it on and you’re able to get into VR. We really want to make it this an easy experience for people.”
PlayStation at E3 2014: an interview with Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida
Sony Computer Entertainment’s Shuhei Yoshida wants his company’s new game-streaming service, PlayStation Now, to be the Netflix of gaming. When it launches later this summer, it won’t be. In fact, it’s launching in open beta. “We have to walk before we run,” Yoshida told us in an interview this week at E3, the game industry’s big annual show in Los Angeles. He sees the service as a long-term plan, part of Sony’s ongoing initiative to bring PlayStation games to many devices. And that plan is just kicking off.
Beyond taking our questions, we also asked you fine folks for your questions. Yoshida, gregarious as ever, took the time to answer each; you’ll find that video below.
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