Game Time ID: PlayStation 4

On Friday when I first got my PlayStation 4 I felt like I had to put something up right away. I rushed it out in excitement of my shiny new console. Now that it's been a few days I feel like I can say a lot more about the system as a whole. I've played many hours of Assassin's Creed 4, Lego Marvel Heroes, Need for Speed Rivals, Resogun, and Warframe. All of them have been quite fun. Since all of these games are either for PC and/or the previous generation of consoles the most interesting part about the system right now is the operating system.

I mentioned in my quick impressions that I liked the UI. I still do to a certain extent, but not as much as before. In an attempt to make everything much more simple the operating system lost a lot of basic functionality. For example, every time you put in a game it's added to a list of recently used applications. They show up in a row as fairly large squares. As far as I can tell there's no way to get rid of any of them, and there's absolutely no way to sort them. Right now it's not that big of a deal. but when there are a bunch of downloadable titles it will be a huge pain to find what you're looking for. At least on the PS3 you could sort things into folders. Hopefully some type of sort option will be patched in at a later date.

It doesn't seem like it will be too hard for Sony to patch things in either, which is nice. One major complaint I had has already been fixed. For some reason games won't patch until the first time you open them. As soon as they boot the patch is pulled, which is kind of dumb since you can't play anything online unless the game is up to date. This means that you have to quit the game to install the patch and then boot back into it. This is still an issue. What Sony did fix however is the fact that there was no way to differentiate between a game and a patch. I downloaded Resogun from the store. That was listed in my downloads as Resogun. Then it tried to patch and the patch was in the downloads also as Resogun. Last night Sony pushed the firmware update 1.51, which now lists patches you've downloaded as game updates. Not a huge change on it's own, but it's good to see that they can change things if they need to.

Friends

The PlayStation 3 will only let you have 100 friends on your list. The PlayStation 4 on the other hand will let you have 2,000. Why you would want to do that I don't know, but you totally can. I only have around 30 friends on my list right now and the list is super annoying, so I can only imagine how it must be for people who have more than that. Friends are split into 2 categories of Online and All. Online obviously shows you everyone who's online and what they're playing. All shows every one of your friends. What sucks is that both lists are in alphabetical order and there's absolutely no way to sort them. In the end it's almost easier to search for the username you're looking for with the new search function. I'm sure they'll patch this in the future to change how all of this is displayed.

When you first log in with your PSN account you'll be asked if you want to integrate it with Facebook. If you choose to, which I did, it pulls your real name and profile picture. I chose not to use my profile picture, because I like my PSN icon of Cody from Street Fighter just fine. It is super weird to see my real name all over everything though. Your friends won't be able to see your real name unless you send them a name request. This doesn't really have any bearing on anything, but it's an interesting feature.

What's cool is that you can see what game your friends are playing and what system they're playing it on. Even if they're playing on Vita you can see what they're playing, which is something that you can't see on the PS3. The same profile features from the PS3 carry over as well, so you can see their brief introduction and what languages they speak. Their level and how many trophies they have are displayed prominently on their profile page and you can easily compare if you want to.

Messaging is a little better now, because you can send voice messages. As you may have heard there is also party chat now. These are both things that the Xbox 360 had, so it's nice that the PS4 is at least on par with that now. I chatted it up with a friend today while playing Need for Speed Rivals. It worked quite well. I used the pack in mic, which sounds a whole lot better than I thought it would. I might be able to get away with using it for a while longer.

Trophies

Trophies are now a staple of the PlayStation, so it's good to see that they're integrated into the system and not tacked on and poorly implemented like on the PS3. Once you log in to PSN all of your trophy data comes right down. On a new PS3 I had to wait 20 minutes or more for my trophies to pull down since I have almost 4,000 now. This makes viewing trophies a much more pleasant experience. Apparently it's not too bad on the Vita either, but I don't have one of those yet.

When I first heard that the trophies still had to sync all the time I got a little worried. It's not nearly as bad as I thought, but it's still kind of annoying. Sure it takes hardly any time at all to sync them up, but there's no reason that I should have to go to my trophies in order for them to do so. Achievements show up automatically on the Xbox, so it's a little weird that people can't see what I've gotten since I last synced my trophies manually. Trophies are supposed to sync automatically like they did with PlayStation Plus on the PS3, but they aren't for me. I'm probably supposed to leave the system in standby mode, but I don't.

There are two new things with trophies that I think are really cool. The first is that if you view a game it separates out the trophies from the main game and each different DLC set. This doesn't really matter, but it's cool to see regardless. What's interesting is that all of my PS3 games are separated out in this way and some even have custom art to go along with the DLC packs. It's weird that these games all have the same treatment, but it's only when being viewed on the PS4.

The other feature is actually super awesome. When you view a trophy list there is a rarity next to each and every trophy, which ranges from common to ultra rare. It takes into account how many people have played the game and have gotten that trophy. It even shows what percentage of that games players got that trophy, which is pretty neat. It adds a little more depth to a system that I care less and less about with each passing day.

Internet/Store

I'm happy to report that the PlayStation store doesn't run like garbage on the PS4. As I mentioned in my quick impressions it's the exact same store as the PS3 had with a lot less on it. As the PS4 gets more games I'm sure they'll do away with the huge advertisement like panels in favor of something that's a little less frustrating to navigate just like on the PS3 store. That part doesn't even really matter though, because the download speeds don't totally suck! I was able to download Resogun which is over a GB in a little under ten minutes. Game patches took hardly any time to download as well.

What sucks is the way the PS4 handles downloads. If you're downloading multiple things at once they don't queue up and instead all download at the same exact time. What's worse is that you can't pause the downloads, or at least there was no option that I could find. It's crazy, because the PS3 both allowed you to pause downloads and it only did one at a time. I guess that's the trade-off for reasonable download speeds.

I'm also happy to report that I'm not having stupid connection issues when playing games online either. With the PS3 I couldn't connect with my friends 90% of the time even though I have a NAT 2 connection. I still have hard times finding matches in any online PS3 game as well. With the PS4 I had absolutely no problem finding games and connecting with other players in Assassin's Creed, Warframe, and Need for Speed Rivals. Maybe this means I won't have to try and mess around with my connection every single time I want to play a game with a friend.

Sharing

In the past few years recording video games with commentary has become a big deal. The same goes for streaming video games out live as they're being played. Both Sony and Microsoft realized this and now the PS4 and Xbox One have built in streaming. I myself have wanted to get into the world of streaming and recording video games, but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. My previous laptop wasn't exactly a powerhouse, so it wouldn't have been able to do it very well.

As of right now I'm very disappointed with the PS4's sharing features. Yes they make it very easy to do things that previously weren't, but it could be a lot better off the bat. Some of the things that aren't included make it feel rushed out, which it probably was. The Xbox One won't have it's streaming until 2014. Perhaps the PS4 should have been the same way.

It is very easy to start up a stream. When you push the share button you get three options, which are upload video clip, upload screenshot, and broadcast gameplay. Hitting boradcast will prompt you  to stream on Twitch or Ustream and then you're pretty much ready to go. The quality is relatively high and you can even show some of the chat at the bottom. What makes me upset about it is that you can't archive broadcasts yet, so everything you do will disappear into the ether. This wasn't even apparent until I looked it up and found out on Twitch itself. Archiving will never be available on Ustream. It's kind of weird that this stuff would be omitted at launch. It's even weirder that they'd never say anything about it. Maybe they did, but if so, I never heard about it.

The ability to take an in game screenshot is cool too, but the resolution is so low it's not really worth it. Even then you can only upload it to Twitter or share it on Facebook. Hopefully in the future you can upload the images to Flickr or even Instagram. You know, an image hosting site.

Gameplay videos are also interesting in theory, but right now I have no interest in making them. The system will always record up to 15 minutes of your gameplay, so if you see something awesome you can hit record and grab it. This is good if you're just trying to show off a glitch or a cool sequence of gameplay. What's really lame is that it doesn't pick up any microphone inputs so I can't even talk over videos of my gameplay. If I wanted to do that it would be the most convoluted process ever. First I'd have to upload the video to Facebook, then I'd have to find a way to rip the video from Facebook. Following that I'd have to record my voice and re-encode the video. Finally I would have to re-upload it for everyone to hear. I don't really want to go through all that so I'm just going to wait until archiving is available.

This feature has so much potential and I was looking forward to it so much. That's the reason why I sound so angry about the whole thing. You can't even upload videos to YouTube! What kind of video sharing service can't upload to YouTube! These are all things that I'm sure will be fixed in the future, but right now it's just frustrating.

The Newest Black Box

I don't really like the way the PlayStation 4 itself is shaped. Sure it's flat so I can set things on top of it, but why couldn't it have just been a literal box. Instead it's slanted in the front and back. The slanted front is fine, but the back makes it hard to find where you need to jam all of your cables. Also for some reason the top left of the console is made of that stupid glossy plastic that gets super dirty. I don't get why companies insist on putting that stuff on devices that people are going to touch a lot. With time I'm sure I'll get used to it, but as of right now I like the look of the PS3 a whole lot more. Specifically the slim. The original fat PS3 was a beast, and the new cheap PS3 looks like garbage.

The buttons on the front kind of bother me as well. They're both super tiny and at first I didn't even realize they were buttons at all. Above the disc slot is a super thin power button and below it there's a super thin eject button. They're barely recognizable as buttons unless you're looking for them. The good thing is that theoretically you'd only need to use the power button the first time you turn on the console. After that you could use the controller to turn the system on and off and eject the discs from the system level menu.

While the box itself hasn't impressed me all that much outside of it's internal hardware I've absolutely fallen in love with the DualShock 4. Yes, it looks like a weird version of the DualShock 3, but it's so much more. Almost everything about it is better with the exception of the d-pad. As of right now it seems like the D-pad is worse, because it doesn't give me any feedback on my movement. It barely moves at all. I'll need a fighting game to qualify that statement though. Overall though the whole thing is incredibly comfortable. It has grips on the bottom of both sides and the analog sticks have an indentation to rest your thumbs. The triggers feel excellent compared to the awful ones that were on the Dualshock 3. Perhaps now shooters will use the same controls on both the Xbox and PlayStation.

It's odd to have a touch pad in the center of the controller. It might not be as weird when games utilize it more though. In Assassin's Creed you can use it to navigate the map, but it works super poorly. There's no way to know where your finger is on the pad, so I kept sliding off of it. On top of that the movement speed and accuracy were both much worse than if I was using a controller. That's just a product of the game itself though, so hopefully in the future games will put it to better use.

Greatness is Here

Upon re-reading this post I sound very angry about the PS4, which was not my intent. I'm just being overly critical, because this is a new console generation. When it can't do some of the basic things a PS3 can, or things that were promised it's more than a little frustrating. The sleep mode feature they talked up so much isn't in the system yet, but that's one of the first things they announced. Yes, most of the things I have issues with will be fixed, but that time isn't here yet.

The PlayStation 4 as a gaming machine is excellent. I can put games in, they play, and they look excellent. I can't wait until games like InFamous come out in March so I can see the system at its full power.

The next generation of gaming is finally here and it's very exciting. It's just going to take it a while to get off the ground. With the Xbox One launching this coming Friday I hope it lights a fire under Sony's ass. With any luck we'll be seeing many firmware updates in the months ahead.

March will probably be when these systems finally take off and show us what they can really do. The Xbox One will be getting Titanfall. Both systems will be seeing Destiny in that time frame, and the PS4 will be touting InFamous Second Son. Those are the first true next gen games and I'm super excited to play them.

     -Manny