E3 Sony: Exclusives, Now

Sony were the next of the big three to take the stage. Last year, Sony’s conference was a roaring success; a two hour “fuck you” to Microsoft. Rumour has it they initially planned to implement the same restrictive DRM with the PS4 but changed all this after the Xbox One backlash. Whether this change happened a few weeks before E3 or in the few hours between Microsoft’s and Sony’s conferences, we’ll never know. Either way Sony came on top after last year offering, at the time, the only console where games could be traded and sold at will. Unfortunately, Sony are also famous for often producing rather dry and stat filled conferences and this year was no different. We got to find out how many hours on PS4s have been logged so far, how many times people have pushed the “Share” button and how many times people have spectated other players. This stuff surely interests the shareholders but doesn’t do much for regular gamers.

A lot of third party multiplatform stuff was shown, essentially everything not shown in Microsoft’s conference. There were demos and trailers for Destiny, Batman Arkham Knight, Far Cry 4, Battlefield Hardline and Metal Gear Solid 5 amongst others. A lot of this had already been shown elsewhere either at EA or Ubisoft’s conferences or, in the case of Battlefield and MGS5, leaked on the internet a few days before. A personal favourite amongst the third party bunch was No Mans Sky, a very big game from a very small UK developer. Currently announced for PS4 and PC No Mans Sky drops the player on a procedurally generated in planet in an infinite procedurally generated universe. In the demo shown the player roamed through a tropical world full of dinosaur like life forms. He then jumped into a space ship and, completely seamlessly flew into space. From here he shot a few asteroids and then flew over to the next nearest planet. Again completely seamlessly and without loading screens he flew down to the surface of this new planet. A brief montage showed the huge diversity that these worlds will have from jungle planets to water planets to the obligatory lava planets. It’s still not clear what you’ll actually do in this game beyond fly around and occasionally shoot stuff but the scope is just astounding.

We were, of course, also treated to some PS4 exclusives aiming to provide more reasons why you should pick up a PS4 instead of an Xbox One. The Order 1886, a third person supernatural shooter was shown. Like a lot of what I’d seen so far it was hard to tell what was game and what was not. The game itself looked decent enough but the werewolf looked downright stupid. LittleBigPlanet 3 was also announced and demoed for the very first time and it looked a lot like LittleBigPlanet. There’s now a selection of new cloth based characters to play along with Sackboy each with their own set of abilities. It looks like there’s a lot more emphasis on co-op with the players having to work together to get through the various obstacles the levels present. This is sure to offer up a lot of interesting level design possibilities. This demo also honoured the age old tradition of getting people who are downright awful at video games to play this game in front of a live audience. Presumably these people were the developers who invented the darn thing but they really struggled to even just jump from ledge to ledge and it was at times painful to watch. There was also a brief trailer for Bloodborne, previously known as Project Beast the newest game by From Software. These are the guys that make the bitterly difficult Dark Souls series. Again, no gameplay but the PS4 snagging exclusivity here is a big win.

Unlike the Microsoft conference there was a brief departure from games for a while to discuss a few other fancy developments. This mostly revolved around Playstation Now, a new streaming service that allows you to stream old Playstation games to your PS4 over the cloud. Currently this will be limited to PS3 games but in the future this will extend to both PS2 and PS1 classics. Even more interesting is this service will be coming to some Sony televisions. Pricing and stream plans weren’t discussed but potentially if you own a Sony TV you could have access to nearly 20 years of Playstation gaming and all you’ll need to buy is a Dualshock controller. If you don’t own a Sony TV you can purchase a new device simply entitled Playstation TV for only $99 to gain access to the service. A major caveat so far though is all of this will only be available in the US for the foreseeable future; it may be a while before this crosses the Atlantic.

Unfortunately after these intriguing announcements the conference took a serious nose dive. By this point it had gone 3am UK time so admittedly I was very, very tired and Sony struggled to pique my interest with their next gaming announcements. Of course I’m well aware that HD remasters of games are very popular these days and I own a fair few myself but they spent far too long discussing the imminent rereleases of The Last of Us and GTA V on the PS4. These are both absolutely fantastic games (especially TLOU) but they amount to little more than a sheen of gloss and a fancy new box and did not warrant 20 minutes of conference time. At last Mays disastrous Xbox One reveal a large amount of time was spent talking about television. Netflix, iPlayer, original TV shows all provided through Xbox. It was an announcement that was met with something between derision and ennui but it seems that Sony did not get the message. The last 20 -30 minutes of their conference were dedicated to detailing the original television that will soon be provided through PS4. Sure we got to see Marvel comics giant Brian Bendis discuss the TV adaptation of his comic Powers and we got to see a trailer for the Rachet and Clank movie which I’m sure everyone has been dying to see for years….but in reality it was just not an exciting way to wind down an E3 conference. Sony tried to win everyone back with the reveal of Uncharted 4, a game everyone already knew was happening with a trailer that showed essentially nothing but the full title of the game, A Thief’s End.

I’m definitely being overly critical and think it’s best to reiterate that the first half of this conference was pretty darn good. I personally believe Sony still have a lead in terms of exclusivity especially with Bloodborne. Also it’s worth pointing out that most of the big games shown off by Sony and Microsoft won’t be hitting store shelves until 2015 at the earliest. E3 is normally a way of gauging how the big companies will do in the holiday season but so far….. it’s anyone’s guess who will come out on top.