The Shrine

$350 starting Friday.

Finally picking up one myself. Got a whole bunch of bestbuy gift certificates from using their credit card to buy new appliances for our house.

Why would one want to buy a PS4? Sell me on the idea.

I'll be getting one eventually so I can play Kingdom Hearts 3 and a few other games that are exclusive that I am interested in, like the new Star Ocean game. Right now, I feel no need to have one. Here is hoping there will be another drop between now and when Kingdom Hearts hits ^_^

If you have a capable PC there's really no reason to get a console unless the exclusives seem worth spending several hundred dollars for the console and peripherals. I guess there's the community of being able to sit down and play with your friends. So exclusives and gaming with friends face to face is basically why a PS4 could be nice to have.

But I've never been crazy (well, since I've gotten out of grade school) about gaming with other people and when you do have a console around to do it with it never seems to happen often enough. So unless you have an implied get-together on a regular basis or a significant other that is happy to join you, it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

The problem with most X-Box/Nintendo/Playstation exclusives these days is that they're all basically sequels. You get stuff like (to stick with Sony on this one) Until Dawn and Bloodborne once in a while but if they don't have you already hooked with stuff like Kingdom Hearts then it's just a gamble as to whether you'll like the never-ending sequel fests or the 2-3 new IPs that actually get developed exclusively for the console that year.

Actually it's kind of the same problem with PC gaming, but I'm hooked on them already lol

Shrinweck wrote:If you have a capable PC there's really no reason to get a console unless the exclusives seem worth spending several hundred dollars for the console and peripherals. I guess there's the community of being able to sit down and play with your friends. So exclusives and gaming with friends face to face is basically why a PS4 could be nice to have.

But I've never been crazy (well, since I've gotten out of grade school) about gaming with other people and when you do have a console around to do it with it never seems to happen often enough. So unless you have an implied get-together on a regular basis or a significant other that is happy to join you, it just doesn't seem worth it to me.

The problem with most X-Box/Nintendo/Playstation exclusives these days is that they're all basically sequels. You get stuff like (to stick with Sony on this one) Until Dawn and Bloodborne once in a while but if they don't have you already hooked with stuff like Kingdom Hearts then it's just a gamble as to whether you'll like the never-ending sequel fests or the 2-3 new IPs that actually get developed exclusively for the console that year.

Actually it's kind of the same problem with PC gaming, but I'm hooked on them already lol

Sadly, these days the idea of local multiplayer on consoles is not as strong as it used to be. A lot of games come out that ONLY offer online, not split screen local, because they don't want to have the performance drops that come with split screen.

Well damn.

There's a good chance the whole gaming console landscape will shift drastically over the next two years. Apple TV, NX, and Google Nexus Player.

As far as local multiplayer goes, it's largely 3DS at the moment.

Julius Seeker wrote:
As far as local multiplayer goes, it's largely 3DS at the moment.

Wii U does a lot of it as well still.

ManaMan wrote:Why would one want to buy a PS4? Sell me on the idea.

PC: PC Exclusives, Blizzard games, MMOs, etc, Best looking 3rd party games if you can afford to make a beastly computer. Downsides: Price, DRM everywhere, Hackers in online gaming(Mileage may vary)
PS4: Price, Exclusives, best looking/performing 3rd party games. Downsides: PSN is Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde
Xbox One: Price, Exclusives, Xbox Live. Downsides: Worst looking 3rd parties titles typically perform/look worse across the board vs PC/PS4.
Wii U: Exclusives, Downsides: Everything else, Price considering it's place in the market, Japanese management living in bubble, non-existent 3rd party support, awful online, no online infrastructure or account system, digital content tied to hardware.

If you're going to mention DRM as a downside of the PC you should also mention how ridiculously locked things are this generation :D

It's like you don't even own what you buy except instead of it being the games (like it arguably is on the PC when DRM goes wild) it's the entire machine.

They dealt a blow against piracy (which is hardly the worst thing in the world) but took all of the freedom out of it. MURICA

As locked down as it is, I can still put a disc into any of the 3 consoles and start playing with 99% of releases short of day 1 patches and DLC.

PC gaming has gotten to the point where retail releases you buy in a store don't even include a disc but instead a download voucher and all of them require some kind of client to actually play whether it's Steam, Uplay, Origin, GOG, whatever.

What i failed at getting at is that the firmware/OS in consoles is the exact same thing as GoG/UPlay/Steam/Origin except arguably worse.

Also GoG is a bad example since it's almost always an absence of DRM. GoG Galaxy is (usually) a completely optional thing and is only really essential for something seeing a lot of patching/DLC activity like in Witcher 3. 99% of the time when you buy something from GoG you essentially just get an exe to run and boom your game is installed without even needing a product key. Witcher 2 didn't have anything like Galaxy and it could be a nightmare to patch - Galaxy is a way around that.

Steam also isn't an altogether complete example as DRM because there are quite a few Steam games that don't even GO through Steam (or any where for that matter) to validate that you're running a legit copy.

Uplay is shit but hey so are almost all Ubisoft games in the long run. Origin would be kinda fine if it wasn't EA.

The only actual failures of DRM/always online lately (not counting MMOs) have been Simcity (okay you got me) and the Diablo 3 launch and you can't really call something a con for something so many games do seamlessly or not at all these days.

Also if you do something wrong with Steam/Origin/whatever they don't essentially brick your computer, or at least prohibit it from going online. The great thing with the PC is choice of whose (or sometimes no) DRM you're willing to put up with. With a console you're basically bound to whatever corporation whose whims/ToS you've paid several hundred dollars to go with. I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that PSN/XBL are doing the exact same thing as Steam or whatever only you don't get to see it or make any choices about it. It's all just different flavors of ice cream. Pick whichever one makes you want to gag least, but don't have any illusions that we're all kind of basically eating shit flavored ice cream.

But, yeah, if you like physical media that's a big plus to consoles. I don't miss it a bit, but we just talked about that in that other thread :D

I think I've edited this post 12 times and it was originally just the first sentence lol

I thought you can play most Steam games offline and it won't even complain too much about it, not counting anything that has an online component of course.

Yeah after you've logged into your account it doesn't really care any more.

ManaMan wrote:Why would one want to buy a PS4? Sell me on the idea.

This is the year the last gen gets left behind. Lots of games are only on current gen or get bastardized versions on last gen.

Just as a note, NX dev kits have gone out to third parties. So you might want to hold off for NX before investing in any new consoles in the next few months - they'll likely unveil it by March, and probably in mid to late January; then we can see what it actually is.

As far as Nintendo goes, the Wii U era is past, in my opinion. Nintendo didn't really do anything exciting with Wii U, and I think they knew the situation either shortly before or shortly after release. That's why they were already in next gen prep mode before the end of Wii U year 1 and instead just releasing generation incremental games on Wii U (outside of Xenoblade X), kind of like what they did on GameCube. I'm also making the assumption Zelda is going to be NX.