PlayStation 4’s Reveal

Last Thursday, like a meteor crashing from out of the sky, Sony unexpectedly revealed that it would discuss the future of PlayStation at an event in New York City on February 20. Since then, we’ve been given very few answers and are instead left with about a million questions. What will the hardware look like? How about the controller? What kind of games will we see? How big will the jump from this generation to the next generation be? The inquiries – frustratingly without answers accompanying them – are many.

We’ve already heard a great deal – at least in rumor form – about what we may be able to expect from PlayStation 4 itself. Word emerged late in January that PS4’s dev kits are powerhouses. Then, a flood of rumors came down the pipe following Sony’s announcement of the February 20th date, detailing everything from the PS4’s release window to the nature of its social functionality. But again, everything is speculative, even on our PlayStation 4 wiki, where scant an actual fact is to be found.

Consider this: Sony owns 12 studios, and we only know what fewer than half of them are up to. We know that Naughty Dog is working on The Last of Us, Sony Santa Monica is working on God of War: Ascension, Studio Japan is working on Puppeteer (and Rain), Media Molecule is working on Tearaway and Guerrilla Cambridge is working on Killzone: Mercenary. That may seem like we actually know a lot, but let’s put things into context: all of those studios, save perhaps Guerilla Cambridge, are more than big enough to juggle multiple titles (for instance, Naughty Dog has split into two teams). And you can bet your bottom dollar that they are.

And then there are the seven other studios that Sony owns that have been dormant, some for years. We haven’t heard from Sucker Punch since Infamous: Festival of Blood was released. Evolution has been quiet since it launched MotorStorm RC (and even then, a tiny game like that likely didn’t require its entire team). Sony Bend helped put out an Uncharted card game on Vita that another studio mostly developed, and haven’t put out a full game since Uncharted: Golden Abyss.

Sony London, on the other hand, often juggles a lot of projects, with Wonderbook the only game of consequence it has launched recently. Guerrilla Games launched Killzone 3 two years ago with scant a word out of them since. Polyphony Digital has been supporting Gran Turismo 5 with scattered DLC, but it hasn’t released a new game in over two years. And Sony San Diego, best known for its baseball series The Show, may be working on something special as well, with more assets at their disposal than simply their core baseball-centric team.

We just don’t know what these guys are working on, but something tells me we will soon enough.

So here’s what I expect we could see (and won’t see), at least in terms of software, from Sony’s first party studios at the New York City event on February 20. With The Last of Us and God of War: Ascension still in the pipeline, it’s unlikely we’ll see anything from Naughty Dog and Sony Santa Monica, if only to avoid unnecessary crossover and confusion. While something like a new Uncharted or God of War reveal would be huge for the future (and are basically inevitable at some point), those studios haven’t even put out the games they’re prepping for the here-and-now. With God of War, specifically, it would be strange to reveal another game in the franchise before the one we know about is on store shelves.

source:ign