As expected, today’s big Sony event focused solely on one thing: the newly announced PlayStation 4. The presentation clocked in at two hours and covered a wide variety of subjects, although many of the key details — a specific release date, a price, plans for its online service — were nowhere to be found. What we do know is the system will indeed be known as the PS4, its rumored controller is the real deal, it’s coming this holiday, and its games look very pretty — although it’s debatable whether the games we saw showed the kind of innovation you’d hope to find on a next-generation console.
When it came to the games shown, what was and was not real gameplay footage was not always clear. Some things were clearly labeled as tech demos. We got a glimpse of the Unreal 4 Engine demo shown previously, as well as Agni’s Philosophy, the impressive-looking demonstration of Square Enix’s next-generation engine first seen at last year’s E3. In the case of the latter, there was no doubting it looks tremendous. However beautiful it is, though, there’s no denying the demo loses its luster when accounting for the fact that the same footage made the rounds last year. Word of a new Final Fantasy being in development did provide an opportunity for Square Enix’s presence on stage to have some real significance, but forcing us to weight for E3 to learn anything about it was a cruel tease for series fans who were hoping to hear about the status of Versus XIII.
