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PS3 Home delayed to fall at least, probably longer
cloudeagle
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Sorry I can't find the original Home thread, but I figured this would be newsworthy. Home is the long-delayed PS3 social network that would combine avatars, 3D meeting places, earnable trophies (kind of like the 360's achievements), casual games, etc. And it's been delayed again. From Engadget:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/22/playstation-home-beta-adding-more-users-this-fall-in-other-wo/
Also according to Engadget, Sony's plan as of last March was to have a closed beta, then an open beta of 50,000. If this plan is still in place and the more open part of the beta isn't till fall, the general public might not get a crack at this until next year.
Yeesh. At this point this thing better be awesome, or folks just flat aren't going to care.
After hitting delays already, we can't say that this was the PlayStation Home press release we've been expecting. Nevertheless, Sony just announced that it is expanding the closed PlayStation Home beta to more users in "Fall 2008." Kazuo Hirai, prez and ringmaster of Sony Computer Entertainment, said, "We understand that we are asking PS3 and prospective PS3 users to wait a bit longer, but we have come to the conclusion that we need more time to refine the service." Come on Mr Hirai, you can say it, PlayStation Home is delayed. See, that's wasn't so hard.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/22/playstation-home-beta-adding-more-users-this-fall-in-other-wo/
Also according to Engadget, Sony's plan as of last March was to have a closed beta, then an open beta of 50,000. If this plan is still in place and the more open part of the beta isn't till fall, the general public might not get a crack at this until next year.
Yeesh. At this point this thing better be awesome, or folks just flat aren't going to care.
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In game XMB please Sony.
But if in-game XMB still comes out this summer, it's more than all right.
Sony seems to think we all want some streamlined, perfect Second Life experience.
What I could use on my PS3 is what the Xbox 360 already offers: achievements, universal voice chat, and access to the XMB bar while in-game.
Have there been any online games for the PS3 that lacked voice chat that really needed it? The only online game I've played that didn't have it was Rock Band, and I don't feel like it suffered at all.
As for Achievements, the PS3 has them, they're just optional. I kinda prefer it that way. When devs are forced to do Achievements, you can end up with some pretty uninspired, by-the-numbers Achievements. In those instances, I'd rather not have them at all.
I think all games should do it like Uncharted. Fuck gamerscore. I want them to unlock cool stuff in the game.
Do we have an ETA for rumble-enabled Dualshock 3 in Europe yet?
They're actually recalling all unsold Sixaxis controllers from retailers in the US and Japan, and sending them to Europe. You guys get the Dual Shock 3 after those are all sold.
Of course, even after you guys go through all that stock, the DS3 will be delayed for 6 more months because they missed one of the languages when printing the "Safety Precautions" pamphlet.
:^:
This is where the 10 year lifespan comes into plan I guess, since it is going to take a couple before we get the "real" PS3.
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It is indicative how often this happens that at this point I am neither surprised or infuriated. All my rage at getting fucked over for living in Europe was spent after the Rock Band thing.
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Recently stores have started working (with free items, of course). I just purchased a house on lake with a big fireplace in the middle. I think it will be interesting if the in game achievements really do become items that be be placed around your house. Get a fancy couch for beating Resistance 2, or something like that. I plan on filling a room with pointless trophies; id it's cool it could get me to play multiplatform titles on the PS3 instead of on the 360 just for the points.
The game room is pretty lame; bowling, pool and no name arcade games.
There was a theatre for trailers and shorts, but I did not check it out last time I logged on, so I do not know if it has changed.
It probably means that PS3-centric features which might have made the game "better" (especially as a multiplayer-focused title) such as unified friends / messaging / invite / party system will have to now run through a game-specific environment, and not a general-purpose PS3 XMB or something. How and if those features could be re-introduced at a later point to tie in with the eventual launch of Home etc is anyone's guess.
Sometimes I Stream Games: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/italax-plays-video-games
Anyway, does anyone have a clue whether these delays are more caused by technical problems or by Sony feeling that Home isn't that compelling without added features?
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Probably both. I think at this point, after all the delays, Sony are worried about releasing this thing with it being almost perfect to what they planned for it.
Sometimes I Stream Games: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/italax-plays-video-games
It seems like a lot of frills and not alot of functionality. Maybe they don't think they can compete with Xbox live directly so they are doing the whole "Hey look over here, SHINY".
Hey, I have a blog! (Actually being updated again!)
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I'd also like to add that Microsoft ought to consider putting in a party-chat, Ventrillo/TeamSpeak style private chat feature into XBL.
I thought you could already to this.
Not have to quit a game in order to see messages from friends, view friend requests, check out your music, etc. Basically being able to anything you can do with the XMB just from within the game.
You can do private chat, but it's only 1 on 1.
Could you? I would love to know how if there is.
Right now, all you can do is chat if you are playing the same game. But sometimes, we aren't, but we still want to chat. You see, I play games with two of my friends and, often times, we like to just chat if we happen to be playing different games. From what I've seen, you can only do one-on-one, which means that one person is ostensibly left out. As you can imagine, that sucks ass. So while my friends might be playing, say, Final Fantasy XI and blissfully lol'ing it up, I'm sitting here alone making cheeky remarks to myself about the goal I just scored in Pro Evolution 2008. To alleviate this, we've actually resorted on multiple occassions to firing up our PS3s, loading voice chat, and playing on our 360s but as you can imagine this is a bit of a pain in the ass.
Edit: I'm sure this wouldn't be difficult for Microsoft to accomplish either, for that matter. I highly doubt a petitition would work as those things are useless. Maybe, if I'm not the only guy who wants this, we could get in contact with Major Nelson? He's kind of an important guy in the community.... or maybe I should just try to get all my friends to play the same game that isn't FFXI (which, by the way, doesn't have voice chat anyways so we'd be fubar'd regardless in that respect).
Oh don't worry, that's already a well-known feature request by the team. In fact, just the other day, I was complaining about this with my friend who works in Xbox LIVE. (I love nagging him to add feature X, Y, and Z. Then again, he does the same back to me, heh) As you can expect, neither he or I can divulge whether or not such features are actually coming soon. There's a lot of stuff going on these days, but rest assured that such feature asks are known amongst the right people.
Anyway, I have a theory as to why the in-game XMB continues to be delayed/fubared. As you may know, MS and Sony request a small percentage of the CPU/memory to be available to platform components, such as the in-game HUD. In Microsoft's case, they made damn sure that the amount they requested was enough to do what they needed for basic in-game community features. I'm not sure that Sony did the same, unfortunately.
I'm guessing that Sony continues to find a solution that doesn't suck for gamers. It probably means squeezing every last bit of performance out of the in-game XMB ... but that's much easier said than done. Personally, I agree that this is much more important than Home. But I believe Sony actually has different teams working on each.
What does that mean? Well, while Sony can request that new games only allocate Y% much CPU/memory instead of X% ... that's not easily fixed for older games. It can cause all sorts of odd backwards compatibility issues if you force in-game XMB features across them. The alternative is to have in-game XMB only work on newer games, but that's really crappy. I'm not convinced that patching older games is easily done, or even possible.
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Doesn't the long delay on both of these projects lend credence to the idea the the PS3 is a pain to program for? It would be like if even Nintendo's Wii game looked like half ass PS2 ports.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
We get it on 9/5 so I assume you guys will get it around then too.
Anyway, I'm not terribly surprised by the Home delay. Their plans were pretty ambitious and development sounds like it's going pretty slowly.
JCRooks: Uh, the PS3 initially had a SPE and 50MB of RAM dedicated to the OS. In fact, it seems like Sony has actually been too conservative, since they've unlocked another 5-10MBs of RAM since then (which is why Criterion are adding custom soundtracks to the PS3 version of Burnout Paradise).
The problem with in-game XMB probably comes from the fact that it wasn't designed to be accessed in-game.
My theory is similar but different. I don't think the problem is SONY didn't allocate enough ram/cpu to the OS because they have reduced the OS memory footprint already in one of the firmware releases. (Why would they reduce the memory used if it wasn't enough?) I think its actually because MS abstracted the hardware a bit more than SONY did. MS has very good libraries for its system and the games are all written to that. Where as SONY has crappy libraries and comparison and lets the game creators have much more direct access to the hardware. I suspect its this "closer" to the metal access that is causing problems. If the game has direct control of your sound card trying to have the OS use it for voice chat might be problematic. Kind of like linux when you aren't using a high level sound daemon (like arts, esd etc). Most cards don't have hardware mixing built in so only one program can playback sound at one time if you are using ALSA or OSS (low level sound systems on linux). Windows users don't notice this because all their sound goes through the windows middlewear which has a software based mixer.
I bet this is a similar situation on the ps3 especially since coding for it is supposed to be very similar to linux. SONY provided too much low level access to the hardware. While this is good in the sense that game programmers can really push the hardware to do some neat tricks in a few years its bad for adding OS/outside functionality.
I think this really comes down to the company's background. SONY is used to makeing electronics, but doesn't know crap about operating systems and programing. And MS is a software OS company but isn't experienced in designing complicated hardware *cough*RROD*cough*. (keyboards and mice don't count they are easy as shit, and they copied most of they manufacturing from Logitech)
Let me tell you about Demon's Souls....
Hmm, the SPE is news to me. I had heard there was a "spare" SPE in the system that I thought Sony could use, but I was informed that it's actually just a backup for quality purposes. Developers can't assume that the spare SPE is even usable.
If it's true that there's a whole SPE available just for the OS, that changes things. But I find it very hard to believe that 1/6th of the system is dedicated to the OS. That's a lot to budget.
Your theories are very interesting and hold quite a bit of merit. And I completely agree with your last statement. At MS, everything is very developer focused (and arguably too much at times). The result is that most developers (at least Western ones) love working with the platform. I've been to many post-mortems where they say many nice things about the GDK, the tools, the developer support, etc. that MS provides. And not so nice things when it comes to the competition (well, specifically Sony). (And FYI, they don't pull punches either ... they also take the time to complain about certain aspects of the system as well, so it's not like they're 100% positive)
I do think Sony is getting better. They have to. Same with MS. (In fact, where I am, I'm surrounded by MS Surface machines, those are huge, hulking beasts of electronics)
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Reported from where? I've never heard that ever.
I've just checked and you can't pre-order it anywhere, no mention of it on any retailer websites, and the forthcoming GTAIV bundle comes with a plain old Sixaxis. So...
How the fuck do we even manage to get shafted by a standard peripheral release?
I've heard that rumor as well. From a cultural standpoint, that makes some sense. But even if that's the case now, it's surely changing, with online become more and more prevalent throughout the rest of the world. Both Sony and Nintendo need to adapt, lest they get left behind. Arguably, though, we're still very much in the early days of online gaming, as recent studies have shown ... so there's still plenty of time to catch up (no more friend codes please!).
- Don't add me, I'm at/near the friend limit
Steam: JC_Rooks
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JiunweiC
I work on this: http://www.xbox.com