Yoshida on PS4
MANY gamers of the current console generation will probably be familiar with Shuhei Yoshida, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios.
Yoshida has been the face of the PlayStation 4 since producing and appearing in a number of videos on YouTube when the console was launched, most notably in a very short but hilarious video ( youtu. be/ kWSIFh8ICaA) taking a dig at Microsoft’s Xbox One limits on sharing game discs. ( This limitation has since been fixed.)
We managed to catch the very busy Yoshida at Tokyo Game Show 2015 to talk about his plans for the PS4 console and its games.
Probably the biggest surprise at E3 ( Electronic Entertainment Expo) held in the United States this year was the announcement that The Last Guardian was finally going to be released in 2016.
The game, which now has been in development for eight years by Team Ico, was assumed to have been quietly cancelled before the surprise announcement.
He said porting the game over to the PS4 from the PS3 has allowed for better artificial intelligence for non- playable characters, as well as faster response times, better effects and improved draw distance.
According to Yoshida, the game as it stands right now is already in a “really good state” with a large number of fully playable levels and with all the basic systems already completed.
Virtual reality is the current buzzword in the gaming industry and this year Sony’s Project Morpheus morphed into PlayStation VR, the official name for the company’s upcoming virtual reality headset for the PS4.
Historically, success of new gaming hardware has always depended largely on whether there’s a lot of titles released to support it.
In this regard, Yoshida is optimistic that by the time the PlayStation VR launches next year, there’s going to be a good variety of titles available from the company’s own and third- party developers.
“Game developers are always trying to create something new and innovative to wow people and it’s so easy using VR tech, it’s almost unfair,” said Yoshida with a laugh.
Almost all the Japanese publishers are on board and working on a title for the PlayStation VR, and gamers can look froward to VR versions of Final Fantasy, Dangan Rompa and Hatsune Miku.
Yoshida has also been actively encouraging small developers to produce a game for the PlayStation VR.
The most interesting launch title for the PlayStation VR headset has to be Rigs from Guerrilla Games Cambridge.
The game puts players in mechs and pits them in a three- versusthree battle in an arena. Players have a choice of six mechs ( or Rigs) to pilot, each with its own strengths and abilities.
The aim of the game is to destroy your opponents and collect the orbs they drop – once you have enough you can jump into a “goal”.
While it is primarily a multiplayer game, Mark Green, senior producer of Guerrilla Games Cambridge, says that there will be
One of the strategies Sony adopted for the PS4 is that every game that’s released as a physical copy will also be out as a digital version on the PSN ( PlayStation Network).
In terms of sales, Yoshida said digital versions are selling more and more every month even though they have yet to catch up with physical copies.
“It’s amazing how quickly digital is catching up – there’s a huge jump going from the PS3 era to the PS4,” he said.
The actual ratio of digital to physical sales is dependent on the title. a single- player campaign as well.
It wasn’t an easy game to get into, as we had to wrap our heads around the fact that the view is controlled by moving the headset but the body of the mech ( and the direction it’s moving) with the DualShock 4 controller.
According to Green, there are other control options as well, which will allow you to make your body follow the orientation of your headset but we didn’t get to test it.
More problematic for some of us was that the fast movement coupled with the in- your- face display caused some to get a bit of motion sickness.
Maybe that’s why each game only runs for about five minutes.