It sounds interesting, there are a few novel features that it sounds like Sony has added that MS doesn't include, but the author also mentioned features saying that XBL didn't have even though they do, like having multiple profiles on the system at once, as well as the whole "Master" and "associate" type profiles, they have them but they don't have names and hardly anyone uses them so you never really hear about it.
I'm not sure how I fell about the wallet thing, showing real money is kind of cool but points have the benifit of being an international standard... so I can post about it here without worrying if someone in Canada, or Austrailia are interpreting it different.
800 points is 800 points wheither your in the US, europe, japan or mars.
On the one hand real money takes away innitial confusion of having to learn a new metric, but on the other hand it's another degree of separate from a true global community. Again I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. What I did like about the wallet was that you could setup allownaces, I'm curious if you could setup an allowance for yourself. I wouldn't mind giving myself $15 a month to spend in the marketplace to keep me from spending too much. Also during the dead summer periods it would build up so I could splurge come fall and not take a hit in my REAL wallet.
I think one thing people need to realize is that while it does offere all these features, aparently you have to exit your game to use them... so it's really more like Xbox 1's Xbox Live
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Again, those familiar with Xbox Live on the Xbox 360 won't find this terribly surprising, but it's worth noting that the system does show you friend sign-ins and new messages received in overlays on top of the game you're currently playing - just little notification windows which pop up to tell you about something happening with your friends list. At present, however, there's no system for actually reading or responding to messages while you're still in the game, as the operating system doesn't take resources away from games in order to do that - however, according to Harrison, that functionality may well appear in an OS update, presumably based on whether users actually express a desire for it or not.
That is incredibly LAME.
I think this has a lot of POTENTIAL.. it could become as great as XBL on the 360 but I don't see it happening until at least 6 months down the road. The reason I believe that is this:
If you remember when MS launched XBL on the Xbox 1 they had an extensive beta testing period, they didn't even launch the service at the same time as the console such that they could work the bugs out of each individually.
If you launch an international online service attempting to compete feature for feature with an existing well established and evolved system, I honestly don't know how you'd do it without a massive public beta test. Couple that with the fact that it's essentially launching simultaneously with the console, which I'm sure will have problems of it's own... They're just lining themselves up for massive rapid fire headaches, I'm not so much worried about Sony as the consumers/gamers who might be left sitting on their hands waiting for the bugs to get worked out of the ointment at every level.
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As for the online gaming part, I'm still skeptical, I'm sure it will be free, the real question is:
Does Sony provide the online gaming part of the service or does the publisher/developer?
This question is VERY important because if it is being left up to the developer/publisher then chances are you wont see it being supported much more then it was on the PS2, game makers don't want to front the cost of running servers unless they think it will allow them to sell enough extra units to make up the costs.
Your EA's and Ubisofts will still probably offer games online as they're large enough that running their own servers is a necessity, but smaller developers, or developers who normally don't delve into online gaming probably wont be interested or wont have the means to add that functionality to their game. Not to mention the quality of the online service would be a crap-shoot as to how good that particular server is.
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Topic: Preview Of Sony's Online Network (Read 671 times)