Sony pulls back the curtain on the PlayStation 4 Pro and new slim PS4.
The ‘PlayStation Meeting’ was a tepid and often bizarre presentation with Andrew House looking downtrodden and Mark Cerny purring like a Bond villain unveiling a dastardly plan to destroy the world.
As its name suggests the meeting was more like something you’d find in your Outlook calendar than the global launch of a new mass-market entertainment device. It was a far cry from Sony’s joyous E3 press conference and at times resembled a spot on QVC as the benefits of HDR were recited repeatedly. Even new footage from Mass Effect Andromeda failed to stir the crowd from their slumber.
As for the announcements, the new slim PS4 we’ve seen and sure enough it’s now the standard-issue PlayStation 4 console. It will be released on 15th September priced $299 in North America and £259 in the UK.
The PlayStation 4 Pro will be released on 10th November, priced $399 and £349. Today’s presentation was light on detail but at first glance the Pro’s specs are pretty much as predicted with 4K support, a boosted clock rate, plus improvements to the GPU and CPU. It also gets a boost in storage with a 1TB hard drive.
[youtube url=”https://youtu.be/11XjMplfTd4?t=48m55s” autoplay=”no”]As expected, the increased power of the PS4 Pro will also bring performance and graphical improvements to PSVR titles. This was demonstrated by some slightly better looking rocks in the dreary virtual reality FPS, Farpoint. Wowzers.
And under the non-ironic moniker of ‘Forward Compatibility’ a number of existing games – including Shadow of Mordor and Infamous Second Son – will be patched to take advantage of the PS4 Pro’s increased power.
Although the PS4 Pro remains an exciting prospect this unveiling had all the energy of a snail’s funeral cortège. It didn’t help that by its very nature it was almost impossible to see any of the Pro’s graphical prowess via the meeting’s stream, like trying to advertise a 4K flatscreen TV to people watching on an old CRT. But we are still excited, just about.
We’ll see you at Best Buy to check out a demo unit.
