Things started off slowly with Phil Harrison speaking of the business angle of their products explaining the whole "Beyond the Box" philosophy that he outlined, which meant the interdependency of the Hardware, Software, and the Audience. In typical Sony fashion various slides were shown detailing the dominance their console sales have had for the past couple of years with the PlayStation's 12 year life cycle and achieving over 100 million in sales. Next David Jaffe was brought on stage to present the God of War 2 video and to explain their decision as to why they decided to keep the series on the PlayStation 2; unfortunately the PS3 is incapable of rendering an orgy.
Moving right along Phil spoke about the PSP and the newly lowered price of the Tool kit which was set at $5,000. He also touched on the new OS features that will be in the next update including Video/Audio over IP chat, an imbedded flash player within the browser, RSS feed support, and a GPS receiver. The PSP will also work in tandem with the PS3 to work as a sort of media server. Afterwards a Loco Roco trailer was briefly shown and that concluded the PSP's section of the conference. The conference quickly moved into high gear and Phil switched over to the PS3. The quintessential PlayStation duck demo was shown only this time in an underwater scene with hundreds of fish with procedural/behavioral animation swimming about.
He then reaffirmed a few PS3 details such as full Backwards Compatibility (if TRC), Full Blu-Ray Disc support, support for all display resolutions and HDMI. Again the Global Launch was touched upon although the date has been moved up to early November with a million unit production schedule per month. 16 companies were included in the Tools/Middleware of the system with the highlights being Unreal Engine 3, Ageia, and Havok Complete XS 3.3. In June these software tools will be finalized. By E3 the Cell, RSX, Blu-Ray Drive, and controller will be finished and shown.
Another tech demo was shown and co-developed with Ninja Theory which had a thousand characters reacting to complex rag doll physics. The graphics were all PS2-caliber with nice post processing effects such as depth of field.
The next demo was a demonstration of a yet unannounced vehicular game that involves complex destruction of cars. The demonstration demonstrated how detailed physics can be when applied to objects, which in this case was shooting a car.
Phil then moved on to more slides showcasing the optimum scenario of the 100:1 ratio of media capacity to system ram, of course this was done to place the Xbox 360 in last place behind most other consoles. He then presented how the large capacity format of BD can help developers achieve a Global SKU where they can have all the translated speech, video, and text on one BD.
The Getaway demo was shown yet again showing the importance of a large format since the single area of the demonstration was several hundred MB. The highlight of the conference began with the Warhawk demonstration. GDC essentially confirmed that everything game related Sony showed at E3 was purely rendered footage and was no indication of the final product.
Warhawk, while looking great, was essentially a barren section of ocean with a lot of fighter ships (they were aiming for a hundred for the final game) going around destroying larger vessels and some nice looking water (wave simulation with procedural animation) and clouds (volumetric raytracing). Overall it was a great demo but a far cry of what was shown last year and gave a nice sobering introduction to the rest of the demos which was shown towards the end. Fortunately it will be playable at E3.
Afterwards Phil decided to speak about what has been known as the PlayStation Hub. The internal name is PlayStation Network Platform which essentially completely imitates Xbox Live in virtually every way and launches with the system. They highlight their "open-internet" philosophy with the network and spoke largely about user made content and downloadable software/media. If you're familiar with Xbox Live then you know exactly what Sony will be doing. The one interesting feature is that they mentioned that games could be run off the HDD which works in tandem to their goal of providing a network retail channel.
The final production environment for the PlayStation Network Platform will be available in September, barely marking it before launch.
Next up was Motorstorm and just like Warhawk was no where near the E3 target render. The car models and physics were decent although the texturing and the environment was PS2 level of quality. The real star of the demonstration was the deformable terrain which worked quite well with the physics of the cars. The demo also had HDR, post processing effects, and occlusion.
The next game was Resistance, the title formally known as I-8. Out of all the games this one was the farthest along but unfortunately the least interesting. It was your standard FPS affair with highly linear levels, decent A.I. and moderately interesting weapons. The lighting/texturing/modeling was all decent but nothing groundbreaking.
The next title from Insomniac was a bit more interesting and also confirmed that the Ratchet & Clank series is moving to the PS3 in fine form. The demo was a large and vast city environment similar to R&C with a massive amount of cars on screen and some great depth of field.
Unfortunately that was the last of the PS3 demos and Phil moved on to their "Wheel of Fortune" which was a chart about all the options companies have to sell their products. It was comprised of: packaged games, network sales, episodic content, in-game advertising (Socom was used as an example), subscriptions, mobile gaming, game object sales, and merchandising. With the keynote wrapping up Phil touched upon the e-Distribution initiative that all SCE studios will be undergoing.
Finally the Singstar series of games were shown and that ended the keynote.
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