The E3 revelations have started, and more information is finally available about the upcoming next-gen consoles. It’s still early yet, but on a purely published spec basis, the PS3 will be a bit ahead of the Xbox 360.
But, of course, there’s always more to it than that.
Really, the specs of the systems are so close together that there isn’t really going to be a clear advantage of one over the other. The PS3 is slightly better in that it’ll be able to do 1080p on HDTV sets…for those five people out there who’ll be able to afford such sets. :-P The PS3 should be able to push more polys overall, but we’re approaching the point where that means smaller and smaller differences in the fine details. Otherwise though, if you were given a random screenshot, you’ll probably be hard-pressed to tell whether it’s the Xbox 360 or PS3 version.
One area that has become a significant difference between them though is in online play. The Xbox pushed hard on that and the X360 is expanding it even further, whereas it was an afterthought barely supported in a small handful of games on the PS2. GT4 is great, but hearing about things like Forza’s ability to set up racing clubs, compete against friends online, see rankings among your friends, find competitors, etc., all through Xbox Live, makes you feel like you’re missing out on something. Unfortunately there aren’t many details about the PS3’s online features yet. Hopefully they’re just holding back on that information and not ignoring that area again.
Backwards compatibility is also being touted as a major factor. The PS3 will be compatible all the way back to the PS1, but I already have a PS2 so that doesn’t really matter much to me, other than the convenience of not having to hook up and switch between two systems. The Xbox 360 is also claiming backwards compatibility; I haven’t picked up an Xbox yet since there aren’t enough titles I’m interested in to justify it, but getting an Xbox 360 would be more tempting if it has enough decent titles of its own *and* lets me go back and play those older titles. Unfortunately they also say it’ll be limited backwards compatibility with the major titles only, not all games, so it depends on exactly which ones they pick.
What will really matter though, is what games will be available on each of them. So far the information is limited though, so we can really only project based on how it broke down on the PS2 and Xbox. The PS2 was the better platform for RPGs, my preferred genre, and that should continue on the PS3. But then again, the Xbox team recently acquired one of the major Final Fantasy team members, and will have the Morrowind sequel, Oblivion, around launch time. But that doesn’t guarantee a steady future supply of RPGs either, and Oblivion will probably come out for the PC too…
Driving games are currently strongest on the Xbox now that Forza is out, but there will be a chance for the GT series to catch up, as it has been announced for the PS3. But, that depends on the PS3’s as-yet-unknown online features, and the screenshots so far aren’t very exciting; it looks like the same quality as GT4, just with more cars out at the same time. But it’s early yet, still — they probably just quickly slapped something together for E3 and the big improvements are yet to come.
This is all still largely speculation though, and it’s just too early to say for sure what the game lineup will be like in the long run, and that’ll be the real deciding factor. Whatever one I pick, I probably won’t get it as soon as its released anyway (historically, the first-gen hardware has typically been plagued with problems), so there’ll be time to wait and see.
So who’s going to be the biggest winner? IBM, strangely enough — they’ll be selling PowerPC-based CPU cores to pretty much everyone else, in huge quantities. It must be nice to be able to play both sides of the fence.