As I guessed in last column, Sony announced their next-generation console this past Wednesday, Feb. 20. And, surprising no one, it’s called the PlayStation 4.

One of the first things they announced, and what I believe is one of the most pivotal, is the simplified architecture used in the PlayStation 4. This generation, developers complained about how difficult it was to program a game for the PlayStation 3 because of the proprietary Cell processor. This made developing games, and especially ports, for the PS3 a much more difficult task than to make the same games for its direct competitor, the Xbox 360. This resulted in some games looking and running significantly better on the Xbox 360. With the simplified architecture announced for the PS4, Sony is looking to remedy that mistake this time around.

Another surprise about the guts of the PS4 is the RAM it’s sporting – namely, 8GB of GDDR5 RAM. This is getting rather technical, but having a lot of RAM, especially of the faster GDDR5 variety, allows the system to display a lot more detailed and varied graphics without getting bogged down. Considering rumours were floating around about both the next Xbox and the PS4 having 4GB, or some rumours even claiming 2GB, the 8GB of exceptionally fast GDDR5 is a blessing for developers. Even OS-related tasks will benefit from this – something Nintendo should have learned with the Wii U and its sluggish user interface.

The controller has also been tweaked. The DualShock 4 (pictured) has all of the same features of its predecessor, along with a touch pad on the front and a coloured light on the back.

What’s the light for? The new PlayStation 4 Eye. Essentially, it’s a higher-resolution version of Microsoft’s Kinect that is able to track the position of even standard controllers, thanks to the DualShock 4’s built-in light. It will also track the original PlayStation Move controller and, of course, the human body.

One rumour making the rounds before the announcement was the possibility of both the PS4 and the next Xbox not playing used games. Fortunately, at least on Sony’s part, this isn’t true. In follow-up interviews after the conference, Sony officials confirmed that consumers would indeed be able to play used games on the PS4, the same as before.

Unfortunately, the PlayStation 4 won’t be able to play as many titles as you might initially expect, given the backwards compatibility of both the PS2 and PS3 (at launch.) Natively, the PS4 will not be able to run PS1, PS2, PS3 or even current-generation PlayStation Network titles. There is a silver lining, though: Sony alluded to the ability to “stream” these games over the internet in the future. What this would amount to is, instead of your PS4 running your games, they would instead be played at a Sony server and the resulting picture would be sent back to your console over the internet, similar to what Netflix does. Unfortunately, this can introduce a lot of delay between when you input a command on your controller and when it’s finally displayed on screen, especially in relatively remote places not likely to be near a Sony server – like Brandon, MB, for instance.

This isn’t the only use for streaming though. The DualShock 4 controller has a button I didn’t previously mention: a “Share” button. At the touch of a button, you can upload a picture or video of a game you just played, or stream live to your friends or the whole world. It’s even possibly to give direct control of your game over to one of your friends; an example Sony gave for a use of this feature was a friend taking over if you were stuck in a section of a game that friend had already beat.

This game-streaming service was also used to tout another goal of the next PlayStation: getting you into your games faster. For instance, say there’s a demo of a game you’re interested in on the store. Instead of downloading gigabytes of data and finally playing it an hour or two later, you can just instantly stream a demo to your console instead.

They also claimed that you’d be able to play your games as you download them. Essentially, it would download all that it needs to get you playing and then download the rest as you’re playing. This is similar to what Blizzard has been doing with their games on PC as of late, though it’s worth noting that the base downloads needed to even start the games are a couple of gigabytes. Whether it will be a similar situation on the PS4 only time will tell.

But what if you didn’t need to wait for a game to download at all because it’s already on your system? This is Sony’s goal with predictive downloading. Similar to TiVo recording shows along your viewing habits, your PS4 will detect a pattern in your purchases and automatically download games you are likely to be interested in. This would allow you to begin playing the full game the second that you purchase the game. If this is implemented, I imagine you will be able to toggle it off, as downloading gigabytes of data without consent would be a deal breaker for those with small download caps from their internet providers.

I know what you’re thinking: what about the games?! Oh, yes, they’ve got those too. They showed demos for sequels from a lot of well-known franchises, including Killzone: Shadow Fall and Infamous: Second Son. There were a host of all-new IPs (intellectual properties) shown as well: a platformer along the lines of Ratchet and Clank called Knack; the first multi-platform game from Bungie (Halo series) in over a decade, Destiny; A new medieval game from Capcom called Deep Down; and my personal favourite, Watch_Dogs, a Ubisoft-published open-world game set in a near-future dystopia where everyone’s information is tracked -- and you have access to all of it.

Whether all of this actually comes to fruition or is just a lot of hot air to garner hype, we won’t really know until the system launches. Fortunately, we won’t have an exceptionally long time to wait; the PlayStation 4 is set to release Holiday 2013.