It'll be a scant two-ish months until the PlayStation Vita launches in Japan. Sony Computer Entertainment may've had a pretty decent Vita splash at the Tokyo Game Show, but there's a lot left to be done between now and December 17 -- something that both SCE Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida and SCE Japan president Hiroshi Kawano know too well. Famitsu magazine published long interviews with both execs in this month's issue -- some of the highlights follow below:
- The Vita's launch lineup is planned to encompass 26 titles in Japan, by far the biggest launch library of any Sony console. "The real surprise to me is that it's been a very short time between when software makers committed and when they had a playable game on their hands," Yoshida said. "That's something we never could have seen on previous PlayStation platforms. The prototypes all get palpably better in the two or three-month intervals they show them to us, so the speed is just amazing. I don't think anyone in Sony could have predicted that we'd have a 26 game launch library, but it goes to show that our work on the PS Vita's development environment has paid off."
- Not that there's nothing at all due out post-launch. "Worldwide Studios has shown off a pretty wide range of titles at the Tokyo Game Show and elsewhere, but there are others that we haven't yet due to lack of space and other reasons," emphasized Yoshida. "The titles we're launching wish are only a part of the entire lineup we have -- there are others that are well underway, and our plan is to have a pretty good pace going through the new year and beyond."
Kawano went into more exact numbers in his interview: "We'll have 26 titles day-one and we already have more than 70 titles beyond on the horizon. There's a lot of variety and depth to the lineup, and there's a lot we haven't announced yet."
- Kawano and Yoshida both took pains to point out that the Vita, perhaps more than any Sony system previous, was designed from the ground up for developers in mind. "To be honest, the design of the system has changed between the initial announcement on January 27 and the final version you saw at the TGS," he recalled. "The response we got from the game creators we showed it to was something we took very seriously, and after a fair amount of debate, the design team made the changes. The developer response was really positive -- more surprise, than anything, that we actually changed things. The PS Vita you see today is the combination of SCE's original concept and those people's opinions. We stated at the press conference that the system is like 'a challenge to creators,' but we're really serious about that."
- Sony spent a lot of time at that TGS conference talking about things like AR and online connectivity, but Yoshida also wanted to discuss the Vita's camera, something that's been largely overlooked by most. "The camera's been tuned to make AR as easy to use as possible," he said. "To work well with AR, the camera needs to have a fast shutter speed -- in other words, the ability to make each image clear and distinct. Otherwise things in motion will come out all blurry and AR just won't work. We also endeavored to make it as sensitive as possible in order to work well in darker places. The resolution is set at the minimum necessary to reduce the burden that image processing requires. The result is a high-spec device that runs at 120 frames per second."
- The keynote also featured Killzone 3 being beamed from a PS3 to the Vita thanks to the new Remote Play function. Yoshida admitted that, despite the fact Remote Play works with Wi-Fi only, the TGS demo was being played on a wired connection: "TGS has a massive amount of wireless connections being passed around, so we connected that up with a cable, but in real life, you can play it at the exact same speed [on wireless]."
Where could Remote Play -- which many observers thought was Sony beating the WiiU at its own game -- go in the future? "Technically speaking, there are two ways you can use the PS Vita as a PS3 controller," Yoshida said. "One way is like with Remote Play, sending the PS3's output to the Vita. The other is to run an application on the Vita that synchronizes with the PS3 somehow. Either approach is possible, so you can go with whatever works with the game you're playing. You can use all the Vita's processing powers and send the results to the PS3, or you can use the Vita as a subdisplay for the PS3 as a sort of bonus."
- Japanese gamers think shortages and long lines are what await them December 17, but Kawano isn't so sure. " I think we'll be okay," he said when asked about Vita launch shipments. "We only announced the date once we were sure we could launch with at least the bare minimum of shipments we felt we needed."
As for negative opinions? "I think we're going to have opinions like that," Kawano replied, "but I don't there are people who simply hate PlayStation from the start. The criticism we get is an expression of the hope that it gets better, after all. We might not be able to answer every request, but we do look at them and think over them. That's why we want as much response as we can get. I think SCE is going to be a really touch place to be over the next three months. I'll probably be running around so much, I'll be ready to fall over by the end. But what we're launching here is a platform that'll be a major turning point for the game industry. That's why we're all trying our best, to help get this industry energized."
Source: http://www.1up.com/news/vita-post-tgs-postmortem
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