The PlayStation 3 Online

First let’s go right ahead and stomach the stinking pile of badness that is PlayStation 2 online. It has to be done. Even Sony must face its demons.

May 2000. Only six months before PS2 launches in the United States. Kazuo Hirai, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sony of America, proclaims, “We want [PS2] to lead the broadband revolution!” He’s doing this because Microsoft is planning to launch with a broadband ready console the following year.

Obviously Sony decided against its broadband revolution. In fact PS2 has barely clung to the coat tails of a revolution so clearly led by Microsoft and Xbox Live. One thing’s for sure, Sony has a lot of ground to cover if it is to match Xbox 360 for what it will deliver out of the box.

At least the hardware is loaded with network capabilities this time around – no confusion over who owns a network adaptor and/or hard drive. Also, the standard will be broadband, no pretending that online gaming via dial-up connection is in any way fun (unless you like big phone bills and stop-animation SFX).

Unfortunately Sony is yet to outline its PS3 online service to rival Xbox Live – let alone Xbox Live for Xbox 360, which is something of an online gaming Utopia.

The existing set up for PlayStation 2 is a minefield of confusion and expense. After registering a username and password with Sony’s ‘Central Station’ you must then register separately to play games made by the various publishers. To play FIFA, for example, you need to create a new profile with EA. It’s up to the various publishers to decide how much they want to charge for their online content – Sony isn’t paying them a bean, so they need to find some way of funding their servers. Speaking of expense, you might need to invest in a PDA of some sort to keep track of all your usernames and passwords.

Deciding on which game to play online, and who with, is also unnecessarily complicated on PS2. Xbox Live allows you to check out who is online, and to see whichever game they’re playing. You can then invite people to join in your game, or wait to join theirs. If you’re not even playing Xbox, you can receive messages via Instant Messenger to let you know what the folks on your Friends List are up to. With Xbox Live on Xbox 360, you can even chat to people while they’re playing something completely different or even listening to music or watching a DVD movie. Currently with PS2, the only way to know if your friend is online is to phone them. Of course you could arrange something formally in advance, but seriously! To be fair, Sony has already demonstrated games being played on PS3 while video-conferencing takes place in a separate window on the same screen, but how this will eventually work with all its games is still uncertain.

The shoddy PlayStation online set up is a mystery. Not just because it’s Sony, who you’d expect to get things right, but because Sony already has helped pioneer the online experience with EverQuest for PC. Developed by Verant, but published through Sony Online Entertainment in 1999, EverQuest was one of the first massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). It paved the way for recent hits City of Heroes and World of Warcraft with its ravishing 3D worlds enticing a thriving community of fans.

Even on PlayStation 2, Sony can point to success. Final Fantasy XI has over half a million active users. Together with SOCOM and a smattering of interest in other third-party titles Sony boasts the largest number of people playing online with PS2 than any other console. Of course this is simple mathematics – 100 million PS2s versus 20 million Xboxes – but number one is number one. As for online GameCube, yeah well...

Sony understands online, and it understands online gamers. With PS3 we absolutely must see this reach fruition as something sensible and compelling.

“Online is part of the DNA of the machine,” says head of European software development Phil Harrison, in an interview with Eurogamer. Another Sony Exec, technology officer Masa Chatani, has described PS3 as “always on, always connected device based on community, communication, commerce and content.”

All well and good, but still nothing definite as to how online services will manifest on the new machine.

Next: Connectivity Of The PlayStation 3