Originally published on Trevor Trove on March 1, 2016
This morning, PlayStation announced the key features of their upcoming major update. And while there’s still no PSN Name Changes, I figured I’d dedicate today’s post to looking at each item 3.50 will include. It’s a very nice update for multiplayer fans but even as a single player person, I can appreciate what these features hold in store.
Friend Online Notification
Want to know the moment your friends come online? With this update, you can, as we’ve added an option to be notified when members of your friends list sign on the network.
For the multiplayer-friendly among us, this is a great way to easily catch when friends are online and available to play. This will presumably make it pretty easy to grab somebody as they hop online and get them to join your party/session. As for single-players, I’m sure I’ll smile when I see familiar faces popping into my notifications.
Appear Offline
Sometimes you want to play a game or watch a movie without being bothered by friends. Now it’s easier to go incognito as we’ve added the option to appear offline. You can designate if you would like to appear offline when you log-in or at any time from your Profile or the Quick Menu.
The update most directly benefitting introverts like myself, being able to easily hide your online status is great for those of us that just like some alone time or who really want to just play some embarassing games without being ridiculed. Or maybe you want to let your girlfriend’s mom play something while she’s in town staying with you…
User Scheduled Event
Time for a play date! We’ve added the ability to schedule a future gameplay session with your friends on the system. When your event starts, users who registered for the event will automatically be added to a party so you can start playing right away.
The rare time I have played online, it wound up being a bit of an ordeal to put together. Scheduling play sessions with my sister when were a few states apart wound up being a bit of a headache. So I appreciate the idea of being able to set up these types of scheduled events with the system doing some of the heavy lifting.
Play Together
This features allows all members of a Party to see what each person is playing so that you can easily join a friend’s game, or start a new game together.
Admittedly, I didn’t even think about people in a Party playing different games. I just automatically assumed they’re all playing together. But if I want to play my PS2 classic and shoot the shit with my friends while they play Destiny and Rocket League, the Party chat allows for that. So it makes sense that you could also easily jump into somebody else’s game or bring them into yours through that functionality as well.
Remote Play (PC/Mac)
We’re bringing PS4 Remote Play to Windows PC and Mac. This feature won’t be available to test in the beta, but you can look forward to it soon.
“With Remote Play, every PlayStation 4 game is a Vita, PC, or Mac game.” I know Xbox released similar functionality on the Xbox One too but I am curious what kind of audience this supports. Maybe people who travel a lot and don’t want to take their PlayStation 4 and gaming laptop?
Dailymotion
With this update, you’ll be able to live stream directly to Dailymotion on PS4. We’ll also support archiving live broadcasts, like we do for other streaming services.
I don’t know that I knew what Dailymotion was before reading about this update. I guess this functionality is good to have in case YouTube, Twitch, and Ustream are all down?
So by and large, this whole update appears like it was designed to support Streamers, fueling the theory that the landscape is changing and it’s in PlayStation’s best interest to maximize the use of that Share button and get people talking together about the games that their enjoying on the system.