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As the PS4's second ceremony draws closer, Sony is working hard on the tertiary major iteration on its BSD-based operating system. With improved cloud storage, amend social features, and the improver of YouTube live streaming, this update won't be revolutionary, just hopefully it'll make the twenty-four hours-to-solar day operation of the PS4 significantly less of a hassle.

Last October, Sony released firmware ii.0 to the world. It brought Share Play, music playback, and themes to the popular game console. Dorsum in March of this year, firmware ii.5 gave united states of america higher quality Remote Play streams and the ability to suspend/resume gameplay at will. Firmware 3.0, dubbed "Kenshin," is set to deliver a similar level of improvement this fourth dimension around.

PS4 Online Storage

By far, the biggest impact hither is how Sony will exist handling cloud saves for PlayStation Plus subscribers. Instead of the measly 1GB of cloud storage space we've been stuck with, 10GB is the new standard. Considering that my save data for Dragon Historic period: Inquisition alone is 300MB, this is a godsend. As it stands, I striking the 1GB cap on the regular, and I'm forced to manually delete items if I desire to upload a new salvage file. Even improve, firmware 3.0 will offer better tools for monitoring how much cloud storage you're using, and altering which titles will try to automatically upload new saves.

Now that Google is taking the gaming market seriously, Sony is adding in the ability to live stream to YouTube from your PS4. Of course, you'll still be able to stream to Ustream and Twitch, and then diehards of those services won't be negatively impacted. While this is certainly a smart move, I'd also like to come across Sony add support for smaller platforms like Hitbox.

Historically, Sony hasn't had a particularly stiff grip on the social aspects of online gaming. With Kenshin, the PlayStation team is attempting to address some of the more frustrating elements of communicating and playing online. "Favorite groups" will offer easy access to your favorite PSN friends, and then yous won't have to curl through your entire friends list to find them. If you're in need of new online friends to play with, the new "communities" characteristic will help yous connect with new people. And if you can't be bothered to communicate with your phonation, or even the written give-and-take, you'll at present be able to ship stickers back and forth.

Firmware 3.0 has a few other overnice touches, but they're relatively minor. Yous'll be able to send up to ten seconds of gameplay footage directly to Twitter, and you tin can now badger your friends to start live streaming with the new "request to watch" feature. The "what's new" and "live from Playstation" features are getting a fresh coat of paint, but there's nothing hither to go excited near — only some quality of life improvements here and there.

The closed beta began before this calendar week, but Sony has remained silent regarding the public release date. However, it's safe to assume that we'll run into this update hit later on this yr unless the beta testers find a catastrophic showstopper.