All the news from Sony's PlayStation 4 event at E3 2013

During its keynote presentation last night, Sony bet big on the upcoming game Destiny. The highly-anticipated title will be available to PlayStation 4 owners in a limited-window alpha this weekend, and a beta is coming next month. For the game's full release, however, Sony is putting together a special bundle package that will feature the game, a white PlayStation 4, and a matching controller.

Sony has both on display here at E3, along with a pair of white branded headphones. Simply put, it's a stunning combination, proving that the PS4's design chops don't need to be cloaked in black to score a win against the Xbox One. The PlayStation 4 Destiny bundle will be available on September 9th.

Before yesterday's E3 keynotes from Sony and Microsoft, opinion was split on the very different paths each company is taking. Some found the PlayStation 4 the more appealing proposal on paper — a more powerful, developer-friendly box that seemed to have been created with gamers' best interests in mind. Others, however, were more impressed with the Xbox One's expansive entertainment options and Microsoft's audacious plan to take over the living room. Now that both companies have played their hands at the biggest gaming show of the year, where do they stand?

If a quick poll around the Verge newsroom is any indication, things are looking up for Sony. The PlayStation 4, while perhaps a more conventional product, appears to beat the Xbox One in just about every area that counts.

Sony’s E3 press conference started a full six hours after Microsoft’s ended, plenty of time for everyone to digest the Xbox One’s $499 pricetag, glut of AAA games, and sparse utilization of Kinect and SmartGlass. Now Sony gets the last word, a chance to explain why the PlayStation 4 won’t repeat the mistakes of the PlayStation 3, a chance to explain why this time it has figured it out. It’s a full on console war from here on out, and this was Sony’s best chance to prove it can win it.

Of course, first it had to show what the PlayStation 4 actually is. At Sony’s initial PS4 announcement in February, the games, capabilities, and controllers for the system were heavily emphasized, but we didn’t see the box itself.

Several months after it was first revealed, we now know what Sony's PlayStation 4 looks like, and surprise: it's a black box. While we still haven't gotten to see the PlayStation 4 in action, we've gotten a quick look at both it and the DualShock 4, Sony's new controller. Where the new PlayStation is hard and blocky, the controller has gotten softer, with rounded sides and a matte black finish.

Microsoft had its say this morning and the company had a laser-sharp focus: games. Sony just responded at its own E3 press conference, and along with the long-awaited reveal of the PlayStation 4 hardware the company had a few other things up its sleeve. Join Polygon's Justin McElroy and The Verge's Bryan Bishop as they talk about the latest news — along with a few special guests!

One key differentiator in this newest iteration of the console wars has been Sony’s commitment to backward compatibility with the PlayStation 4. At Sony's announcement event in February, we learned that it would be using recent acquisition Gaikai’s streaming technology to make it all happen, and today at E3 we’re getting a small handful of additional details about how legacy PlayStation titles will be delivered to Sony’s newest hardware.

Firstly, the service won't be available immediately at launch, but rather sometime in 2014. When Sony does release it, first in the US, it's going to give PS4 and PS3 owners access to a limited library of PS3 games, before adding streaming functionality to the Vita sometime down the road. Also, the service is headed to the US first, before rolling out internationally, and Sony expects it to "evolve rapidly over the coming months," although what that means is anyone's guess.

Sony has revealed that the PlayStation 4 will be priced at $399. The console, which at launch will cost $100 less than Microsoft's Xbox One, will ship this holiday season in the United States and Europe — Sony stopped short of specifying an exact date (or month).

Sony says a second DualShock 4 controller will sell for $59, as will the PlayStation Camera — the new name for the PlayStation 4 Eye peripheral announced in February. The camera will not be included inside the basic PlayStation 4 package, whereas Microsoft will bundle a Kinect sensor with every Xbox One.

Playing online multiplayer games on PlayStation 4 will apparently require a PlayStation Plus membership, Sony said today during its E3 liveblog. A slide shown during the presentation said "immersive multiplayer online" was a feature of PlayStation Plus. Single-player games will not require Plus, nor will accessing streaming services like Netflix, Sony said in a tweet:

Sony's big PlayStation 4 event at E3 2013 is nearly wrapped up at this point, but it just brought developer Bungie out to show off the first gameplay footage for Destiny, it's upcoming first-person, sci-fi epic. The developer first announced Destiny back at Sony's first PS4 event in February, and more recently it showed off a live-action trailer, but this is the first actual in-game footage we've seen such far. It's a pretty impressive demo that shows off a clever feature — a "ghost" that follows the player around, kind of like The Monitor from Halo or Wheatley from Portal 2. While it's hard to be too objective after nearly 90 straight minutes of gameplay demos, we think it's safe to say this is one of the more interesting games we've seen on display thus far. According to a slide at the end of the gameplay demo, Destiny will be out for Sony's consoles in 2014, and Sony mentioned that it has established a "long-time exclusive partnership" with Bungie and Activision, thought it's not yet clear what that partnership will yield.

Sony has announced that its upcoming PlayStation 4 console will not impose restrictions on used games, nor will it require an online connection. Speaking at the company's E3 keynote, SCEA president and CEO Jack Tretton took pointed swipes at rival Microsoft, which will require Xbox One users to connect to the internet once every 24 hours, and is allowing publishers to block access to used games.

"PlayStation 4 won't impose any new restrictions on used games. This is a good thing," said Tretton, to huge applause from the audience in attendance. "When a gamer buys a PS4 disc, they have the rights to that copy of the game." Tretton added that disc-based games "won't stop working if you haven't authenticated within 24 hours."

At its pre-E3 press conference today, Sony unveiled some of the first titles that will be coming to the PlayStation 4, including Final Fantasy XV, Kingdom Hearts 3, The Order: 1886, and Transistor. The Order: 1886 is a steampunk action game from developer Ready at Dawn, a studio best known for its work on the PSP entries in the God of War franchise. Set in an alternate history Victorian-era London, the game is the studio's first original IP. No release date has been revealed. Supergiant Games was also on hand to show off Transistor, which will be debuting on the PS4 sometime next year. We managed to play the cyberpunk action RPG at GDC, and came away very impressed.

Square Enix announced a pair of titles at the event. Disney fans will be happy to learn that Kingdom Hearts 3 is currently in development for the platform, while the long-in-development Final Fantasy Versus XIII was rebranded as Final Fantasy XV. Both games are coming to the PS4, though neither appears to be exclusive. Also on display was a Mad Max game developed by Avalanche Studios, the developer behind the over-the-top Just Cause series. Mad Max is coming to the PS4, but it's unclear if it will be available on other platforms as well. Perhaps the biggest reveal at the event was for Bungie's wildly anticipated shooter Destiny: at Sony's event we were able to see the game in action for the very first time.

During its PlayStation 4 event at E3, Sony announced that it's joining the herd of original programming creation, but didn't offer any details about what kind of content gamers can expect to see on the platform. Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lyton said that Sony Pictures is working on an original programming plan for the console — which will be available on the PS4 through the PlayStation Network — and that whatever content it makes will be "tailored specifically for gamers."

Sony may have downplayed everything but pure gaming in the lead up to its E3 press conference, but the company appears to be on the same track as Microsoft, which is rumored to also be working on original Xbox programming.

After a controversial no-show at the PlayStation 4's February event, Sony has finally revealed the console's hardware design. The PS4 has an understated, angular form with matte and glossy black finishes on different sections of the body. As with the PlayStation 2 and Playstation 3, the console can be used in both horizontal and vertical orientations.

Sony announced most of the PS4's technical specifications earlier in the year. On the inside, the PS4 is powered by an AMD chip combining eight Jaguar cores with a Radeon graphics processor. The system has 8GB of fast GDDR5 RAM, a 6x Blu-ray drive, and a built-in 500GB hard drive for storage.

Next week is going to be crazy, from start to finish. On Monday, Apple's hosting its annual Worldwide Developers Conference where the company will announce a new version of iOS featuring a much-anticipated visual overhaul by Jony Ive, as well as a new version of OS X. At literally the same time, Microsoft will be holding its Xbox One press conference at E3, where we'll presumably hear a lot about upcoming games for the new console. A few hours later, Sony's PlayStation E3 keynote will kick off, where we'll hopefully get our first actual look at the PS4 — and find out how Sony intends to compete against Microsoft's ambitious living room plans.

And that's just Monday.

Sony has teased the hardware design for its upcoming PlayStation 4 for the first time, after a February reveal that kept the device completely under wraps and left fans guessing about how Sony's next-generation console would look. In a new video, shown below, the company teases the PS4's hardware with a blurry black rectangle and flashes of design details.

The timing of the tease is no surprise, with Microsoft set to reveal its own next-generation Xbox tomorrow at its campus in Redmond, Washington.

The PlayStation 4 is coming, and gamers around the world have gotten their first look at titles they'll be playing on Sony's new console when it hits retail shelves. The first title showed off was Knack (below), developed by Sony's in-house Japan Studio. Clearly a showcase of the console's horsepower, a brief demo featured hundreds of objects whizzed around the game's main character with nary a hiccup. In terms of visual style, the game takes on an animated movie-like appearance. Knack was also used to demonstrate Remote Play on the PlayStation Vita, and again the game looked spectacular when beamed over to Sony's portable device.

Sony has announced the DualShock 4, a new controller with a touchpad and headphone jack. The controller will come with a dedicated share button and a light bar that identifies players or changes color during play, and it essentially looks like a sleeker version of the classic DualShock. The light bar, which rotates between three different colors, can actually be used to provide feedback during gameplay — to notify a player if their health is running low, for example.