Our beta program for PlayStation 4’s next major system software update, version 3.50 (codenamed MUSASHI), kicks off tomorrow. If you signed up for the beta and were selected, keep an eye on your email for instructions on downloading.
Regardless of whether you’re in the beta, we wanted to detail some of the key features we’re adding to PS4 in this update. We’re making it easier to play together with friends and adding the ability to appear offline when you’d rather play solo.
New Social Features
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Other New System Features
- 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.
- 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.
Stay tuned for more details on MUSASHI, including additional key features and its release date.
External hard drive support for game installations would be great. Even with a 2 tb internal drive i am starting to run out of space.
OK, here is going to be the problem with the “Friend Online Notification”: You can have up to 2000 friends now. So, if you have over, say 100+ friends and a lot of them are on/off various times of the day/night, you’re gonna have that notification popup in the corner off and on so much, it might as well be there permanently.
Here’s a suggestion of 2 different ways to handle it…
1) Group your friends by game/category (“IRL Friends”, “Friends from __game__”, “Just chat friends”, etc etc), and you can choose which groups pop up or not.
OR
2) You can designate which friend you want to pop up or not. Have an option pop up in the friends list, so you can click which friend to have “On” for notifications, or which ones to have “Off”. (Both options together would make this function the best of ANYTHING.)
Otherwise, this notification is going to be horrible without the ability to choose WHERE on the screen we want notifications to popup. Because currently, where the notifications normally popup, is HORRIBLE since quite a few games either have their Status Bars or Map there in the upper-left corner of the screen. (that cant be moved in a lot of games).
So yeah, making things a bit less intrusive would be NICE.
You can tailor the notification to be used for specific users. This was mentioned on the PS Europe blog.
It was mentioned on the EU Blog that you will be able to choose which friends you want to see appear online. It should be updated here too.
“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 in on the network. Notifications can be tailored to certain friends.”