Get the most out of your PlayStation 4 by exploiting all of its great new features and best-kept secrets
ORDER YOUR PS4 AROUND
People don’t realise that you can control your PS4 using voice commands. We’re sure a lot of you are regularly playing games with a headset, in which case you’re already set up to start using them. Ensure ‘Operate PS4 With Voice’ is enabled in your system settings, say “PlayStation” to make your PS4 listen, and then you can order it about to make navigation swifter by ordering it to take you to your Library, the Home screen, PES 2016, or whatever else you fancy.
TAKE YOUR SAVES ANYWHERE
Cloud saves have always been great in theory – you’ve always got an online backup, and you can easily get to your save when you’re playing elsewhere. It’s just become a lot more practical, though, now that the storage limit has been upped from 1GB to 10GB. You can enable auto cloud saving in Application Saved Data Management in the Settings menu, provided you’ve got PS Plus.
DOWNLOAD ON THE GO
The PlayStation app is useful to have installed on your phone. You can arrange a game session with your friends though messages while out and about, for example, or buy a game in the store and have your PS4 download it ready for when you arrive back home.
IMPROVE YOUR SCREENSHOTS
In the PS4’s 3.0 update, Sony added the ability to take higher quality PNG screenshots. To switch from the default JPEG format, go to the Share screen, select ‘Share Settings’, ‘Screenshot Settings’ and then ‘Image Format’.
SORT YOUR CONNECTION
Are you using wireless internet when you’ve got a perfectly good wired option available to you? Why? Get it sorted and connect your PS4 up to your router directly with an Ethernet cable if you can – you’ll generally get faster download speeds and less lag while playing online.
JOIN A COMMUNITY
The PS4’s new Communities feature allows you to connect with other players who share the same interests. Anyone can set up a group based around a game, a genre, or whatever else you want. Once you’re in a Community, you can jump into Community parties, share screenshots and chat on the Community’s wall.
PICK YOUR FAVOURITES
Since the 3.0 update, you’ve been able to ‘favourite’ groups of players. This is really useful if you’ve got a crew of friends you normally play a particular game with. You can have a favourite Destiny group, for example, which just makes organising your play time a whole lot easier.
TYPE MORE QUICKLY
You can use both motion control and the touch pad to type on your PS4. That might seem a bit pointless at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s typically faster than typing with the D-pad, saving you time when typing out messages to friends or trying to get a quick quip out during a Rocket League match.
SORT OUT YOUR SOUND
A good sound setup can make all the difference, particularly when you’re playing online. A surround sound system or a good headset will allow you to hear what direction footsteps are coming from in an FPS, for example, ensuring your foes don’t get the drop on you.
PLAY YOUR PS4 REMOTELY
If you’ve got a Vita, you’ve got to give Remote Play a try. If you’re doing it for the first time, you’ll need to add your Vita as a device on the PS4. Once you’ve done that, you can just use the PS4 Link app on the Vita to connect to your PS4. That means you can play PS4 games on your Vita while someone else is using the TV.
CONTROL WHO KNOWS WHAT
You can control your privacy settings from PlayStation ‘Network/Account Settings’ in the PS4’s Settings menu. This is useful if you want to hide the fact that you are getting some easy Trophies from Hannah Montana: The Movie from your friends.
CUSTOMISE YOUR HEADSET
Do you have Sony’s 2.0 Pulse headset? Then you need to download the app that goes with it. While you can fiddle about creating your own EQ settings with the app, the best thing about it is the option to grab preset sound modes tailor-made for specific games like The Last Of Us and Destiny.
MAKE YOUR PS4 HAL 9000
If you’ve got a PS4 camera, head to your login setting and enable face recognition. Once you’ve calibrated the PS4 to recognise your face, you’ll be logged into the PS4 whenever you turn it on. It’s useful if you’ve got a lot of profiles, but more importantly, makes you feel like you’re in the future.
RECORD YOUR OWN VIDEOS
By default, the PS4 has HDCP enabled, which prevents you from using capture kits to record your own video straight to a computer. Fortunately, you can easily turn it off. Go into the PS4’s settings, select ‘System’ and then untick ‘Enable HDCP’.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF DOWNTIME
Head into your PS4’s setting, select ‘Power Saving Settings’ and then ‘Set Functions Available In Rest Mode’. From there, you can set up your PS4 to download updates, charge your controller via USB or suspend games so you can skip load times next time you boot up your PS4 from Rest mode.
BACK UP YOUR PS4
Having your PS4 break is bad enough, but losing all the data saved on it makes it even worse. That’s why it’s worth backing up your PS4 now and again in case anything goes wrong. To do so, connect a USB storage device, go to ‘Settings’, ‘System’, ‘Back Up And Restore’ and then select ‘Back Up PS4’.
TRACK YOUR STATS
If you’re looking to up your game online, or just fancy perusing your stats, there are a number of potential ways of doing that. Destiny Tracker, for example, is a great way of delving in to all the key statistics related to your characters. You can probably find an equivalent for whatever game you’re interested in to have at your side on a phone or tablet while you are playing.
USE PARTY CHAT
You’re almost always better off using Party chat over in-game chat. It’s generally more stable, better quality, and, perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to listen to random morons shouting abuse at you. With Party chat, it’s just you and whatever friends you choose to invite along for the ride.
INTERACTIVE STREAMS
A number of PS4 games allow viewers of a stream to interact while you’re playing on Twitch. With Dead Nation, for example, viewers can periodically vote on whether to make the game easier or harder, slowing you down, or making enemies tougher. Even Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition has a feature where your viewers will help decide whether Lara lives or dies. It’s a really fun feature and it is a shame more games don’t take advantage of it.
SPREAD THE LOVE WITH SHARE PLAY
Being able to virtually pass the controller to a friend is a pretty cool feature of the PS4. To do that, hit the Share button on your DS4, choose the ‘Start Share Play’ option and then invite whichever friend you want to play with. They can then see your screen and you can even give them control so that they can play instead of, or with you. Just don’t be an idiot and Share Play with randoms you meet online who will probably delete all your saves as soon as you give them control.
SIGN UP FOR EVENTS
The new Events tab on the PS4 is a gateway to get involved in online competitions, announcements, and key Sony conferences like PlayStation Experience. Sign up for an Event and you’ll get a reminder when it is about to take place.
FIX YOUR NAT TYPE
There are three NAT types in total. Type 1 is Open, meaning you can connect with more or less any other players easily. If you’re on Type 2 (Moderate) or 3 (Strict), you’ll need to fiddle with your router settings – the easiest way to fix this issue is to set up your PS4’s IP address as a DMZ, if you can.
GET ON PS PLUS
This is an excellent service. If you can afford the £40 a year, we’d recommend it. The save storage and special discounts are useful, but it’s the games you get as part of the service that really make it worthwhile. Generally speaking, you’ll get two or three PS4 games, two PS3 games and a couple of Vita games every month. Sure, not every game will be to your taste, but we’ve played more than enough excellent games through Plus to know it is worth it.
TWEET YOUR GAME CLIPS
Update 3.0 added the ability to upload short ten second video clips straight to Twitter. Perfect for sharing an epic Rocket League goal or a particularly impressive kill in Call Of Duty: Black Ops III.
MAKE YOUR CONSOLE PRIMARY
Have accounts from multiple regions? Set up the console as your ‘primary PS4’ on each of them and you can access all content with any of the accounts. This also works with PS Plus games downloaded from free foreign trials or temporary subs, letting you play them on any Plus-enabled account you may have.
MANAGE PARENTAL SETTINGS
If you want to cast a protective arm around your younglings, go to the PS4’s Settings menu and then select ‘Parental Controls’. From here, you can set up a sub-account for your kids where you can restrict access to certain content and features.
SPEED UP YOUR DOWNLOADS
A quirk of the PS4 is that pausing a download for a few seconds and then resuming it can speed it up. Nobody seems to know why it works, but the fact is that it does, so it’s certainly a trick worth knowing.
CHECK PATCH NOTES
Having the ability to see exactly what has changed when a new patch hits is useful. Knowing which guns have been nerfed in a shooter, for example, can give you the edge online. Simply hit Options over the game you want to check and you’ll see this feature in the pop-up menu.
GRAB SOME FREE GAMES
There are a few of free-to-play games that are worth checking out in the free-to-play section of the store. Among these are the first episode ofTales From The Borderlands, Planetside 2, Dead Or Alive 5, and Loadout, to name a few.
CUSTOMISE YOUR STREAMS
Sony has gradually been improving the streaming functionality offered by the PS4. For one, you now not only have the option to stream to Twitch and Ustream, but to YouTube as well. Once you’ve decided where you want to stream, you can customise whether you want to use your camera and mic and, in the advanced settings, whether you display a message to viewers. Make sure you change the quality of your stream depending on your connection, too – people aren’t going to watch if you don’t have a smooth stream.
MEDIA PLAYBACK
Sony has vastly improved the PS4’s media playback functionality since its release (when it couldn’t really do anything). The PS4’s media player now supports MP3 (hurrah!), MKV, AVI, MP4 and JPEG formats, as well as several more.
SET UP FOREIGN ACCOUNTS
What is one to do when Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- is out months early in the US? Or when the first PES demo is up in Australia and you can’t play it yet? Easy – you simply set up a foreign account. We’ve got access to a whole load of stuff we wouldn’t be able to otherwise through Japanese, US, and Australian PlayStation accounts.
GO PRO
Okay, it hasn’t quite made its way to these shores yet, but we’re excited enough about PlayStation Plus League that we need to tell you about it. As you can probably guess, it is an eSports service being run by PlayStation that allows you to compete in competitions in games like Rocket League, Street Fighter, Driveclub and PES 2016. Even better, you can win real cash!
CUSTOMISE YOUR PS4
If you’re the type of person who likes to customise stuff, you’ll want to personalise your PS4. Now you can now get official faceplates in neon orange, aqua blue, red and glacier white. Gold and silver are coming later, but we’re also hoping for some more game-specific faceplates in the future.
GET PS NOW
PlayStation Now is the name for Sony’s streaming service that allows you to play PS3 titles on your PS4. Sony is planning to add PS4 titles, but for now it’s a decent workaround to get backwards compatibility on the console. You can get a free trial of PS Now so it’s worth giving it a shot. Just remember to cancel your subscription after the trial period is finished if you don’t get on with it.
STOP THOSE RUBBISH SCREENSHOTS
Since Sony added the curious feature where the PS4 takes a screenshot every time you get a Trophy, we’ve not had a single decent image out of it. Instead, it just fills up our PS4’s hard drive with rubbish. You can disable it by going to the Share menu and turning it off in Share Settings.
GET MORE STORAGE
Thankfully, Sony has designed the PS4 to allow you to put in your own hard drive easily. Do a bit of research to make sure whatever hard drive you’re looking at is compatible – at a base level, it should be a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive and under 9.5mm tall – and you can whack in a 1TB or 2TB drive to up your capacity.
MAKE YOUR PS4 FASTER
We can’t vouch for this as an official fix, but a lot of people claim their PS4’s have been significantly sped up by rebuilding their databases. You can do that by holding down the PS4’s power button (when the console is off, of course) until you hear two beeps. Your PS4 will then enter Safe Mode, giving you the option to rebuild the database.
GET IN ON BETAS
Betas are becoming increasingly regular on PS4. We’ve found that after signing up for first party betas, we’ve automatically been added to lists for future betas. Get it done yourself and you’re more likely to be playing future releases before everyone else on PS4.
CUSTOMISE YOUR NOTIFICATIONS
Don’t you just hate it when you’re in the middle of a dramatic scene in a videogame and a spammy notification pings up in the corner, spoiling the moment? Well, if it keeps happening you’ve only got yourself to blame, because you can customise your notifications by going into ‘Settings’ and selecting ‘Notifi cations’. First thing we did was turn that bloody annoying ‘When Friends Join A Party’ notification off.
SAVE ENERGY
If you’re looking to save energy, there are a number of easy ways to reduce the power consumption of your PS4, such as these…
1 To dim your Light Bar, hold down the PS button to get to your Device Settings and turn down the brightness of the light – it’s actually effective.
2 Head to your PS4’s settings and Power Saving Settings and you’ll find a number of options to turn your PS4 off after being left idle.
3 Turn your PS4 off rather than putting it into standby, or limit what it does it rest mode – you can turn off USB charging, for example.
4 Let’s be honest, the DS4’s speaker is annoying when it is used anyway, so you may as well turn it off via the Device Settings menu.