Commander Fury

After 55 weekly updates and approximately 200 pizzas eaten during its development, we are proud to finally release NeuroVoider on PS4 March 14. And if you weren’t lucky enough, the launch of NeuroVoider on consoles comes with more of everything: more enemies, more environments, more explosions and, of course, more BOOM VIIIZ ZAAAP KABOOOOM. We crafted NeuroVoider as an action-packed, top-down, twin-stick shooter featuring RPG mechanics. With four-player cooperative support, it’s an adventure with hack ‘n ‘slash rampaging, featuring a pinch of roguelite and a bunch of explosions. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to play as one of the four human brains kept as test subjects, and lead Mankind’s last hope against the Evil Robots of the master NeuroVoider. Easy peasy. It’ll definitely be easier once you unlock and load the Doom bringer and unleash your pew pew pew power. If you don’t want to end up as bloody brain remains scattered on the cold floor, you’ll have to loot and assemble parts from defeated foes so you can build your own robotic entity to pilot. As icing on the cake, new dark synth tunes from Dan Terminus will be included for your speakers (and neighbors) pleasure! NeuroVoider has already gathered a small community of twin-stick lovers skimming the leaderboard with their Prophetic Mini-Nuke of Mother Bleeding. If that doesn’t do it for you, I don’t know what will. We are Flying Oak Games, a two-man team composed of Florian (the pixel magician) and Thomas (It’s me! I’m the “tech and other stuff†guy.), and everything started around some pizza. Before working on NeuroVoider, Florian and I had the habit of spending our Friday nights together playing local multiplayer games like TowerFall, Borderlands, and Nuclear Throne. Playing with friends, all together on the couch with a slice of pizza, is what we like the most in gaming! Hence, we were quite obliged to create our own take on the four-player, action-packed style of those games. NeuroVoider was born! Explosions, dark synth music, high replay value, and a good dose of difficulty to spend the whole night having a good time, alone or with a bunch of friends. We are really looking forward to bring NeuroVoider to your console! Cheers guys! View the full article

Monolith has been keeping busy. Following the success of 2014’s hit Shadow of Mordor, the studio began concepting a direct sequel that would attempt to fully deliver on the scale, spectacle, and savagery only hinted at in Mordor. The result? Middle-earth: Shadow of War, a sprawling action-RPG epic due out on PS4 this August. Last week, I was able to watch a lengthy demo complete with color commentary from Michael de Plater, the game’s creative lead. It made for fascinating viewing. My main takeaway: Monolith is pushing their Nemesis technology hard for Shadow of War. A wise approach, given that Nemesis is one of the more promising technical innovations in recent memory. In short, Nemesis simulates a living world, at least in broad strokes. It catalogs your actions and doles out consequences and tailored experiences appropriately. It’s a way to make each player’s story feel more personal and unique. In 2014’s Shadow of Mordor, the system allowed for startling random encounters. Slay an orc leader and Nemesis might make him return later, uglier and nastier, spouting a colorful one-liner referencing his fate and proclaiming his vengeance. But in Shadow of War, Nemesis seems to be headed in bolder, more intriguing directions. Yes, you’ll still encounter death and destruction, but also stories of betrayal, loyalty, even friendship, according to de Plater. Because Nemesis’s tendrils can now bind characters and environments, each player’s game can play out that much differently. You capture an orc fortress. Do you reward the loyalty of a follower by naming him overseer, or gain a sensible strategic advantage by handing it to a veteran war chief? Either way, you’ll live — or die — with the consequences. Meanwhile, the game is looking cinematic as hell. Don’t take my word for it; watch the video above. Orcs and humans alike boast expressive animations, camera angles skew wildly to capture your attention, and stylish character interludes inject drama. There’s a lot to love here. Deeper customization and loot for the RPG-minded, more gruesome combat for the gorehounds. Meanwhile, the new fortress conquest scenarios shown in the gameplay debut hint at a bigger, yet more focused experience. So far, so good. Will Shadow of War top Mordor? We’ll find out for sure this August. View the full article

Hi everyone! My name is Ben Tester from Wales Interactive. We have something brand new for all the full-motion-video and choice-driven narrative fans out there! Introducing Late Shift, a cinematic FMV crime thriller with branching storylines. Written by Michael R. Johnson, the author of the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, Late Shift arrives on PS4 this April. After being forced into the robbery of a lucrative auction house, student Matt is left proving his innocence in a brutal London heist. Your choices will have consequences from the very start, right through to the end. One small decision could change the entire outcome in a choose-your-own-adventure style gameplay that can lead to one of seven conclusions. The game features more than 180 decisions in total, and however big or small they may seem, any one of them could be the turning point, sending you off on a different branch of the story. Some players may reveal harder to reach endings, some may make friends or enemies along the way, and some may even play different chapters because of a series of choices which are evaluated at key points in the game. You’ll have mere seconds to make your decisions as the film seamlessly continues to roll with no pauses and no looping footage. We invited Director Tobias Weber, to join us today with a bit of insight into the multi-optional writing and filming process. Take it away, Tobias… “We started writing Late Shift like a normal film, but soon had to abandon the industry standard scripting software. It very quickly got too confusing. We therefore invented a kind of hybrid between flowchart and traditional film script, which allowed us to properly write dialogue while keeping track of the logic behind the film. “This multi-stranded script became the backbone of our production. We stuck to it all the way from writing, to shooting, to post-producing the film. Even the composer used it for reference when he wrote and produced the soundtrack, which sounds like a film score, but is as dynamic as any game score. “Shooting Late Shift wasn’t always easy. When the actors saw the script for the first time they refused to work with it. Everyone had to be educated about the new format. Keeping track of a production like this is demanding, continuity is a nightmare. “Eventually though everyone, cast and crew, got accustomed to the process and at the end we all became quite proficient I should think. The main cast was terrific. Joe and Haruka (lead actors) did a great job, and they basically knew the entire script by heart. We would first film one story strand, then move on to a variation of it. Then we’d change camera angle and do all the variations again. At times it was confusing, but somehow we did it! “Already during post-production we had a lot of people test the movie, as we wanted to avoid any beaten tracks within the film. It was very important to us that all the endings would be reached, and that all choices were evenly balanced. “Luckily so far in all the screenings and testing sessions, we’ve seen all the endings time and again, though some are certainly less common. But the achievements are in the details, I guess. Not everyone outsmarts the thieves, anticipates the villain’s moves, gets to spit in the antagonist’s face, or… well, you’ll have to wait and see to reveal your version of the story!†Now, for the completionists out there, you’ll have the option to replay the story to find the different routes and hidden chapters, being rewarded with Trophies (including a Platinum). Developed by CtrlMovie and shot in full HD across London, Late Shift’s cinematic experience blends the line between movies, games, and interactive storytelling. You won’t have to wait long as the game lands on PS4 this April. Thank you all for reading and please do leave your comments below! View the full article

Our next major system software update for PS4, version 4.50 (codenamed Sasuke), rolls out tomorrow. We’ve already shared some of the key features last month, like external HDD support and custom wallpapers, but that wasn’t all this update has to offer. Here’s a look at some additional features heading to your system soon. Improved 2D Images on PS VR If you’re playing a game in PS VR and you return to the PS4 home screen, you may notice that the resolution looks lower than normal on the TV Social Screen. Following this update, you’ll find that the resolution of the system screen displayed on your TV is significantly better when you’re out of VR mode. Also, the resolution of Cinematic Mode on PS VR will improve — if your PS VR screen size is set to Small or Medium, the frame rate of content viewed in Cinematic Mode goes up from 90Hz to 120Hz with this update. Voice Chat for Remote Play We’re adding voice chat when using Remote Play on Windows PC, Mac or an Xperia device. This is especially useful if you’ve got a gaming session planned with your friends, but you’re away from your system. You can switch your mic on and off via the microphone icon on the Tool Bar of the Remote Play app. Off Console Availability We have a variety of off-console apps and features that make communication with other gamers easier, like the PlayStation App and PS Messages. We’re adding an icon, shaped like a smartphone, which indicates a player is logged into PSN but away from their system. Boost Mode (for PlayStation 4 Pro only) PS4 Pro gets a new feature in this update called Boost Mode. This feature has been designed to provide better performance for select legacy titles that have not been patched to take advantage of the PS4 Pro’s faster CPU and its faster and double-sized GPU. This can provide a noticeable frame rate boost to some games with variable frame rates, and can provide frame rate stability for games that are programmed to run at 30 Hz or 60 Hz. Depending on the game, the increased CPU speed may also result in shorter load times. You can turn on Boost Mode by going to Settings > System. Keep in mind that Boost Mode is not guaranteed to work with all titles. Turning the setting off will allow the game to be played in a mode that replicates the standard PS4. PS Messages and Communities app Updates We’re also updating the PS Messages (Android/iOS) and PS Communities (Android/iOS) apps tomorrow with a few handy features. When you receive a Party invitation from your friends on PS Messages, now you can respond with a quick reply, “I’ll join later†or “Sorry, I can’t join,†when you want to get back to them ASAP. On the Communities app, you can now easily check the PSN service status under Settings > View Status of PSN Services. Also on the Communities app, iOS users can tell at a glance if there are any new posts in their community by checking the badge app icon (the number in a red circle at the top-right corner of the app’s icon). We can’t wait for you to get your hands on all these new features, and make sure to let us know what you think in the comments. We’re listening and always appreciate your feedback! View the full article

Hello, PlayStation fans! This month we’re adding 13 games from the Sega library to the PS Now lineup, which now boasts nearly 500 games. Starting today, enjoy a range of classic Sega titles like Super Hang-on, Revenge of Shinobi, Golden Axe, and Altered Beast. We’re also adding some Sega fighting game classics like Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers. And of course — Sonic. In addition to Sonic Generations which has been playable in the service for a while now, you can get even more of your favorite blue hedgehog with Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic the Fighters, and Sonic Unleashed. Here’s the full list of new games available as of today on PlayStation Now: Alex Kidd in the Miracle World Altered Beast Comix Zone Fighting Vipers Golden Axe Revenge of Shinobi Sega Bass Fishing Sonic Adventure Sonic Adventure 2 Sonic the Fighters Sonic Unleashed Super Hang-on Virtua Fighter 2 If you’re new to PS Now, the service offers access to a large and ever expanding lineup of games for one low monthly price. Since the service is based on our cloud streaming technology, you can access the entire catalog of games, select one, and start playing quickly without needing to wait for downloads. Also, PS Now uses cloud saves, letting you start a game on PS4 and continue playing on Windows PC (or vice versa). If you haven’t given the service a try yet, now’s the perfect time to give it a spin with the seven-day free trial. Here’s a list of some of the most popular games on PlayStation Now during February: Red Dead Redemption Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Mortal Kombat WWE 2K15 The Last of Us Mafia II Injustice: Gods Among Us NBA 2K14 Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution Batman Arkham Origins Sonic Generations Lego Batman 2 DC Super Heroes Wheel of Fortune Beyond Two Souls Dark Souls II Saint’s Row 2 Saint’s Row IV Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare God of War III Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception Jeopardy The Sly Collection God of War Ascension Farming Simulator 15 Catherine Ninja Gaiden 3 Ultra Street Fighter IV Batman Arkham City Twisted Metal Lego Harry Potter Years 1-4 View the full article

Hello! It’s Ricky here from Hollow Ponds, to give you some inside info about our new game Loot Rascals, which hits PlayStation 4 today, March the 7th. Loot Rascals is a game which looks like a silly space cartoon, as a way of disguising the fact that it’s actually a brutally hard, deeply strategic roguelike You’re on a mission to rescue Big Barry – your huge robot head pal – from a space theme park that’s been invaded by The Thing Below – a horrid, tentacled pan-dimensional beast. You’ll explore an alien planet, beat a menagerie of strange baddies and win Loot Cards which give you special abilities. Choosing which to equip requires strategic thinking – the way you lay them out is crucial, and some must be sacrificed because cards are also the precious resources you need to heal and use powerful abilities. Here’s our launch trailer: I wanted to use this space to talk a little about the antagonist in the game – The Thing Below, which very few people outside of the development team have seen. When we started working on this game – back when it existed only as a set of cardboard hexagons on a pub table – we were talking to our artist and collaborator David Ferguson about some of our influences. We knew we wanted to make a silly space game, inspired by the science fiction tv shows, movies and toys of our youth, but felt it would be good to have the main baddy in the game be something more sinister, as a way to counterbalance the overt humour elsewhere in the game. Our inspiration for ‘something sinister’ was partly from HP Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu – the idea of an ancient, tentacled all-powerful monster is so prevalent in popular culture, and it felt right here. The idea that it would form an alliance with the player worked well too – providing a solid explanation for how the player is being reincarnated over and over again. And there was only one person we thought of when it came to doing the concept art for a nasty wobbly tentacle beast – our old friend Jon Boam, who worked with us on a Vita game called Frobisher Says. No-one draws space slime like Jon! We started off with pencil sketches, and gradually worked it to the point where we had a fair idea of what we wanted – whereupon Jon gave us a full ‘kit’ of pieces, to allow us to stitch the final forms of the Thing Below together however we wanted. Here’s some of the concept art which shows how the Thing Below came together: Here are some of the parts of the Thing Below ‘Kit’: And here’s a teaser shot of the Thing Below in the game – when it’s infested Big Barry. To see what it looks like when you actually do battle with it, you’re going to have to get good enough to get there yourself, I’m afraid! Loot Rascals lands on PlayStation 4 today! We’re really happy with it – hope you all have fun trying to escape intact! View the full article

If you love games where you can strategize and multitask to build up an empire, you might want to keep an eye on MLB The Show 17 — we’ve found that many gamers, even those who aren’t big sports fans, get a huge kick out of this year’s new Franchise mode. The Pressure’s OnThis year we added two completely new ways to play the game — let’s start with Critical Situations. Instead of waiting for the best parts of the game, Critical Situations takes you directly to those nail-biting, game-deciding moments when they naturally occur, breezing past some of the time-consuming baseball details that can get in the way of an action-packed experience. This makes games short, intense experiences that have a huge impact on your team’s record. One of the many possible situations that might pop up: your star player at the plate with a chance to win the game with one swing. In addition to these intense, game changing moments, you’ll also encounter other important situations, such as keeping long hitting streaks alive or hitting three home runs in a game. In these situations you’ll be “locked†to the player involved, meaning you’ll only play his at-bats or fielding chances (much like Road to the Show, for all the veterans reading this). And this leads us perfectly into our next Franchise feature, Player Lock. If you’ve ever wanted to see what you could do with your favorite MLB player over a full season, but you’re strapped for time, you’re in luck. Player Lock makes this possible, allowing gamers to play exclusively with their favorite players and help progress through the season faster. With Player Lock you can say goodbye to playing full 9-inning games! And don’t worry — it’s not permanent. Before every game, you can choose a different player to “lock-on,†meaning you can mix it up between your star players or the prospects that are just getting their first taste of The Show. Quick Games for Quick ManageWhat about all the simulation-minded Franchise players out there? We haven’t forgotten about you, and we think you’re going to love our next feature: Quick Manage. Just as if you were calling the shots from the dugout, Quick Manage is a text-based simulation mode that puts you in complete control of all the managerial decisions during a game. Want to bring in the closer an inning early to lock down the game? Think a sacrifice fly will score you the winning run? All of these actions and more are available to you in Quick Manage, so you control your team’s destiny. If you’re wondering what’s so “Quick†about this mode, it’s the fact that you see the results of your actions instantly with the press of a button. We’ve given you plenty of managerial depth as well, as you can see in the screenshot below with all ways you can pitch to the hitter. Getting antsy and want to get back into the action? With Quick Manage, you have the ability to enter the game at any point and can jump back-and-forth between managing and playing as many times as you’d like. This means that you can pick and choose when to play, while always being in complete control of your team. And for all of you stat enthusiasts who want our MLB players to perform even more like they do in real-life, we’ve got one more thing for you, and that’s our newly introduced Player Quirks. Quirks are very specific traits assigned to a player based on real-life data which give the player a bonus when triggered. As you can see in the screenshot above, Anthony Rizzo has the Breaking Ball Hitter quirk, which means he excels at hitting curves, sliders, and other breaking pitches. When you’re playing as Rizzo, you’ll want to look for breaking pitches to hammer, since you’ll get a hitting bonus when swinging at these types of pitches. There are tons of different Quirks for both pitchers and position players, and in addition to changing the way you go about at-bats, we think they’ll also change the way you construct your roster. We hope you’re as excited as we are about the big and little changes to Franchise mode. To hear more, make sure to tune in to our next Twitch stream this Thursday, where we’ll go over all of our new Franchise features in more detail. And if you haven’t already, follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest news on MLB The Show. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you when MLB The Show 17 launches on March 28. View the full article

We’ve got some great news for sports fans and TV lovers. Today, we’re launching a new multi-view feature for PlayStation Vue that allows you to watch up to three live channels — all on one screen. With March Madness starting next week, this will be a great way to catch several live games at once from TNT, TBS, TruTV and CBS.* You can also use this feature for any live TV channel available on Vue, such as watching a mix of live news programs or live events at once. Multi-view will be available on PS4 starting today. The new feature gives you the option to watch and listen to a main TV channel and view up to two additional channels at the same time. Keep an eye on all the action and enjoy mixing and matching your favorite channels. To use this feature, just press and hold X on any live TV program from the Guide or Live TV row of the home screen to open up the selection screen for multi-view. A menu will pop up to give you an option of using either two or three multi-view screens. You can select any other live programing from the Live TV strand and start viewing multiple programs at once. The main screen in multi-view will contain audio of the programming. Press X to start any program. Press and hold X on any live program to start a multi-screen viewing experience. If you want to switch programs within the multi-view screen, press Square on your DualShock 4. To move a program to the main screen, just highlight the smaller screen and press Square. Our team is currently hard at work to bring even more new features to PS Vue. Coming soon, real-time sports scores will be added to help you know the games to watch. You can also turn off spoiler alerts if you are waiting to watch the big game. Stay tuned for more information on the additional sports features we’re adding to PS Vue. We’re pleased to bring you more new innovative features and we hope you enjoy multi-view during the tournament on PS Vue today — just in time for March Madness. Give it a try, and let us know what you think. *CBS is available live in major TV markets. For more information on channels available in your area, please visit www.psvue.com and enter your zip code. View the full article

Ah, PAX East. Near and dear to my heart! Since it’s just a few days away, we wanted to share what you can expect this weekend in Boston. Expect dozens of playable PlayStation games, from the epic spectacle of MLB The Show 17 to the harsh alien landscapes of Farpoint on PS VR. But there’s more. PlayStation’s booth will also be hosting playable demos for Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, Nex Machina, Sundered, and Cosmic Star Heroine. If that’s not enough, grab a PS VR headset and immerse yourself with Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin. For a full list of the playable games at our booth this year, read on. Boundless Cosmic Star Heroine Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy Cryptark Dino Frontier Disc Jam Eitr Everything Farpoint Full Throttle Remastered Gang Beasts Gnog GT Sport Loot Rascals MLB The Show 17 Nex Machina Nidhogg 2 Pox Nora Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin Rain World Rime Sundered Tooth & Tail What Remains of Edith Finch Windjammers Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles Hope to see you at the show, and have an amazing PAX! View the full article

Subscribe via iTunes, Google or RSS, or download here On this week’s Blogcast, Sid and I recount our favorite stories to come out of GDC ’17. We also ponder the finer points of the “clicker†genre, look forward to the sleeper hit-to-be Disc Jam, and share stories of our adventures in Guerrilla’s Horizon Zero Dawn. Finally, a thought-provoking listener letter kicks off a discussion about overhyping games and expectation management. Enjoy the show! Stuff We Talked About The biggest news from GDC Horizon Zero Dawn Ghost Recon Wildlands Nier Automata Loot Rascals Disc Jam Clicker Heroes Hype trains and the managing of expectations Recent Episodes 239: Bring Me That Horizon 238: Take Me Out to the Ball Game 237: Andromonauts The Cast Sid Shuman – Director of Social Media, SIEA Justin Massongill – Social Media Manager, SIEA Send us questions and tips! blogcast@sony.com Leave us a voicemail! (650) 288-6706 Thanks to Cory Schmitz for our beautiful logo and Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music. [Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.] View the full article

The Santa Blanca cartel has spread across the beautiful landscapes of Bolivia, choking the populace and poisoning the government with bribery and corruption. It’s time to stop it. Ghost Recon Wildlands launches March 7 on PS4. The latest chapter in the long-running action series, Wildlands features a play space on a massive scale, with sprawling open-world missions, a free-form structure, and seamless cooperative play. Customize your Ghost, fine-tune your weapons, develop a strategy, and take down Santa Blanca piece by piece. For a full list of new games coming to PlayStation, read on. And enjoy the Drop! New Releases: Week of March 7, 2017 2Dark PS4 — Digital (Out 3/10) From Frédérick Raynal, the creator of Alone in the Dark and pioneer of survival-horror, 2Dark is a grim journey of stealth and courage into the heart of corruption. Use your cunning to infiltrate Gloomywood’s bastions of cruelty. Investigate to uncover the secrets of the deranged psychopaths within, seek retribution for their crimes, and bring the children to safety. Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and the Mysterious Journey PS4, PS Vita — Digital (PS4 Version at Retail) The second entry in the Mysterious saga follows the adventures of the enthusiastic Firis Mistlud and her loving older sister Liane Mistlud. The sisters have lived their entire lives in the isolated town of Ertona, where Firis uses her unique ability to see where crystals are buried. By way of a fateful encounter, Firis learns of the Alchemy Exam and decides to take her first step into the outside world, setting off on a grand journey to become a certified alchemist and discover the mysteries that life has to offer! Clicker Heroes PS4 — Digital Ever wondered what one quadrillion damage per second feels like? Wonder no more! Embark on your quest to attain it today! Start out by clicking on the monster to kill them, and get their gold. Spend that gold on hiring new heroes and get more damage. The more damage you deal, the more gold you will get. Feel your power grow exponentially! Darknet PS VR — Digital Darknet is a strategy/puzzle game in which you play as an elite hacker contracted to retrieve data from the world’s most secure networks. Plug into the Net, install viruses, inject code, and tunnel through cyber-security in an experience inspired by the classic cyberpunk vision of the future. Dino Dini’s Kick Off Revival PS4, PS Vita — Digital (Cross Buy) Dino Dini’s Kick Off Revival combines the elements that made Kick Off, its sequel Kick Off 2 and Goal such a success, together with the improved technology offered by PS4: high-resolution graphics that keep the spirit of the franchise, updated physics, artificial intelligence, and gameplay that is both easy to learn, yet deep and unusually intense! Disc Jam PS4 — Digital (Free for PS Plus this Month) Disc Jam is a fast-paced action-sports game that pits two to four players against each other in a frantic mix of air hockey and tennis. Players scramble to retrieve and throw a glowing disc while unleashing devastating abilities and defending their end zone. An exciting blend of strategy and skill. Gem Smashers PS4, PS Vita — Digital Gem Smashers is a fun puzzle game with eight worlds and more than 100 levels. Help the three heroic creatures who escaped capture during the invasion of the Earth to rescue their friends. Lego Worlds PS4 — Digital, Retail Explore. Discover. Create. Together. Lego Worlds is an open environment of procedurally-generated Worlds made entirely of Lego bricks which you can freely manipulate and dynamically populate with Lego models. Create anything you can imagine one brick at a time, or use large-scale landscaping tools to create vast mountain ranges and dot your world with tropical islands. In LEGO Worlds, anything is possible! Loot Rascals PS4 — Digital Only you can rescue Big Barry — your huge robot head pal — from a space theme park that’s been invaded by a tentacled pan-dimensional godbeast. Explore an alien planet, beat a menagerie of strange baddies, and win Loot Cards which give you special abilities. Loot Rascals is a tale of friendship, loss, and redemption! Nier: Automata PS4 — Digital, Retail Invaders from another world attack without warning — unleashing the machine lifeforms. To break the deadlock, a new breed of android infantry is sent into the fray: the YoRHa squad. NieR: Automata is a fresh take on the action RPG genre that gracefully blends mesmerizing action with a captivating story. Shift Happens PS4 — Digital Shift Happens presents Bismo and Plom — two loveable jelly creatures who got merged due to a comical yet dramatic accident. Together they have to solve lots of puzzles, survive daring jump- and climbing actions. Sublevel Zero Redux PS4 — Digital Sublevel Zero Redux is a first-person, roguelike, six-degree-of-freedom shooter set in a universe where reality is falling apart. Take control of a lone gunship pilot whose mission is to loot and craft ancient technology. Descend into a vast underground facility, fighting through procedurally generated zero gravity environments to recover the technology you and your clan need to survive. Talisman Digital Edition PS4, PS Vita — Digital (Cross Buy) In Talisman Digital Edition, there are 58 characters a player can control, from the heroic Warrior to the powerful Sorceress. In this perilous adventure, players battle it out to journey across a dangerous land and be the first to claim the Crown of Command, a magical artefact with the power to destroy all rivals and make the bearer the true ruler of the kingdom. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands PS4 — Digital, Retail Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is the very first military shooter in a massive, dangerous, and responsive open world that you can play entirely solo or in four-player co-op. Total Jigsaw PS4 — Digital Love jigsaw puzzles but hate the amount of room they take up? With Total Jigsaw your worries are over. Start a jigsaw, save it midway through, and complete it later. Containing more than 100 high quality jigsaw puzzles that will knock your socks off! Unearthing Mars PS VR — Digital Carrier-class spacecraft Sentra has arrived in Mars orbit, tasked to retrieve remnants of the missing explorer satellite Phobos. What they will uncover instead are the possible vestiges of an ancient civilization. Horizon Zero Dawn Soundtrack Khalid – American Teen Ed Sheeran – ÷ Westworld | Season 1 Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (plus Bonus Features) Passengers Assassin’s Creed (plus Bonus Features) iHeartRadio Music Awards-March 5 at 8/7c (TBS) FEUD: Bette and Joan- March 5 at 10/9c (FX) The Americans- March 7 at 10/9c (FX) The information above is subject to change without notice. View the full article

Hello, I’m Yoko Taro. I’m the director for a game called Nier: Automata that launches March 7 on PS4. The reason why I’m writing here today is because I received a question from the PlayStation.Blog team: “The original Nier has become a cult classic, but what does it mean to you, and what were your goals for the sequel?†But… it’s hard to answer because I didn’t have a noble vision for it. Rather, it was more like a force of habit. When I created Nier, it was getting harder to create games within the business structure of the company that I was working for at that time, and I thought to myself “This is so tiresome, maybe I’ll just leave the company.†The concept document that I wrote at that time, thinking that it would be my last, was the prototype for Nier. After many twists and turns, the previous Nier became a title that I like, although it did not sell too well and I did end up leaving my previous company. However, fans of the previous title have continued to support it for a long time after that. This reached the producer’s ears, which led to the start of the Nier: Automata project… this is the sequence of events leading up to our release of this game. Everyone at PlatinumGames who developed this game respected the previous title and created a spectacular game for us. I was in charge of the scenario, but it’s all poop so I don’t want you to expect too much from it. Sorry, I went off track there. What I wanted to say was that both the previous Nier and current Nier: Automata are games that exist due to the constant support of fans. The true nature of a game is not a strong and charismatic director displaying his or her vision, but instead is something formed by some kind of an unknown passion felt by a greater number of people. And after being formed in such a way, I’m not quite sure what kind of result Nier: Automata will bring about. I do think that there will be all sorts of reactions to it. Some may think that it’s fun, and others may think that it’s boring. But as someone that took part in the creation of the game, I do hope that it would hold some kind of meaning to everyone that plays it. Alright then, goodbye. View the full article

Hello PlayStation fans, Dom here from Ninja Theory. I wanted to take the opportunity to update you on the progress of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, which we’ll be launching later this year on PS4. We’ve just hit the Alpha stage in the development of Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. This is significant, because it means that for the first time the entire game is playable from beginning to end. That doesn’t mean that the game is finished, however. There’s still a huge amount of work to be done across Hellblade. Some parts of the game are starting to look and feel just as we envisioned, whereas others are still only built to a basic level. The important thing at this stage is that all of the areas are laid out and the design clearly defined. We have now shot all of our performance capture scenes in our budget-built, in-house, mo-cap studio — and these scenes are now in the process of going into the game. We have recorded all of our VO for the voices that follow you throughout Senua’s journey, capturing them binaurally so that when you hear them on headphones you’ll be able to place the voices in the 3D space around you. All of our gameplay mechanics are in and are now being refined. Our combat system is complete and set for thorough play testing, and our puzzle experiences — based on our learnings of psychosis — are now ready for a final art polish. Our vision for Senua’s movement is starting to be realised, where we’ve captured hundreds of bespoke animations in performance capture so that Senua moves and reacts realistically in all situations. Finally, most of the game’s music is complete and is being mixed into Hellblade’s soundscape. Two years of hard work by the Hellblade team is starting to pay off and we’re ready for the next stage: Beta. This is where we can focus on the player experience — looking at the game step-by-step, improving it along the way, honing how the game will look and feel to our players. It is at this stage that we will add a lot of the small details that make a big difference. Beyond Beta, we will move into the final stage of Hellblade’s development: Mastering. It is in this stage that we will iron out any remaining bugs, ensure that Hellblade performs optimally on PlayStation, and prepare for launch. We have a lot of work ahead and the team is putting all of our care into Hellblade to make it as special as it can be. We’re getting super excited about sharing Hellblade with you later this year and we look forward to bringing you further updates on the road to release. View the full article

Good news! The official soundtrack for Horizon Zero Dawn hits Spotify today, available now on PlayStation Music. With its driving tribal rhythms and stirring vocal performances, the Horizon Zero Dawn soundtrack is a huge departure from Guerrilla soundtracks of yesteryear. Listen to the full album here, a week before it’s available anywhere else. In honor of the soundtrack release, we caught up with the entire composer team – Niels van der Leest, Joris de Man and The Flight – as well as Vocalist Julie Elven and Guerrilla’s Music Supervisor Lucas van Tol, to talk about how this memorable musical collaboration came to pass. PlayStation.Blog: What inspired this musical collaboration? Lucas van Tol: When I started working on the music we didn’t have a game to score against, so we decided to focus on Horizon’s three main pillars: machines, tribes, and beautiful nature. We started with the tribal music. We asked ourselves, “What would a tribe sound like in the future, after they’ve lost most of their culture?†and also “How can we create something that sounds like tribal music, but isn’t necessarily the tribal music we know today?†PSB: How did you go about answering those questions? Lucas: Well, we knew we were in way over our heads. So we brought in some outside help, starting with Niels van der Leest. Niels van der Leest: Lucas and I had actually met a couple of months earlier at a recording session for sound designers. He learned that I studied percussion, so when he contacted me, he asked me to research what the tribal music of Horizon might sound like. In July 2014, I presented my findings to the game director, the writers, and the designers, and they liked it so much they decided to put me on the ‘diegetic’ (in-world) music for the game. Lucas: So then we had our first composer. However, we also knew that we’d need a certain amount of music in our game, which would require multiple composers. PSB: How did you find the remaining composers for the project? Lucas: In late 2014, we approached an old friend of the studio, Joris de Man, with whom we’d worked on Killzone 1, 2, and 3. Joris de Man: Lucas contacted me and said that they were working on a new game. I was immediately interested because I’d heard that it was going to be different from Killzone, and I was curious to see what they’d been up to. So we had a conversation and he asked me if I wanted to pitch on this job and put some music forward. The studio set me up with some artwork and a synopsis of what the game was about, and I was quite blown away; the scope was really ambitious, a clear departure from what I’d been used to seeing from Guerrilla. Lucas: The idea we had back then is that Joris would focus on the ‘beautiful nature’ pillar and Niels would take care of the ‘tribes’ pillar. That meant we still needed someone to cover the ‘machines’ pillar. Which is where The Flight came on board. PSB: Who, or what, is The Flight? Alexis Smith: The Flight is a musical duo consisting of Joe Henson and myself. We’re record producers and artist producers and songwriters, but we’ve also done a few games; the last one was Alien Isolation. Through our agent we heard that Guerrilla was looking for additional members on the composing team for their new project. We’d known Joris de Man for a long time, and we thought it’d be fun to work with him. So we got in touch, had a video chat with Lucas, and then did a pitch. Joe Henson: What Lucas was able to show of the project looked amazing. Coming from the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere of Alien Isolation into the lush, open world of Horizon was incredibly exciting. Although both games belong to the science-fiction genre, they’re almost polar opposites in that respect. Well, apart from both having a strong female lead. PSB: The E3 2015 trailer theme was the public’s first taste of Horizon’s musical score — how did it come about? Joris: As Guerrilla was already working on the game, we had to come up with a memorable theme for the game itself, but also for the E3 trailer. Because the composers mostly worked remotely, we would have weekly video chats about where the music was going. During one of those chats I was talking to Lucas, and as he explained what they were going to show in the E3 trailer, the idea for the theme just popped into my head. I told him “Give me a second†and quickly ran upstairs to my studio to put something down on the piano. PSB: Is that also where vocalist Julie Elven became involved? Joris: Yes. What I heard in my head was a female voice, and I thought – Aloy is a strong and kind female character, so it would be nice to have a female voice that can be strong and gentle at the same time. I called around to see if I could find this voice, and incidentally a composer friend of mine was actually just working with Julie at the time. He said, I think I’ve got the perfect person for you. We did a little test, and Julie just nailed it instantly. Julie: It was actually quite funny, because I’d only recently started doing vocal performances for video games. Prior to that, my vocal performances could mostly be heard in trailers and film scores. When Joris contacted me I was actually slated to sing for a video game score by Ian Livingstone the very next day. It was quite spontaneous – Joris turned up and was like, “Hey, I don’t know you but would you be interested in doing this?†And just like that, I was suddenly involved in two different video game scores. After E3 we worked on more of the music together, especially on the other trailers as well as the cutscenes of the game. Our focus was to give a musical voice to Aloy’s emotions through the singing. Aloy’s story tells us about her search for identity, about great loss, but also about the courage to overcome obstacles and to persevere. These aspects were very present for me personally, and in my vocal work I aimed to express both the vulnerable and lonely as well as the strong and resilient facets of Aloy’s internal world. PSB:What are your overall thoughts on this collaboration? Niels: It was a tremendously fun and rewarding experience. Creating a whole new musical history for the world of Horizon Zero Dawn took some research and trial and error, but it worked out great. Joe: It was also a pleasure to work in a team with the other composers, and with the creatives at Guerilla who were so dedicated to their unique vision. The colors, the machines, the fall and rebirth of mankind; these were all deeply inspiring to us as composers. Joris: Overall, I feel it’s been an absolute joy to rise to the challenge of plotting Aloy’s journey musically, and to follow the roads less travelled. From bowed dobros and guitars to fujaras, live strings, massive taiko drums and circuit-bended synthesizers, I hope players will enjoy the soundtrack as much as we had making it! View the full article

Today at Game Developers Conference, I gave a presentation discussing the challenges and lessons learned in reintroducing a classic samurai genre to a modern action audience. In my opinion, this would be a tough proposition for any developer. Target and ApproachTeam Ninja was chosen to take over development of Nioh in 2011. By 2014, we had decided to take Nioh in a direction that was different from the original plan and we therefore restarted development. The first thing I did was to redefine the target audience and a new approach for Nioh. I felt that Team Ninja should not attempt to make a user-friendly action game targeting a wide consumer base, but take an approach that played to the strengths of Team Ninja and develop a quality action game with intense difficulty and challenge, targeting hardcore gamers. In Nioh, the main protagonist is a sword-wielding samurai, a character and a genre which we know a thing or two about. But our newfound conviction to this approach was not suddenly born from our arrogance or recent achievements. Rather, the experience of our past failures was the guiding force behind this position. You see, I was the also the director in charge of Ninja Gaiden 3 and Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, two projects where I learned very difficult and valuable lessons. And based on those experiences, I reminded myself from the beginning of Nioh’s development that I should never compromise our core audience and the integrity of our work. The Demo ProcessDevelopers have to continuously juggle a lot of elements under various constraints, such as budgets, technical issues, and so forth. I think that all developers get to a point where they feel anxious about whether their concepts and direction meet players’ expectations. So, we decided to reshape the development process by communicating directly with our target audience through game demos. The demos were released several times in the mid-to-late term development where feedback could be utilized; they became a development tool to validate our approach, rather than a promotional tactic for the marketing campaigns. One thing we learned through this process was the difference between play styles in the East versus the West. Many players in the West were quite positive about the demo, but that was not the case in Japan and Asia. We realized that this disparity was caused by the cultural differences in how people perceive difficulty and the contrasting ways players navigated through the alpha and beta demos. Interestingly, there were some common opinions — a lack of tutorial elements and desire to improve user performance — that were echoed in both regions. The realism and authenticity of the samurai armor, as well as the environment design, were overwhelmingly well received in the West. I suppose this is because people here view this world as an exotic setting. Our Experience with the Demo ProcessGathering information about the players’ experience was not an easy task, since the players who provided their opinions and filled out the official questionnaire were inevitably few in number. So we also had to obtain information proactively. Through social sites and bulletin boards, we were able to discover positive and negative feedback, which was very useful due to the candid nature of peoples’ opinions in a very “colorful†manner. The first problem we encountered after researching feedback was that many members of our team became too influenced and affected by the opinions of the players. Some of the team wanted to make the changes in certain ways because players said they wanted it. For example, there were a measurable amount of opinions asking us to remove the Ki Pulse system. It was ultimately rejected, because we wanted to design tactical battles as a samurai and how players can negotiate their constraints in this game. Another popular opinion was to create an open-world system. This was also rejected, as we wanted to shorten the load time after death, as well as raise the frequency and density of the battles (it also would have cost a lot of money). On the other hand, we adopted the feedback regarding the behavior of the camera lock-on feature, because we increased the level of difficulty and wanted to allow the players to control their techniques and focus on their opponents more effectively. Ultimately, I tried to remind everyone that we are the developers who are creating this game. And by attempting to consider all of those opinions we were not arriving at solid solutions, but rather creating more questions. It was easy to determine whether to incorporate opinions about technical issues or to disregard discernible negative feedback. But it was difficult to make our decisions on subjective elements such as the difficulty settings. Every time I felt lost, I tried to remind myself of the games’ principal concept of “masocore,†and its target audience — core gamers. To communicate with our fans who played the demo and demonstrate our commitment to them, we regularly disclosed the improvements we planned to make based on survey results. So that was a small window into our journey with Nioh and the interactive communication we established with our potential fans. I hope this provided you with a better understanding of our creative process and how it ultimately shaped this game. This user-engagement provided us with an opportunity to reaffirm our direction and gain the confidence to steer boldly forward with our game. As an exercise that was designed to learn more about our fans and gain valuable feedback from them, we ultimately learned a lot about ourselves in the process. View the full article

When asked what games influenced Prey, it can lead to a long and complex answer — with a lot of references that cascade out into yet more references. So, here’s what it would look like from our perspective: Prey is a combination of Dishonored for the systems and simulation, Arx Fatalis for the structure and crafting, and System Shock for the “RPGness†and the mood. Now, it’s worth noting that Dishonored was influenced by Thief and Deus Ex, which itself was influenced by Ultima Underworld and Ultima VII, etc. So there you have it. Our influences are Looking Glass and Origin from back in the 90s, but I guess only gamers that are older than 30 have even heard of these companies and their games. Developers and fans refer to that family of games as “immersive sims.†It’s a style of game that sits at the intersection of two other genres: FPS and RPG. But what makes the immersive sim more than just “FPS meets RPG†is that the game development philosophy behind it relies a lot on simulation. As many systems and outcomes as possible are simulated and layered on top of each other as opposed to being scripted and isolated from one another. Arkane has always invested its full energy into this approach to development. To us, games in this genre are more than a game. We believe they have a magical power to both transport people and create emotionally engaging moments where players feel a tremendous amount of creative agency. For instance, we remember a player having completed one of our missions in Dishonored in the most unexpected way ever. The target was on the third floor, inside an apartment. Instead of infiltrating the building and climbing the stairs to the third floor, the player stayed at street level, threw a grenade, immediately froze time (using Bend Time) as the grenade was still close to him, used Wind Blast on the grenade to propel it through the open window of that apartment on the third floor, which resulted in eliminating the target in no time. We love this kind of player! At Arkane, our development methodology consists of: 1.) Creating a believable environment that serves as a playground. This is a combined effort between art direction, writing, and level design. Our goal is for the setting to have a deep sense of place that tells a story on its own, without any exposition. Just by looking at the detail of the world and the set dressing, players should be able to read what happened before they arrived. In addition, the environment is tactically interesting and invites exploration: spaces are interconnected with multiple pathways, there is verticality, objects that can act as cover, and plenty of hiding spots. 2.) Populating the playground with gameplay elements that are simulated and interactive. AI’s (characters) who have behaviors players can learn and exploit, physics objects, traps, doors, computers, etc. For instance, in Dishonored players could learn that deadly swarms of rats seek out corpses. Dragging a body near to where guards patrol can create effective (and darkly hilarious) distraction. 3.) Providing interesting tools to the players. We like to give players not only direct weapons, but also indirect tools that encourage creativity and experimentation with the game and the simulation in general. The GLOO gun in Prey is a good example: players can use it to incapacitate a human, but they can also use it to climb where we (the designers) didn’t plan. As far as narration goes, we try to tell the story as much as possible through the actions of the player and through optional information that doesn’t interrupt the flow of the game: audio communications, overheard conversations, environmental storytelling, player objectives… All this combined provides the kind of experience that is important to us and our values as gamers. Raphael Colantonio // Prey Creative Director, Arkane Studios Ricardo Bare // Prey Lead Designer, Arkane Studios View the full article

Hi everyone! We’re incredibly excited to announce that our idle RPG Clicker Heroes is coming to PS4 on March 7. Clicker Heroes is part of a relatively new genre of games called “idle games†(sometimes also known as incremental games or clicker games). At their core, idle games are all about exponential growth, and having the game “play for you.†You start out with some amount of resources and you make decisions on how to grow your resources into more resources in the quickest amount of time. These decisions are not unlike how you might compare pieces of gear or spend stat points in a normal roleplaying game. However, instead of needing to grind for gear or experience by performing tedious work, resources are gained automatically over time based on the decisions you make. By requiring your attention for the most important choices of how to spend your resources, games like Clicker Heroes are great for running in the background of your life. While Clicker Heroes starts deceptively simple, with only the option to “click†to damage monsters, it quickly evolves into a deep and interesting strategy game. Your choices will juggle several resources such as damage and gold which are critical for increasing how fast you progress. Determining how to maximize your progress for the minimum cost is an important strategy to reach higher and higher zones. The numbers in Clicker Heroes grow exponentially so there are hundreds of hours of gameplay as all your resources approach infinity. Within the first few hours, you’ll be dealing millions of damage to monsters and acquiring billions of gold. Eventually, you’ll have more gold than the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe (which is about 10 raised to the power of 80, last time we checked). We are incredibly humbled by the passion of our fans and owe you all a massive thank you for not only supporting us through the development of the game but also making great suggestions that shaped Clicker Heroes into what it is today. We would also like to thank our friends at BlitWorks for all their hard work in bringing the game to PlayStation. Without them, this excellent version of the game wouldn’t exist. Clicker Heroes will be available for free on PlayStation Store starting March 7! We hope you’ll check out the game and we’d love to hear about your experience with it, so feel free to reach out to us in the comments below. View the full article

Game Developers Conference in San Francisco saw a new chance to go hands-on with Injustice 2, the brutal DC brawler from Mortal Kombat X developer NetherRealm. But the biggest takeaways came out of a short demonstration of Injustice 2’s robust RPG-style gear system, which revealed some of the most in-depth character customization I’ve seen in a one-on-one fighting game. There are two main ways to earn gear: conquering opponents in online and offline modes, or by purchasing Mother Boxes using gold earned from matches. Gear revolves around four main body parts — head, chest, arms, and legs — plus an “accessory†(think Harley Quinn’s pistols). Most gear you collect will buff at least one of your four base stats: Strength and Ability determine the offensive power of basic attacks and special moves, while Defense and Health dictate how much damage your superhero can absorb. More exotic effects — resistance to environmental damage, earning XP more quickly — come via “augmentations†found on some higher-tier items. Full gear sets, such as Batman’s kryptonite-infused outfit, are likely to be especially prized because they can grant dramatic bonuses when fully assembled. After playing dress-up, you can apply shaders to alter your hero’s color schemes in some striking ways. A purple-clad Superman? Why not! I’m expecting to see some seriously creative designs here come May. Beyond gear, players can further customize their character’s fighting style using a new loadout feature. Want to play a Batarang-heavy Batman build, or emphasize parries? The choice will soon be yours. Purists can stick with a Tournament mode that reverts all superheroes to their base stats and abilities, while retaining the visual customizations. Otherwise, the game’s brutal, bone-breaking combat will feel pretty familiar to Mortal Kombat X and Injustice fans. Newcomer Doctor Fate brings sneaky magic spells and high maneuverability, but Black Canary might be my favorite so far — she’s a lightning-fast martial artist who hits like a dump truck. I didn’t have a lot of luck in my limited time with Swamp Thing, thanks to his lumbering wind-up attacks and floaty, gravity-defying jumps. I definitely enjoyed my time with the new Story mode, which seems to serve up a more cinematic, polished presentation. The plot still focuses on a rogue Superman who, still grieving after the death of Lois Lane in the first game, now plans to wipe out all crime no matter the cost. So far, so good. I’m ready for May 16! Leave any questions you may have in the comments below. View the full article

Hello PlayStation Nation — ready to game? This month we have the action-packed Disc Jam and the beautiful Tearaway Unfolded for our PS Plus lineup. First up, Disc Jam, which is an insanely addicting cross between air hockey and tennis. Players scramble to retrieve and throw a glowing disc while unleashing powerful abilities and defending their end zone. This game is just launching on PlayStation Store but is available to all PlayStation Plus members as part of your membership. It’s a must-have in your collection! We’ve also lined up the gorgeous Tearaway Unfolded for PS4. Tearaway Unfolded is the expanded retelling of the BAFTA award-winning PlayStation Vita game Tearaway, where you are placed in a magical papery world and tasked with delivering a top-secret message while collecting papercraft models. Full Lineup Disc Jam, PS4 Tearaway Unfolded, PS4 Under Night: In-Birth, PS3 Earth Defense Force 2025, PS3 Lumo, PS Vita (crossbuy on PS4) Severed, PS Vita Enjoy! View the full article

The Escapists 2 is coming to PS4! Until we return to the day-to-day of prison life, let’s take an early look at a few things you’ll be able to do behind bars… Dust off the old instruments and get the band together for the departing gig as you play alongside your fellow inmates, providing some much needed relief to the sound of sweet music. Oh yeah, feels good, right? But! Please don’t forget you are meant to be escaping after all, right? …right? Prison life has never been so good, or should I say “fashionable?†Once you’ve established your mob of inmate pals, go nuts with the criminal amounts of accessories and styles to get across your versions of what “Prison Chic†really is all about. Crazy hairstyles, glasses, facial hair, hats… With such adornments available at your guilty fingertips, would you ever want to leave your cell without looking like a million (stolen) bucks? Become the ultimate incarcerated deviant as you foil and plot your opponents’ downfalls one by one. “But how,†you ask? That’s up to you! If you are asking for advice, I would recommend such activities as flooding a rivals’ toilet. It’s just an example, though. An example where you accidentally lure in curious prison guards, who happen to stumble across a certain prison cell littered with escape attempt debris! Generate the ultimate plan of escape alongside your freedom-hungry online friends! Be sure to establish who takes up what role in the crafty plot — who exactly is tasked with keeping an eye out for danger? Who’ll be in charge of providing the muscle if the plan goes west? And of course, who will be the brains behind the operation ensuring all required materials and tools are at hand for the mischievous act? …Oh, and one more thing; you’ll be able to learn how to speak “dolphin.†See you on the inside, chum! View the full article

When I got the opportunity to work as narrative designer on the upcoming VR game Star Trek: Bridge Crew from Red Storm Entertainment, a Ubisoft studio, I knew I was in for the project of a lifetime. Who wouldn’t be excited about working on a brand new platform, developing a game unlike anything we’d ever made before, and using one of most beloved franchises of all time? So much frontier! In fact, the development process for Star Trek: Bridge Crew was an awful lot like an episode of one of the TV shows; a whole crew of talented individuals encountering never-before-seen challenges, and finding creative solutions with science. (Except we never had to beam anyone down to dangerous alien planets. Even though there were plenty of times we wanted to.) Star Trek: Bridge Crew is a co-op VR game, enabling up to four players to serve as the critical officers on the bridge of a brand new Federation starship the U.S.S. Aegis, and the iconic classic bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Players can choose the role of Helm Officer, Tactical Officer, Chief Engineer, or, of course, Captain. Though it can be played single-player, we designed the game primarily with a social, cooperative experience in mind. As the principal writer on the project, I knew there were going to be some surprises along the way, and some lessons to learn as we made the leap from more traditional game development into the relatively unknown space of social VR. If I were to write a post about all the things we discovered, it’d be too long for anyone to read. But here are three quick highlights: PacingOften times as game developers, we’re concerned about making sure players always have enough going on to keep their interest. Whether that’s through the high-octane tension of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege, or the wealth of gameplay opportunities of an Assassin’s Creed or Far Cry, keeping players engaged is a critical part of game and narrative design. With the power of social presence in VR, though, we found with Star Trek: Bridge Crew that we had to give players the time and space to fully appreciate the whole experience. Sometimes we found ourselves wanting to put more pressure on players, to shorten the distance between objectives, or to reduce the time players had to make a decision. But hands-on player testing helped us discover just how much we needed to slow down. When you first load into Star Trek: Bridge Crew’s main menu, you start in an inspection shuttle, following a short orbit around the beautiful U.S.S. Aegis in dock at a space station. When we first started showing the game to the public, it wasn’t unusual for players to spend five minutes or more just sitting in that shuttle, staring out at space. In fact, one of our guys who ran a lot of demos said not once, but twice, players had to pause to wipe tears from their eyes. And this was just our main menu. The sense of presence, of actually being there is so strong in VR, that we as developers had to keep reminding ourselves to make room for our players to just enjoy the thrill of being on the bridge of a starship. Directing Player ActionThe All Seeing Eye/Talking Head is a fairly common mechanic games use to make sure players know what they need to do to accomplish game objectives. (You know, the guy who calls in over the radio and tells you that the room you’re in is on fire and you need to find a way to get out.) But in a shared, virtual environment we found that the experience of having a talking head on the screen wasn’t compelling enough, and didn’t really feel right for the Star Trek franchise. In Star Trek: Bridge Crew you are, after all, supposed to be an expert crew, entrusted with a starship. It just didn’t seem right to have a Starfleet Admiral constantly showing up on your viewscreen, reminding you of everything you were expected to do. To that end, we decided to lean heavily on the Captain player as our primary method of communicating mission objectives. Through an interface on the Captain’s chair, the Captain keeps track of everything it takes to accomplish a particular mission, and is responsible for communicating all the relevant information to the rest of the crew. In addition to mission requirements, however, the Captain also receives information about different ways objectives might be accomplished. In some cases, the crew is faced with decisions that have no clear right answer, and it’s up to the Captain to make the call that seems best to them. We’re putting a lot of faith in our captains, but it seems to have been the right call; when we’ve given demos, it’s been a beautiful thing to see four complete strangers come together as a crew under the command of a decisive Captain. Interaction of ExpertsThe Star Trek franchise often centers on the interaction of various experts, and we wanted to make sure that our players got that experience, even if they’d never seen a single episode or movie before. To that end, we spent a lot of time designing each officer’s station and crafting the language we used on our Captain’s information panel so that when players are talking to each other, they have a shared vocabulary that makes it easy to communicate, while also sounding authentic to the franchise. We have, for example, a specific protocol that players follow to take the Aegis and Enterprise to warp. The Engineer is responsible for providing enough power to the engines, and then starting a process to charge the warp coils. The Helm Officer plots a course and then aligns the ship with the proper vector. But the warp coils can’t hold their charge forever, so the Captain needs to coordinate the process to ensure that everyone does the right thing at the right time. It’s an easy process when you’re just hanging out in Federation space. It might be a little more stressful when you’re trying to rescue civilians while being attacked, and also trying to escape a star that’s about to explode. Each of the individual actions is simple, but combining each of them together into a process, and wrapping the actions in language that sounds like classic Star Trek really make for a convincing experience when the crew is working together. (And, of course, when they aren’t, it still sounds pretty convincing when the Captain is yelling at the Helm Officer to punch it, and the Helm Officer is yelling at the Engineer to give him more power.) There are many other things we learned over the course of developing Star Trek: Bridge Crew, but hopefully this brief overview gives you an idea of just how exciting the future of VR is. It truly is a new frontier, and I’m looking forward to seeing all the great things that we’re going to discover. View the full article

The 2017 Game Developers Conference kicks off this week with the Independent Games Summit, and if all has gone according to plan, Michelle and I will have just finished delivering a postmortem of Salt and Sanctuary, our well-received 2D Soulslike that we launched nearly a year ago on PS4. The hardest part about putting together a postmortem is figuring out how to cover years of work and what to even talk about. Michelle and I may have spent years of our lives designing, creating, polishing, iterating, redesigning, polishing, crunching, and polishing Salt and Sanctuary, but how do we figure out what the interesting parts were? After designing more than 600 weapons, armor pieces, spells, and items, drawing more than 10,000 sprites, animating and scripting more than 100 characters, and building a massive, seamlessly interconnected game world of a few dozen regions, it’s hard to know what’s interesting anymore. So I did the smart thing: I asked you. More accurately, I asked Twitter. And we got a bunch of questions! Here’s what we learned: We had some concept art. Because it’s just Michelle and me, I generally don’t do a lot of concepting — when there’s no discipline gap between concept and final art, it’s just a more optimal use of time to just start drawing game art. I did end up making some concept art when I was stuck on planes, which happens here and there. Michelle is much more into concepting. Her concepts are mostly digital though, and also done while traveling, or through her annual Monster of the Day project each October. Our story had some origins. If nothing else, Michelle and I are geeks for A Song of Ice and Fire, and Salt and Sanctuary was loads of House Greyjoy: drowned gods, blessings of salt, and that cold, morbid philosophy: “what is dead can never die.†Otherwise, I’ve been pretty fascinated by pre-modern “science†— where the supernatural could be as much a candidate to explain the world as the natural. Much of the story and visual aesthetic came from medieval murals to ptolemaic diagrams. I didn’t plan out a lot of the actual coding. There were times that I felt I should have, but after nine years of making very similar games, I kind of have a pretty tried and true technique, mostly revolving around tools. I love to talk about tools. Imagine you were creating Pac-Man. How would you represent the world map? When you’re just starting out in Computer Science 101, text files made in Notepad are a great place to start: There’s a simple system! “#†for walls, “.†for pills, “*†for power pills, “G†for ghost spawn points. I’ve used systems like this. Great! But what if we wanted to add some variety to the scenery? Lighting? A boss battle? Our ASCII system is great if we want to represent 4 or 5 simple things, but anything more complicated just blows it right up. In the case of our ASCII Pac-Man maps, Notepad is a tool. And as far as tools for game content go, Notepad is rock bottom. So what to do? Make better tools! Salt and Sanctuary took no fewer than eight discrete tools. A few of them were new for Salt and Sanctuary, and a few have evolved since The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. The cornerstone is the character animation editor, upgraded for Salt to support skeletal animation. Then there’s the sprite sheet atlas editor, the map editor, and the destructible objects editor, all updated from Charlie Murder. And new for Salt and Sanctuary are the dialog editor, loot editor, monster editor, and skill tree editor. That’s right: I’m so in love with these special purpose editors that I made one just for the skill tree, and I have no regrets. Yeah, I like talking about tools. And it’s not hard to see why: maybe 90% of Salt and Sanctuary is just content that Michelle and I used those tools to make. And a lot of the game logic even emerges through the creation of these tools, like the code to render the map, skill tree, or animated character. Jumping off is hard to do. The prototyping phase is a wonderfully free phrase of experimentation and laying groundwork: defining things like “what is a door?†“What is a boss fight?†“What is loot?†“How high do I jump?†Once that groundwork is laid, it gets really easy to make content, but really hard to fiddle with that groundwork. For instance, let’s say I can jump a four-tile gap. Then — after building half of the world map — I decide that the game feels too floaty and I need to tighten up the gravity constant. But that change allows the player to jump a five-tile gap. Well, now I’ll have to audit the whole game up until that point to make sure I haven’t introduced any game-breaking new shortcuts (Speedrunners will know that such shortcuts still found their way in!). Working with your wife is great. We are often asked what it’s like working with your spouse. It’s a bit like working with your coworkers, only more personal. You share not only your work but your life. It all blends together and when you’re doing what you love with the person you love, it’s amazing. It’s not without its challenges, but those we take like any relationship. Communication is key, and we’re not perfect, but we get better every day. Paying homage to Soulslikes while still finding our own voice was a critical challenge. I looked at ways games exist on a common landscape: incredibly inspirational games like Dark Souls, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Ninja Gaiden Black existed alongside our own The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, Charlie Murder, and what would be Salt and Sanctuary. Drawing from a landscape of concepts, themes, and mechanics, we were able to build a cohesive action game that drew the brawly feel of Dishwasher and Ninja Gaiden, the world progression of Castlevania, and the obscure lore and character progression of Dark Souls. Some things went wrong. Self publishing may have given us more freedom than we were used to. In our early days, localization was all handled for us by our publisher; my job was just to make sure the game rendered it correctly. With self publishing, this responsibility to localize falls on us, and we hadn’t quite figured it out in time. I did implement all of the text rendering, and I set up some tools to automatically machine translate our text to test out the rendering, but we didn’t have proper translations. With a zillion other things to worry about and crunch over for launch, I guess I sort of convinced myself that maybe machine translations aren’t the worst thing. Well, they are. And we’re still fixing them. Sorry about that. Some things were unexpectedly amazing. We could not possibly have predicted the level of excitement from gamers and support from streamers and content creators after announcing Salt and Sanctuary. We’ve always been very grassroots about marketing, more having to do with being terrible at self-promotion than any kind of intentional PR style. Having the support of streamers and YouTubers was so crucial. I don’t think Salt and Sanctuary could have been the success it was without these people. A huge thanks goes out to them. Working with Sony was seriously great. Working with Sony was absolutely a transition for us. Before PS4 launched, we were a tiny studio that made exclusives on other platforms. But the new console generation brought a lot of uncertainty to indie developers like us (a lot of which was about our tech), and sitting down with Sony really made a fantastic impression. Indie game developers struggle with motivation. This was a sort of meta-takeaway: while organizing the questions I got from Twitter, I noticed that a lot of them were asking how we kept motivated. My semi-reliable trick is to switch up tasks a bit when I get worn out, but I know this only works to a certain extent. At any rate, if you’re trying to make games and struggling with motivation, know that this is something we all deal with! Finding motivation through other developers and even other creatives in other industries helps a lot. We always come away from game conferences, after meeting up with other devs, recharged and ready to get back to making awesome stuff. Game development has some pretty insane ups and downs, but with hard work, perseverance, and a little bit of classic insanity, we’ll all pull through. PS Vita owners are patient, loyal, and fierce! We’re sorry it’s taken so long. The port is being handled by another studio, but it’s still in the works! It’s been a wild time in development and we’re still reeling post-launch of Salt and Sanctuary almost a year ago. Thank you so much to PlayStation and all the gamers who believed in us. Thank you for playing our game. Your support truly keeps us going. View the full article

Today we’re very excited to announce Rebellion’s first new game since we launched Sniper Elite 4 on Valentine’s Day! If you follow Rebellion you might already know that we don’t just make games. We also publish the legendary British comic 2000 AD, famous for characters like Judge Dredd, Sláine, Nemesis, and — of course — Rogue Trooper! Coming soon to PS4, Rogue Trooper Redux is a loving remaster of the acclaimed 2006 third-person shooter based on the comic book of the same name. This year 2000 AD celebrates its 40th birthday, and we can’t wait to bring one of its most memorable figures to a whole new generation of PlayStation players. New to 2000 AD? Never played the original game? Here’s a little intro to our blue-skinned soldier… Who is Rogue Trooper? Created by beloved writer Gerry Finley-Day and groundbreaking artist Dave Gibbons, Rogue Trooper has been a comic book mainstay since 1981 and has even included contributions from Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Rogue Trooper tells the tale of the sole-surviving Genetic Infantryman (or “GIâ€), a blue-skinned, bio-engineered soldier on a mission to avenge his fallen comrades across the blasted, chemical-poisoned planet of Nu Earth in a remote corner of the galaxy. Why does he fight? Bred for war by the Southers in their endless conflict with the colonial Nort regime, the GIs were the only troops that could fight on Nu Earth’s surface without respirators or sealed HAZMAT suits, giving them a huge advantage in combat. Aware of this threat, the Norts conspired with the Traitor General to set a deadly trap for the GIs which later became known as the infamous “Quartz Zone Massacre.†Of the hundreds of GIs who made the drop, Rogue was the only survivor, taking the bio-chips from the bodies of his three closest comrades so they might survive to be implanted in new GI bodies. From that day on he had one mission — hunt down the Traitor General! What makes Nu Earth so special? A planet-wide conflict across petrified forests and polluted plains, a yawning black hole that dominates every skyline… I’m not sure there have been many more dramatic stages for a war story! What makes the set-up unique though, is Rogue himself. While Rogue walks alone, he fights as a team. With the sentient bio-chips of his fallen buddies Gunnar, Bagman, and Helm inserted into his rifle, pack, and helmet, respectively, Rogue has access to a huge variety of unique upgrades and abilities that not only drive the game’s tactical shooting, but pays homage to the essence of the comic. All this makes for a unique action game that feels as good now as it did in 2006. We can’t wait to show you more of Rogue Trooper Redux and maybe even convert a few more of you into GIs! View the full article

Hi everyone, this is Eric from Winking Entertainment, a company you might not be familiar with. This is our first outing on Playstation, and we’re excited to bring our PS VR sci-fi adventure Unearthing Mars to the United States. Let me start off with this: I’m happy to announce that Unearthing Mars will be launched digitally on March 7! So what is Unearthing Mars? Is it a shooter, a puzzler, or some sort of space sim? To be honest, it is all and none of those things at the same time. The Unearthing Mars experience is comprised of 10 different stages, each with its own unique gameplay mechanic. Each stage also advances the story of a space expedition team trying to unravel the secrets of Mars. Players will take the role of the Co-pilot, a member of the retrieval team sent to recover fragments of the mysterious Phobos satellite, believed to hold clues to the possibility of an ancient civilization on Mars. As you can tell, this isn’t a documentary-type VR experience, but really something that plays more like a good science fiction novel (or novella, in our case). In the first half of the game, players will experience operating a Mars landing craft vehicle firsthand, as well as explore the surface of Mars on foot and via a rover vehicle. In the latter half, there’s a lot more cross-genre gameplay as players discover a more esoteric side to the Red Planet, solving puzzles along the way and culminating in a first-person shootout that… well, I’ll let you guys experience that for yourselves. With such a wide variety of gameplay mechanics in the game, production was quite a challenge. The production staff was split into four smaller teams, each responsible for a different game genre, or gameplay mechanic. Traditionally at Winking, a single product is worked on by a single team, but to tackle the challenges posed by making a new VR product, four different teams were necessary. One team was responsible for the landing craft cockpit simulation, another for the driving mechanics of the rover vehicle; another for the adventures underground and on the surface, and finally a team that was brought in to execute the shooting stage. The team also invested in facial and body motion capture equipment in order to make movements as fluid as possible. Unlike traditional console games, in VR everything holds an additional factor of realism, and in order to get the amount of detail required, adjustments were added by hand post-motion capture. In order to ensure players experience the fullest immersion in the VR environment, the decision was made early on to have leave minimal on-screen UI, use full voiceovers to guide the player and tell the story. The team flew to record on-location in Europe, Japan, and Korea to provide natural-sounding native voiceovers. We had the help of some very talented voice actors, and having been involved in the recording personally I recommend playing through the game in different languages (try the German voiceover). To wrap things up, Unearthing Mars is a sci-fi PS VR game set on the Red Planet. It’s a smörgåsbord of game genres and mechanics that has something for everyone. VR is an industry with amazing potential, and it’s great that through a wonderfully accessible platform like PS VR, everyone has the chance to tell their story in virtual reality. View the full article

We’ve got a cool bundle to share for new and existing PlayStation Plus members! Starting today, if you purchase a one year membership through PlayStation Store, you’ll get three additional months of PS Plus and three months of Showtime through PlayStation Vue — a value of $111.95 — for a bundle price of $59.99. The Showtime offer is only available to new subscribers to Showtime through PlayStation Vue. This promotion runs through March 31, 2017 while supplies last. To see the full terms and conditions of this offer, please visit our website. As a member of PS Plus, you can enjoy benefits and features such as online multiplayer on PS4, free games, online game save storage, and exclusive discounts. We continue to work on providing great offers and value for PS Plus members, so we hope you enjoy! View the full article