Oops! Despite a few technical hiccups, the team is back to talk Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Absolution, the latest map pack that launched today on PS4. The pack adds four new multiplayer maps and a new chapter in the zombies co-op experience — which means more content for COD fans to sink their teeth into.
Plus, we hear from more listeners about their earliest gaming memories. Enjoy!
Sid Shuman – Director of Social Media, SIEA Zac Minor – Sr. Social Media Manager, SIEA
Send us questions and tips! blogcast@sony.com
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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.]
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Bungie isn’t messing around — today they’ve revealed first details on Destiny 2’s Open Beta, kicking off on PS4 this July 18 through July 23.
The Destiny 2 Open Beta will provide a sampling of Destiny’s different play modes. Here’s what’s scheduled for July 18 on PS4 , straight from Bungie HQ:
Destiny 2 campaign
You’ll get a chance to try the first mission in Destiny 2’s campaign. What does Dominus Ghaul want with the Traveler?
Crucible competitive play
The Destiny 2 Open Beta comes with support for two competitive modes. In the new mode Countdown, you’ll attack or defend a base on a map custom-built for this new scenario. In Control, an update on the Crucible standby, you’ll attempt to dominate zones on a map built for this objective type.
Strike
In the Inverted Spire Strike, you’ll assault a well-protected Vex stronghold with the help of two teammates. You can also use matchmaking to join up with a Guardian fireteam!
New Subclasses
Each Class’s new fighting style will be available in the Open Beta — that means Warlocks can try out the Dawnblade, Hunters the Arcstrider, and Titans the Sentinel.
How to get access
Preordering grants you early access to the Destiny 2 Open Beta on PS4 starting July 18.
The Destiny 2 Open Beta will also offer fans a chance to check out The Farm, Destiny 2’s new social space. Bungie is extending an open invitation to Open Beta players to participate in a limited technical test. Take a tour of The Farm from 10am to 11am on Sunday, July 23 to see how many players the new social space can accommodate at one time. Note: Most vendors and other services will be non-operational.
I can hear Justin hyperventilating from here. I’ll definitely be joining in on the fun come July 18 — how about you?
We’ll have lots more Destiny 2 Open Beta coverage coming to PlayStation.Blog soon. Be brave, Guardians!
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Hello, wonderful PlayStation fans! Chris Floyd from Radial Games here, with an exciting message from our giant videogame zeppelin flying high overhead. We’ve been working day and night to create a most exquisite and whimsical virtual reality morsel: Fantastic Contraption for PlayStation VR!
Release Date
That’s right! We’ve been having a blast creating Fantastic Contraption for PlayStation VR, and we’re excited to announce that we’ll be sharing all of our hard work with you on Tuesday, July 11th, 2017. National Fantastic Contraption Day, mark it in your calendar! It will retail for $19.99 with an extra launch-week-special 10%-off if you have PlayStation Plus.
Seated Gameplay Specifically Designed for PS VR – The Most Relaxing Way to Play FC!
Sure, you could stand around, windmilling your arms in our magical virtual reality wonderland, but now you have the choice to sit back and play Fantastic Contraption right from your couch! Imagine! We redesigned the gameplay experience especially for PS VR, taking advantage of the likelihood that you have a favorite place to relax in front of your PlayStation 4. We’ve included special PS VR-only features that allow you to resize and position your gameworld at the press of a button, which we’re sure you’ll find slick and amazing.
It has fast become my favorite way to play, and makes contraption-building feel a whole lot like model-making, which we are Very Big Fans of here at Radial Games.
New, Unique Levels for PlayStation VR
We have a handful of brand-new, PlayStation-exclusive levels in the release. Try your hand bouncing around some moguls, attacking a big-bricked wall, and more! We’ve designed a few challenges specifically around seated play, and we know you’ll enjoy them.
Dynamically Resize the Entire World in the Brand-New Resize Island
Welcome to Resize Island, where you can dynamically resize the entire world around you! This opens a world of customization for your preferred way to play. You can make the world really huge to fit your standing-style gameplay preferences, or shrink it all the way down to fit on your lap, where you can marvel at tiny Neko. That’s right, THE CAT RESIZES TOO. You can do anything in videogames.
PS4 Pro Enhancements
For those of you with a lovely new PS4 Pro, we’ve spiced up the game a bit extra for ya:
8xAA – We averaged out all those sharp corners for smoother looking curves!
Higher-resolution textures – you can almost smell that wood-grain!
Improved backdrops and scenery
Additional special-effects and visual flairs
Extra island decorations
125% resolution oversampling – A fancy way of saying that things look real sharp in there.
Let us know below what you’re most looking forward to, and I hope to see you having a great time with Fantastic Contraption when it launches next Tuesday!
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Hey PlayStation fans — greetings from Telltale! The second season of Minecraft: Story Mode — which we’re once again creating in collaboration with our partners at Mojang — is coming to PS4 on July 11, so we sat down with three of the project’s lead developers to gain some behind-the-scenes insights into the references, easter eggs, and teases hidden in the new trailer. Watch the trailer above, then dive into the full breakdown below…
Gone But Not Forgotten – You may have noticed we have a new animal friend (frenemy?) in Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two: Lluna the llama. “When we heard that Mojang was adding llamas, that was it,” says Lead Designer Brian Freyermuth. “It was perfect. An animal that could be cute and nasty, all at the same time.” After Reuben the pig’s…er, incident in the first season, however, the team took the introduction of a new animal companion very seriously. “We were unsure if it was too soon or not, and we didn’t want it to feel like we were just replacing Reuben,” says Season Director Jonathan Stauder. As part of their effort to ease the transition, the team created a memorial in town and included an optional pig pageant. You can see some of these pageant-worthy pigs in the trailer.
Glitches?! – That big Sea Temple you see uses some custom textures not actually found in Minecraft proper because it was built by season two’s larger-than-life villain: the Admin. “We worked with Mojang to pull stuff from old versions of Minecraft [including] glitches and exploits that people used while building, like glowing obsidian and floating water,” says Lead Writer Eric Stirpe. You may notice some re-skinned creatures in there as well.
A New Adventuring Duo – Adventuring and business partners Jack and Nurm have been a hit internally, so it’s nice to see them in action in the trailer here. Nurm answers the question “What role would a villager play in Story Mode?” but where did Jack come from exactly? “Jack is our version of Kurt Russell,” says Stirpe, “and Jack and Nurm are our very own Han and Chewie.” Freyermuth elaborates, “I’m a huge fan of Big Trouble in Little China, so the thought of a character like Jack Burton in Minecraft was amazing.”
Your World is Expanding – In Jack and Nurm’s adventure emporium, there’s a particular square of the world map that’s conspicuously missing. So what’s the secret behind that mysterious square? We tried to get Eric Stirpe to give us some spoilers, but all he would say is this: “We explored the Order of the Stone in the first season, and now we’re going back even further into the foundational secrets of our world.” Ominous.
Beacontown Easter Eggs – Jesse’s home base, Beacontown, is jam-packed with easter eggs and references to later plotlines, including a very special easter egg that’s just off-screen during the Beacontown shot in the trailer. “There are two cat houses in Beacontown that our Art Director, Mark Hamer, made with his daughter and directly imported into the town,” says Stirpe. Freyermuth adds, “The Beacontown area is something I’m particularly proud of. I bet most players are going to see different things every time they play through it. Keep a look out for a certain familiar building from all the way back in episode one of season one.”
Hidden Parrots – You might notice a lot of parrots flying around throughout season two of Minecraft: Story Mode. Jonathan Stauder loved putting bats into the first season and made it his personal mission to include at least one parrot in the second. Once our dev team learned of his mission, they decided start adding a few… extra parrots. Like, a lot of extra parrots. See how many you can spot in the trailer alone (hint: check the rafters in Jack and Nurm’s shop)!
YouTubers IRL (Sorta) – In case you didn’t hear when we first announced season two, Minecraft YouTubers Stampy Cat and stacyplays have returned! You can spot them in Beacontown in the trailer alongside their very own custom houses. “We had a great collaborative process with Stampy and Stacy in making their houses,” says Stirpe. “We asked them to write a paragraph about their building trademarks, then our art team made mock-ups for them, and we all got to work on the designs together.”
New Outfits for the Gang – It’s been a few years since the events of the first season, so when we see the Order of the Stone again, they have some updated outfits. “Petra’s old armor has been starting to basically break down, so she’s cobbled together different pieces here and there,” Freyermuth comments. “I love Petra’s new armor because you get to see this really cool combination that reflects both her mercenary ways in the first episode of season one and the iconic Order armor we gave her later on.”
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I’m excited to announce that as of today, the PlayStation Now library includes PS4 games! This lineup is just the start, as we’ll add more PS4 games in the coming months alongside our regular monthly content drops.
On top of that, PS Now’s library has now ticked to over 500 games. That’s a massive range of games to explore and play, all with one subscription, the push of a button, play on your PS4 or Windows PC (app download link). With PlayStation exclusives like Killzone Shadow Fall and The Last of US, hit blockbusters such as Red Dead Redemption and Batman Arkham City, indie games like Journey and Broken Age, and many more, the PS Now library really has something for everyone.
Now is the perfect time to try PS Now, or upgrade your existing subscription. By popular demand we are bringing back our $9.99 intro offer for the first month (new subscribers only), and the 1-year subscription for $99.99. That’s less than $9 a month for a full year of on-demand access to an ever-expanding library of PS4 and PS3 games to stream any time you want. Start streaming today because this offer is only available until September 22, 2017.
Here is the full list of all of the new PS4 games available as of today on PlayStation Now. We’ve got a variety of genres, from FPS, action adventure, RTS, fighting, racing, and more.
Killzone Shadow Fall
God of War 3 Remastered
Saints Row IV: Re-Elected
WWE 2K16
Tropico 5
F1 2015
Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition
Evolve
MX vs ATV Supercross Encore
Resogun
Helldivers
Broken Age
Dead Nation: Apocalypse Edition
Grim Fandango Remastered
Guilty Gear Xrd Sign
Castlestorm Definitive Edition
Exist Archive: The Other Side of the Sky
Arcania Complete Tale
Nidhogg
Super Mega Baseball
We already have 100 publishers in the service, with plenty more great PS4 and PS3 content coming this year and next from SIE and other top publishers such as 2K, 505 Games, Aksys, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Codemasters, Deep Silver, Double Fine, Loot Interactive, Sega, THQ Nordic, Warner Bros., XSEED, Zen Studios, and more.
Regardless of the platform, PlayStation Now is all about great games. Some of the best games ever released were on PS3, many of which are available on PS Now. Here are the top most popular 20 PS3 games on the service so far this year.
Red Dead Redemption
Mortal Kombat
WWE 2K15
Injustice: Gods Among Us
The Last of Us
Tekken Tag Tournament 2
Mafia II
NBA 2K14
Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution
Sonic Generations
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Batman Arkham Origins
Saint’s Row IV
BEYOND: Two Souls
Saint’s Row 2
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes
Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare
God of War III
Sonic Adventure 2
Streaming games via PS Now allows you to access other cool PlayStation features. Unlock both PS3 and PS4 trophies, send and receive multiplayer invites (PlayStation Plus not required for online multiplayer within PS Now), and your gameplay status updates will be seen by your friend list. You can also copy your PS4 save files back and forth between your PS Plus cloud storage (PS Plus subscription required) and the PS Now cloud save storage. That way, you can continue your game where you left off if you end up buying it later, or want to finish playing a game on PS Now with your own save file.
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 on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC. Note that in order to take advantage of the $9.99 intro offer, you will need to purchase that directly, as the 7-day trial will transition into the standard monthly subscription.
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We were so excited to be able to announce the upcoming Horizon Zero Dawn expansion, The Frozen Wilds, at E3 last month. As we were wrapping Horizon Zero Dawn, we had a lot of ideas for new characters, quests, and places for Aloy to discover, so we started to develop The Frozen Wilds. We can’t wait for you to experience the dangerous frigid lands to the north!
While we’re hard at work on The Frozen Wilds, we have also been working on something else…
As of today, you can download patch 1.30 which includes additional fixes to progression issues which some of you may have encountered. However, it also includes the highly anticipated New Game+ option.
With New Game+ you will be able to relive the adventures of Aloy without losing your character progression and your collected inventory. You won’t be able to progress beyond the level cap of 50, but you can still collect XP during your adventure.
We have also added updated versions of existing weapons and outfits with an extra modification slot at your disposal. These will not come cheap and will set you back some extra shards.
Before embarking on a new quest you can manually adjust the difficulty level to your liking. For players who seek an extra challenge, we are also introducing an ‘Ultra Hard’ difficulty. This new setting will enhance machine senses and behavior and will limit player health regen and other additional smaller tweaks. Players who decide to embark on the Ultra Hard path will not have the option to switch it to a less difficult setting.
New Game+ also comes with two new Trophies and extra unlockable content that gives players the ability to add facepaint or change Aloy’s Focus.
Keep an eye on our Twitter or Facebook to stay up to date on new information on Horizon Zero Dawn.
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Housemarque’s recent Nex Machina was notable not just because it was yet another fantastic arcade shooter from the studio, but also the game’s development was in collaboration with legendary game developer Eugene Jarvis.
Jarvis birthed the top-down shooter genre with seminal ’80s classic Robotron: 2084 and perfected it in his glorious ’90s sci-fi co-op shooter Smash TV. With Nex Machina being as much a spiritual successor to those as it is to Housemarque’s other works, such as PS4 launch title Resogun, we decided it fine time to sit down with the man himself and find out his own personal favorite games.
1. The first game you remember playing…
“Pong. We played Pong a lot with my sister and I think she was even better at it. But, Spacewar was the first one I remember seeing at Stanford. It took money and ran on a refrigerator sized terminal. It was a predecessor to Asteroids in a way, but it was player vs. player. Similar to Pong in that way, but Spacewar was really complicated in comparison.
“Really all the first games were PvP, as it was very difficult to code a good computer opponent, so playing against another person was much more viable. It’s funny how this still holds somewhat true even these days with games like Street Fighter or even arena shooters like Overwatch.”
2. The game made you want to become a developer…
“Space Invaders. I used to actually make pinball games before that, but seeing Space Invaders opened up the possibilities of what video games could be. Before that they were just novel entertainment with very little depth. A small, 10 minute spike of fun.
“Space Invaders had a huge impact with its alien enemies and artificial A.I. It was the first time I really noticed the potential of the ‘man vs. machine’ setup, which later had huge success with Pac-Man, Asteroids and others.
“Pinball, in essence, was a very strict PvE setup where you always had the same elements of bumpers, lights, sounds and the metal balls. That was a lot of fun, but you could only do different themes and effects, so it was a bit confined.
“Space Invaders was the first time I really noticed a new audio visual world that really had no restrictions. The aggressive movement of the invaders hunting you down made your heart beat faster. It was a real interactive experience. As long as your imagination and the tech allowed it, the sky was the limit. After that, pinball seems a bit limited and video games really had a hold on me.”
3. The game you wish you had made…
“Well, that’s a good question. Hindsight is 20/20. For example, why didn’t I make Candy Crush? As a developer you are trying to occupy the mindset of the people out there, so you always try to create something that is on the nerve of the human condition.
“As far as huge mega budget games go, I really don’t wish I made those, because they are really a product of masses of ideas coming together to form something huge and great. Those are not really a product of the author, but rather a hundred lifetimes of work.
“The type of game I wish I made are the simple things where I think like I could have done that in, like, two nights. Like Tetris, it could have been done in the early ’70s, just a very classic simple formula. Brilliant concept and brilliant execution. The kind of title you hope your brain could come up with, before someone else does.
“Also something like Candy Crush which is an age old formula, but it’s executed perfectly for the modern audience.”
4. The game that made you rethink the medium…
“That would be Candy Crush, not just because of the mobile revolution side, because there was Angry Birds and other great ones. Candy Crush is just a match-three game, and that formula was already made well in Bejeweled. Taking that to the next level really makes you think human emotions and how to work out the basics of gaming. I admit that, yes, it does have all these pay-to-play and paywall-type elements, but it almost makes the achievement more valuable to the player. As you play on you become more engaged with the title and, come level 1000 or so, you are really in deep.
“This is, in a way, close to what we did back in the day with arcade cabinets, where you could spend $1,000 becoming the best Robotron player. Skill and endurance were the key elements there – that and your wallet. With Candy Crush it’s your wallet and patience. But yeah, that really made me rethink the way games are played and that things are really changing.
“In a classic skill game your skill allows you to only to get so far. With this new approach you could go much further even if your skill didn’t let you. That’s somewhat similar to what we did with Smash TV; a lot of the games of late ’80s you could buy ‘Continues’. So more people could see the ending if they paid more.
“It changed the system. Now bad players could go all the way to the game’s end. Funnily, this also made a lot more money as it turns out there are a lot more bad players than good players, so it was a win-win in that sense! It made us question what a game was. Was it skill based? Or is it an experience you pay for, like a joy ride. It was wonderful to see that then and still see this value proposition take shape.
“Even when Everquest came out, people were gold-mining assets and selling them online. Others were buying them and, in a sense, cheating their way to the top, but that really broadens the sense of what a game is. Others want to be on top easily and others want to grind. It’s a wide spectrum and to many it is also an obsession or a compulsive disorder, but in the end they are still playing the same game.”
5. The last game you saw the end credits for…
“Hate to admit it, but it’s likely Smash TV.
“A funny thing with that was that we wanted something that meant if you beat the game we’d still want to you to come back. So during development we came up with the concept of ‘pleasure domes’ – magical places only accessible if you met certain conditions. We never implemented them, but that didn’t stop the rumour that started circulating the arcade halls as people speculated as to how to get to there.
“It became an urban legend, even though they never existed in the game. People would go on to bulletin boards and claim that they had found them. So our stupid lie turned into the perfect end game that people always tried to reach.
“It was very similar to the ‘Polybius’ cult, people that kept saying that they’ve played it. Another one called ‘Oops’ was a vector monitor game, a prototype where you played an egg trying to protect itself from insemination. It was a one off game in just one location in Stanford, but now it’s just a legend that seems to have disappeared.”
6. Your favorite multiplayer game…
“I love Spacewar and that was player vs player. It was developed at MIT in 1960 and it had gravity, and a sun that you could crash into. A very rich gameplay experience with a lot of different moves like the hyperspace that would transport you out of the way of shots. It also had ship damage that actually cripple your abilities while playing. Making you just a nose cone that could shoot, but had no movement control. The first video game in many ways.
“The graphics were surprisingly silky smooth with their vector graphics of that time – it was a very smooth video experience. Really close to modern 4K in a lot of ways. Just in black and white of course.”
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