The Mid-Year Deals promotion comes to PlayStation Store. For a limited time*, mark the halfway point of 2023 with discounts of up to 75% on games and add-ons across multiple genres. That includes the likes of Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® II – Vault Edition, EA Sports FIFA 23 and Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty.
Head to PlayStation Store to find out your regional discount.
*Mid-Year Deals promotion runs on PlayStation Store from June 21 until July 5.
The world of Meet Your Maker is expanding with the arrival of Sector 1: Dreadshore.
We’re packing a lot into this release, and since Dreadshore marks our first major content update, we’re celebrating by letting you claim the Sector 1 Arsenal Pack for free beginning tomorrow until July 10.
With Meet Your Maker launched and officially out in the wild, it’s been a pleasure watching millions of Outposts spring up around the world, all thanks to our engaged, incredibly creative community. You’ve made some truly twisted stuff, and we love you for it.
It’s our job to keep fueling that creativity, and Sector 1: Dreadshore with its new lore, environment, arsenal additions, and cosmetics, is an important step in that direction.
Let’s start with the obvious: What exactly is Sector 1: Dreadshore, and what does it include?
“We’re using the Sectors to deliver large gameplay updates though a narrative,” explains Ash Pannell, Meet Your Maker’s Creative Director. “The Dreadshore is a place in our world and the items that you get from that Sector are all tied to its story. It helps expand the lore of Meet Your Maker alongside the actual gameplay.”
Each Sector in Meet Your Maker explores a new location on Earth, devastated in its own specific way.
The Dreadshore, situated on the remains of the New England coastline, is the location of an abandoned Sanctuary housed beneath a lighthouse. Within this facility, clones were subject to a host of cruel, disturbing experiments until one escaped, killing the out-of-control Custodian and Chimera on their way out.
Sector 1: Dreadshore will include a new environment and themed Deco Pack – both free and instantly accessible to all players.
“Environments and Deco Packs give tools to the builders to create stories out of their Outposts,” shares Ash. “Completely different from the Red Sands, Dreadshore is all about being dark, moody and playing with light. As such, it’s the perfect place to construct dark and scary Outposts. The Deco Pack’s rusty metal and worn wooden blocks allow players to imagine a lot of old buildings and structures.”
Undoubtedly the most exciting Dreadshore additions come in the form of the Sector 1 Arsenal Pack.
The four new gameplay elements not only deliver new ways for builders to strategize and concoct unexpected kills, but also give raiders some new tricks of their own to survive them.
“Being a systemic game, every single new item has massive gameplay repercussions,” says Ash. “Just playtesting this sector has been amazing, and knowing what it’s going to do to change the meta in the game is indeed exciting – and that’s before players start getting hold of it and really showing us how to use these new items.”
The Nautilus represents the lone survivor of the Dreadshore Sanctuary. This mysterious figure was one of the clones being held captive and experimented upon. He built a suit in secret that could bolster his defensive abilities and help him escape.
While the two other suits currently available are geared towards ranged and melee perks, Nautilus is all about defensive weapon capabilities with all three of its perks greatly buffing the Arc Barrier’s effectiveness.
The Sentry Beam was designed by the lighthouse Sanctuary to keep its population of prisoners in check. It uses motion tracking to fire a laser beam of super-heated amplified light at raiders that can ricochet multiple times before dissipating, adding an element of chaos to its attack.
“This trap is great. It’s an area denial trap designed to pin unsuspecting players down,” explains Ash. “As it bounces off walls it brings a nice new sense of randomness that helps break repetitive patterns of play.”
The Ravager is the unintended result of a Dreadshore experiment gone wrong. The guard sees multiple targets where there’s only one, and simultaneously shoots a bolt at each, creating a deadly scattershot effect.
“Think of this one as a different kind of pattern breaker,” points out Ash. “The Ravager has a horizontal field of fire making it very tough to strafe to avoid. Strafing has previously been the way to defeat these enemies, so when combined with other guards and traps, players will again have to adjust their playstyles.”
The Demolition Cannon was developed for war, but as global unrest occurred, it was used more as a lethal crowd control weapon. Essentially a grenade launcher with recoverable ammo, the lighthouse Sanctuary stocked this weapon as a last resort should the prisoners revolt. Nautilus discovered and used one during his blood-soaked escape.
Don’t forget to visit PlayStation Store to claim the full Sector 1 Arsenal Pack for free starting tomorrow, until July 10. We hope you have a blast with this new content!
From the very inception of the world that would come to be known as Luna Abyss, there has always been a clear vision. Bonsai Collective’s Art Director Harry Corr, and Creative Director Benni Hill, set out with a grab bag of influences and a set of aesthetic and narrative waypoints which underpinned the worldbuilding in its early stages. That vision remains integral to the game we have created.
Caption: Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame! was a major influence on our art style and level design
Building the world of Luna Abyss has been a process of extrapolation – building outwards from carefully defined core concepts, expressed in early level blockouts and key narrative beats, a core cast of characters to bring those beats to life. All good construction needs a solid foundation; ours was a sprawling brutalist megastructure, a sky within a moon, sufficiently strange as to pique the imagination. How did we get here? Where is here? These are the questions our protagonist asks, and who better to answer than an omnipresent disembodied head…?
Caption: Beyond the decaying halls of Sorrow’s Canyon lies a vast alien landscape for Fawkes to navigate.
So how do you take something as vast as an alien moon and scale it down enough to understand where your characters fit, and how best to tell their story?
“We started with the cell,” says Lenny Ilett, a character designer at Bonsai Collective. “The game revolves around the axis of the cell, so it was pretty important to define those characters in the cell so we have something to work from.” For our primary characters – protagonist Fawkes, and their prison warden Aylin – the cell is the site of their most important interactions. It’s also a space of transition, literally and narratively – Fawkes returns here between missions to rest and process the events of the day. It was a useful waypoint in building the relationship between these two characters – how were they going to react to one another in this place of forced proximity versus out in the world, where their roles are more clearly defined?
Caption: Ellie: Lift guardian, train conductor, poet.
For the most part, building our characters was a back-and-forth process between the art team and the narrative team. Fawkes and Aylin were defined early on in the process, as the key characters in the story, but over time, and as the world grew in scale, it became necessary to expand our cast in order to tell the story we wanted. Here, art and story worked hand in hand. An example of this is Urien Caldecott, dubbed “axe cat” by the internet, who existed in concept for quite some time before receiving the character design treatment. Lenny describes the process of visualizing a character as chipping away at a block of marble, revealing the character in increments based on their dialogue, or their backstory. “You’re bringing words on a page to life,” Lenny says, of Urien, “but what does that look like? That’s something you have to navigate.”
Caption: The mysterious Waif is the first person you’ll meet in the Abyss – but not the last.
This process exists in parallel, too. Some of our NPCs began life as basic character models; biomechanical wardens, much like the one Fawkes inhabits, which come in a variety of weird and wonderful shapes. Lenny explains that these wardens emerged from a process of continual iteration; back-and-forth between character design and animation, ensuring that the designs were actually feasible in three dimensions. For this, the designers often looked to the natural world for inspiration. Lenny gives the example of a particular warden which originally had human-like legs, but ended up with a structure more akin to a kangaroo, the better to maintain balance. Similarly, Animator Marie Trystad mentions looking at the way snakes move in order to animate Aylin’s uncannily long neck. This in turn inspired the sound design; a particular character the player will encounter in the Meadows is a glorious amalgamation of ideas from across the team, brought to life by Marie, and given even more personality by Sound Designer Sarah Sherlock. In this way, our characters have truly been a team effort.
Caption: Environmental storytelling allows us to shed further light on the world of the Abyss.
Part of the process of making our NPCs feel like living, breathing people who populate a world that is vast and lived-in, beyond the limits of Fawkes’ scope and perception, was bridging the conceptual gap between the machine and the human soul within. It was important to us to give these characters their own self-contained stories, which intersect with Fawkes’, but nonetheless give a sense of a world beyond that which the player experiences directly. In assigning models to these characters, we then found ourselves in a situation where it seemed necessary to understand why they were in these particular wardens – which traits might lead a person to being assigned one type over another, and what this meant for the characters. It was from this core question that we ourselves began to understand more about the world we’d created. The results of this can be seen threaded through the supplementary lore encountered in the game world.
Caption: Our art team rose to the challenge of representing the human soul trapped within the machine.
As these characters began to gain a life of their own, so it seemed important to make them visually distinctive – not just on a practical level, so they might be differentiated from the multitude of other wardens across the Abyss, but also because it seemed reasonable that these individuals, with their own personalities and identities, would seek to individualize their own appearance in some way. This was the most important point of collaboration between the story and art teams. I had an ongoing dialogue with Animators Waseem Shaheed and Marie Trystad, exchanging questions and backstories to gain a greater understanding of who these characters were, and by extension, how they might move; this in turn influenced the personalities of these characters, which became more clearly delineated in the way they held themselves, or in the subtleties of their motion. Similarly, I worked with Lenny and Art Director Harry Corr to develop visual shorthands, within our limitations, to express elements of personality through appearance; working from the understanding that these characters, by virtue of being trapped inside biomechanical bodies, would find ways to customize them to their liking.
We had always intended to create a cast of characters with diverse identities. Our protagonist, Fawkes, is nonbinary; we chose to present this quite simply as a fact about them, without posing it as an issue to be discussed or a dilemma to be pondered. We chose to include a variety of ethnicities, sexualities and gender identities among our cast to reflect the lived reality of those at the studio; it was important to us to normalize all of these things and weave them into the fabric of the world, which also included casting voice actors to authentically represent those characters. From a visual perspective, we faced the challenge of how to signpost certain elements of these identities in a way that felt realistic, given the limitation of the nonhuman warden bodies. In other cases, we decided to play with the cognitive dissonance of – for example – two cisgender male characters housed in feminine-coded bodies. Ultimately, we allowed the characters themselves to guide our hand.
Finally, we also created a library of lore entries, which the player discovers as they progress through the game. Collecting these will build a codex of entries, which act as an archive rather than an exhaustive encyclopedia; letter, diary entries and other windows into life on Luna, adding context to the events Fawkes experiences. The end result, we hope, will be a glimpse into a world which collapsed two hundred years before Fawkes ever set foot on the blood moon.
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This week the team chats with Ben Starr, English voice actor for Clive Rosfield, and Square Enix Localization Director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox on all things Final Fantasy XVI.
Stuff We Talked About
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.]
Last week, we celebrated ten years of The Last of Us by asking you to share moments from the iconic game using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s #TLOU10 highlights:
YouSpoonyBardd shares Joel’s broken watch in black and white
wingsforsmiles shares Ellie crouching and sneaking
_HypeDX shares Joel wearing a mask, leaving a spore-filled building
LukeKasinger shares a portrait of Sam
Dash_845 shares Joel shining a flashlight on Firefly graffiti on a wall
calisarah1998 shares Ellie and Riley looking at her joke book in front of the mall carousel
Search #PSshare #PSBlog on Twitter or Instagram to see more entries to this week’s theme. Want to be featured in the next Share of the Week?
THEME: Joel and Ellie – The Last of Us
SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on June 28, 2023
Next week, we’re continuing the love for #TLOU10 and highlighting Joel and Ellie. Share moments featuring Joel and Ellie together using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.
Since the end of The Callisto Protocol’s main game, things have gone from bad to worse inside the penitentiary. The virus that’s been wreaking havoc inside is threatening to escape the prison and it’s up to you to retrieve Mahler’s data and transmit it off-world. It’s not going to be a walk in the park. You’re going to have to fight tooth and nail to make your way through monster-infested corridors, where new abominations await.
When it comes to battling Biophage, players need reliable tools to survive. The Stun Baton is a great blunt instrument, but new threats call for new gear. According to Lead Systems Designer, Paul Guirao, the team behind The Callisto Protocol listened to fan feedback and decided to add a new melee weapon to the game. “We wanted to give players something more powerful than the Stun Baton,” Guirao explained.
The result is the all-new Kinetic Hammer. With its design and shape, you can feel the power and weight behind every swing. It has light and heavy melee attacks that hit harder than the Stun Baton, but that’s not all – Guirao explains, “Holding down the heavy melee button produces an even more powerful attack. But mastery of the heavy charged mechanic can be tricky… you become the ultimate badass once you’ve mastered it. It’s one of our favorite weapons because it obliterates everything it touches.” As a bonus, a successfully executed charge attack also creates a powerful area-of-effect.
However, the thrill of wielding the Kinetic Hammer is only fully realized when pitted against worthy adversaries. Final Transmission introduces a new enemy type and boss for players to square off with.
With twistedly agile corruptors and brutally powerful two-headed brutes lurking around every corner, not to mention the hard-to-kill Security Units, Black Iron Prison was always a treacherous place. But now a new enemy is stalking its halls: the Biophage Robot, or the Biobot as the developers affectionately call it. This terrifying foe is a combination of Biophage and UJC Security Units, and a deadly reminder that Black Iron is still as dangerous as ever.
“In the main game, the security robots are only seen a couple of times,” Guirao tells me, “With the final chapter, we really dug into the idea of what happens when the Biophage starts taking over machinery.”
Visualizing the Biobot as a grotesque and intimidating bio-mechanical enemy was an iterative process, “We worked closely with the Concept Art team to create a look that fits in TCP’s universe. It took several iterations to establish the look. We went in both extremes, too robotic and then too organic,” Guirao explains. The more robotic iterations felt too much like the existing Security Units and lacked the gruesomeness the team was looking for. On the other hand, the more organic versions appeared too fragile and didn’t do enough to differentiate the powerful new enemies from their Biophage brethren. Eventually the team “found that sweet spot.”
Affectionate nicknames aside, the Biobot is not an enemy to be taken lightly. According to one of the Senior Systems Designers, “Security Unit Robots were big, daunting enemies that couldn’t really be beaten up and would only go down from precision headshots.”
Guirao adds, “we’re not a tactical cover-based game, so making the Biobots a melee unit made more sense for us. We have an in-your-face style of combat and did not want to deviate from that.”
Guirao and the team at Striking Distance watched hundreds of hours of streamers playing The Callisto Protocol, “there was a lot of feedback on how all our NPCs felt the same and it was something that we needed to address.” To survive, players need to employ new tactics to take down Biobots, however, once players get the new melee weapon, they’ll have the chance to exact satisfying and well-deserved revenge on the bio-mechanical enemies and “finally get their chance to smash them apart.”
The Biobot isn’t the only new enemy you’ll encounter in your return to Black Iron. Without giving too much away, the final boss in Final Transmission is truly something special. “Our goal was to showcase the Kinetic Hammer’s power and make players strategize on the best ways to beat the boss; deciding when to use melee or ranged attacks and utilizing the arena to their advantage,” Senior Systems Designer Quinlan Richards reveals, “we’ve given the boss similar mechanics as Jacob, switching seamlessly between hard-hitting melee and aggressive ranged attacks. And to keep things interesting, we’ve given the final boss an ability that goes beyond anything Jacob can do.”
We can’t wait for you to return to Black Iron Prison to face the new horrors lurking its halls. PS4 and PS5 players get exclusive 48-hour early access to The Callisto Protocol: Final Transmission starting on June 26 at 9:00pm PST.
Developing a new numbered Final Fantasy game is a balancing act. Players have expectations of what they’ll encounter but still crave elements that change up and build upon established series traditions. But even those have to start somewhere: many elements commonly associated with Final Fantasy as a whole–Chocobos, Moogles, summons, and beloved job classes and abilities–were, at one point, completely alien to the series. Finding a delicate balance between tradition and innovation is always challenging, especially so with Final Fantasy XVI, the first numbered game in the long-running series to fully eschew menu-driven battles in favor of real-time combat.
Elements of action gameplay have evolved in Final Fantasy over time, beginning with the implementation of the “Active Time Battle” system in Final Fantasy IV. This upped the pressure on players by forcing them to respond quickly and consider the order in which enemies and allies would be able to act. Waffling on crucial decisions could prove costly, as foes would continue their onslaught no matter how long it took you to input your commands. (If you want to check out the genesis of Active Time Battle, you can play the Final Fantasy IV-VI Pixel Remasters now available on PlayStation.)
Final Fantasy IV (left) and Final Fantasy XII (right)
Active Time Battle would serve as the mechanical basis for most numbered Final Fantasy games going forward, with the positioning-driven open-field combat of Final Fantasy XII and the dynamic, on-the-fly role-swapping battles of the Final Fantasy XIII saga building on many of the concepts ATB solidified. Final Fantasy XV moved many of the typical menu commands to face buttons, shifting combat in a decidedly action-focused direction.
Final Fantasy XV (left) and Final Fantasy VII Remake (right)
Even with this gradual evolution, many modern Final Fantasy games, notably the Final Fantasy VII Remake series, still use some hybrid of menu- and action-driven gameplay. FFXVI going full-on action-RPG surprised many hardcore fans, who wondered how this may impact the “essence” of Final Fantasy. To talk about developing FFXVI to evolve the franchise while satisfying existing fans, we sat down with producer Naoki Yoshida and director Hiroshi Takai to dive deeper into their process.
Yoshida’s love for Final Fantasy blossomed from the very beginning of the series. “Final Fantasy I was an important gaming experience for me,” he says. “I bought it on launch day, and I remember how confused I was when I booted it up and there was no title screen. Then you leave town and cross the bridge, and up comes the Final Fantasy logo! I was blown away that a video game could feel so cinematic, and that’s what I wanted to recapture with this new game—the feeling that you’re playing the leading role in an epic movie.”
“So yes, I grew up on turn-based RPGs, and they still have a special place in my heart,” he remarks.
“We decided to go with real-time combat in FFXVI for two main reasons. The first is simply that most of the members of our development team are gamers, and recently, most of us have been into action games. The controller-gripping combat in those games really makes you want to pour hours into them. The other reason is that, in today’s market, going with an action combat system that anyone can get to grips with quickly and easily was our best way of appealing to the largest audience.
“By interweaving the real-time action with a fantastical story, we believed that we could create a game that was still Final Fantasy at heart. And, of course, when we say we want to appeal to the largest audience possible, that includes stalwart fans of turn-based games and those who aren’t the greatest at action games, too. We’ve put systems in place so that anyone of any skill level can enjoy the game just as much as a seasoned action gamer—maybe even more.”
Yoshida, a veteran producer who helmed the universally praised reboot of Final Fantasy XIV, also recognizes the expectations that come with the Final Fantasy name. “Making things different for the sake of it is the easy option,” he says. “For me, the key elements to an FF game are the cinematic presentation, the gripping story, and the battle system that underpins it all–not to mention the cutting-edge graphics and evocative soundscape. The combination of all those things, plus the fact that the world, story, and characters change with each installment, makes it feel like a series that is always breaking new boundaries. As Hironobu Sakaguchi, the father of the series, once said, ‘Final Fantasy is what the director at the time thinks is best.’”
“FFXVI is no exception–the whole team worked together to make the very best game we could. The challenge we set ourselves was to change things up while keeping the game recognizably Final Fantasy. For instance, the classic high fantasy setting was inspired by the time-honored FFI. When you play through FFXVI, there are lots of little touches and nods to that game.”
Director Hiroshi Takai chimes in with his perspective. “One of the stand-out things about the franchise is that every one of the games in the mainline series brings with it a whole new world, story, and gameplay experience. It’s the shared elements that tie them together–the summons, the spells, the Chocobos and the Moogles–as well as the things that always change between entries, like the battle system–that make Final Fantasy games unique. Maybe the reason the players have stuck with the series so long is because we’ve always stayed true to the vision Yoshida mentioned–striving to make the very best game they can at that particular moment.”
“I’ve also played every installment in the franchise and have been involved in the making of a fair few of them,” Takai continues. “So naturally, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from past games, even on a subconscious level. For example, I loved the customizable ability system from FFV–that idea formed the basis of the new battle system in FFXVI.”
Perhaps the most recognizably Final Fantasy element in FFXVI are the Eikons–summoned monsters known by many different terms like “Eidolons,” “Espers,” “Guardian Forces,” and more throughout the series. Takai explained their place in FFXVI.
“The classic Summons take a leading role in both the story and the battle system,” he says. “Even though we’re switching over to an action battle system with this game, it’s all centered around the Summons, which gives it that all-important Final Fantasy flavor.”
Even with all of their passion and effort put into the game, the team acknowledges that some players might not see Final Fantasy the same way they do. “Every FF fan around the world has a different idea of what makes for the perfect FF game,” notes Yoshida. “And as a fan myself, I’m sure my own idea differs from everyone else’s. So while we always knew that it would be impossible to satisfy the expectations of the whole fanbase, Takai, [Kazutoyo] Maehiro, and the whole of the development team took the approach to make the game we wanted to make while at the same time keeping an objective eye on the fans’ expectations. I think it’s important to always try to remain objective about your own work, even if it’s only for your own peace of mind.”
Takai is optimistic that fans will find a lot to enjoy about FFXVI upon its release date. “I hope that Clive’s story, and the hopes and dreams of all the people of Valisthea whose path he crosses, will stay with players. The decisions that Clive and his friends make are seen and judged differently by the different people of the realm, and I think there’s a real parallel with the world today, where everyone has a different viewpoint. FFXVI is a game that tackles the issues that it deals with head-on in both the story and the presentation, and I hope that, when people look back on it and its place in the series, it will be remembered for exactly that.”
Final Fantasy XVI will launch exclusively for PS5 on June 22. Be sure to download the demo ahead of time and transfer your progress to the full game.
A year has flown by so quickly since we rolled out our new PlayStation Plus tiered plans, ushering in new benefits to the service such as our Game Catalog and Classics Catalog, along with Game Trials for blockbuster titles. Whether you subscribe to PlayStation Plus Essential, Extra or Deluxe, it’s been great to see the positive feedback we’ve gotten from players around the world for the quality titles that we offer monthly.
Today, we’re celebrating this wonderful milestone with 10 days of activities for the PlayStation community. It’s also our way of saying thanks to players everywhere for supporting us in this new era for PlayStation Plus.
Now, here are some of the games joining the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog this week:
Classics Catalog:
Game Trial for WWE2K23 (PS4), will also be available on June 20.
From June 20 through June 30, we’ll have a number of activities for both PlayStation Plus members and non-members to participate in.
(for PlayStation Plus members)
To mark this occasion, all members will receive a voucher code to redeem custom avatars that commemorate some of the popular titles offered through PlayStation Plus. Be on the lookout for an email, or check the PlayStation Plus website for a voucher code that can be redeemed from June 20 to June 30.
A free PlayStation Plus wallpaper illustration for desktop and mobile will also be available; check this website between June 20 to June 30 to download the wallpaper.
As part of our celebration, we’re taking inspiration from the memorable 2022 PlayStation Plus Mr. Malcolm spot, which debuted alongside our new plan offerings. Three exclusive digital collectible rings will be available through the following campaigns, which will run from June 20 through June 30.
(for PlayStation Plus Extra, Deluxe members)
Pay homage to PlayStation Plus Game Catalog by playing any one of these recent Game Catalog additions to get the Game Catalog digital collectible: Final Fantasy VII Remake, Demon’s Souls, Yakuza Kiwami, Uncharted Legacy of Thieves Collection, or Assassin’s Creed The Ezio Collection.
(for PlayStation Plus Deluxe members)
Step back in time and celebrate a year of the PlayStation Plus Classic Catalog with the Classics Catalog digital collectible. To unlock this special digital collectible, you’ll need to launch the four games that match the hints provided once the campaign begins.
(for PlayStation Plus Deluxe members)
It’s been an incredible first year of the AAA PlayStation Plus Game Trial. Play any one of these featured PlayStation Plus Game Trials to get the Game Catalog digital collectible: God of War Ragnarök, MLB The Show 23 (PS4), The Last of Us Part I or Dying Light 2 Stay Human (PS4 & PS5).
(no PlayStation Plus membership required)
Join the PlayStation Plus celebration for an opportunity to win a PS5 console and the groundbreaking PS VR2 headset with the PS VR2 Sense controller. To participate, head over to the PlayStation Plus website and answer five questions about the service. This campaign runs from June 20-June 30. Be sure to check out the PlayStation Plus webpage for more details!
Participating locations:
● Starting June 20 at 2:01AM PDT – June 30 at 3:59PM local time
● Starting June 20 at 10:01AM GMT – June 30 at 3:59PM local time
● Starting June 20 at 10:01AM KST– June 30 at 3:59PM local time
(no PlayStation Plus membership required)
Get ready for another online multiplayer weekend starting June 24 through June 25 and play against, or alongside, other players online. Online multiplayer is available without a PlayStation Plus membership during this time.
(for players with or without a PlayStation Plus membership)
Sackboy is back to celebrate PlayStation Plus with another round of Speedrun challenges. Join us starting on June 24 through June 25, and enter for a chance to win a 3-month PlayStation Plus Deluxe membership. Sackboy a Big Adventure is currently part of the Game Catalog for PlayStation Plus Extra and Deluxe members, and non-members can also join the challenge if they own the title. To participate, simply select the challenge card from the Sackboy Game Hub on your PS5. You can also locate the challenge in-game within the Knitted Knight Trials via the Pause Menu or World Map. You can find out more details on our website.
Thanks again to our PlayStation community for embracing PlayStation Plus and joining us on this journey. It’s been a wonderful year so far, and we look forward to more great adventures to come.
See https://www.playstation.com/Plus for details and updates on PS Plus offerings. PlayStation Plus is an ongoing subscription subject to a recurring subscription fee taken automatically (at the then-current PS Store price) at the frequency you choose at purchase until cancellation. Terms apply: play.st/psplus usageterms.
*PS Stars campaigns are not available in Indonesia.
The Wumpa Fruit is calling, and it’s nearly time to open the gates. Experience a whole new way to Crash with the upcoming launch of Crash Team Rumble, arriving today, June 20 for PlayStation 4 and 5.
Developed by Toys for Bob, this all-new strategic multiplayer experience brings 4v4 platforming action to the Crash universe, featuring eight crazy characters and nine wild arenas at launch. Your team’s goal? Collect and bank the most Wumpa Fruit. Though strategically deep, it’s easy to pick up and play, making Crash Team Rumble a great title for Crash veterans and new players alike.
In their pursuit for fruit, each character will use their own unique abilities in addition to fulfilling one of three important roles as a Scorer, Blocker, or Booster. Scorers excel at moving around the map to collect and bank Wumpa, Blockers fight to prevent enemy players from depositing Wumpa at their bank, and Boosters collect Relics to activate map-specific, tide-turning Relic Stations and capture Gem Pads, which provide temporary multipliers to their team’s Wumpa deposits.
With eight characters available at launch plus more coming in post-launch content, there are plenty of ways to approach each match. For now, let’s focus on three of our characters: Catbat, N. Brio, and N. Tropy.
A speedy Scorer with unmatched aerial mobility, Catbat is an all-new playable character in the Crash universe, equipped with a long-ranged dive attack and the ability to jump five times higher than other characters, making it easy to access hard-to-reach areas on the map.
Catbat also supports teammates with their healing ability to keep them going during the toughest combat encounters while easily engaging and disengaging opponents through use of their aerial maneuvers — they can even stall in the air to wait out the most dangerous situations below.
A high-risk, high-reward powerhouse, N. Brio is a Blocker who controls the battlefield with summoned monsters. By throwing flasks on the ground, he can summon up to two slime monsters that attack enemy opponents. The monsters also make for great jumping pads, allowing N. Brio to bounce off them for a major height boost.
By drinking his potion, he can transform himself into a huge monster, smashing anything in his path for a short time. Timing is critical, however: N. Brio is vulnerable to enemy attacks during the transformation process.
The self-proclaimed master of time, N. Tropy is a ranged Blocker who sweeps the battlefield with large, slow-moving projectiles that can knock the enemy away. Using her long attack range, she chases down and pesters the enemy team from a safe distance.
When working in tandem with a powerful melee Blocker like Dingodile, N. Tropy really comes into her own, providing valuable ranged damage while her teammate takes on the brunt of the attack.
Expect the roster of characters to expand with additional post-launch content, including two more characters arriving later in Season 1. Other post-launch content includes new arenas, modes, powers, time-limited events, customization options, and more.
Purchase Crash Team Rumble for $29.99 SRP for the Standard Edition and $39.99 SRP for the Deluxe Edition. The Standard Edition includes the full game plus additional post-launch seasonal content and limited-time modes, as well as the Season 1 Premium Battle Pass*.
The Deluxe Edition includes everything in the Standard Edition plus 25 Battle Pass Tiers instantly unlocked during Season 1, the Season 2 Premium Battle Pass**, and the digital “Proto Pack,” which features extra customization options for each hero and villain at launch and more.
* Premium Battle Pass will be accessible in Crash Team Rumble once the Season 1 Battle Pass, or equivalent system, is made available in-game. Limited time only. Season 1 Premium Battle Pass (or equivalent version) must be redeemed by September 12, 2023.
**Premium Battle Pass and Tier Skips will be accessible in Crash Team Rumble once the Season 1 Battle Pass, or equivalent system, is made available in-game. Limited time only. Season 1 Premium Battle Pass (or equivalent version) and Tier Skips must be redeemed by September 12, 2023. Season 2 Premium Battle Pass (or equivalent version) must be redeemed by December 4, 2023.
Hello readers! We’re very proud to launch Harmony: The Fall of Reverie on PlayStation 5 on June 22nd. It’s a narrative adventure with two vibrant worlds, a cast of loveable characters, and a compelling story we hope all kinds of players will enjoy.
One of the main features of our game is the Augural, and that’s what we’d like to talk about in this blog. The Augural is the game board and visual representation of our main character, Polly’s, gift of clairvoyance. It is the place in which you will foresee and make all your choices in Harmony: The Fall of Reverie.
We wanted to the Augural to be a peaceful and beautiful place where you can prepare your next move without any stress. That’s why the Augural is set against a placid lake reflecting a starlit sky, and this starlight conveys the idea of an astronomical map where fates can be deciphered.
When we first set out to build the Augural, the intention was to offer significant choices that were well-informed, so you need never be surprised or caught off guard by the decisions you make. From there, it evolved naturally into a way to expose the ‘core’ of the story and show how events are connected to one another. We wanted to do something new in the Choices Matter sub-genre.
We experimented with graphs and trees during conceptualization. One of our main references was Augury, the Ancient Greek art of divination, which they performed because they believed that the gods were willing to communicate with mortals. This was a good way for us to make the link between Polly’s clairvoyance and this method of representing it.
But it came with its challenges – we wanted you to feel the gift of clairvoyance and still be surprised by how the story unfolds. The biggest issue however was readability; the Augural went through quite a few iterations!
Some versions that we experimented with but ultimately didn’t make it into the game are more complex trees that would spread in several directions, cards that would reveal themselves on the board as the story progressed, and at one point there was even a building you could rotate in 3D! In the end, we made the system more user-friendly with lots of testing, removing any unnecessary visual elements, simplifying the background, improving readability at any level of zoom, and spent a lot of time tweaking the navigation.
As the Augural is a very visual way of playing, we had to create a system in which you can see even the seemingly trivial decisions eventually build up to greater outcomes down the line. This is so you can visualize how you’re going to play to reach the outcomes you seek. During the game you’ll also make decisions which have an immediate impact on the story and unlock branches while closing access to others.
When it comes to the bigger decisions, you’ll use Crystals. This resource, which is your connection between the two worlds, is another unique aspect of the game which you will see and manage in the Augural. As the story progresses, you’ll gather Crystals from the Aspirations – ancient godlike beings living in Reverie – that you’ve helped or been helped by during your journey. Which Crystals you use and from whom will feed that Aspirations’ influence on the real world until one of them ends up standing above the others as the heart of humanity… perhaps.
Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is a game that relies on story and gameplay responding fluidly to one another – the complexity of the story mustn’t be an obstacle to comprehension. We think we’ve managed to pull it off, but we’d love for you to play and let us know what you think! Harmony: The Fall of Reverie releases on 22nd June on PlayStation 5.
