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Five delightful things to do in Solar Ash, out tomorrow

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Solar Ash is a game that is, at its heart, about traversing with great speed through a massive world to discover its secrets. The protagonist Rei skates over wild cloudscapes, eerie landscapes, and great ruins. She’s a stranger in a strange and dangerous land – out of her depth, but pushing forward with incredible will and commitment.

Here are five amazing things you can do in Solar Ash…

1. Take down a giant lava-bird-monster 

Rei encounters a wide variety of aggressively large creatures in all manner of forms, such as an enormous bird-like monster that resides in the lava biome in the north. Why does it live in the burning heat of such a volatile environment? Perhaps you’ll find out. Victory will require great speed, careful balance, and precise timing all while soaring through the air high above the dangerous flow of lava.

The oozing heat tempts the foolish to leap. Only the skilled survive.

2. Build out your suit collection 

As she glides, jumps, and flies across the world of Solar Ash, Rei can grab multiple pieces of gear from hidden or hard-to-reach spots strewn about the world. These will net you rewards in the form of suit parts that can be assembled to unlock new bonus powers. These may be well worth your time to find and build out and succeed on your journey through the Ultravoid.

Patience, vigilance, and exploration will be rewarded.

3. Rail-grind up an ancient ship graveyard 

The universe of Solar Ash contains a great host of desolate, abandoned structures that Rei can glide over and through. Find the derelict fleet floating above the clouds, highlighted by the uncanny glow of the sky. Grind, slash, and platform up this ominous scrapyard. Perhaps there’s something, or someone, at the end of this once-great heap to greet you?

Sometimes decrepit ruins belie great rewards.

What to expect in Call of Duty: Warzone Pacific Season One

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With the recent launch of Call of Duty: Vanguard, we’re only days away from the start of Season One, bringing with it the launch of the new map Caldera in Warzone Pacific. Caldera marks a new era of pulse-pounding tactical combat on a massive scale.

Beginning December 8 with the start of Season One, Vanguard players get 24-hour early access to Caldera before it opens for everyone else on December 9. Featuring a dedicated Playlist with new vehicles, the introduction of Vanguard weapons, and more, there’s a whole lot to look forward to as we kick off another epic year of free content.

What to expect in Call of Duty: Warzone Pacific Season One

Introducing Caldera

This is one big island. Caldera comprises 15 huge, distinct areas to explore and fight across, including hundreds of points of interest to investigate and use to your advantage. We’ve highlighted just three to give you an idea of what’s ahead:

Naval Arsenal

This sprawling shipyard on Caldera’s northern coast features a strategic mix of interior and exterior combat opportunities, including unusual fighting locations like the deep drydock basins and radar array. Farther inland is a cluster of large buildings housing plentiful loot.

Clear Water Lagoon

An old lighthouse overlooks a shallow bay with bamboo huts alongside a quaint coastal community with more-recently constructed homes. Traverse the lagoon to uncover its secrets, including what remains of Captain Butcher’s plane.

Caldera Capital City

Set into a huge natural basin along the southern shore of the island, Caldera’s main city features a variety of historical structures built on either side of a working tramway system. Hillside suburbs and a lighthouse offer space and height compared to the bustling downtown, while coastal developments south of the city offer a luxurious beachfront yacht club and bar.

There’s the central volcano, too, after which the island is named. Only the fiercest Operators can hope to face its perils.

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Knockout City Season 4 starts December 7: Ride UFOs, brawl across an alien crash site

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I’m Zack Hiwiller, Lead Designer on Knockout City. I’m here to tell you that things are getting tense in Knockout City. First, we had an AI start taking over everything (Why can’t Perennial Labs just make AIs that, I dunno, help you find somewhere to go for lunch?), and now? You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It’s better if you just… watch. Here, check it out in this trailer:

Knockout City Season 4 starts December 7: Ride UFOs, brawl across an alien crash site

One of the benefits of developing a live service game like Knockout City is that you can constantly try new things. If these things work for players, you build on them. If not, you try something else. The cycles can be really rapid. We want to constantly update game content and keep each experience fresh; we packed Season 3 with events, and you can expect more where that came from in Season 4. We have four two-week events planned for a twelve-week season which starts with our Conflict Escalation Playlist on December 7 and ends, as always, with a week of Midnight Madness at the end of February. The start of Season 4 will also feature our new map: Alien Smash Site.

The level design process on Knockout City gives us the flexibility to focus on centering each level around a specific unique mechanic. For instance, at the Holowood Drive-In, we have movie vignettes that change every minute, significantly changing the level geometry throughout the match. In last season’s Lockdown Throwdown, we added menacing-looking turrets that shoot cage balls at you if you get caught in a Security Drone’s spotlight.

This Season, we’re taking brawlers to Alien Smash Site, located on a peaceful farm hovering high above the ground on the outskirts of town. It was a peaceful place in Knockout City until recently, when the Knockout City Defense Force shot down UFOs directly on top of it. It has a full range of combat spaces: tightly enclosed barns, big open gaps (more on that in a bit), and places to flank and drop into an ongoing battle. 

This is Knockout City’s biggest level so far, so it needs something to help with traversal. Luckily, the aliens have left around a bunch of little saucers that you can hover around on and zip from place to place, even using its tractor beam to suck up balls (or players in Ballform, before you chuck `em into the nearest pit). For me, using the saucers is the most fun in our Basketbrawl mode as you can ride the saucers to dunk opponent balls through the hoops.

One of Warframe’s biggest secrets revealed

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We’ve been developing Warframe now for nearly nine years strong, working diligently to create an experience that is much more than a looter shooter with fast, frenetic, and visceral action combat. Warframe boasts a dramatic cinematic storyline that we’ve spent years crafting, and often spent just as much time strategizing how we hide its epic plot twists and shocking turns that our players really value to this day. 

For years, players have been guided through Warframe by the Lotus, their Space Mom, but the true nature of their relationship has been highly guarded. As Warframe continues to evolve with the upcoming launch of our biggest cinematic expansion to date, The New War, on PS4 and PS5 December 15, we’re taking a moment to reflect on Warframe’s biggest plot twists and openly discuss pivotal moments in this blog that are key to understanding the stakes of The New War and the players’ relationship with the Lotus. 


Spoiler Alert: Major Spoiler Warning


Secrets of The Second Dream

Since we introduced The Second Dream in 2015, we’ve been extra cautious of spoilers — being careful not to spill our cup of secrets so that new players can discover the excitement of our story for themselves. We’ve gone out of our way on the development side to ensure the integrity of our plot twists remain unscathed — in 2019 we unveiled Creator Mode, which helped keep spoilers out of streams and VOD by hiding certain dialogue and transmissions when Warframe is being broadcast. Our community of players who have since completed The Second Dream Cinematic Quest in-game have also joined us in our mission of keeping this pivotal moment under wraps, hiding intimate details from other players in-game, following certain unspoken rules for interacting with new players, and even shutting down forums that threaten to virally spread news of our longest-standing question: who is behind the Warframe?

Behind the Warframe

Until The Second Dream, the nature of the Warframe is never questioned. Players control fearsome suits of futuristic armor, warriors of blade and gun, to cut down enemy onslaught and complete various missions to level up their Mastery Ranks while working across an intricate Star Chart. But from the beginning we’ve deliberately left breadcrumbs for players to pick up on that allude to more — starting with when Ordis first greets the players as “Operator” inside their Orbiter. So what is, or who is, an Operator?

The Operator is the actual player, a young human child whose Void powers are the source of their Warframe’s powerful Abilities.

Once this truth is revealed, we’ve really shaken things up for players. They’ve learned that this entire time, the Warframe they are controlling isn’t the center of the story but is a scientifically advanced biomechanical warrior being operated and mind-controlled by a sleeping child and their dreams. The narrative continues to evolve alongside the action with Quests like The War Within, but this single pivotal moment in Warframe dramatically changes the player’s perspective in-game, creating an emotionally charged shift that sets the stage for Warframe’s following story arcs. 

Revealing the Surprise

You might be wondering why we’ve decided to proactively dish out one of Warframe’s best-kept secrets in our new trailer. For over five years, our development team and community

New Dreams update brings Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale and DreamShaping 2.0

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Hold onto your buttresses – the dungeon-crawling, monster-slaying, castle-crashing Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale is out now!

Exclusively available to play in Dreams, Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale is a third-person dungeon crawler made by Media Molecule and designed to test the skills of only the bravest adventurers. Whether you’re after frantic combat against strange and silly foes, puzzles to tickle your brain cells, or a showdown against a dragon with huge teeth (and an even bigger ego), Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale has you covered.

A screenshot from Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale, featuring orc twins Scoria and Gabbro running up the stairs in a dungeon towards a group of ravenous plant enemies.

Fight solo as heroic orc Scoria in single-player mode – or bring along a friend to play as Scoria’s twin, Gabbro, in local co-op mode (local co-op play still requires an internet connection). Challenge yourself to top the scoreboards by clashing with enemies and activating your Berserk chain to maximize those sweet, sweet points. 

A screenshot from Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale, featuring orc twins Scoria and Gabbro raising their swords to the sky to enter Berserk mode. Lightning is shooting out of the swords. 

Will Scoria and Gabbro find the herb they need to cure their grandmother’s terrible snoring? Can their wise-cracking bat pal find his way home? And is there a reasonable explanation as to how a dragon learned the noble art of floristry? All these questions and more possibly answered within.

A screenshot from Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale, featuring orc twins Scoria and Gabbro looking towards the camera with puzzled expressions.

To celebrate the launch of Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale, we’re treating you to five glorious new imps, based on some of the most memorable characters from Ancient Dangers: A Bat’s Tale. Get a load of these.

But that’s not all. This latest update also brings a significant overhaul to DreamShaping.

Dreamshaping

Screenshots of some of the new DreamShaping templates in action.

For the uninitiated: DreamShaping is the name of the Dreams create mode. Since launching Dreams, we’ve found that DreamShaping can be overwhelming for new players. With our new template system, and a reworking of the DreamShaping UI, we hope this huge update will help make getting started making games in Dreams quicker, easier and more fun than ever before.

The new version of DreamShaping includes handy game templates and brand-new elements for making a 2D platformer, a dungeon crawler, a side-scrolling shoot-’em-up, mini golf and more be

Dauntless launches on PS5 December 2

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Hey PlayStation Slayers, I’m here with exciting news – Dauntless is coming to PlayStation 5 on December 2! This new native version of the game, launching alongside our “Call to Arms” content update, includes significant graphical upgrades, much faster load times, DualSense controller and 3D Audio support, and much more.

Dauntless launches on PS5 December 2

With the native PS5 version of Dauntless, we’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade visuals across the game. In addition to dynamic 4K resolution targeting 60 frames-per-second, there are enhanced environmental textures and detail across all our islands, including upgraded trees, grass, and water. We’ve also got higher-quality lighting and materials, new volumetric fog, and improved visual effects across the game. The Shattered Isles have never looked so good!

Of course, we couldn’t come to PS5 without supporting the DualSense controller. You’ll feel your character’s stamina and empowered Repeater ammo through trigger resistance, hear radio callouts through the speaker, and see applied elemental effects in the lights. You’ll also be able to use the microphone built into the DualSense to chat with your party and we’ve added support for immersive 3D Audio. Together with the PS5’s SSD, load times have been significantly reduced, getting you into the hunt faster than ever.

If you’ve already been playing Dauntless on PS4, you’ll be able to pick up your progress automatically on the PS5 version. You can also jump between the two and play with your friends with cross-play and cross-save. To celebrate everything we’ve added to Dauntless since our initial PS4 release two years ago, the “Call to Arms” update launching December 2 adds 36 new Trophies for you to collect in the PlayStation 4 version of the game. On PlayStation 5, there’s a whole new set of Trophies to unlock, including a Platinum.

Also arriving in the Shattered Isles as part of the “Call to Arms”update is the razor-sharp new Behemoth, Sahvyt, a gameplay refresh for our Chain Blades weapon, the new Krolachi Warlords Hunt Pass, new quests and challenges, and a host of other additions and improvements. Stay tuned to PlayDauntless.com for more details as we approach launch.

You can download and hop into Dauntless right now on PS4 and PS5 (backwards compatible), and we’re excited for you to enjoy the new native PS5 version and all our other new content on December 2!

Clear skies, Slayers.

End of Year Deals promotion comes to PlayStation Store

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PlayStation Store welcomes the End of Year Deals promotion on Monday, November 29. For a limited time* enjoy discounts on titles such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Deluxe PS4 & PS5, Jurassic World Evolution and Days Gone – Digital Deluxe Edition.

  • 270 FS Points
  • 2K Ball N’ Brawl Bundle
  • 36 Fragments of Midnight
  • 550 FS Points
  • 7 Days to Die
  • A Hero and a Garden
  • A Little Lily Princess PS4 & PS5
  • A Summer with the Shiba Inu
  • A.O.T. Wings of Freedom
  • Accel World VS Sword Art Online
  • Access Denied
  • Ace of Seafood
  • Aces of the Luftwaffe
  • Aces of the Luftwaffe: Squadron – Extended Edition
  • Agatha Christie: The ABC Murders
  • Age of Wonders: Planetfall – Deluxe Edition Content
  • Age of Wonders: Planetfall – Season Pass
  • Air Conflicts: Pacific Carriers – PlayStation 4 Edition
  • Alekhine’s Gun
  • Alien: Isolation
  • Alien: Isolation – The Collection
  • Alphadia Genesis
  • Alphadia Genesis 2
  • Amnesia: Collection
  • Amnesia: Rebirth
  • Angels of Death
  • Angels with Scaly Wings PS4 & PS5
  • Anodyne 2: Return to Dust PS4 & PS5
  • Anthem: Legion of Dawn Edition
  • Antiquia Lost
  • AO Tennis 2
  • Apple Slash
  • Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection
  • Arizona Sunshine
  • Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
  • Assassin’s Creed Odyssey – Deluxe Edition
  • Assassin’s Creed Origins
  • Assassin’s Creed Origins – Gold Edition
  • Assassin’s Creed Rogue Remastered
  • Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
  • Assassin’s Creed Triple Pack: Black Flag, Unity, Syndicate
  • Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Deluxe PS4 & PS5
  • Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Gold PS4 & PS5
  • Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection
  • Asstto Corsa – Ultimate Edition
  • Astebreed
  • Astro Bot Rescue Mission
  • Atelier Arland Series – Deluxe Pack
  • Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland
  • Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland – Digital Deluxe Edition
  • Atelier Lulua: The Scion of Arland – Lulua Season Pass
  • Atelier Meruru: The Apprentice of Arland DX
  • Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland DX
  • Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland DX
  • Attack of Toy Tanks
  • Autumn’s Journey
  • Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack
  • Bai Qu: Hundreds of Melodies PS4 & PS5
  • Barry the Bunny
  • Bassmaster Fishing 2022
  • Batman: Arkham Knight – Premium Edition
  • Batman: Arkham VR
  • Batman: The Telltale Series – Season Pass
  • Battlewake
  • Bayonetta
  • Bear With Me: The Complete Collection Unlock
  • Bear With Me: The Lost Robots
  • Beast Quest
  • Bee Simulator
  • Bird Game +
  • Birthday of Midnight
  • Bishoujo Battle Cyber Panic!
  • Blackguards 2
  • Blair Wit

Exclusive look at Fall Guys Season 6 Round, Pipe Dream

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Prepare your beans for the Party Spectacular. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout Season 6 drops November 30, bringing a festival-themed makeover to the Blunderdome. An all-star lineup is headlined by five new Rounds, our wildest obstacles to date and costumes fit for the carnival of Crowns. We’ve teamed up with PlayStation to take you ‘behind the beans’ of Pipe Dream – a totally tubular Season 6 Round. Stumble beyond the velvet rope and join us for a pre-release peek.

Pipe Dreamin’ at the Fall Guys festival

Pipe Dream focuses on vacuum pipes, a totally new obstacle for Season 6! Every time a bean tumbles in, you’ll be zoomed at full-speed through twists and turns before being launched into maze-like challenges. We can’t wait for you to experience this rapidly changing race to the finish line. But how did such a wild ride come about?

Leading up to a Fall Guys season, teams across the studio are brimming with ideas of how to bring a new Blunderdome theme to life. As a designer, our Level Design concepting sessions are my favorite part of this early process, creating a space to bring our wildest possible Round schemes to the table…no matter how improbable or ridiculous.

The vacuum pipe idea originally came from Junior Designer Max Boyle (creator of Snowball Survival, Lily Leapers, Gate Crash…and perpetual menace to the Fall Guys Community Team on live streams). We were particularly inspired by how some games utilised pipes to near-instantly drop you from one ‘world’ to another. We’ve had Fall Guys bouncing on lily pads, propelled by flippers and flung by Big Yeetus…could vacuum pipes change things up? And most importantly, would it be fun?

What makes a Fall Guys Round?

Our goal is to have every Round be a place where players can show off their Fall Guys skill, but without sacrificing that quintessential Fall Guys chaos that creates the slapstick moments the game is known for. Like See-Saw, it’s all about balance.

This means tumbling through a lot of development stages, as initial concept discussions are fleshed out into a more in-depth level outline. From there, we took the Round to a ‘blockout’ stage, building Pipe Dream from scratch using basic shapes to get an initial feel of the core gameplay. Internally, that goes through multiple iterations and playtests…which for me means watching colleagues poke, prod and generally break what’s been lovingly created.

The Round then headed off to the art team to become one with the new season’s aesthetic, which for the Party Spectacular means super vibrant colors and inflatable flourishes. From there, it’s all about rigorous bug fixing and (as our Board of Beans will know) lots of playtesting.

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Share of the Week: Feast

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Last week, we asked you to tuck in for some of the fanciest feasts games have to offer using #PSshare #PSBlog. Here are this week’s delicious highlights: 

AhmadYuanda_1st shares a delectable selection of meals from Monster Hunter World.

coalabr14 highlights a bountiful fruit stand in Far Cry 6.

KouhyarB stumbles across the remains of a feast in Uncharted 4.

15_kyuuu_6 shares a feast fit for a warrior in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

JO_yamayama shares a warm bite in Laid-Back Camp – Virtual – Lake Motosu.

singleplayer33 shares Aloy taking aim at some feast-ready game in Horizon Zero Dawn.

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: Glowing

SUBMIT BY: Wednesday 9 AM PT on December 1

Next week, we’re drawn like moths to a flame. Share moments where something is glowing from the game of your choice using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.

Fine-tuning The Last of Us Part II’s interactive guitar

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Music has always been a cornerstone of Naughty Dog titles, but with The Last of Us: Part II we knew we wanted to take things a step further, and put the music directly into players’ hands.

The idea sprung first from a narrative angle: between our first internal story pitch and our first external trailer, the guitar was always a story focus. And as designers, we wanted to make the guitar playable from the get go, to make the player feel that connection between Joel and Ellie.

However, the world of The Last of Us is grounded and somber. A flashy guitar mini-game wouldn’t fit the tone of our post-apocalyptic environment. Moreover, Ellie playing guitar shouldn’t be about showing off your skills or fulfilling your dreams of being a rock star, it should be about remembering a loved one and expressing oneself through music to connect to them.

We felt early on, then, that we should avoid rhythm-based games.  While those experiences are extremely fun, our tone was better-suited to introspection and expression, rather than high-skill riffs, combos, and the like. 

But what are our alternatives? How could we craft a playable guitar that matched our expressive, melancholy tone? We started looking for inspiration not just from existing games, but from music-making apps – tools for people to create music of their own. Of particular note were smartphone music apps, whose touchscreen interfaces got our gears turning about harnessing the DualShock 4 touchpad.

Thankfully, one of the earliest captured cinematics for the game was Ashley Johnson (Ellie) singing “Take on Me” by Aha. So even early on, we had a reference to use as our goal for the minigame. With that target, we asked ourselves how much of the song should the player play before we transition over to the cinematic? Should we try to layer Ashley’s singing over the player playing as we transition? Stepping back, how much freedom do we give the player before we consider it a failure? We saw that a good way to distinguish success from failure was by tracking chord progression but leaving the plucking of strings up to the player. This allows for more musical expression – including things like tempo, time signature, and style – to be determined by the player while still keeping the song recognizable.

Once this “Take On Me” prototype felt solid, we started to consider the rest of the game, and the other songs we needed. We knew “Future Days” by Pearl Jam would be a critical one to figure out, but there were ideas kicking around for other songs as well. Knowing that either way we would need more chord wheels, we started to ask ourselves…how many chords might we need to cover any potential song we might want to include down the line?

This was the origin of our Free Play (Practice) mode. This mode wasn’t our original intention, but rather an idea that emerged from expanding the system to multiple songs. Once we started down the Free Play rabbit hole, we got to lean even further into our goals of player expression. Our goal was to lay out the chord wheels so that they’d be intuitive to players with some musical knowledge, but also allow novices to still sound good even when strumming around randomly with a wheel.

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