Hey everyone-  My name is Darren Bridges, and I’m the lead co-op designer for Ghost of Tsushima: Legends. To celebrate Legends’ inclusion as a bonus game in this month’s PlayStation Plus lineup, I wanted to give you all a window into our development philosophy and process.

For me, the journey started in 2016, when Nate Fox showed me the original pitch for Ghost of Tsushima and asked if I’d lead the design on the cooperative mode. I was excited… and intimidated! I knew it would be a challenge.

Concept art of our playable heroes 

I happily agreed to work on it, and my first goal was to make sure we had the flexibility to make decisions that would enable a great co-op experience. A lot of the choices that work in single-player don’t translate well to multiplayer content (and vice versa). After several pitch attempts, we came up with one that really resonated: co-op would be set in a world of supernatural tales told by an eccentric storyteller that Jin meets in his travels.This “Legends” story framework gave us freedom to design and optimize the experience to be inviting, challenging, and enjoyable for multiple players, while still connecting thematically to the world and characters of Ghost of Tsushima.

Finding the fun… with friends (or randos)!

Once we had established a versatile foundation, we needed to ask ourselves- what actually makes co-op fun? There are many good answers, but here are three major elements that we focused on:

#1: Co-op is fun when you can play with other people

This seems obvious- if you don’t have other players, it’s not really co-op! But a lot of design decisions can make it easier or harder to play together. We wanted to streamline the experience and avoid decisions that would separate players or make it hard to matchmake. Here are some of the features that make it easier to play together:

Short tutorial: The training mission takes about 10 minutes, and then you can immediately start matchmaking or playing with friends.

Wide availability: One of my early mantras in development was “The best feature we can add for co-op is all of your friends.”  We made the decision ahead of release to offer the mode to everyone who owned Ghost of Tsushima rather than as a paid DLC

Focused matchmaking, and Join In Progress: We intentionally designed our difficulty structure and Quick Play system to minimize the total number of matchmaking pools. This makes it easy to play the type of content you’re interested in while minimizing the amount of time you have to wait for a match. Additionally, if other players disconnect during a session, you can activate matchmaking again to fill their spot and keep going.

Escalating, Fresh Challenge: As you start replaying missions on harder difficulties, you’ll notice the introduction of new mechanics, rules, objectives, and enemies. This helps the content stay fresh and surprising, and also increases the necessity of working together as you get deeper into the experience.

Hello, Travelers! Today we’re pleased to share with you the latest information about Genshin Impact’s Version 2.6 “Zephyr of the Violet Garden” arriving on March 30! With an all-new area added, we can soon head to the westernmost of Liyue, delve deep into this unfathomable area, and continue a new chapter in the story of the Traveler Twins together with Dainsleif.

On the other side of the sea, life in Inazuma has taken on a new look after the Sakoku Decree was abolished. The Magnificent Irodori Festival will invite many in and outside of Inazuma to celebrate a time of arts and culture. At the same time, Kamisato Ayato, the young master leading one of Inazuma’s most powerful clans into a new era, will make his debut as a playable five-star with an exciting Story Quest.

Down Into The Chasm

For a long time, The Chasm has been Liyue’s primary source of ores, especially for its famous porcelain goods. Overlooking this area, one can see that the soil in this area are tinted in violet-red. Recently, this area has been sealed off due to a series of mysterious events. However, as Travelers, you can join a team of experts from various backgrounds to explore the underground.

What we see above the ground is only the tip of The Chasm. The vast underground space has been hollowed out layer by layer by generations of miners, and unique fluorescent creatures thrive here. Meanwhile, unknown dangers also seem to be paving their way to the known world above. In addition to hilichurls, Treasure Hoarders, and the Fatui who have snuck in, you will also encounter the new boss Ruin Serpent, as well as enemies from the Abyss.

But you will not be left unprepared in the dark. The Lumenstone Adjuvant is a useful tool to light up your path. Upgrading this gadget will assist you in exploration and also grants you plenty of rewards, including a 4-star Weapon Billet and an all-new Namecard.

If you succeed in reaching the bottom of The Chasm, you will meet with the long-lost Dainsleif again among the ancient ruins and relics. More about the Traveler siblings and the secrets of Khaenri’ah will be uncovered during the new Archon Quest “Requiem of the Echoing Depths.”

Festive Season in Inazuma

Version 2.6 will feature “Hues of the Violet Garden,” our first seasonal event celebrating an Inazuma festival! Hosted by the Yashiro Commission and Yae Miko, the Magnificent Irodori Festival is a cultural event to commemorate a group of five talented poets from ancient Inazuma named “The Five Kasen.” This year’s Irodori Festival invites not only local talents but also creative minds from Mondstadt and Liyue. Venti, Xingqiu, and many others we haven’t seen for a while

How do you start a game? That is such a difficult question. There are so many things a game needs to do for a player at the start; introduce them to the world, teach them how to play and most importantly, hook them in. We spent a lot of time and effort on the beginning of Paradise Killer to try to get it right. I haven’t done the maths on this but I know that the start of the game is the most commonly shared video clip from Paradise Killer on social media so I guess something worked!

In Paradise Killer you play Lady Love Dies (LD), an investigator brought out of exile to investigate the crime to end all crimes on the bizarre Paradise Island. We knew that the start of the game would depict LD arriving on the island and introducing the player to the world. As we were making an open world game, we wanted to start by showing the player the whole world at the start. The island is quite big and you can explore the whole thing, but you don’t usually get to see the scale of what you are about to explore in games. We hoped that giving the player a bird’s-eye view of a huge vista that was ready for them would blow them away and whet their appetite for exploration.

With this in mind, our initial story draft started with LD arriving by plane, allowing the player to see the island as they flew over it. It wasn’t very exciting and it didn’t feel right for our game, so we shelved the idea and worked on other things while we thought about it. Eventually Phil, our technical director, said to me: “I want an intro like the beginning of Bayonetta”. That’s quite the challenge! For those who haven’t played it, the beginning of Bayonetta sees the player fighting a huge army of angel freaks on a ruined cathedral that’s plummeting through the sky. It is one of the best game beginnings anyone has ever made, it really makes an impression. I thought to myself, “how do we make something like that in a first person narrative game?”

After abandoning the arriving by plane intro, the story had developed in other ways and we had decided that the exiled Lady Love Dies was going to be in some kind of prison cell called the Idle Lands, high above Paradise Island. One of the issues we had to solve was working out how we’d get the player down from there at the beginning of the game. Our first idea was to have Lydia pick you up in her car. Lydia drives a car that can travel through dimensions so it would make sense that she could find a way to be parked way up in the sky in the Idle Lands.

However, we just didn’t think that was very exciting. Luckily, we had decided early on in development that there wouldn’t be any fall damage in the game because the game is about free exploration and we didn’t want to punish that. Alongside needing to figure out a good intro, we also needed a good way to communicate this, so we decided to make the player jump down from the Idle Lands at the start of the game. We tried it out, and taking a great big running jump and flinging yourself into oblivion felt great! As they fell the player could see the whole island stretched out below them and start picking out places of interest for their investigation. It served many purposes.

Lumos!

Hi, I’m Chandler Wood. I’m a Slytherin and the Community Manager here at Avalanche Software. It’s been a while since we first revealed Hogwarts Legacy. Back then I still hadn’t even joined the studio. Now I’m part of this incredible team that has put a ton of effort into making sure our gameplay reveal would be worth the wait. We couldn’t be more excited that it’s finally here.

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We’ve all dreamt of receiving our letters, attending Hogwarts, and forging a legacy of our own. As Wizarding World fans, we’ve wondered what it would be like for our stories to be found between the pages of a book, because that magic-filled world has always felt close to our own. Hogwarts Legacy is your story, rooted firmly in wizarding world lore, and it starts with creating the witch or wizard you want to be. 

An Authentic Wizarding World

It’s finally happening! On March 31 exactly two weeks from today, you’ll be able to reunite with Quill in Moss: Book II. As the next game in the franchise, Book II builds on the story you started with Quill in the original Moss. In this continuation of the journey, the stakes are higher than ever as Quill works to save the world of Moss and end the merciless rule of the Arcane. New allies, old friends, and the very world around you will offer help along the way, but in the end, it is you alone who can lift Quill up to save this world, and together, rise to legend.

To celebrate this announcement, I had the pleasure of sitting down with PlayStation’s Justin Massongill and Tim Turi to record an episode of PlayStation Underground to give you a sneak peek at some of the environments, enemies, and challenges you’ll encounter in this new adventure. While I showed off some new, unique features—including a teaser for a pretty big encounter that Quill is about to face—I purposefully left out a lot of really cool things that we want you to experience on your own. And I have a feeling you’ll be glad we didn’t spoil them for you.

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If you don’t have time to watch the entire PlayStation Underground episode, here are some highlights that I think you’ll enjoy:

We start the episode in the gardens, an area just outside of the castle that you traveled to in the first game. There’s a reason you made the journey to the castle, but we won’t spoil that for the few of you who have yet to play Moss. By now, you’re a couple chapters into the game where you’ll have already met a few new characters, and both you (the Reader) and Quill have unlocked new abilities. As the Reader, you have a real physical presence in the world, and in addition to guiding Quill, you’re also able to reach in and interact with the environment—something you can expect to do in all new ways in Book II. With your new natu

In Ghostwire: Tokyo, you awake amidst the mass disappearance of nearly all of Tokyo’s population, paving the way for otherworldly Visitors to take over the city. Resembling real-life superstitions, folklore, yokai and urban legends, these Visitors won’t be stopped by conventional weapons alone. You’ll need to work alongside an unlikely ally – the spirit of a grizzled detective named KK – to have the powers and skills necessary to hunt down the perpetrators behind Tokyo’s vanishing and restore reality to the city.

In addition to gear like a powerful bow and arrow and mystic techniques like Ethereal Weaving, knowledge is also a useful tool for solving the paranormal threat enveloping Tokyo. Here are just a few examples of the beings – both hostile and potentially friendly – you’ll encounter in the haunted streets of Tokyo, as well as a little intel to aid you in your ghost hunting adventure.

Kuchisake 

Based on the urban legend of the kuchisake-onna , AKA “Slit-Mouthed Woman,” Ghostwire’s Kuchisake is a vicious Visitor in the form of a masked woman wielding a massive pair of scissors. In the original folklore, the kuchisake-onna asks its victims if they think she is beautiful, only to reveal her disfigured grin. She then repeats the question, often maiming the victim with similar scars if they disingenuously maintain that she’s pretty or killing them outright if they say the opposite. 

“At least some part of including the kuchisake-onna came down to how ubiquitous the concept is in Japan as an urban legend,” explains Game Director Kenji Kimura. “That said, what ultimately led to the inclusion was the fact that they don’t look like monsters at first glance, just regular women wearing coats. As such, they complemented one of our goals for the game: to portray the unsettling and extraordinary within entirely ordinary settings. As they get closer to the player, you’ll be able to hear them clacking and snipping while they open and close them. It makes for an extra-immersive aural sensation when experienced through the PlayStation 5’s 3D audio capabilities.”

A clever misdirection can help prevent you becoming the kuchisake-onna’s prey and besting Ghostwire’s version requires a similar approach. When she closes in, use your Ethereal Weaving to summon a blocking barrier at just the right time to parry her attacks but beware, even deadlier foes lurk along Tokyo’s alleyways. “Ghostwire: Tokyo also features another variety of kuchisake-onna in red clothing. That version is inspired by a different urban legend involving a woman in red,” explains Kimura. “In that sense, the kuchisake-onna in Ghostwire aren’t just pulled directly from legends and folklore, but more like a combination and reimagining of the concepts.”

Tengu

While Visitors like the bloodthirsty Kuchisake pose a serious threat to the under-prepared, not every supernatural being in Tokyo is an enemy. Some, like the wandering tengu floating around the city’s skyline, can serve as crucial assets in your mission.

Look near the top of buildings (or tap into your Spectral Vision ability) to locate these airbo

The aptly named Mega March promotion brings mega savings to PlayStation Store from Wednesday, March 16. For a limited time* enjoy discounts across a variety of games and add-ons. 

That includes the likes of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Deluxe PS4 & PS5, FIFA 22 on PS4 and Back 4 Blood: Deluxe Edition PS4 & PS5.