Ghostwire: Tokyo is almost here! If you pre-ordered the Deluxe Edition of the game digitally, you’ll be able to jump in starting today, March 22 to enjoy Tokyo’s haunted streets early before the game officially launches on March 25.

But before you dive into Ghostwire: Tokyo, we’ve got some quick words of advice to help kickstart your journey. From tips on exploration to some pointers on combat, we hope this guide helps you become a ghost hunter in no time. 

Go vertical

With its eye-catching blend of traditional architecture and modern skylines, Ghostwire’s version of Tokyo begs you to take to the rooftops for some off-the-ground exploration. Get some air from grappling Tengus and utilizing your ethereal gliding ability to reach areas quickly, discover hidden secrets and even get a vantage point on some unsuspecting foes. 

Reigning cats and dogs 

While Tokyo’s mass disappearance whisked away most of the city’s population, there are still a few survivors left, including some of the area’s animal residents. Using your abilities, you can read the thoughts of cats and dogs you come across, and some even have missions for you to accept. Stock up on pet food and you can even give out treats! After all, who could say no to a face like that? 

Speaking of animals, keep an ear out for a Nekomata’s meow, which alerts you to nearby hidden collectibles. They can give you Meika to spend on useful consumables at shops, as well as lead you towards secrets in the world. 

Absorbing spirits 

Tokyo’s vanishing has left several lingering spirits trapped throughout the city. Using katashiro paper dolls, you can absorb these spirits and keep them away from Hannya and his Visitors’ nefarious plans. After absorbing enough spirits, report to any nearby phonebooth to send them to safety, netting you bonus Meika and XP that you can use to level up your skills. Throughout the game, you’ll also come across additional katashiro dolls, allowing you to absorb even more spirits before having to deposit them in a phone booth. 

Go off the beaten path 

The streets of Ghostwire: Tokyo are rich, varied and detailed, with tons to do and soak in outside the main story. Give into temptation and explore the city for collectibles, side missions and yokai activities in the world. Not only do side missions let you dive deeper into the game’s world, they’re also a good source of spirits to collect (as well as magatama, a rare resource used to unlock more advanced areas of your skill tree).

Strategize 

Visitors often attack in groups and can overwhelm you if you get surrounded. Try maneuvering around enemies and strategically positioning yourself to keep them under control – or line them up for a well-placed explosive fire shot or wide-area water blast using your Ethereal Weaving to clear out multiple foes at once! 

Accessorize 

Throughout the game – particularly after cleansing certain shrines – you’ll find equippable beads that provide a boost to some of your abilities, from reducing damage taken to increasing the power of your Ethereal Weaving. As you progress, you’ll also be able to equip more beads at one time, so try out different combinations. 

Today, I’m delighted to announce that Haven Studios is officially joining PlayStation Studios! Jade Raymond brings a wealth of experience from her industry achievements and an infectious passion for creating games, and the leadership team at Haven is an equally impressive group of industry veterans who have collaborated on some of the biggest and most beloved games and franchises that many of us still enjoy today.

We began working with Jade and her team in early 2021 when they were on the brink of announcing the formation of Haven Studios. From their first pitch, we were inspired by Haven’s vision for creating a modern multiplayer experience that brings gamers together in positive and meaningful ways. We were confident in their creative and technical expertise to deliver on such an ambitious project and were thrilled to invest in their journey developing a new, original IP for PlayStation.

We’ve had the privilege of working closely with Haven this past year and have been impressed by the studio’s growth and progress. So now, practically on the anniversary of when we made our partnership official, it’s especially exciting to formally welcome them into the PlayStation family. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for Haven Studios.

Welcome to PlayStation Studios, Haven!

One year ago this month, we embarked on a journey to start Haven Studios with a small team and big ambitions. Our goal was to build a studio where we could make the kind of games we’ve always wanted to create – and games we’ve longed to play!

We’ve made amazing progress in a short time thanks to our talented, passionate team and their exceptional contributions. We established a culture at Haven grounded in kindness, adaptability and courage that unlocks creativity. Our first new IP for PlayStation is on track to deliver a AAA multiplayer experience with a vision to build a systemic and evolving world focused on freedom, thrill, and playfulness that will keep players entertained and engaged for years.

Today, the Haven team begins a new phase of our journey, as part of the PlayStation Studios family. Working with Hermen, Connie Booth and the team at PlayStation over the past year has been a career highlight. SIE is a supportive partner that truly understands the creative process and what it takes to make a blockbuster AAA game. They have empowered and encouraged us to bring our bold vision to life and make our dreams come true and we could not be more thrilled about this opportunity to strengthen our partnership.

As a SIE first-party studio, we will have the opportunity to collaborate with some of the world’s most renowned development teams, including studios like Guerrilla, Naughty Dog, Media Molecule, and Insomniac Games, the creators of games that have inspired us as players and developers for years. We’re excited to learn from these world-class studios, as well as the exceptional central creative, technology and marketing teams whose expertise will enable us to deliver even better games to players.

To our Haven team – a huge thank you. It’s been one of the most rewarding years of my career – and to the players out there, we can’t wait to share more. We’re just at the beginning of what is sure to be a wondrous adventure that will span generations.

Jade Raymond
CEO and Founder, Haven Studios

Last time, we asked you to get behind the wheel of Gran Turismo 7 and share your best shots from the track using #PSshare #PSblog. Here are this week’s highlights:  

TheFourthFocus shares the moment they inched past another car across the finish line.

JonPSindies shares driving off into the desert sunset.

Xenolith3D shares a dreamy moment above the clouds.

Photoingame parks their car amongst the sand dunes.

ZEBRA_GT7 drives through a patch of cherry blossoms.

AjGamingPics1 turns a corner mid-race.

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: In Motion
SUBMIT BY: 11:59 PM PT on March 23, 2022

Next week, we’re kicking things into motion. Share moments where your character is moving or mid-action using #PSshare #PSBlog for a chance to be featured.

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.