The remote villages and their surroundings are home to folk and beast alike, and among them lurks the unseen: spirits, demons, ancient creatures, and many other supernatural beings. Only the Knowers – witches and wizards – know how to defeat or subdue them to service. 

In Black Book, out tomorrow on PlayStation 4, you play as Vasilisa, a peasant girl who was given an ancient artifact by her grandpa – the Black Book. With it, Vasilisa turns to witchery in order to break the seals of the Black Book, for it is said that doing so may grant any wish. There is nothing more she wants than to bring her deceased beloved back from the dead. 

During your journeys through her homeland, Cherdyn, you will encounter numerous magical creatures, each a formidable foe that requires a unique approach and zagovors (spell combinations) in order to defeat…

Leshy

Ancient keepers of the forest, it is said that leshys live for thousands of years and can take any form, animal or human. Leshys jealously guard the forest they claim as their own. Everyone who passes through the leshy’s forest must ask for permission, or face dire consequences. A leshy can cast powerful curses and a Knower would do well to prepare with certain herbs against them. 

Rusalka

Rusalkas are akin to mermaids but have legs instead of a fishtail. They are cunning and beautiful, they hunt their prey with ease by hypnotizing it and strangling it slowly. Rusalkas can call upon her entranced allies to aid her in battle. 

Werewolf

Werewolves are humans who stayed under a powerful changeling spell too long to return to their human form. They almost always hunt in a pack and prove to be fearsome foes, with damage attacks capable of cleaving people in half. Take care to have ample defenses against such an enemy ahead of time. 

Ikota

A parasitic demon that crawls inside the unsuspecting person and slowly possesses them, tormenting the victim with convulsions, pain, and involuntary actions. The possessed person cannot rest and is often cast out of the community. To defeat an Ikota, the Knower should take care to target the demon when it crawls out of its host, otherwise the victim may perish as well.

Hello! I’m thrilled to share with you that Arashi: Castles of Sin launches exclusively on PlayStation VR tomorrow, August 10. 

In Arashi: Castles of Sin, assume the role of Kenshiro, an elite shinobi assassin. With an arsenal of feudal weapons and your wolf companion, Haru, exact vengeance against ruthless bandits who have terrorized the countryside and claimed castles across feudal Japan as their own.

One of the keys to making this game was to stay small, scrappy, and flexible. We kept our approach as DIY as possible by using state-of-the-art mocap tools like an inertial motion capture suit for full body capture, mocap gloves for finger capture, and an app that captures high quality facial motion. We captured this all on a sub-$1,000 laptop, proving it can be done without huge, expensive workstations.

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By having these tools on hand, we were able to have a mobile mocap studio capable of shooting at a quality that would usually require a mocap stage, a dozen personnel, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware and equipment – all with a three-person team of Forrest Söderlind, Patrick Jandro, and myself from our office last summer. 

To provide the motion capture for the combatants you’ll fight we worked with Master Russell McCartney, a world record holder in Japanese swordplay. As our Creative Director Tom Doyle likes to say, “you won’t simply be fighting against some sword-wielding bad guy; you’re actually facing one of the greatest swordsmen alive.” 

Your katana isn’t your only weapon though- it’s only one of ten different weapons in Arashi.  Meaningful player choices and expressive play are paramount to our design director, Peter Carlson, so we made sure each weapon has its own strengths and drawbacks which enable players to tackle challenges in the play style of their choice.

Our team was passionate about presenting this story entirely in Japanese with subtitles. We have a deep love and appreciation for Japanese cinema of the 40s and 50s and wanted to transport the player right into their own personal Criterion Collection film. 

We felt it was important to find a way to represent cultural manne

As the MLB season heats up with teams battling for a postseason berth, we take a small break to celebrate the smaller things, specifically a baseball field nestled in a cornfield in Iowa as the Field of Dreams stadium is added to MLB The Show 21 on Tuesday, August 10 in a free content update for all players on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 consoles.

Check out San Diego Studio’s design journal below to learn more about the development process!

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As the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox step onto the diamond this week in the cornfields of Iowa, you too can step onto the field with this update and live out your dreams. The team at San Diego Studio worked closely with the field architects and MLB to accurately replicate this one-of-a-kind field. We didn’t stop with just adding this iconic stadium to MLB The Show 21, but we have an entire week of live content dedicated to Field of Dreams.

Reconstructing the most famous cornfield in Iowa to include in MLB The Show 21 was an awesome chance to show what makes this game unique and why we love baseball.

Since Major League Baseball is coming to Iowa this August, we figured, why couldn’t we? At the start of the year, we received artwork that would help us build a stadium paying homage to the famed Field of Dreams in rural Iowa. I remember watching the movie with my dad back in 1989 thinking how exciting it would be to play here. When the opportunity arose to bring this new stadium adjacent to the most famous cornfield in Iowa I thought, this might be the only chance that fans get to experience this so we must get this right.

Recreating the Field of Dreams was no small task for us, and because of that we needed to be very fluid in our build process.  We started listing all the elements in the stadium that would be unique and representative of this famed site, like the corn for example. We were able to start designing the light structure locations, seating area, and general surroundings. One of the more technically important things in-stadium is the field dimensions. This render was a good start, but far from the essential information we needed to create a true representation that this stadium demands. 

We then received the first detailed layout of the stadium, which was essential for our teams to begin production. With the bleachers, while we didn’t have exact dimensions available, our team has been designing stadiums for so long, we felt we had a good idea what they would realistically look like.<