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Greetings Adventurers! The bustling city of Neverwinter is preparing to welcome new and veteran players to the upcoming module, Jewel of the North, launching August 24! In preparation for this, we’ve put together some tips for making your way through Neverwinter.
- Explore Protector’s Enclave – Once you’ve completed the initial quests, you will arrive at Protector’s Enclave (PE) where adventures can find various locations for all their needs.
- Know your Non-Player Character (NPC) contact locations – NPCs are integral in getting you started on your adventures. With the release of Jewel of the North, some NPCs have moved from their prior location. Sgt. Knox can now be found within the Adventurer’s Guild.
- Take Advantage of the New Training Room – A special demiplane has been created for adventurers to practice techniques and test their mettle! Access to this unique area is found within the Adventurer’s Guild.
- Make Contact With Your Events Contacts – Heralds for most events can be found in the large event dais on the ground level of Protector’s Enclave. These NPCs will provide adventurers with introductory quests and showcase the event rewards!
- Special Vendors and Traders – Certain merchants for special events such as Neverember’s Recruitment have stationed themselves in the Seven Suns Coster Market. Unique currencies can be used to trade with these vendors.
- Control the Bard, Don’t Let the Bard Control You – The new Bard class has special and unique mechanics: Perform and Free Perform. Notes C, D, E, and F are activated via the Cross, Circle, Triangle, and Square buttons. Notes G, A, B, C are activated via the directional buttons. Make more music with quickslots and octaves with the controller’s R1, R2, L1, and L2 buttons.
- A Rewarding Entrance – Make sure to stop by the Reward Claims Agent on launch day for some free goodies! The launch of Jewel of the North will also kickstart 20 weeks of different weekly gifts.
- Max Level Change – Feeling…younger? No, this is not your imagination! With the leveling changes introduced in this new module, the max level has been adjusted to 20. Characters who were level 80 will be set to level 20 and offered a free gear pack.
- Whistle While You Work – While Masterwork Professions will appear at a later date post-module launch, the profession and artisan levels have been adjusted to align with the new max level. For new adventurers, the quest “A Workshop Opportunity” will become available at Level 8.
One button covered three key attacks: a powerful strike at the battle’s start, a set of continuous attacks during, and a gorgeous Execution at its end. The functions and visual effects worked as one, giving the sensation of an arcade experience. We were very satisfied with it.
We spent more than two months producing a demo based on this system. Feedback from players who tried the demo at expos was positive, which convinced us that we are heading in the right direction.
The contradiction between streamlined combat and rich stages
Then, we started formal development. We defined F.I.S.T. as an easy-to-operate action game with more than 10 hours of main story playtime, an expansive and seamless map, and a large number of exploration elements. However, after completing the first stage, with more and more content and a longer overall playtime added in, the original combat system began to show some disadvantages.
The original three-stage combat experience involves charge, attacks, and Execution. Charge attacks take time to prepare, which is difficult when combat encounters happen suddenly. Execution is essentially a performance with little input beyond the initial activation. As a result, players have to press the same button again and again for combo attacks most of the time during the battle.
Such a combat system is a reasonable design for a 15-minute demo, but not quite as suitable for a game that lasts a few hours. It became boring.
Considerations while designing combo attacks
After rethinking the player experience when performing combo attacks, we decided to add one button into the combat system. The two attack buttons are to perform light attack and heavy attacks. Players will need to memorize combos, such as L(ight)L(Light)H(eavy), LHL, HLH to perform different skills.
But we don’t want to give up our original intention of developing an arcade-styled action game. If it’s necessary to memorize combos, how could we simplify it as much as possible? After several brainstorms, we developed th
Bonjour, this is Cyrille from Dotemu! I’m the executive producer of Windjammers 2.
You may be familiar with other works of ours, such as Streets of Rage 4 (released last year) and the port of the original Windjammers for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in 2017. We are a small team here in Paris and retro is our motto. Ever since our re-release of the first Windjammers game, we’ve been anxious to do a sequel. In fact, Windjammers 2 is the first game that we’re developing 100% in-house! We can’t wait for you to try it yourselves. More on that in a bit…
…But first, I’m happy to confirm that the game will be released on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5! The PlayStation community was extremely supportive of the first game, so bringing the sequel to PS4 and PS5 was a no-brainer.
Development is going well, and we wanted to provide gamers with a sneak-peek before our launch later this year. So get your controllers ready, because from August 11 until August 22 we’re hosting an open Beta for Windjammers 2 on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
The open Beta will be free and available for all – no PlayStation Plus subscription is required. Also, Windjammers 2 will offer cross-play between PlayStation consoles, so you’ll face players from both platforms. It’ll be a blast!
What is Windjammers?
Windjammers is a sports arcade game where you have to shoot a disc into your opponent’s goal to win. It’s fast-paced and highly addictive…think of it as Street Fighter meets Pong. And we’re pulling out all the stops to ensure that Windjammers 2 is even more exciting and engaging than the arcade classic.
Here’s a quick tutorial that explains how to play Windjammers 2. We’ve asked an old friend to lend a hand with this – none other than the legendary Windjammers champion of the United States. The one…The only…Gary Scott!
Open beta content
During the Beta, you can demo four characters:
- Steve Miller (United Kingdom)
Clever and agile, Steve excels at executing split-second reversals and tricky curved shots.
- Gary Scott (United States)
DreamsCom, our in-game convention for Dreams content creators made a return this year, bigger than ever! It’s an entire expo, made in Dreams, featuring a show floor with over 40 halls and 250+interactive booths from nearly 300 unique creators. There were demos to play, new titles announced and so much more from the amazing Dreams community – and we can’t get enough of the creativity on display.
It’s been a challenge picking a handful of booths to showcase in this blog, but the following 13 booths really captured what’s possible at DreamsCom, so we asked the creators to tell us about their process:
Made In Dreams Podcast – Hall #47
LucidNebulaGames: The Made in Dreams Podcast is community-based, so it was only fitting to use community assets from the Dreamiverse. I loved searching through assets and placing them all together to create a talk show style booth that represents our show and its community.
Magma-Monsta’s Booth – Hall #40
Magma-Monsta: I kept my booth fairly plain in color to create a strong contrast to the colorful DreamsCom. With the voiceover coming from the animatronic character, I tried to underline the whole concept of the booth. My goal was to question the concept of an expo in a game like Dreams – just for fun. I love games that break the fourth wall. DreamsCom is very special to me, because it shows the power of the Dreams community. It offers every creator the possibility to express their work in a really cool and unique way.
ApesOnFire’s Booth – Hall #8
ApesOnFire: Without the Dreams community, I would have had no booth for DreamsCom. Brought to life with the help of MrCaseyJones and AndymationB, I was able to express my creativity, and encourage new members of the community to stop by my channel and share their creations! My favourite part about participating in DreamsCom21 is the opportunity to discover new creators!
“SUPER ROBOT WARS 30,” the latest home console for the simulation RPG “Super Robot Wars” series for PlayStation®4, is set for release on 28 October 28!
This title will feature a dream collaboration of 22 titles, including 5 new entries: “The Brave Police J-Decker,” “The King of Kings: GaoGaiGar VS Betterman,” “Knight’s & Magic,” “SSSS. GRIDMAN,” and “Mazinkaiser (INFINITISM).” The first PV is now available, and pre-orders start on 12 July.
30 years on, the battle for our world’s future continues.
The first PV features the latest information on the game’s entries, original units, new features, and more!
The first PV also covers an introduction to the 22 titles, including the 5 new entries, the original “Huckebein 30,” and new features such as “Tactical Area Selection,” “AUTO Battle,” and many more!
Announcement of release date and entries! Watch the first PV of “SUPER ROBOT WARS 30” here!
Featured titles in SUPER ROBOT WARS 30
| Super Electromagnetic Robot Combattler V | Mobile Suit Gundam | | Mobile Suit Z Gundam |
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.
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!
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.<
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