Greetings to the PlayStation community! I’m Félix, marketing manager at Sloclap, and I’ve worked with the team to give you this short overview of Sifu’s combat system and a sneak peek into our design choices.

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Building on our experience working on martial arts gameplay with Absolver but focusing this time on a single-player game, we wanted with Sifu to offer a unique player experience, heavily drawing from kung fu and martial arts movies. Fighting villains by the dozen in a nightclub, jumping over tables and throwing bottles, we want the player to feel like the main character of a kung fu movie.

In terms of design, it meant for us striking a balance between credibility – realistic combat techniques, faithful animations – and esthetics, with crisp action and immersive camera framings. With Sifu, we wanted to mix the esthetics of classic kung fu movies with the raw close-quarters combat found in modern movies such as The Raid, Old Boy, or John Wick. 

The combat system draws from these different inspirations. We want the gameplay to offer a challenge consistent with the kung fu values of training and self-improvement. And we want players to experience a progression, to feel like they are learning kung fu, improving, and progressively earning their power fantasy. 

We designed what we called the Structure system, to emulate the real combat notion of impacting and breaking the stance of your opponent, his ability to attack and defend himself. It takes the form of a gauge, for both you and your enemies. If you manage to break your opponent’s structure, you will be able to finish them with a powerful takedown, which is the opportunity to display the devastating techniques of Pak Mei. But if your own structure gauge is filled, you’re unable to fight and defend yourself for a short duration and you will find yourself vulnerable to your enemies’ attacks.

Blocking attacks will quickly fill your balance gauge, and we’ve given the players a few more flexible defensive options. Dodges will allow you to create space at key times and can be life savers. But more importantly, parrying hits at the right time will let you deflect the blow, unbalancing your opponent and opening opportunities to counterattack or to throw them down. You can also avoid blows altogether, by ducking under or jumping over incoming strikes. It is particularly useful against strong hits that you can’t parry or to quickly recover balance and strike back at your opponent.

Hello.
So…
Right…
Now then…

Things have been happening… 

To mark a period of 21 years since the expulsion of Kid A and Amnesiac from a converted barn in the Oxfordshire countryside into an unsuspecting world we’ve built… something.
We aren’t sure what it is.

To start with, when we first started thinking about it, we intended to build a physical exhibition/installation in a central London location. 

It was going to be a huge red construction made by welding shipping containers together, constructed so that it looked as if a brutalist spacecraft had crash-landed into the classical architecture of the Victoria & Albert Museum in Kensington.

This astounding steel carapace would be inserted into the urban fabric of London like an ice pick into Trotsky. Jutting up into the grey English sky. And then – being constructed from shipping containers – we could ship it around the world… New York, Tokyo, Paris…

But then we couldn’t fit it at the Victoria & Albert without parts of the museum building collapsing.
So we changed location – now it would look as if it had crashed into the side of the Royal Albert Hall.
But Westminster council didn’t like the idea one little bit.
And then Covid delivered the final annihilation. 

Our dream was dead.
Until we realised…
It would be way better if it didn’t actually exist.
Because then it didn’t have to conform to any normal rules of an exhibition. Or reality.
Much better.

So…

With Nigel Godrich we have been working on this for about two years, through lockdowns, self-isolations and many very long intermittent Zoom calls.  
We worked with Sean Evans, a genius video/computer artist who directed it all with awe inspiring dedication and energy, theatre set designer Christine Jones and the game developers [namethemachine] and Arbitrarily Good Productions.
And finally persuading Epic Games to help us put it out to the world.

We had one guiding principle, visually.
NO NEW WORK.

Because… there was loads of it already.

Like really.

Like a really crazy amount… You’ll see.

Everything that we built came directly from what we made 20 years ago, in one way or another.

And we had all the multitrack recordings from the albums so we were able to rebuild the audio from the original elements in a new controlled space which wasn’t just stereo.
That was a lot of fun.

Working on something as strange as this over long Zoom calls with a large team of technicians all around the world has been one of the strangest experiences we have ever had.
Unreal in every sense of the word, especially within the months of almost total human isolation.
In all those days of blankness…
A small Minotaur sat on one shoulder saying ‘This is too mad. This ain’t ever gonna happen’
And the other shoulder sat another saying ‘Oh yes. It is.’
What we have made is… it’s something like a mutant re-e

Black Friday comes to PlayStation starting tomorrow, Friday, November 19. Discover great deals, with deep discounts for a variety of titles on PlayStation Store*. Make sure to bookmark the PlayStation Black Friday homepage to track every discount available.

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It’s fun to forget the time and immerse yourself in the game or to play against strangers online, but one of the most charming elements of gaming is that you can play together with your family and friends on one screen. Here are 15 recommended titles that offer local multiplayer by connecting multiple DualSense™ wireless controllers to one PlayStation®5.
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After months of hard work, we are almost ready to unleash our brand new Precinct update and Make it Count DLC, and shake up prohibition Chicago. All of us are extremely excited for you to play it, so while we’re working toward release day, why not share our excitement and showcase some new design and gameplay features?

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Precincts Update

Precincts are definitely our most ambitious change to the game, so let’s start there. Precincts are subdivisions of neighborhoods which provide a new level of control. Right now, you can build or burn a racket anywhere from Municipal Pier to Chinatown, and stake your claim. It’s a lot of fun at the start of the game, but as the game progresses, we feel it becomes too predictable. As upgrades are done on an individual basis, managing rackets dotted around the city results in considerable amounts of administration for any budding Mob Boss. Besides, once you own enough rackets, losing an odd one to the enemy doesn’t affect your game much.

First off, economic controls have been streamlined with the Precinct update. You can keep track of your rackets, precinct by precinct, from one easy-to-use screen.

This is a more efficient way to manage your empire and keep an eye on the parts that need attention while leaving you time to get on with the other demands of being a Mob Boss.

In terms of expansion, precincts stack incrementally outward, painting your faction’s colors across the map, while also setting up a Supply Line. Another crucial element of your empire, Supply Lines form a pathway to get supplies out to your precincts and ensure your money has a safe route back to you. That means it’s bad news if your Supply Line is broken by the enemy and your precincts are cut off, stopping money from coming in until the Supply Line is restored. This also gives you new offensive strategy options, however: the only way past the enemy is through them, and if planned well, you can surround their precincts, giving them no way out.

So, how do you own a precinct? Simply take out the Depot. This is the precinct’s control building, and control won’t fall to you until you have claimed it. Depots are not to be underestimated. Security is heavy and they can draw reinforcement guards from surrounding rackets to help in the defense. This gives you options when it comes to taking over a precinct.

Attacking surrounding rackets first eliminates the reinforcements, removing them from th