What’s up PlayStation Nation?! We are very happy to be back on the blog to announce that Skater XL Multiplayer Free Skate mode is now available for PlayStation players! With this update, friends from all corners of the world can link up online and share a skate session, regardless of location, weather, or physical ability.  

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Skateboarding is more fun with friends, and there’s nothing quite like hanging out, talking shop, and vibing off each other. That essential experience inspired us to create Skater XL’s online Multiplayer Free Skate mode.

Multiplayer Free Skate mode is built to replicate the energy and hype of a real life skate session as closely as possible.  No rules or barriers, you and the homies decide where to skate, what to skate, and how to skate it.  Whether you want to match each other trick for trick, choreograph party lines, or just vibe off each other in a more freeform way, Multiplayer Free Skate provides the platform.

The social component of skateboarding has always been part of our vision for Skater XL, so we’ve given Multiplayer Free Skate players the capability to capture and save video of impressive lines and momentous trick moments using the in-game replay editor. Videos are a big part of the culture and we felt it was important to give players a way to share and rewatch their favorite moments long after the session is complete.  A check of the Instagram #SkaterXL will give you an idea of the amazing content that is already coming out of the creative community. 

Building on our foundational goal of giving skate gamers more control than any prior title with our innovative Independent Foot Control system, the opening of the social ecosystem will allow for an even more immersive experience through increased interactions, collaboration, and more lively environments.  

 Multiplayer Free Skate is our first step in opening up social modes in the game and features: 

• Skate with up to 10 people online – Join a random room or start your own private one and invite your friends to join using a passcode
• Replays – Replay and save your group party lines, with the same replay editor functionality available in single player mode

Following the PlayStation community’s incredible response to Godfall on the PlayStation 5, the team at Counterplay Games is ecstatic to open up the world of Aperion to PlayStation 4 players. We are excited for the expanded community to experience all the new content coming to the game, including the next chapter of our story – Fire & Darkness*, starting August 10. 

With additional allies joining our adventure, the Godfall community has a lot to be energized about – including a free upgrade path to PS5 for all PS4 players, as well as the free Lightbringer Update. With the Lightbringer Update, PS5 and PS4 players will now experience cross-generational co-op and can utilize our new matchmaking beta to tackle our most challenging endgame content. On top of that, we’re introducing a new game mode, unique cosmetics, and even more loot! With all the refinements we have made, I thought it might be helpful to take a moment to look at how far Godfall has come and let you know what’s in store. 

Last year, we launched Godfall alongside the PS5 and have continued to hone the experience based on your immensely helpful feedback. With additions like our hefty Primal Update and quality of life updates, revamped input buffering, new resource tools through Zenun, boss fight improvements, Tower of Trials upgrades, Dreamstones, and more. The game has evolved past our wildest expectations and that is all thanks to you. 

Together, we have faced and defeated the mad (wannabe) god, Macros, and are about to embark on an even more harrowing journey into the Fire Realm in Fire & Darkness. You will face new foes as an all-consuming darkness threatens to spread throughout Aperion and choke the world of all light. Expect nothing less than fierce resistance as you enter the Fire Realm. The Flameblood Tribe are some of the most formidable enemies in all of Aperion. They will stop at nothing to prevent you from reaching their leaders as they work to fulfill Kosmera’s plans of old. 

Need an even greater challenge? The Lightbringer Update, which is free for all players, introduces the all-new endgame Lightbringer mode for those that have achieved level 50. The Sanctum’s light has been trapped, and the most powerful knights will be needed to release and spread it, building up enough strength to face the all-consuming darkness.  

The mode begins with you and up to two other friends loading into one of the realms of Aperion where a mysterious force has emerged and shrouded the land in darkness. You will need to seal Dark Tears in a race against time to allow the Light of Seventh Sanctum to shine through. Teamwork will be essential to surviving these threats – matchmaking beta will serve you well. 

Hello! I’m Szymon Erdmański, producer at Bloober Team, and I’m happy to tell you more about The Medium, coming to PlayStation 5 on September 3.

For those who haven’t heard about the game, The Medium is a third-person psychological horror game that features innovative dual-reality gameplay – basically, you can play in two worlds at the same time. This unique twist on single-player split-screen gameplay is only possible on next-gen hardware such as PS5. 

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You play as Marianne, a medium who lives in two worlds: our world and a hostile spirit world. At the beginning of the game, Marianne is haunted by a strange vision: a little girl murdered at a lake. She comes to believe that she can learn the truth behind the vision at an abandoned hotel resort. Once there, she discovers that years ago the place was a stage of a horrifying tragedy and hides a grim mystery only a medium like her can solve.

Using Marianne’s unique psychic abilities, you must uncover deeply disturbing secrets, solve intriguing dual-reality puzzles, survive encounters with sinister spirits, all while exploring two realities at the same time. A haunting soundtrack co-composed by Bloober Team’s Arkadiusz Reikowski and Silent Hill composer Akira Yamoaka will accompany you on your journey.

DualSense controller and dual-reality horror 

On PS5, we are taking full advantage of the console’s DualSense wireless controller to immerse you even deeper into the mystery of the Niwa Hotel.

Our goal is to let you feel Marianne’s reactions to what is happening as she explores and interacts with the game world, thanks to haptic feedback. For example, when she is using her Spirit Shield ability, you can literally feel in your hands as dozens of spirit-world moths hit the barrier. 

Another example is Marianne’s Out of Body ability, which lets you leave your physical body and explore as the spirit only. It’s a bit like diving, you can’t survive too long in that state, eventually you’ll suffocate if you don’t return. So the longer you remain out of the body, the quicker you’ll feel the controller pulsate – giving you a hint when it’s time to go back.

The adaptive triggers will not only raise the level of immersion but also make the controls more intuitive. When you start charging up the Spirit Blast, the medium’s offensive ability, the trigger will resist at

Hades launches next week on PlayStation! We hope you have a wonderful time exploring the Underworld of Greek myth and discovering all its many surprises starting August 13. Today marks almost four years since we first started thinking about this game, so I wanted to tell you about some of the unique circumstances that led to our small team developing what’s become our biggest hit ever — a game that’s already earned more than 50 Game of the Year awards from publications including IGN, Eurogamer, and many others. Suffice it to say we could never have imagined all this when we were just starting out!

We first started talking about the Hades project in the late summer of 2017, just weeks after the launch of our third game, Pyre. Our studio had recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, and we were in a reflective mood, thinking back on the different games we’d made. From Bastion, to Transistor, to Pyre, we jumped from one original setting and playstyle to another. However, a central goal in each project was to create a richly atmospheric, fully realized world for you to immerse yourself in. Practically speaking, that meant discarding our best ideas from our last project and starting from scratch. After all, we didn’t want our latest games to feel overly similar to their predecessors, and wanted each world to stand on its own. But, heading into Hades, the thought of yet again setting aside all our best ideas from the past felt needlessly limiting. Couldn’t we build on our best ideas and experience, rather than starting over yet again?

So, one of the foundational ideas behind Hades was to make it sort of a ‘greatest hits’ of everything we’d been able to accomplish and enjoyed doing in our previous games to that point. Here then were some of the central ideas behind Hades:

A ‘narrative rogue-like’. We were drawn to creating a game in the rogue-like format, meaning a game centered on replayability, where each time you die and start over, you get a different experience due to procedurally-generated encounters and other interesting bits of randomness. Despite this being a popular genre with many outstanding titles, we felt we could contribute something to it by placing a bigger emphasis on narrative and storytelling than the genre is typically known for. This approach would not only play to our strengths as a team, it would hopefully help open up the thrills of rogue-like games to more players.

Our first-ever adaptation (rather than a wholly original setting). We’ve had the privilege of being able to create our own unique worlds for each of our games. After three titles, we had a good sense of what that experience was like. But something we’d never done before was adapt an existing world or setting in our own style. We chose the world of Greek myth, both because I and others on the team have a lifelong fascination with it, and because we felt it was such a good fit for the rogue-like genre. We also felt like we had a specific point of view on Greek myth that we hadn’t seen expressed much in modern adaptations, through our focus on the Olympians as a big, dysfunctional family, and centering our perspective on the Underworld and its own little-known gods.

We’re super excited to announce that Carrion, our grisly reverse-horror experience is chomping its way onto PlayStation 4! If you’ve always dreamed of portraying an amorphous blob of gristle, teeth, and tentacles as a PlayStation owner, you’ve come to the right place.

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Carrion has been greedily gobbling up players during its first year on Earth, and we’ve had our sights set on bringing our tentacle-baby’s wanton path of destruction to PlayStation for what feels like forever! We hope those of you who have yet to feel the warm, sticky embrace of our alien protagonist find that it’s been worth the wait.

We are thrilled for you to soon get your feelers on Carrion, but what is a “reverse-horror experience”? Surely that’s just made-up marketing nonsense? Well, if you’re still unaware of our creepy (award-winning) creation, Carrion immerses you in the role of an abominable alien creature as it awakens in a secret, underground laboratory. With no explanation how it arrived there or for what purpose, there is only one thing on the mysterious monster’s mind: escape! And eat people. Okay, two things. But that reverse-horror title makes a lot more sense now, right?

Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce that A Short Hike is coming to PS4 this fall! A Short Hike is a little exploration game about climbing up a mountain.

In it, you guide a bird named Claire up to the peak, freely exploring the mountainside and helping other folk along the way.

I started working on the game after going on a few road trips along the west coast, hitting up as many hiking spots and natural landmarks as we could. I really fell in love with hiking, and I started to wonder if I could capture that experience as a video game.

There were some specific moments I wanted to capture, such as the moment of respite upon reaching the summit, and surveying the landscape from a new perspective. But generally, I wanted to try and recreate the peaceful meditative feeling you get as you explore the world around you.

To help create a sense of freedom, I tried to design the game as a tiny open world. I wanted to encourage exploring the road less travelled, and have your curiosity be rewarded. This meant I had to design around the player going the exact opposite of the obvious route, and have the game’s pacing still feel good!

This led to the creation of a variety of mini-games to discover on the off-paths and break up the hiking. After adding in fishing, boating, and (a form of) volleyball, the game was starting to feel a little more like a little summer getaway – a love letter to those breezy summer days without anything to do and all the time in the world.

For the most part, I’ve been working on A Short Hike by myself. Between the programming, design, art, and testing… I’ve had my hands full! One thing I found difficult was the writing. Although the game is light on story, I did want it to be meaningful to me, and I wanted to touch on some of the fears or worries I have.

In a previous project, I had hit a creative block with the writing, and I really struggled with putting something together I was happy with. So for A Short Hike, I tried to take a more improvisational approach. Once I started writing dialogue the same way I chat with my friends over text, it came much more naturally, and helped me find a voice for the game.

Since I was doing most of the art myself, I took the opportunity to experiment with the style. I was interested in trying to create a 3D game where the pixels are a core part of the aesthetic, the way retro 2D games often are. While 2D games have been refining pixel art for decades, 3D games have been working to hide pixels as much as possible. I wanted to see if I could make a beautiful (and readable) 3D world using as few pixels as possible.

This is Hideki Kamiya, Chief Game Designer at PlatinumGames and creative director of Sol Cresta.

Did you all enjoy the new Sol Cresta trailer? Some of you may be thinking, “A sequel to Moon Cresta and Terra Cresta in this day and age? And from PlatinumGames? And it’s not an April Fools joke after all?”

To explain a bit for those who may not know, Moon Cresta and Terra Cresta were released in the 80s by a game company called Nihon Bussan, better known as Nichibutsu. Both games were vertically scrolling shooters that included a play mechanic where you docked with friendly ships.

At a time when shooting games where you fought alone were the norm, aggressive gameplay that made your ship more powerful as you docked with allies had gamer kids burning with excitement back then, and both games took a place in gaming history. Of course, I was one of those gamer kids and experienced the fever in real time.

Sol Cresta itself is a “free-form docking and shooting” game that PlatinumGames will release, and it bridges the gap of 36 years since the release of Terra Cresta in 1985 as the official sequel and next entry in the Cresta Series.

But just how did this miraculous project come to be? Well, I’d like to tell you the secret of the birth of Sol Cresta.

Starting with Bayonetta and continuing with titles like Anarchy Reigns, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, The Wonderful 101, Nier: Automata, and Astral Chain, PlatinumGames has been fortunate to have the titles we’ve released receive acclaim for the “action feel,” and we’ve come to be known as “the studio that makes action games.”

However, as a studio we want to make all kinds of fun games, not just action games.

Since I was a kid, I played and had fond memories of a lot of games; shooting games (although these days this tends to mean FPS), adventure games, RPGs, and more. Eventually I thought, “I want to make games too,” and that dream came true when I became a game designer.

Moon Cresta ©2014 HAMSTER Co.

Terra Cresta ©2014 HAMSTER Co.

But as times changed, technology advanced, and the player base grew, the very nature of games and the corresponding trends changed a lot and having become a creator myself, I was involved with large-scale projects centered around 3D visuals and gameplay. Before I knew it, the kind of games I knew as a kid—the simple, almost primitive yet packed with fun “classic games”—had disappeared from the mainstream market.

This is getting into production talk, but it is no simple task to launch a game project in a genre that’s not mainstream. Furthermore, in my position it’s also my duty to develop the company’s flagship titles. But even while buried by my workload day in and day out, I never forgot the way I felt when I first dreamed of making games, and if only o

Hi there, we’re Alientrap Games and today we’re here to share our upcoming game Wytchwood with you! If you’re a fan of fairy tales (the Grimm kind), collecting newt eyes to craft hexes and cursing the living daylights out of shady villains, then read on! 

Made a deal with suspicious black goats lately? Finding it hard to get out of certain magical contracts? Nothing to worry about! In Wytchwood you take the role of a rickety old witch caught up in a dark pact she can’t remember making. You’ll travel the lands and uncover a rich narrative filled with a colorful cast of characters inspired by classic fables. A weeping maiden awaits the return of her lost love, a brutish bear loves nothing more than to knock some heads together, and a feline trickster in a smart pair of boots is plaguing the local market with her deceptions. Only with your magic and sharp wit will you be able to right these wrongs. Maybe with enough good deeds, that pesky billy goat hanging around your house will finally leave you alone! 

Even with all these evils running about unchecked, Wytchwood is fundamentally a chill game where exploration and collecting spell ingredients play a huge part of the experience. As the wicked witch of the swamp, you get to put on your hat- or in this case- your trusty cauldron, and go out into the world to discover what the lush environments hold for you. From the sunny forest, to the gloomy swamp and snow blown mountaintop, each area contains its own unique critters, plants and monsters. If you’re quick enough, maybe you’ll even snare that weird chicken legged fish that’s running around down by the docks! 

What’s a witch without her trusty grimoire? In Wytchwood, crafting potions and spells play a key role in unraveling the mysteries of the world. Did that pumpkin just… move? Crafting a Snagvine spell will be sure to hold it still. That cat seems awfully hungry! Maybe it will give you a special something if you can sate its appetite with a treat. Sometimes, an especially tricky problem will call upon you to dig deep and make something with a little more punch to it. Raising the dead takes more than a little elbow grease, after all. 

Bringing justice to the world and punishing evil doers is no easy feat, but with the right tools and attitude, you might just be the witch for the job! We hope you enjoyed this small peak at Wytchwood. Stay tuned for more news as we get closer to release. Wytchwood is being published by Whitethorn Games and will be coming to the PS4 and PS5 in Fall of 2021. 

It’s cliche at this point to say that making games is hard. Of course it’s hard. It’s in many ways even harder to make a game entirely by yourself. But you know what’s really hard? Maintaining your focus and passion on one project for years at a time.

As I’ve said countless times before, Axiom Verge is both my hobby and my job. It puts food on the table and keeps a roof over our heads. But I’m lucky that it’s also what I would be doing even if I wasn’t making a living from it. For that to be true, and to stay true, I’ve got to push the boundaries of what I’m creating. It would be hard for me to maintain my passion for game development if I were just creating a new map layout and new weapons for Axiom Verge and calling it a sequel.

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So I decided to push myself and try something ambitious. I’ve talked a little in the past about some of the technical challenges of making Axiom Verge 2, particularly the earth-like sloping terrain and the intelligent enemies, but I’ve never revealed the biggest challenge and most distinctive feature of Axiom Verge 2…until now.

Here’s the big reveal: Axiom Verge 2 is two worlds in one. Behind the overworld map that I’ve been showing this entire time, there is another interconnected breach world in an alternate dimension. I’ve hinted about this in an early trailer, where the drone goes through some mysterious portal, but I’ve kept this secret for a while.

So first things first, what is the breach? Well, if you’ve played Axiom Verge 1, you may recall a cutscene with this image:

The breach, on the right, is a region of space, long thought to be unpassable, that at first kept the denizens of Sudra safe from the outside universe. [Minor spoiler alert imminent!] In Axiom Verge, someone named Athetos was able to traverse the breach and use a breach attractor to keep Sudra trapped. Hijinks ensue.

I first decided to include the breach in Axiom Verge 2 in some form around 2016. It took a while for the two worlds idea to gel. At first I considered just having one piece of land elevated above the other.  After toying around with a few approaches, I decided that approaching the breach as an additional dimension could unleash a huge range of opportunities for non-linear exploration.

In Axiom Verge 2, you’ll have the ability to enter and exit the breach and discover how that world is connected to the ove

Last October, we launched Ghost of Tsushima: Legends, our very first online multiplayer project as a studio, which expanded the gameplay of Ghost of Tsushima into a supernatural world inspired by Japanese mythology. And to say that your support and enthusiasm blew our wildest expectations out of the water is an understatement. We have loved seeing reactions and photo mode shares for the past 10 months, and have lost plenty of sleep staying up late to watch teams streaming their Raid progress. Thank you to everyone who’s played so far! 

With just two weeks to go until Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut, we wanted to talk about what’s next for Legends*. As always, just like all Legends content, every update detailed below will be available at no additional charge to owners of any version of Ghost of Tsushima on PS4 or PS5, with no Director’s Cut purchase required. Players on PS4 and PS5 will also be able to play together seamlessly, and progression in Legends carries over regardless of which console you’re playing on. 

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First, today we’re excited to reveal Rivals, an all-new mode coming to Ghost of Tsushima: Legends on September 3 (including new Trophies and cosmetics!). In Rivals, two teams of two will compete to defeat waves of enemies. With each defeated foe, you’ll collect Magatama that you can use to harm the other team. For example, you can spend Magatama on Shades to block your opponents’ purchases, Curses (health drain, exploding bodies, etc), Hwacha fire, and more. Once you’ve spent enough Magatama, you’ll unlock Final Stand waves. Complete these before the opposing team to win!

Second, at the same time Rivals launches, we’ll be releasing the Gear Mastery system.

This is a new expansion of the progression systems and rewards for Legends. Players who’ve earned 110-level gear will now be able to bind it to a class and activate “Mastery Challenges.” This will allow a piece of gear’s Ki level to be upgraded to 120 and eventually unlock a second perk slot! As you activate Mastery Challenges, you can also unlock a new Ability and new Techniques for each class.

Starting on August 20 (release date of Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut), we’re also releasing an update that will add new features to Legends, including some changes based on feedback from the community. We’ve rebalanced the Survival mode to shorten the session length and added new weekly Survival Nightmare challenge variants. We’ve also unlocked additional cosmetics in Legends for players who’