It’s been a few months since we shared the first Horizon Forbidden West gameplay experience during State of Play, where we showed you a glimpse of where Aloy’s journey will take her next and showcased exciting new elements like swimming, free climbing, expanded melee combat, and more.

At that time, Horizon Forbidden West had just passed a major milestone and we had entered the final stage of development; on track, but a bit uncertain if we’d be able to polish the game to the level of quality we strive for.

It’s no surprise that our teams were hugely impacted by the global pandemic; we have been adjusting to new workflows, protocols, and other challenges, while keeping our teams safe and prioritizing a healthy work/life balance.

Today we are delighted to confirm that our long-awaited sequel is coming to both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on February 18, 2022. Pre-orders start on September 2, 2021, so look out for more information on that next week.

While the decision to move the game’s launch to 2022 certainly wasn’t easy, we’d like to take a moment to thank all of our fans for their unwavering support; we know how much you’ve been looking forward to reuniting with Aloy and her friends, continuing her story, and exploring a new and more dangerous world. Your passion, fan art, cosplay, virtual photography, and videos have meant the world to all of us.

To that end, we know our community has been asking for an Enhanced Performance Patch for Horizon Zero Dawn played on PlayStation 5. That patch is NOW LIVE, letting PS5 players enjoy a targeted 60 FPS as a free update! If you already have a copy, this will be automatically updated, or for any first timers to Horizon, you can find it via the Horizon Zero Dawn product page or on our social channels.

We will have more information to come in the following months, and look forward to seeing  you soon in the Forbidden West…

Today is a great day. Earlier this summer we offered a glimpse at what Jett is all about and how it plays, yesterday we announced our project has gone gold, and today we’re thrilled to be here to announce a release date. 

Jett: The Far Shore will alight on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on October 5, 2021.If you’re eager to embark, know that pre-orders are available today at a 20% discount until launch day.

To mark this occasion, we’ve cooked up a new Jett video for you, providing fresh glimpses into the distinct universe, narrative and tone of this unusual interstellar action adventure.

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Jett tells a layered cinematic story, with on foot segments where you’re able to soak in the mood of a space and talk to people, including your fellow Jett scouts, as you piece together a thoughtful narrative that is sometimes warm and intimate, often heavy hearted, occasionally spectacular. When you’re not on foot you’re at the helm of a low-flying Jett, working alongside fellow Jett scouts, employing scientific tools to better understand an unfamiliar planet. As you progress in Jett, the scope of the story will come into focus as the Jett action broadens. Before long you’ll find yourself roaming through scenarios that reveal some of Jett’s immersive sim aspirations. 

Jett began long long ago, even before Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, when Craig D. Adams at Superbrothers A/V and I met. We discovered a resonance, and soon found ourselves discussing concepts involving low-flying Jetts leaving long trails zipping across naturalistic landscapes, while evocative music and immersive audio create strong vibes.

In those early days Craig was pretty fired up about Fumito Ueda’s video games like Ico and Shadow Of The Colossus, as well Motorstorm: Pacific Rift by Evolution Studios, and thatgamecompany’s flOwer. You may detect vibes, and even some design sensibilities, in common with those.

Now, I wasn’t involved in Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, ho

We’re excited to welcome you to a world evolved when Jurassic World Evolution 2 launches on PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on November 9.

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Jurassic World Evolution 2 builds upon the ground-breaking and immersive 2018 original, introducing a compelling new narrative campaign, incredible new features including expanded construction and more customisation options, and awe-inspiring new prehistoric species brought to life with captivating authenticity. Here’s what’s in store.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 offers four game modes, including Campaign mode following on from the events of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom where you work alongside the DFW (Department of Fish and Wildlife), the Government agency tasked with establishing facilities to control, conserve, and contain dinosaurs now in the wild. For those of you looking to unleash your creativity, Sandbox mode offers players all the tools they need to create their ultimate Jurassic Park or Jurassic World dinosaur park. For those of you on PS5 you will also be able to build multi-era parks utilising both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World buildings and decorations in Sandbox mode. While Challenge mode allows you to truly test their management skills in a range of different missions with escalating difficulty, attempting to achieve the best park rating in the shortest amount of time.

A new mode for Jurassic World Evolution 2 is Chaos Theory mode, where you can revisit pivotal moments from the Jurassic World film franchise and add your own mark in a range of “what if” scenarios. Whether realising John Hammond’s dream of an operational Jurassic Park, showcasing a T-Rex in the San Diego Amphitheatre, or building and running your own Jurassic World with the support of iconic characters such as Dr. Henry Wu (voiced by BD Wong). We can’t wait for you to experience this new mode.

Along with these modes and features, we have more than 75 awe-inspiring prehistoric species come to life in Jurassic World Evolution 2. These include highly requested flying and marine reptiles, such as the Mosasaurus, and returning community-favourites like the T-Rex and Velociraptor. These majestic creatures feel more alive than ever as they interact with each other, fight for dominance, preside over territory, and display brand new behaviours while reacting intelligently to the world around them. Our latest trailer showed

Hey PlayStation Nation! I’m Ian, creator of the game Splitgate and CEO of 1047 Games.

Last month, Splitgate started its open beta, a typically uneventful testing phase where us devs receive feedback and put on some minor finishing touches before the official release. However, our open beta was anything but typical.

If you aren’t familiar with what happened, long story short, Splitgate basically exploded (in a good way) which left our servers unable to keep up with the demand. In the span of a month, our servers went from supporting 4,000 players at once to 175,000 players! All in all, our servers had some growing pains, so we had to implement short-term solutions to prevent back-end crashes.

With our original plans completely changed, we decided to put off our official launch in favor of extending the beta to enable us to continue working on our servers while still giving players new content.

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The Splitgate Beta’s next phase – Season 0

With Season 0 starting today, players will experience the same exact content we originally intended for the official release, but we’re still calling it a beta. Here’s what to expect from today’s update:

• New Map: Karman Station
• Season 0 Battle Pass – 100 Levels of exclusive items
• Season-spanning Challenges
• New Mode: Contamination
• New weapon skins, armor sets, and emotes

The new map, Karman Station, is the most beautiful map we’ve ever made, in my opinion. When you load up the game after updating, this should definitely be the first thing you check out.

Season 0’s Battle Pass has some of the best items we’ve ever made. Readers of the PlayStation Blog get a first-look at the Battle Pass.

Another addition we’re really happy about is Contamination mode. Many players have been requesting it, and listening to suggestions from the community is something we pride ourselves on. Contamination is our first “asymmetrical” game mode where both teams are not equal to each other. When the contaminated team gets a frag on the normal team, when that player respawns, they become a member of the contaminated. We’re really excited to see the community’s response to it.

How did we get here?

By now we were expecting to be officially released, have a stream of updates coming, have a solid player base of a few thousand, and be steadily growing. Fate had other plans. Splitgate recently hit over 10 million downloads and 175,

Welcome to another blog about our forthcoming game—House of Ashes! I’m Will Doyle and I’m a game director here at Supermassive Games. Today I am going to talk to you about monsters and what they mean in our game. 

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House of Ashes takes place at the close of the Iraq war in 2003. High in the Zagros Mountains, an elite military unit searching for chemical weapons comes under fire from holdout Iraqi forces. During the firefight, sinkholes open in the ground beneath them, plunging both sides into the ruins of a long-lost Sumerian temple. Our soldiers are not alone down there—they have woken a nest of unearthly creatures, which are hungry for blood! Across the course of one night, our survivors must learn to evade, adapt and strike back against the horde of creatures hunting them. To survive the night below, our soldiers must forge a brotherhood with their enemies from the world above. 

In the most classic sense, “monsters” are grotesque creatures that violate our notions of humanity and the natural order of things. We fear them because their existence shatters our understanding of the world—such things should not be, yet here they are, in the flesh. Monsters don’t obey our rules, they kill, they terrorize, and they corrupt. Of course, not all monsters are supernatural—the term “monster” can also be applied to people who abandon their own humanity. When a human behaves like a monster, are they even human anymore?    

We wanted to explore all these themes in House of Ashes. The underworld creatures you’ll face in the game are brutal, relentless killing machines. They are real, but they are not human. We purposefully wanted them to be as inhuman as possible—they don’t think like we do, they don’t show mercy like we do, they just want us dead. We knew that the more inhuman we made them, the more humanity they’d bring out in our human soldiers. Unfortunately, the characters you control are not all friends, and you’ll be presented with some very difficult choices around who to trust, who to help, and who to leave behind. Setting our game in a war zone immediately gave us thorny tensions between our characters: a mix of prejudices, rivalries, and mistrust. With such strong tensions running within the group, you’ll sometimes question if the creatures aren’t the only monsters down there. To defeat their inhuman enemies, your

As a developer, watching people play your game can be a nerve-wracking experience. It seems like an age ago (it was only 2018) that I was on a busy showfloor at the EGX Expo, peering over the shoulders of players getting to grips with Valfaris, the 2D action-platformer that myself and fellow Steel Mantis dev, Andrew Gilmour, were working on at the time.

Luckily, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The demo we had prepared was no pushover, and I remember seeing players dying over and over. But most were determined to push forward, and they eventually made it to the end with a big grin on their face. It showed me there was something about Valfaris that made people want to persevere and conquer it. Seeing this was an incredibly rewarding experience, and it made me feel we were making something worthwhile.

Fast forward to today, and we’re excited to be revealing Valfaris: Mecha Therion. Anyone familiar with Valfaris will immediately notice a major difference in the sequel – it’s not a platformer, but a shoot ‘em up. New ideas and features are, of course, entirely expected in a follow-up, but switching genres? Not so much.

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Despite knowing players enjoyed the platforming action of Valfaris – as I’d seen first-hand at EGX and was reinforced post-launch by positive user and critic reviews – we both decided we wanted to do something new with the sequel.

Before we arrived at that decision, however, our original plan was to make a sequel to Slain: Back From Hell, a 2D hack-and-slash platformer we released in 2016. It was going to be a 2.5D platformer and we got as far as making a bit of gameplay with some 3D elements. We had a section with the character walking around a spiral staircase, and it looked pretty cool. Even at that point, though, I was already feeling that making another entire platformer was going to be a drag.

It was then Andrew suggested something totally crazy: that we abandon the project and make a shmup sequel to Valfaris instead. It was completely out of the blue, but I grew up playing games such as Thunder Force, R-Type, Gradius, and Raiden, and had already made a shoot ‘em up around 2008 called Cy-Clone, so I was very into the idea!

I was immediately enthused by the change in direction, and – as there are plenty of differences between a platformer and a shmup to consider – straight away started to think about the game from a design perspective. Most notably, a platformer generally allows the player to go at their own pace (rising water/lava levels not withstanding

It’s been six months since the release of Little Nightmares II. Whether you’ve jumped into Mono and Six’s adventure from day one or are still new to this universe, the Enhanced Edition – out today – is a good opportunity to (re)discover these little nightmares on PS5. 

PS5 enhancements 

Thanks to the power of PS5, you can now play Little Nightmares II with ray-traced reflections, increased volumetric shadows and particles, improved loading times and a new immersive 3D soundscape mix when using a 5.1 / 7.1 audio system.

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Thanks to the Graphics mode option, you will also be able to choose between Beauty and Performance modes. The first one emphasizes the resolution and the ray tracing; the game runs at 30fps with 4K resolution and optimized ray tracing. The second one locks the game at 60fps with a dynamic resolution up to 4K and ray tracing.

Owners of the PS4 version of Little Nightmares II can upgrade to the PS5 Little Nightmares Enhanced Edition for free.  

An eye on the development process

Because Little Nightmares II has such a unique atmosphere, we have been very cautious with the enhanced features we decided to use. Each one of them has been chosen and balanced for each room in order to keep the ambiance and push the visual quality to another level. 

When it came to choosing which features to add, one important criteria was also to improve player immersion. We wanted players to feel like they are diving into their little nightmares. This focus on immersion implies an important attention to details. Adding more particles which are dynamically affected by Mono in the air but also on the ground with dust on the old carpets. To make the player’s senses more alert, the 3D audio gives a hint on the direction of the danger but it doesn’t mean that it will be easier to escape. 

Zoom in on the Hospital chapter 

All the chapters in the game had great improvements, but the Hospital might have had the most important changes. Since the beginning of the development of the PS5 Enhanced Edition, it was essential for us to process each room individually to maintain their unique atmosphere. In the Hospital, we quickly decided to try to add ray-traced, real time reflections on the ground of all the indoor environments. This made the Hospital corridors come to life and reinforce the desired feeling of uneasiness while discovering its not-so

NBA 2K22 is about to tip off. We’re thrilled to share the strides we’ve made and the unique Challenge Activities available to our PlayStation fans.

In NBA 2K21 we introduced seasons, an all-new way to level up and earn rewards within MyTeam, and we’re expanding it even further in NBA 2K22. Seasons will play an important role throughout NBA 2K22 and the best part is whether it’s MyCareer, MyTeam, or The W Online*, you’ll be able to access new content and earn rewards simply for playing with no additional costs.

Explore all there is to do in the City (on PS5) and the Neighborhood (on PS4). Leveling up will earn you more rewards, which are refreshed every six weeks at the start of a new season. All year long, seasons will offer fresh new content for you to enjoy.

PS5 MyTeam Challenge Activities

If the plethora of new MyTeam Challenges we’ve got lined up for all players wasn’t enough, PlayStation 5 players will once again have their own unique set of Challenge Activities to earn rewards from. Introduced in NBA 2K21, Challenge Activities are available exclusively to PS5 players through the PS5 Activities feature. NBA 2K22 will refresh these at the start of each season, giving PS5 players new opportunities to unlock rewards by completing special objectives within set game scenarios. Bring your A game, though, because once again players will be ranked against each other through the Activities leaderboard.

To kick things off in Season 1, we’ve got “Assists against Dirk & Luka”. This Dallas Mavericks duo have established themselves as two of the best in franchise history, and it’ll be up to you to build the ideal MyTeam lineup to beat them on PlayStation 5 and earn a Playmaker Award Pack as your reward.

MyCareer

Last year, seasons were exclusive to MyTeam, but not anymore! In NBA 2K22, seasons are coming to MyCareer. Within the City (on PS5) and the Neighborhood (on PS4), you’ll earn highly coveted rewards such as apparel, new Banners for your MyPlayer, and a new Grand Prize each season.

Start your engines, Season 1 is set to take players for a ride, unleashing go-karts in the City and Neighborhood as the Grand Prize. We’re thrilled to introduce go-karts as a fun way to cruise and adventure through unexplored regions – available once you’ve reached Level 40. In addition, inline skates can be used as a mode of transportation once you crack Level 30.

There will be plenty to explore and see within the Neighborhood, but we want to broaden your horizons in more tropical destinations as well. For PS4, NBA 2K22 will set sail to the Caribbean in Season 1, where you’ll showcase your skills topside on a cruise ship, and on some of the world’s most picturesque island courts.

The crown jewel for players in NBA 2K22 will be reaching Legend status, but to do so, you’ll need to reach Level 40 in four different seasons. That doesn’t mean you have to do it consecutively, but you’ll have to put in the work to earn the bragging right of an all-time great.

New Beats and Fresh Swag

Anot

Calling all PlayStation 4 or PlayStation 5 owners! Coming off of the reveal of Call of Duty: Vanguard just a few short days ago, we’re excited to bring more good news: from August 27 at 10 AM PT to August 29 at 10 AM PT, you will be able to participate in the Call of Duty: Vanguard PlayStation Alpha which will feature Sledgehammer Games’ innovative new game mode, Champion Hill.

This PlayStation-exclusive Alpha isn’t only the first chance at playing the newest Multiplayer mode in the Call of Duty franchise, but also the first opportunity to play Call of Duty: Vanguard before its November 5 release. This will be just a small slice of the overall Multiplayer offering coming to Call of Duty: Vanguard when it launches, but is a great chance for PlayStation players to get their hands on the game and provide valuable feedback to Sledgehammer Games.

For most PlayStation players, a PlayStation Plus Subscription is not required*. Only a console and an internet connection are needed to participate, and no preorder is required.

Before diving into details about how you can access the Alpha, we wanted to give you some background on what Champion Hill is all about as well as some tips for making sure you end up on top.

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Champion Hill Primer

Sledgehammer Games is proud to introduce Champion Hill, a multi-arena survival tournament where tactics and strategy combine with quick-action, close-quarter gunplay. The mode is all about impactful gameplay, from the intense periods of combat to the decisions made in-between. 

In Champion Hill, your squad — which during the Alpha will be either a Duo (2v2) or Trio (3v3)— will compete in a round-robin tournament against seven other squads, with each squad having a set number of lives to start with. The mission is to reduce all other squads’ life count to zero in a series of timed Combat rounds, before the same happens to you.  Do that, and claim victory on Champion Hill.

In this mode, everyone starts with the same Loadout, but you will collect  cash by taking enemy lives and picking up drops scattered around the map. This  cash will allow you to upgrade your starting weapons and purchase new armaments, equipment, Perks, and Killstreaks during Buy Rounds that happen between Combat Rounds.

It’s in the Buy Rounds that the real strategy comes in (more on that below). No two matches will be the same, since the way that you use  cash throughout each match (e.g. held for bigger upgrades as the Rounds go on, or used on smaller, more incremental upgrades along the way) will greatly change how you and your squad counter every other squad. It’s a chess-

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Welcome back! This week the team assembles to interview Marvel’s Avengers narrative consultant Evan Narcisse and T’Challa voice actor Christopher Judge on the War for Wakanda expansion. Then we take it to the field and chat with EA’s Mike Mahar about Madden 22.

Stuff We Talked About

• Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut
• Fracked
• Quake
• Call of Duty: Vanguard
• Marvel’s Avengers War for Wakanda expansion (interview begins at 21:37)
• Madden 22 (interview begins at 38:38)
• Our favorite DLCs

The Cast

Sid Shuman – Senior Director of Content Communications, SIE

Tim Turi –  Manager, Content Communications, SIE

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