Classic 2000 AD PS2 shooter Rogue Trooper is being remastered for PS4

Today we’re very excited to announce Rebellion‘s first new release since we launched Sniper Elite 4 on Valentine’s Day!

If you follow Rebellion you might already know that we don’t just make games, we also publish legendary British comic 2000 AD, famous for characters like Judge Dredd, Sláine, Nemesis and of course Rogue Trooper!

Coming soon to PlayStation 4, Rogue Trooper Redux is a loving remaster of the acclaimed 2006 PS2 third-person shooter based on the comic book of the same name.

This year 2000 AD celebrates its 40th birthday and we can’t wait to bring one of its most memorable figures to a whole new generation of PlayStation players.

New to 2000 AD? Never played the original game? Here’s a little intro to our blue-skinned soldier…

Who is Rogue Trooper?

Created by beloved writer Gerry Finley-Day and groundbreaking artist Dave Gibbons, Rogue Trooper has been a comic book mainstay since 1981 and has even included contributions from Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta.

Rogue Trooper tells the tale of the sole-surviving Genetic Infantryman (or “GI”), a blue-skinned, bio-engineered solider on a mission to avenge his fallen comrades across the blasted, chemical-poisoned planet of Nu Earth in a remote corner of the galaxy.

Why does he fight?

Bred for war by the Southers in their endless conflict with the colonial Nort regime, the GIs were the only troops that could fight on Nu Earth’s surface without respirators or sealed HAZMAT suits, giving them a huge advantage in combat.

Aware of this threat, the Norts conspired with the Traitor General to set a deadly trap for the GIs which later became known as the infamous “Quartz Zone Massacre”.

Of the hundreds of GIs who made the drop, Rogue was the only survivor, taking the bio-chips from the bodies of his three closest comrades so they might survive to be implanted in new GI bodies.

From that day on he had one mission – hunt down the Traitor General!

What makes Nu Earth so special?

A planet-wide conflict across petrified forests and polluted plains, a yawning black hole that dominates every skyline … I’m not sure there have been many more dramatic stages for a war story!

What makes the set-up unique though, is Rogue himself.

While Rogue walks alone, he fights as a team. With the sentient bio-chips of his fallen buddies Gunnar, Bagman and Helm inserted into his rifle, pack and helmet respectively, Rogue has access to a huge variety of unique upgrades and abilities that not only drive the game’s tactical shooting, but pays homage to the essence of the comic.

All this makes for a unique action game that feels as good now as it did in 2006. We can’t wait to show you more of Rogue Trooper Redux and maybe even covert a few more of you into GIs!

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Sci-fi adventure Unearthing Mars launches on PlayStation VR 7th March

Hi everyone, this is Eric from Winking Entertainment, a company name probably not many of you are familiar with. This is our first outing on the Playstation platform, and we’re really excited to bring our PS VR sci-fi adventure Unearthing Mars to Europe.

Let me start off with this: I’m happy to announce that Unearthing Mars will be released digitally on PSN stores globally on 7th March! That’s right, you guys heard it here first!

So what is Unearthing Mars? Is it a shooter, a puzzler, or some sort of space sim? To be honest, it is all and none of these at the same time. Let me explain while sharing some concept art we made in production with you.

The Unearthing Mars experience comprises of 10 different stages, each with its own unique gameplay mechanic, while advancing the story of a space expedition team trying to unravel the secrets of Mars. Players will be taking the role of the co-pilot, a member of the retrieval team sent to recover fragments of the mysterious Phobos satellite, believed to hold clues to the possibility of an ancient civilization on Mars.

As you can tell, this isn’t a documentary-type VR experience, but really something that plays more like a good science fiction novel (or novella, as Unearthing Mars has an average playthrough length of 2 hours).

In the first half of the game, players will experience operating a Mars landing craft vehicle firsthand, as well as explore the surface of Mars on foot and via a rover vehicle. In the latter half, there is a lot more cross-genre gameplay as players discover a more esoteric side to the Red Planet, solving puzzles along the way and culminating in a first-person shootout that… well, I’ll let you guys experience that for yourselves.

With such a wide variety of gameplay mechanics in the game, production was quite a challenge. Production staff were split into 4 smaller teams, each responsible for a different game genre, or gameplay mechanic.

Traditionally at Winking, a single product is worked up on by a single team, but to tackle the challenges posed by making a new VR product, 4 different teams were necessary in the end. One team was responsible for the landing craft cockpit simulation, another for the driving mechanics of the rover vehicle, and yet another for the adventure parts in the underground and on surface of Mars, as well as the puzzle areas. Finally a team was brought in to execute the shooting stage.

The team also invested in facial and body motion capture equipment in order to make movements as fluid as possible. Unlike traditional console games, in VR everything holds an additional factor of realism, and in order to get the amount of detail required, adjustments were added by hand post-motion capture.

In order to ensure players experience the fullest immersion in the VR environment, the decision was made early on to have leave minimal on-screen UI, use full voiceovers to guide the player and tell the story. The team flew to record on-location in Europe, Japan and Korea to provide natural-sounding native voiceovers, as poor voiceovers really do kill the atmosphere of a game.

We had the help of some very talented voice actors, and having been involved in the recording personally I recommend playing through the game in different languages!

To wrap things up, Unearthing Mars, a sci-fi PS VR game set on the Red Planet, will be available digitally on PlayStation Store 7th March. It’s a smörgåsbord of game genres and mechanics that should be enjoyable for all players: it really has something for everyone.

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Charting the four-year journey to today’s launch of crowdfunded RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera

After four years of development and with $5 million raised in crowdfunding, it’s finally here: Torment: Tides of Numenera launches on PlayStation 4 today!

Set on earth one billion years in the future on the science-fantasy Numenera setting, Torment is a game where we invite you define your legacy – find your answer to the question “What does one life matter?” On the road towards that goal, you’ll have to make thousands of choices and face the consequences.

At inXile, we love making games where the player tells the story, and we make sure to add many different opportunities to make decisions that truly matter. Torment: Tides of Numenera, true to its legacy, is a game set in a world unlike any other, with a deeply personal story, and offers near-bottomless choice and consequence. As RPGs go, it offers one of the most in-depth stories we’ve ever built, with over 1.2 million words, and some of the craziest situations and characters we’ve ever dreamed up. And on top of that, the game has a unique combat system we call the Crisis System, where each encounter is handcrafted and you can use your environment or even talk your way out of the fight.

But let’s go back a few steps, as you may be asking yourself “Alright, but what’s a Torment?” Two decades ago, I ran a studio by the name of Interplay, which published and/or developed titles like Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, Descent, Stonekeep, and – of course – Planescape: Torment. We were a studio that lived by the credo “by gamers, for gamers”, and I don’t think any of our titles expressed that quite as well as Planescape: Torment did. Here was a game unlike any other, the fevered brainchild of developers with a love of pen and paper games and a penchant for the dark and bizarre. It wasn’t the usual kind of pitch, but both the artistic side of me and the teen inside me that loved D&D had to see this game happen, so it was an easy greenlight.

Today Planescape: Torment is remembered as one of the great classics, often listed as the best cRPG of all time, and praised for its literary qualities. People have long been asking me if a sequel would ever happen. Four years ago, I got developers from the original game together to create a thematic successor worthy of the Torment name, and people proved they truly wanted this title when they made us the highest funded Kickstarter at the time.

Development on crowdfunded games is unlike that of traditionally funded games. It allows us to make games using crowdfunding that otherwise would simply not exist. We’re blessed with a backer base that has supported our vision throughout. Of course, for us that adds a hefty double burden for Torment: Tides of Numenera. Make a game true to the heritage of one of the greatest RPGs of all time that simultaneously makes your nearly hundred thousand backers happy.

So of course expectations are high, but our backers have also helped us through the way – giving invaluable feedback during the development process and testing our beta version with us. Because gamers are so uniquely involved in this title from its very inception, perhaps it holds truer to the phrase “by gamers, for gamers” than we ever did before.

It’s been a long four years to get this title to them, but we’re delivering a game we’re very proud of, and early the feedback has been positive. I hope you’ll join us in exploring the Ninth World, and find your legacy!

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New on PlayStation Store this week: Horizon Zero Dawn, Torment: Tides of Numenera

Arriving on a wave of critical acclaim, this week sees the debut of Horizon Zero Dawn, the stunning new PS4-exclusive open-world adventure from Killzone studio Guerrilla Games. In an era where Machines roam the land and mankind is no longer the dominant species, step into the shoes of a young hunter named Aloy as she embarks on a journey to discover her destiny.

Also out this week, eccentric indie adventure Night in the Woods, fantasy RPG Torment: Tides of Numenera, out-of-this-world PS VR experience Apollo 11 and new DLC for Steep, Minecraft and Tom Clancy’s The Division, among others.

See the full list of new arrivals below.

Out this week

• 
  Torment: Tides of Numenera
  28th February
• 
  Professional Farmer 2017 – Gold Edition
  28th February
• 
  Night in the Woods
  28th February

 

• 
  Dying: Reborn
  28th February
• 
  Dying: Reborn PSVR
  28th February
• 
  Ghost Blade HD (Not in Aus/NZ)
  28th February

 

• 
  Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride
  28th February
• 
  Gryphon Knight Epic (Not in Aus, NZ, Middle East)
  28th February
• 
  Pineview Drive – Joe’s Diner Horror Bundle (Not in Middle East, Russia)
  28th February

 

• 
  Horizon Zero Dawn
  1st March
• 
  Horizon Zero Dawn – Deluxe Edition
  1st March
• 
  Dynasty Warriors: Godseekers
  1st March

 

• 
  ADK Damashii
  1st March
• 
  The Sun and Moon/Letter Quest Bundle
  1st March
• 
  Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Extended Edition
  1st March

 

• 
  Apollo 11 VR
  1st March
• 
  The Pure Bundle
  2nd March
• 
  ACA Neo Geo NAM-1975
  2nd March

 

• 
  Dynasty Warriors: Godseekers
  1st March

 

PS4 DLC

28th February

• Tom Clancy’s The Division
   
• Last Stand
• 500 Premium Credits Pack
• 1050 Premium Credits Pack
• 2400 Premium Credits Pack
• 4600 Premium Credits Pack
• 7200 Premium Credits Pack

• DRAGON BALL XENOVERSE 2
   
• DB Super Pack 2

• Steep
   
• The Complete Beaver Pack
• The Beaver Costume Pack
• ALASKA Look Pack

• World of Tanks
   
• PAINGOD’s Picks T23E3/FV201 Mega
• Team UK All Stars Ultimate
• Team USA Power Forward

• Minecraft
   
• Fallout Battle Map Pack

1st March

• Warframe
   
• Banshee Prime Access Pack
• Banshee Prime Accessories Pack

Remember, if you’ve not got access to your PS4, PS3 or PS Vita then you can also buy through our online store on your mobile, tablet or computer.

Free for PlayStation Plus subscribers in February

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How Thumper’s ‘rhythm violence’ was made all the more terrifying thanks to PlayStation VR

Thumper began as an idea back in 2008, when high-quality VR was just a fantasy. Last October, we were proud to release Thumper alongside PS VR. It’s been an honour to hear from so many PlayStation gamers who made Thumper their first VR experience!

My co-developer Brian Gibson and I handcrafted our own engine, tools, and embraced risk as we developed Thumper. But perhaps our biggest gamble was deciding to add VR support to Thumper. In most VR games, you, the player, are a human interacting with a virtual environment based on our world. But the world of Thumper is abstract and alien. And you are a space beetle. Without any real-world frame of reference, we had to figure out what Thumper should feel like in VR.

First, we had to decide how large everything in the world is relative to the player. As a starting point, we tried making the player’s character (a space beetle) very large – approximately 15 meters wide in real-world units. This didn’t have the feeling we wanted. When you are this small relative to the game world, moving your head around results in little or no change of perspective. The beetle and in-game objects feel distant, detached, and lack intensity.

So, we made the player much larger. We tried making the beetle about the size of the player’s head. This made things more intense. In fact, it was too intense. At this size, crashing through the game’s many obstacles and sharp turns felt like getting smacked in the face! We thought it best to spare our players from this level of punishment.

Finally, we adjusted the player size so the beetle is about 40 centimeters wide in real-world units. At this size, the path the beetle travels down is just wider than your shoulders. It makes it feel like you’re sliding down a long chute in a children’s playground. As soon as we played the game like this, we knew the feeling was perfect.

A wonderful thing about VR is that visuals are no longer constrained to a static rectangular frame. Players can look around in any direction. We took advantage of this to make our boss encounters more epic in VR. In the image below, you can see Crakhed, the final boss of Level 1, as he looks in normal 2D mode.

But when you reach Crakhed in VR, he is four times bigger! At this size, he looms over the player and encountering him is more ominous and overwhelming.

We made many more minor adjustments to perfect Thumper’s VR mode. But a big technical challenge remained. On PS4, Thumper runs at 1080p and 60 frames per second. That translates to about 124 million pixels per second. On PS VR, we found that the best experience required the game to run at 90 frames per second. We also didn’t want to sacrifice visual fidelity, so our VR mode uses 1.4x super-sampling and high quality anti-aliasing. All that translates to about 366 million pixels per second. So to achieve our visual goals for PS VR, we had to find a way to triple our rendering speed!

Fortunately, with the help of Sony engineers, we were able to improve our custom engine and better utilize the PS4’s graphics processor. It was one of the most difficult things we’ve ever done, but I’m proud to say Thumper runs at a rock solid 90 frames per second on PS VR. A nice side benefit of our intense optimisation effort is that Thumper’s renderer became much more efficient overall.

With the added power of PS4 Pro, you can play Thumper in native 4K at 60 frames per second – a staggering 500 million pixels per second. And if you play in VR on PS4 Pro, the visuals are clearer and even more immersive.

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Checkmate! Chess Ultra comes to PS4 this spring with PS VR and PS4 Pro support

Hey everyone! I’m Kelly Willoughby, the lead producer at Ripstone Games. We’re a British developer and publisher, and we’ve got a whole bunch of PlayStation games in our repertoire. You might know the Pure series, including Pure Chess, Pure Pool and Pure Hold’em, or maybe titles like Stick it to the Man and Knytt Underground.

So here’s the deal: We’ve been secretly working on a brand new title created by our internal development team that we’d love to share with you today. We’re super excited to reveal that Chess Ultra, a sequel to our original 2012 hit Pure Chess, is coming to PS4 and PS VR this spring.

Chess? YES!

Chess Ultra is a massive step up from the original Pure Chess for the Ripstone team. Not only is the game going to be available in stunning 4K for PlayStation 4 Pro players, but PlayStation owners with a PS VR headset will be able to play the game in VR. We’re super excited about that, as you might have gathered! (And yes, you can use the PS Move controllers to play!)

Each of the Chess Ultra environments look absolutely stunning in 4K, as you can see from the surrounding screenshots and the teaser trailer above, and the chess sets themselves are just as slick.

We’ve worked really hard to make every inch of Chess Ultra shine and we think you’re really going to get the wow factor when you boot up the game. Running at a silky smooth 60 frames per second with textures beautifully rendered using PBR (physical based rendering) this really is something special. Developing the game from the ground up with our internal team has allowed us to make the most beautiful chess game ever seen!

And of course, there are all the features you’d expect from a top quality chess game, and plenty more on top of that. There’s a huge amount of single-player content, including ten different AI levels, multiple environments and a variety of stunning chess sets.

Once you’ve shown the AI what you’re made of, you can always take the action online, and play against friends and other Chess Ultra players from around the world. We’ve got plenty of game modes to keep you and your friends entertained online.

Check it out!

If you’d like to see the game in action right this second, you’re in luck! We’re currently hosting a special livestream on Twitch, where you can play Chess Ultra against a Grandmaster by entering chess commands into the chat, and also ask questions about the game.

That’s everything we’re ready to share right now, but rest assured we have some big surprises up our sleeves that we can’t wait to shout about!

As the first internally developed game for PlayStation from Ripstone Games, Chess Ultra is extremely special to all of us here, and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on it this spring. Expect to hear from me again on the PlayStation.Blog very soon!

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How Duke Nukem has met his match in upcoming PS4 shooter Bulletstorm

I’ll put my hand up and say I’m one – of the seemingly many – gamers whose radar the original release of Bulletstorm slipped under.

The 2011 adrenaline-fuelled shooter joined the likes of Beyond Good & Evil and Pschyonauts in falling foul on an unfortunate curse; critical acclaim that didn’t translate into commercial traction. A game that quickly, according to those that did play it, became a forgotten gem.

Six years on, enter Gearbox Publishing. It’s an easy fit between returning developer People Can Fly and the Battleborn creator; the latter is best known for its comedic and action-rich shooter series Borderlands.

Bulletstorm is as gory as it is fast-paced. It favours creative kills, even rewards you for them, and is the core of the gameplay loop. There’s no deliberation over ethics of gunplay. Just a succession of one liners and trigger pulls that are more action era Arnie than modern cinema’s more measured take on battlefield brutality. There’s much in its DNA that Gearbox likely recognised as a twin of its own creation. The pairing then, is an obvious fit.

And little wonder why Duke Nukem’s got in on the action as an alternate campaign DLC character, complete with full voiceover (by his real-world other half John St. John) and rewritten lines to suit the Duke. Though, this may be the first time the bubblegum-chewing, alien-killing machine gets outmatched and outclassed in the F-bomb department.

Because Bulletstorm leans hard into the 18 rating; swearing, blood and gore are frequent fliers in the fictional universe’s skybox (looking better than ever thanks to the HD touchup). It’s unashamedly full-on with its 80s-inspired action.

A robust weapon wheel calls up a solid range of gun types, most of which feel unique even in an overcrowded genre: the four (four!) barrelled shotgun, the chain-linked grenades of the Flail gun, the skin-piercing drill bits of the Penetrator, the mini-game inbuilt in steering your Headhunter bullets to their flailing targets… and each has a secondary fire mode. It’s carnage on the digital dancefloor.

I play an early section of the game that allows me to test these weapons of messy destruction out, as well as the wrist-mounted energy leash that pulls enemies close, and the zippy slide maneuver that lets me cross open areas and move between cover points quickly. Oh, and the melee kick. A boot to an attacker’s face at close range is as almost as satisfying a full stop to a bullet-ridden conversation as watching uour foe explode from afar.

So, it’s an easy win for adrenaline, with just enough combat strategy required to command the fight as multiple enemy types charge your location. On initial impressions, it’d suit those of us whose tastes stray towards both PlatinumGames’ Vanquish and Doom’s modern rebuild.

If you’ve played either you’ll note similarities – despite the separation of a half decade and console generations – but People Can Fly is eager to thrust its own enraged identity into your face. Bulletstorm’s open aggression – and gameplay purity – can feel like a guilty pleasure in the modern era. But that may also make it most welcome; a palette cleanser between those story-rich RPGs and multi-faceted adventure experiences. A power fantasy where the only moral choices are where you shoot a foe, and with how many bullets.

The question then, is not if People Can Fly can capture lightning in a bottle twice, but if there’s anyone around to witness its imprisonment. Will Bulletstorm find its audience? We’ll find out 7th April.

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