Skonec Entertainment’s Mortal Blitz series lives on; Mortal Blitz: Combat Arena is coming to PSVR soon.
The latest game in the shooter franchise was announced last week during the Bitsummit Gaiden stream. Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida introduced the title, as you can see in the (Japanese) video below. Mortal Blitz: Combat Arena is an online shooter in which up to four players teleport around nodes on a map, trying to shoot each other in the face.
Each point on a map is guarded with shields that will degrade as other players shoot at them. You’ll have to balance getting a great vantage point with maintaining cover. There are, apparently “hundreds” of customization options for weapons and items, ranging from machine guns to rocket launchers and stat-boosters. There will also be a single-player component with missions, but it’s not clear how this will look right now. The game supports both the DualShock 4 and the rifle-shaped Aim controller.
Mortal Blitz: Combat Arena will be free-to-play, with an opening beta launching in August. A full release is planned for September. Keep in mind these dates are only confirmed for Japan right now; it’s not clear if the game will be releasing in the US and Europe, too.
We were first introduced to Mortal Blitz all the way back in 2017 with a ho-hum single-player shooter campaign similar to the Time Crisis series. There have also been two iterations for VR arcades in the east that never made their way over here.
Will you be checking out Mortal Blitz: Combat Arena if and when it releases in these parts? Let us know in the comments below!
We’re only just over a week away from the release of Iron Man VR, and so promotional material is ramping up ahead of the July 3 launch. The latest Iron Man VR video from PlayStation runs through some of the customization and adjustments you’ll be able to make to Tony’s suit as you play through the game.
In the video, Designer Ryan Darcey from Camouflaj notes that while flying and shooting is the “bread and butter” of Iron Man VR, you’ll also spend some time in the iconic Malibu mansion playing as and learning more about Tony. It’s here that you’ll be able to visit the garage to modify and upgrade the Iron Man suit in various ways.
According to Ryan Payton, Director of Iron Man VR and Founder at Camouflaj, the garage “allows players to kind of relax, just be Tony, listen to the radio, work out, but also be able tweak the suit and make it feel like this is your suit that you’re customizing and improving.” You can take a look at that customization system in the video embedded below — it looks like you’ll have a fairly high degree of control over not just the weapons, but also the aesthetic of the suit too.
You’ll be able to customize the repulsion and also craft additional weapons to add to your suit for equipping in auxiliary slots or augment slots, which allow you to craft different types of upgraded equipment. You can improve things like your thrusters and your HUD capabilities.
First Contact Entertainment revealed new content coming to Firewall Zero Hour for its fifth season, as part of the Operation: Syndicate update. It includes a new map, a new contractor and some new weapons as well.
Season Five of Firewall Zero Hour begins from today and follows up the previous update, Operation: Black Dawn, that coincided with the start of the game’s fourth season. The game was also offered as a free PS+ title around the same time, so this new Operation: Syndicate update may be the first big content drop for many new players who joined back in February.
Perhaps one of the biggest additions is the new map, which is available for free to all existing Firewall players. Called Blacksite, this latest map is set in a heavily-militarized sector of a Middle Eastern city at sunset, and will feature some tight engagement zones spread across an open-air markets, alleyways and apartment interiors.
A new contractor is also included in the update — Lucia Gallo from Italy, better known by her ‘hacker handle’, Luna. She has a unique skill called ‘backtrace’ which allows players to see an outline of all signal jammers for 4 seconds. Luna will only be available to paid Operation: Syndicate Pass holders.
The update also includes 24 new cosmetic rewards available throughout the season, plus a new weapon and legendary weapon skin — the Custom ZS and Luna’s HZU. The former is a short-range submachine gun available to players who complete the Free Mission in the first week of the season. The latter is a Legendary Weapon Skin available to Op Pass holders who redeem 250,000 Crypto and complete the 24 Free, Premium and Bonus Missions available in Operation: Syndicate.
Will you be jumping into Operation: Syndicate? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
The upcoming PSVR-exclusive horror game Do Not Open debuted a new teaser trailer this week, giving us our first look at gameplay. Do Not Open is from Sony Interactive Entertainment Spain and Quasar Dynamics, set to release next year in 2021.
The developers describe the game as survival horror with escape room elements mixed in, plus it’s supposedly all based on real events. You play as Michael J. Goreng, a “well-known zoologist and epidemiologist trapped in his own house where his wife and daughter are held against their will.” You’ll have to solve puzzles if you want to escape, plus it sounds like you’ll be dealing with a mysterious paranormal threat too.
Reportedly the game will also have high replayability since the puzzles, riddles, and events all change slightly across subsequent playthroughs. The house’s layout and rooms will change with every playthrough, and there also won’t be any save points. This will all be bolstered by several different endings, which can be unlocked while playing. It’s an interesting concept to take a short horror experience and change it each time you play, requiring multiple playthroughs to get the full experience.
Do Not Open will be a PSVR-exclusive, releasing in 2021. Whether this means it will release for PSVR on the PS4 or PS5 is unknown, but it could be the latter (or both) given that we know it will support current generation PSVR hardware. The ending animation of the trailer shows a PS4 and lists PS4 in the copyright detail at the bottom.
Last week, we got our first proper look at the PlayStation 5 and some of the amazing games coming to the console. While we didn’t get any VR-specific news, a Sony executive recently commented that the PS5 user interface (UI) is a complete overhaul from the PS4. Could this include an overhaul to the UI for PSVR as well?
As reported by The Verge, Sony’s VP of UX Design at PlayStation, Matt MacLaurin answered some questions about the PS5 in a now-deleted LinkedIn thread. He described the system’s UI as a “very interesting evolution of the OS” and a “100 percent overhaul of the PS4 UI and some very different new concepts”.
“As it’s UI it’s practical first, but it’s a whole new visual language and a complete rearchitecting of the user interface,” he said, also noting that the new UI is “more subtle than flashy, but no pixel is untouched.”
This seems to allude to the likelihood of the horizontally laid out “XrossMediaBar” (XMB) retiring, which has been the foundation of Sony’s UI designs for the PSP, PS3, PS Vita, and PS4.
For us, the biggest question that comes with these comments is whether the PlayStation VR UI will be included in this overhaul as well. Currently on the PlayStation 4, the PSVR UI is just the standard PS4 UI floating in a big rectangle positioned in the center of your field of view. Not only is this aesthetically uninspired, it’s also immersion breaking to navigate when using PSVR given that it’s a UI designed for flatscreens and isn’t crafted for VR at all.
We do know that current generation PSVR hardware will be compatible with the PS5. However, the question now is whether PSVR on PS5 will simply use a similar method for UI, displaying the new flatscreen UI in a large floating rectangle, or whether we might see something new, designed specifically for VR. We certainly hope it’s the latter.
Did you miss out on the UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition? Check out every trailer, article, announcement, interview, and more from the UploadVR Showcase right here.
We recently got the chance to interview Ryan Payton, founder of Iron Man VR developer Camouflaj, and Brendan Murphy, Lead Writer on the project, about their unique take on telling an original Tony Stark story. Iron Man VR is a PSVR-exclusive releasing this July 3rd.
I first got the chance to play Iron Man VR right when it was originally announced almost a year and a half ago. At the time, I only got to do some practice flight in the Iron Man suit flying around Tony Stark’s mansion and then a quick mission in the sky where I defended an airplane that was about to crash. It was quick and action-packed as a good showcase of gameplay, but didn’t tell me much about what the game as a whole is actually like.
To be clear: this is not related to any active comic book storylines, although the team did look there for inspiration, nor is it connected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or any other video games. Iron Man VR is, from top to bottom, a standalone title we’ve been told.
During a video chat interview last week, Payton and Murphy talked to me about what it was like to try and establish an original take on Tony Stark and Iron Man in the wake of Robert Downey Jr.’s run as one of the most globally recognized, celebrated, and adored movie franchise characters of all-time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe of films.
“Yeah, well, they certainly cast a long shadow,” admits Murphy. “…But, all the stuff about what has come before and the performances by other people before, we didn’t really concern ourselves too much with that. We use the comic books as reference and we set out to start fresh and create a new take on the character…We had talked about not wanting to tell an origin story.
“It just seemed obvious that it had been done and done well, but we still wanted to tell what felt like the essential Tony Stark story. And how do you do that with a character that’s been around since 1963 and there’s, you know, countless iterations of them? When we met with Marvel and it went well and, you know, we started to collaborate with them, the first thing they said was, ‘Yeah, please don’t make an origin story.’ They urged us to tell an original story, not just a retread of something we’ve already seen.”
Everyone knows the origin of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man given their lengthy history of feature film releases, so with the MCU still fresh in the mind of fans, a retread of Stark’s origins just isn’t needed. So, in the case of Iron Man, what does an origin story actually look like?
“Part of trying to make it a quintessential Tony Stark story, without it feeling like something that you’ve seen a bunch of times or at all, was hammering down on this theme of: Tony Stark being his own worst enemy,” says Payton. “I would say it’s probably the main theme of our game. And it’s such an essential, like Tony Stark thing to create a problem and then have to solve it basically. I would say, without spoiling anything, we kind of drove down on that theme.”
Did you miss out on the UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition? Check out every trailer, article, announcement, interview, and more from the UploadVR Showcase right here.
Today at the UploadVR Showcase: Summer Edition we revealed the announcement trailer for the Meatgrinder update in The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners. This big new update will introduce brutal new horde mode-style battle arenas for a quicker and more replayable way of killing zombies.
Watch the first-ever footage of the new update right here:
This is a big feature that a lot of people were clamoring for even back when the game first came out. As great as Saints & Sinners is with its meaty campaign, massive maps, and reactive sandbox-style gameplay that adapts to your actions, it’s hard to replay a game like that. It just isn’t the same.
But people still wanted more of the experience, so Skydance Interactive are releasing the Meatgrinder update! This new update delivers a handful of maps, one of which is brand new, to let you fight through waves of zombies that get progressively harder as you craft weapons and fend them off for your own survival. There’s even a brand new katana added into the game for this too.
The Oculus Quest version of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners is still due out later this year, in Q4, but we don’t know anything else about that yet. For now, the Meatgrinder update is coming to both PC VR and PSVR along with all of its bloody, gory action, in July 2020.
The footage below is from the Oculus Rift version of the game:
In Solaris, players will engage in tense multiplayer PvP combat in virtual environments that look and feel like they’ve been ripped out of an esport from the future. In fact, that’s whole premise of the game. You take on the role of a futuristic cyber athlete that uses VR to compete in first-person shooter competitions, similar to Disc Battles from Tron, but with guns. It’s got a very meta atmosphere to it all.
This will be a very fast-paced experience with quick respawns, guns laying around arenas for quick picking up similar to old-school shooters like Quake and Unreal Tournament, and should be a great option for easy and quick pick-up and play action.
This isn’t First Contact Entertainment’s first forray into VR, though. Their first attempt was a visually striking wave shooter named ROM: Extraction for PC VR and then a squad-based tactical shooter named Firewall Zero Hour for PSVR. This makes Solaris their third VR game and first release for Oculus Quest.
Solaris: Offworld Combat is releasing this August 2020 for Oculus Rift via Home and Oculus Quest, with crossplay and dedicated servers. First Contact Entertainment is also planning to release Solaris later this year for PSVR, but there’s no date on that version yet.
While we don’t know the official PS5 size just yet, Sony’s new console looks like a beast. More so than any other console it’s launched thus far, in fact. Yes, even including the George Foreman grill PS3. But will it fit in your gaming setup?
You can now use AR to find out.
Virtual Studio recently uploaded an unofficial 3D render of the disc drive version of the console to Sketchfab, an online library of 3D assets (thanks to Sam Watts for pointing it out online). If you access the model via the free app on your smartphone and click the AR icon (assuming your phone supports such a feature), you can project the model into your real-world surroundings to find a spot for it. That’s where I’m thinking of placing mine (or at least, putting it while I basically play a real-life game of Tetris to make it fit). It’s either that or the floor, and no one wants that.
Granted we don’t have official dimensions for the console yet, so you can’t take this projection as an accurate depiction of the PS5 size. That said, you can use two fingers to scale the model for best and worst-case scenarios. As of right now, the best people have done is to measure the size of the console in relation to others, based on its disc drive.
Sony revealed the PS5 design late last week and the internet has had its fun with it since. But, whatever you make of it, this is the box that’s going to be powering PSVR experiences for many years to come; PlayStation boss Jim Ryan reconfirmed that the original PSVR works with the console last week. We’re also expecting the company to release a new iteration of the headset sometimes after PS5 launch this holiday season. For now, you can check out everything we know about PSVR 2 right here.
We don’t yet know the price of Sony’s next-generation console, the PS5, but PlayStation chief executive Jim Ryan says the company is focusing on getting the “value equation” right.
Ryan said as much in an interview with the BBC following the PS5 reveal event last week. “Conventional wisdom and history show that our business is one of the more recession-proof businesses,” Ryan responded when asked if the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic posed trouble for the device. “But I think this will sharpen our need to ensure that we focus on getting the value equation right. And I emphasize value as opposed to price.”
Continuing on, Ryan explained that the company wanted to make sure “that the overall value proposition in terms of the console and the games – the range of games, the quality of games, the quantity of games – makes this something that our community aspires towards.”
These comments may suggest that PS5’s launch price will be high; perhaps even more than the $399 price tag PS4 had attached to it in 2013. Obviously, whatever price Sony goes with will have a knock-on effect for PSVR users.
Rumors earlier in the year claimed that Sony was struggling with keeping the PS5 price down. We’ve also heard that the company is only planning a limited launch for the console this year. Still, with PS5 set to launch this holiday season, we’ll be sure to hear the price in the coming months.
