Sackboy: A Big Adventure is crossing over with the free PS5 game Astro’s Playroom. Earlier today, developer Sumo Digital announced that players can equip the free Astro Bot costume later this week.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure crosses over with Astro’s Playroom

The Astro Bot costume arrives in Sackboy: A Big Adventure as a free DLC on March 8. The studio has only shared one image of the costume so far and has yet to show how it will look in the game. However, unlike some other costumes, which are just Sackboy in a funny outfit, this looks more like a Little Big Planet version of the character. It has a larger, boxier head and a proportionally smaller body. The Astro costume’s antenna is also a lot bigger than the original. This has the side effect of making him look a lot more like the Reddit mascot than the designers probably intended.

Astro’s Playroom is a free 3D platformer that comes pre-loaded in all PS5s. It primarily serves as a tech demo for the console’s DualSence controller. It was also the last original game from Gravity Rush developer Japan Studio before its dissolution in 2021. The timing of this new crossover is interesting given the new Astro Bot game reportedly in development.

Meanwhile, Sumo Digital’s Sackboy: A Big Adventure is a 2020 spinoff of the Little Big Planet series. It follows the titular Sackboy in his quest to save Craftworld from the villainous Vex. The game features hundreds of costumes, with developers frequently more through updates. Many of these outfits are inspired by other Sony properties. Past crossovers include characters from God of War, The Last of Us, Ratchet and Clank, Horizon, and Uncharted.

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Sony reportedly has a new Astro Bot game in development and its release date window is sooner than one would expect. According to journalist and insider Jeff Grubb, the next Astro Bot could be out as soon as 2024.

Astro Bot is one of the new unannounced Sony games coming before March 2025, leaker claims

Yesterday, a statement made by Sony Group CFO and Sony Interactive Entertainment chairman Hiroki Totoki was widely misconstrued. Totoki said that Sony will not be releasing a game from “major existing franchises” before March 2025. This was somehow interpreted by some as Totoki confirming that there won’t be any Sony-published games coming this year despite the company having already announced Concord, Stellar Blade, and Rise of the Ronin among others.

Speaking on his Game Mess Mornings podcast, Grubb reiterated that SIE does have unannounced games in the pipeline possibly coming soon, and one of them happens to be an Astro Bot starrer.

While we can’t confirm or deny Grubb’s report and ask our readers to take it with a grain of salt, Totoki’s statement certainly has been taken out of context. What he’s likely referring to as “major existing franchises” are Sony’s tentpole IPs like God of War and Spider-Man.

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A new Team Asobi game has been revealed by the developer, with its next project described as a “full-blown commercial title.” Given that it will also “follow in the footsteps of the games it has done before,” Team Asobi hints that this could be the giant Astro adventure that we all want on PlayStation consoles after Astro’s Playroom. Whatever the studio’s next game, it has stocked up a lot of good will from PS5 owners and Sony for creating a great platformer out of what might have been just a free tech demo.

How the new Team Asobi game takes advantage of PlayStation hardware

Talking at length with GamesIndustry.biz, Team Asobi’s creative and studio director Nicolas Doucet shared some information on the follow-up to Astro’s Playroom. According to the piece, it will likely utilize the PS5 Dualsense controller and its haptic feedback and adaptive triggers to their fullest extent. Doucet has described the controller as a “special weapon” for the studio and that one of the first things the developer does with new technology is “to use it in ways you’re not supposed to.”

Team Asobi’s close proximity to PlayStation’s hardware team in Japan is one of its best assets, as the developer is “one of the first people to get [its] hands onto prototypes.” This allows for a lot of experimentation and outside-of-the-box thinking. In fact, the developer makes it a point to recruit members in the programming community and hobbyist scene who like to tinker with motion sensors, VR headsets, and eye-detection hardware. On that front, Team Asobi plans to expand its number of employees from 60 to 100.

The R&D section of its team is so important that the studio makes it a point to rotate people in and out of R&D regularly so that more developers have a chance to create new gameplay ideas. Using a “quick iteration approach,” the studio can quickly find out within weeks instead of six months whether some innovative mechanic is worth pursuing. So whether or not its next game is really a new Astro game, we can still expect it to be as fun and innovative as its marquee title.

In other news, here’s how to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 campaign early, and another reference to PlayStation’s PC launcher has been found.

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The long-awaited PS5 Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support will arrive in a console update later this week. The update means compatible games will be able to sync their graphical output to the refresh rate of the display for compatible TVs. Over the coming weeks, nearly 15 games will receive title updates that will enable VRR support.

When will the PS5 VRR update be released?

The PS5 VRR update will begin rolling out across the world this week although Sony did not give an exact release date. Any players with HDMI 2.1 VRR-compatible TVs and PC monitors will find enhanced performance from PS5 games, especially those that will be getting patches to actively support VRR. The gameplay will benefit from reduced input lag and scene rendering will be seamless. Graphics will also be improved by reducing screen tearing, frame pacing issues, and the minimization of visual artifacts. VRR support will be automatically enabled for players with compatible TVs or monitors, although it can easily be turned off too.

Sony also gave a list of 14 titles that will be receiving patches over the next few weeks to support VRR. The games getting updates soon are:

• Astro’s Playroom
• Call of Duty: Vanguard
• Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
• Destiny 2
• Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition
• DIRT 5
• Godfall
• Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered
• Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
• Resident Evil Village
• Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
• Tribes of Midgard

More titles will also be getting VRR updates and future games may even be released with VRR support included. However, as seen in the screenshot above, VRR support can also be applied to games that haven’t added VRR support yet and may help to improve gameplay in those titles too.

In other news, PS5 US console sales were beaten by both Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch last month due to ongoing console shortages. Elsewhere, the next Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Ghost Recon games are further away from release than Ubisoft would like.

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Team Asobi, creator of the Astro Bot series of games—most recently the fantastic PS5 pack-in, Astro’s Playroom—have launched a new website where they detail the studio’s past games, job postings, and plans for the future. A relatively new member to the PlayStation Studios family, the studio has revealed that they are “hard at work on [its] most ambitious game yet”, though details are still scarce.

Our new website has launched today. Come and check it out!
本日、ウェブサイトを解禁！ぜひチェックしてみてください。https://t.co/xaquH4q7u3 pic.twitter.com/MBMrmDT2v6

— Team ASOBI (@TeamAsobi) August 2, 2021

The studio revealed the new website via its official Twitter account. Ever since the studio officially joined PlayStation Studios back in June, it has been working on revamping all of its resources and production processes going so far as to post a dozen new job listings. The newly launched website also lists these positions, indicating that the studio is going forwards with plans to expand as it takes on a new project. While Team Asobi has not revealed any information on what the game will look like, from the job postings we can discern that it will likely be some sort of 3D platformer, similar to Astro’s Playroom.

In addition to the job postings, the new website also showcases the studio’s past titles as well as an introductory page filled with photos of the team. As with past posts, Team Asobi describes itself as a “collective of passionate game creators from various nationalities, ages, genders, and backgrounds,” particularly highlighting the team’s multicultural roots. Additionally, the website also shows cute little graphics of Astro promoting the studios’ various job postings, such as the company’s pension scheme, telework flexibility, and relocation support.

The website launch comes after the former Japan Studio was restructured to center around the Tokyo-based Team Asobi, alongside a host of several PlayStation Studios acquisitions this year. Astro Bot Rescue Mission Director Nicolas Doucet (who is also pictured on the newly launched website), is currently head of Team Asobi.

[Source: Twitter]

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I synthesize and rasterize immaterial things

That I fabricate for you. For you…

Yes I tesselate and animate

These dancing sprites

And sun-lit skies for you.

I do it for you. I’m your GPU.

GPU. GPU.

If you’ve played Astro’s Playroom, chances are, you’ve found yourself humming its catchy soundtrack. Well, we have some good news: the OST is now streaming everywhere – YouTube Music, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal.

The track list is as follows:

1. “That’s The Way To Do It”
2. “CPU Plaza”
3. “I’m Your GPU”
4. “SSD”
5. “Follow Me (Into The Storm) [Playroom Remix]”
6. “Botdi Beach”
7. “Cooling Springs”
8. “PlayStation Labo & Gatcha”
9. “GPU Jungle (Powerup & Boss)”
10. “SSD Speedway (Powerup & Boss)”
11. “CPU Plaza (After Dark)”
12. “They Don’t Make’m Like They Used To”
13. “CRT-Rex”
14. “4K-Rex”
15. “Let’s Do This”
16. “Goal”
17. “Uplifting Little Number”
18. “I Am Astro Bot [Playroom Remix]”
19. “Memories of Play”
20. “CPU Plaza (Mashup Overture)”

The soundtrack is the work of composer Kenneth C M Young, who recently offered some track sketches for free over on Soundcloud via the PlayStation Blog.

“I was out for a run one morning and I was thinking about all these ideas and what was I going to do, and I had this idea of making the PlayStation 5 sing to the player, personifying the spirit of the PS5,” Young told IGN. “It’s nice when you realize you’re able to do something that you probably couldn’t do on other projects, and then you can dial it up and make it your own. The nice thing about the game being pre-installed on PS5 is that it’s this great opportunity to really find an audience.”

Tell me what to do

And I’ll do it for you.

GPU. GPU.

The post PSA: Astro’s Playroom’s Catchy Soundtrack Is Now Available Digitally appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.

Naughty Dog developers recently published a blog celebrating some of their favorite games of 2020, which include Sucker Punch Productions’ Ghost of Tsushima, Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Remake, Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout (which Shuhei Yoshida’s a huge fan of, evidently), and more.

Here are their top picks (in no particular order):

• Astro’s Playroom
• Demon’s Souls Remake
• Fall Guys
• Final Fantasy VII Remake
• For The King
• Ghost of Tsushima
• Griftlands
• No Man’s Sky
• Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

“Hopping into Tsushima and clearing out Mongols from camps is exactly the therapeutic gameplay I needed in 2020,” co-game director Kurt Margenau said of the Sucker Punch hit. “The world is beautiful, there are tons of things to discover, the combat is fluid and surprisingly deep, and I can feel like I’m actually accomplishing something turning the entire map from red to white! Sucker Punch really delivered on the samurai fantasy.”

“I loved the setting for the game, the Japanese countryside,” added vice president Christian Gyrling. “It was incredibly beautiful and satisfying to play as a samurai as I slowly got more and more proficient at using my sword and knives while taking on larger and larger groups of enemies. In the end, I felt like a real badass.”

Co-president Neil Druckmann and game director Vinit Agarwal both voted for Fall Guys. Druckmann revealed that Fall Guys was a stress relief for him during The Last of Us Part II‘s final stretch of development, and it’s the only game that he has unlocked the Platinum trophy for.

For more on their picks, check out the developers’ blog below.

[Source: Naughty Dog]

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Just over a week ago, the voting began for the official PlayStation Blog Game of the Year Awards. After a record 2.5 million votes cast despite a shorter voting period, the winners have been announced. The Last of Us Part II is the most successful of them all, taking home seven of the 17 awards on offer.

You can see the full list of all of the winners and runners up below:

PlayStation 4 Game of the Year

• Winner – The Last of Us Part II
• Runners Up – Ghost of Tsushima, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales

PlayStation 5 Game of the Year

• Winner – Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales
• Runners Up – Demon’s Souls, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Astro’s Playroom
  

Best Narrative

• Winner – The Last of Us Part II
• Runners Up – Ghost of Tsushima, Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, Final Fantasy VII Remake

Best Use of DualSense

• Winner – Astro’s Playroom
• Runners Up – Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Demon’s Souls
  

Best Accessibility Features

• Winner – The Last of Us Part II
• Runners Up – Ghost of Tsushima, Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
  

Best Graphical Showcase

• Winner – The Last of Us Part II
• Runners Up – Ghost of Tsushima, Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, Demon’s Souls
  

Best Art Direction

• Winner – Ghost of Tsushima
• Runners Up – The Last of Us Part II, Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, Final Fantasy VII Remake

Best Soundtrack

• Winner – The Last of Us Part II
• Runners Up – Ghost of Tsushima, Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales, Final Fantasy VII Remake

Best Sound Design

• Winner – The Last of Us Part II
• Runners Up – Ghost of Tsushima, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Demon’s Souls
  

Best Multiplayer

• Winner – Call of Duty: Warzone
• Runners Up – Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Ghost of Tsushima Legends
  

Best Sports Game

• Winner – Tony Hawk’s Pro-Skater 1 & 2
• Runners Up – FIFA 21, NBA 2K21, DiRT 5
  

Best New Character

• Winner – Miles Morales as Spider-Man (Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales)
• Runners Up – Jin Sakai (Ghost of Tsushima), Abby (The Last of Us Part II), Eivor (Assassin’s Creed Valhalla)

Best Independent Game

• Winner – Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout
• Runners Up – Bugsnax, Worms Rumble, Skater XL
  

Gaming Moment of the Year

• Winner – The Last of Us Part II: Final Showdown
• Runners Up – Ghost of Tsushima: Horseback title sequence, Marvel’s Spider Man: Miles Morales: The bridge sequence, Astro’s Playroom: Experiencing haptics and adaptive triggers for the first time

Best PSVR Experience

• Winner – Star Wars Squadrons
  
• Runners Up – Marvel’s Iron Man VR, Dreams, The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners
  

Studio of the Year

• Winner – Naughty Dog
• Runners Up – Insomniac Games, Sucker Punch, Square Enix

Most Anticipated Game

• Winner – New God of War title
• Runners Up – Horizon Forbidden West, Resident Evil Village, Final Fantasy XVI
  

Do you agree with the winners? Let us know in the comments below.

[Source: PlayStation Blog]

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Astro’s Playroom came pre-loaded on the PlayStation 5 and mainly served as a tech demo for the console and its DualSense controller, but the game ended up taking both reviewers and users by surprise. As we noted in our own review, Astro’s Playroom is a fun trip down the memory lane (and an easy Platinum while you’re at it), and more robust than you’d expect a free game to be.

Asked by EDGE magazine if Team Asobi is considering making an expansion or sequel, designer Nicolas Doucet said that there are currently no plans for either, but didn’t rule the possibility out.

Doucet said that the team might look into an extension if Astro’s Playroom is popular enough. Although reviews have been positive thus far and Asobi is delighted with the reception, Doucet noted that majority of the praise is coming from members of the press and he wants to wait and hear from players as they get their hands on the PS5.

“If the character has popularity, and if it proves that people are really having fun, [an extension or sequel] could be one avenue to follow,” said Doucet. “But at the same time, in Team Asobi we’re always trying to come up with ideas from technology, and so there are lots of things we want to try and do around the controller. And as we make these prototypes, if one of them turns out to be a game idea in its own right, it could end up being a new direction that we take and we’ll run with it.”

We’d certainly love more of Astro!

[Source: EDGE via Video Games Chronicle]

The post Astro’s Playroom Dev Says There Are Currently No Plans for Sequel or Expansion but Didn’t Rule Them Out appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.

One of the PS5’s biggest new features is the Activity Cards, which allows players to see some options and suggestions for what to jump into next in any given game. It’s a system-level interface that engages deeply with the game (at least when utilized by the developer), and in a title like Spider-Man Miles Morales, it can almost instantly transport people right to the start of a side mission without needing to scour the map and find it. Sure, you can still play the old fashioned way, swinging around looking for icons on the map yourself, but Activity Cards were designed to remove some of the friction players can often run into when playing single-player games.

VICE’s Patrick Klepek was so fascinated by the feature (and the discourse that surrounded it), he wanted to find out more about where it came from and what Sony’s logic was behind developing Activity Cards as a central part of the PS5 UI. VICE Games got their hands on confidential internal documents that were circulated to developers in 2019, which detailed both the Activity Cards and Game Help functions.

Sony used the presentation to explain that single-player gaming wasn’t “dying,” it just had a few points of friction that players often ran into that impacted the experience. Most notably, it outlined the scenarios that players may have that would prevent them for engaging with a single-player game:

• “No idea how long I might need, don’t play unless I have 2+ free hours”
• “Takes a lot of time to scan through long help videos when stuck”
• “How to engage socially without risk of spoilers”
• “Forgot what I was doing in this game last time, hard to get back in”

“Often, free time comes wedged between other obligations. An hour before bed. A 30-minute break between homework assignments. A few minutes before your online [multiplayer] match,” one slide in the presentation says. Sony is pointing out that players end up with decision fatigue. It often take a long time to get back into a single-player game, to remember where you are, what you were doing, and figure out what you want to do next. In addition, you sometimes just don’t know how long that mission is actually going to take.

PS5 Activity Cards are designed to remove some of these barriers to play at the system level. The PS5 itself wants to get you right into the game at exactly the spot you want to be, and give you a rough idea of how much time you may spend with it. The internal documents (again, from 2019, so things may have changed) refers to this as the “Universal Data System,” in which the PS5 interfaces with the game to give you a lot of information up front and let players more meaningfully plan and engage with games in their free time.

Of course, it’s entirely up to the developer in how to implement these gameplay “bookmarks.” Even Sony’s own launch titles use the PS5 Activity cards differently. Klepek points out that Miles Morales uses them for missions, while Demon’s Souls allows players to teleport between worlds with ease. And the PS5’s lightning fast load times remove even more of the friction.

PS5 Activity Cards have an ancillary benefit for multiplayer games too, despite initially being designed to solve a decidedly single-player problem. For a game like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, you can jump right from the PS5 dashboard into matchmaking without needing to navigate any menus at all. Activity Cards allow developers to effectively “bookmark” specific points within their games, whether it’s a place in the world, a mission, or a multiplayer playlist. And this is just the beginning. The feature is sure to find creative uses and further evolutions throughout the life of the PS5, but its initial design was simply to remove decision fatigue and the friction that arises between a player and their games.

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