IGN Video Games

IGN Video Games

Animal Crossing: Bunny Day Eggs Are Back — How Do You Feel?

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 03:27 PM PDT

Monster Hunter Rise: A Guide to All Maps and Locations

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 02:59 PM PDT

Rocket League Season 3 Release Date Announced

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 12:55 PM PDT

Rocket League Season 3 is set to begin on April 7, 2021 and will feature both NASCAR and Formula 1 bundles. Psyonix released a new trailer that gives a glimpse of the new season and the cars featured in the NASCAR and F1 bundles, which are set to be available in early May and mid-May, respectively. Alongside these new cars celebrating NASCAR and Formula 1, the Rocket League team is also adding a "speed demon" of its own in the Tyranno. This new "master of dash with a Dominus hitbox" is part of the Season 3 Rocket Pass, which will get a full reveal next week. Season 3 will also see a newly redesigned DFH Stadium (Circuit), which has been "outfitted with a track and all the pageantry found trackside during a championship Sunday." This arena will be added to the Casual and Competitive Playlists, Private Matches, and Freeplay at the start of Season 3. This news follows Psyonix's reveal of Rocket League Sideswipe, a new standalone game for mobile that allows players to compete in two-minute 1v1 or 2v2 matches using touchscreen controls that will "be familiar to veteran players; while being intuitive for newcomers." [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/03/25/rocket-league-sideswipe-alpha-gameplay-trailer"] For more on Rocket League, check out the new visual options the game added to Neon Fields after reports of seizures, and how achieving 120 FPS is a "minor patch" on Xbox Series X/S, but a "full native port" on PS5. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com. Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

61 It Takes Two Tips

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 10:48 AM PDT

Anthem Director Jonathan Warner Departs BioWare After Nearly 10 Years

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 09:11 AM PDT

Anthem's game director Jonathan Warner has left BioWare after nearly 10 years at the studio. Warner announced the news on Twitter alongside a gif of the spinning top from Inception. "So, today is my last day at BioWare," Warner wrote. "I'm moving on to do new things. BioWare has been home to my grateful heart for nearly 10 years and I want to wish them all the best. [Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: The Old Republic] are in good hands and I can't wait to play from this side of the screen. #ThankYou #BioWare" [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/02/25/anthems-cancellation-is-the-right-call"] Warner's decision to leave arrives a bit over a month after BioWare officially announced that it would be stopping development on Anthem Next. Anthem had a rough launch when it was released in 2019, and BioWare revealed it had plans to overhaul Anthem to improve the game's core loop and systems like loot, quests, and social elements. Unfortunately, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the studio's desire to focus on Dragon Age and Mass Effect, that plan was never realized. This is another departure of note for BioWare, and follows last year's news that Casey Hudson, the general manager of BioWare, and Mark Darrah, the executive producer on Dragon Age 4, were also leaving the studio. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/03/02/mass-effect-dragon-age-and-anthem-biowares-future-comes-into-focus-unlocked-484"] Despite these changes, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said in 2020 that he was "very, very confident" in the studio's future, a future that includes Dragon Age 4, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, and the next entry in the Mass Effect series. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com. Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

The Fans Who Refuse to Let PlayStation Home Die

Posted: 28 Mar 2021 09:00 AM PDT

On March 31, 2015, PlayStation Home, the short lived social space for PlayStation 3, closed its doors for the very last time. For many PS3 owners, this went completely unnoticed. But, despite being largely a critical failure, PlayStation Home had quietly amassed a very loyal and free-spending community, turning the assumed mis-step into a commercial win for Sony. But with Home's closure, its fans were now left in the dark, waiting longingly for an alternative that never game.

Six years later, some of PlayStation Home's most loyal fans can't let go. They make their voices heard through online petitions and YouTube videos campaigning for its return. It's clear that PlayStation Home left an impression on its core audience, and they absolutely refuse to let this often ridiculed, yet surprisingly successful online experience fade away into just a memory.

But some of its most passionate fans have decided to take the next step, finding ways to not only completely restore PlayStation Home, but hopefully preserve it in video game history for generations to come.

This is the Inside Story of the fans who refuse to let PlayStation Home die.

Part1

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=We%20don't%20support%20piracy%2C%20we%20don't%20profit%20from%20this%20at%20all.%20This%20is%20something%20we're%20doing%20as%20a%20passion%20project."]

Nagato, a passionate PlayStation Home fan, has been working for almost two years with a team called Destination Home, a non-profit project attempting to revive PlayStation Home. They do this for not only the community's pleasure, but perhaps more importantly, games preservation - the act of archiving and restoring video games for future generations.

"Our goal is to not step on the toes of the actual companies and developers," Nagato says. "We don't support piracy, we don't profit from this at all. This is something we're doing as sheer passion projects. What we want to do is just host games on our own servers for preservation purposes only."

Preserving game history, in its essence, is about keeping a game's code alive. This is something that's made substantially more complicated when a game like PlayStation Home is not only online based, but unfortunately also long dead. But let's rewind a little and answer a more pressing question: what exactly was PlayStation Home?

Home intro_small

What began life as Sony's first foray into social space evolved into its own commercial beast entirely. At its peak it delivered a wholly unique digital experience, including month-long spanning ARGs (Alternate Reality Games), brand centric spaces loaded with virtual experiences, and even a digital recreation of Sony's E3 presence to explore. But this microtransaction juggernaut of a game platform began life a little simpler.

At GDC in 2007, then President of SCE Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrision, took to the stage to announce PlayStation Home, a console-specific social platform where users could navigate 3D spaces to meet, talk, and play with other gamers. There would be zones themed around new releases, personal and community spaces, and the ability to customise your avatar.

But despite initially promising a winter 2007 release, PlayStation Home stumbled its way out of the gate a year later, with content in short supply and sporting a beta tag that would endlessly remain in place.

In spite of its flaws, though, the service began to slowly mount a following. People were spending time and (perhaps more importantly) money in PlayStation Home. Unlike it's unquestionably more popular counterpart, Second Life (a 3D virtual world released for PC in 2003) PlayStation Home focused wholly on the PlayStation gaming community, giving them a space beyond the confines of specific games to meet with other PlayStation gamers. It even went so far as to help facilitate connecting like-minded players with the revolutionary option of immediately jumping in a game together, all within a 3D world. A key element to PlayStation Home becoming successful, though, was its accessibility. Anybody who had a PS3 could immediately boot up and play Home for free.

Home-2

"Everybody knows the PlayStation 3 in the US was 500 or 600 dollars," recalls Nagato. "I came from a family where we couldn't really afford that. So I used to beg my mom every Christmas. "I want the ps3, I want the ps3" and December 24th 2011 on Christmas Eve, I finally got a slim model of the ps3. My mom couldn't afford any games for me, so the first game I jumped into was PlayStation Home.

"I didn't even know what it was [or] how to even communicate with others," he adds. "I thought it was just like a sims game and I really didn't think anything of it. [But] It was something I got immediately hooked into because it was just an extravagant space to meet people and really just talk about different cultures."

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=I%20got%20my%20PS3%2C%20just%20because%20of%20PlayStation%20Home."]

For some people, this digital social space was the main reason for them to buy a Sony console. "I got my PlayStation 3, just because of PlayStation Home," says iAnony, a PlayStation Home fan so passionate about the game that he's decided to recreate the experience in Dreams. "I wanted to play it so bad and I don't know why. Something attracted me to it."

"I remember watching the early trailers released from PlayStation Home before it was released," he recounts. "I thought it was the coolest thing. I remember getting my PlayStation and PlayStation Home hadn't been released yet. Eventually one update [comes] and boom, there it is. I installed it so fast, played it immediately and fell absolutely in love with it."

PlayStation Home gave a home console audience a social tool that it'd never seen before. A chance to meet, explore, and play games with people worldwide, beyond the confines of a chat room, and to even find like-minded gamers to form friendships with, despite potentially being miles, or even continents apart.

Home-3

"I'm from the US, so I used to play the US region of Home," Nagato says, reminiscing about his globe hopping adventures in PlayStation Home. "I found out by making another PSN account from a different region, you could go to the Japanese region Home, or the UK. So for me, it was virtually experiencing different people's cultures and learning different dialects."

"Most of my friends - even today - I met them in Home and I still contact them to this day. I kind of grew up with people [on Home] that were my age. It's kind of crazy to see; with some people who I'm really close with, they have families now and stuff like that."

As Home and (perhaps cynically) its revenue grew, it began to expand, adding more and more tools to enable users to share time together. But in 2015, with the arrival of the next generation of PlayStation, the rumours of Home's upcoming closure began to gain traction.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=Most%20of%20my%20friends%20-%20even%20today%20-%20I%20met%20them%20in%20Home%20and%20I%20still%20contact%20them%20to%20this%20day"]

"I just remember seeing a post stating that Japan Home was closing down," recalls Nagato. "It was just a store that was closing down, not like the entire server, [but at] that time I'm putting two and two together. PlayStation 4 had just been released, PS3 had had its heyday. I could see from a company standpoint, that it was like "cut the plug on it". That was kind of sad, because I've spent many hours, met a lot of friends on Home. For me personally - during my young adolescence - I had anxiety issues. [Home] was a way for me to communicate to people from the outside world, and actually share the same interests."

For players like Nagato and iAnony, PlayStation Home had not only become an important part of their childhood, but their social space of choice, filled with memories. Without PlayStation Home, though, they lost the vital tool that helped them not only meet, but also enjoy their time together.

On March 31, 2015, with its loyal audience (and potentially a host of voyeurs) there to see the final digital sun set, PlayStation Home closed its servers.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=I%20remember%20just%20being%20sad.%20Like%20not%20even%20going%20to%20school%20the%20next%20day%20because%20it%20kind%20of%20affected%20me%20because%20I%20didn't%20have%20that%20community%20to%20talk%20to."]

"I was in that video, I don't know if you've seen it?" says iAnony, failing to contain his laughter about how uniquely melancholic it was. "There's a video of when PlayStation Home closed. I was one of the people! It was a sad day. Without a doubt I did not enjoy that day."

Nagato also has a clear memory of his final PlayStation Home experience. "I remember at 3am they cut the server. It was kind of crazy because the day after was April 1, so everybody thought it was [an] April Fool's Day [joke] or something? But it was not the case…"

"I remember just being sad. Like not even going to school the next day because it actually kind of affected me because I really don't have that community to really talk to [anymore]. I didn't have a PS4 at that time either, so I was stuck on PS3."

With the closure of PlayStation Home not only was the service lost, but so was its data. Home wasn't on a disk or a cartridge. You couldn't play it offline. It lived completely within the servers that were now gone forever. The people playing Home on March 31 would be the last ever people to experience PlayStation Home. Or so they thought…

Part2

"Even when it closed I was trying to conceive like, yo, there's got to be somebody out there with the same interests," Nagato says. "Home was such a great game, somebody's got to be smart enough to figure out how the client server works from the actual console to the server itself. So a few years later, voila, here I am."

Nagato and the Destination Home team, sharing a love for PlayStation Home and a passion to see it return, began combing through all their PS3s for any stored data they could find. They solicited whatever local or cache files any Home fans could find left on their dusty PS3s, with a goal of being able to reverse engineer and restore the code.

"Imagine a lost game such as PlayStation Home that has its online server [and] Sony shuts it down," Nagato says. "There's really no way for the public to play such games without people archiving it."

Walking

"Tons of games - not even just online based games - are lost every day from beta builds on old development consoles," he continues. "So for me, preservation is really something important because one day, I would like to show…  if I have kids one day - hey, this is what PlayStation Home looked like."

Video game preservation isn't just something limited to Nagato and The Destination Home team, though. Many game historians and passionate fans are currently taking important steps into preserving a still relatively young, but easily lost art form. One of those people is Kelsey Lewin, co-director of The Video Game History Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to preserving video games and teaching the medium's history.

"I came into the preservation world as someone who was just kind of frustrated with feeling like we were really only getting one small part of the story, or maybe the most popular parts of the story, but we were missing a lot of the little pieces," explains Lewin.

"Part of preservation is not just keeping the ability to play the game alive, but also to keep the more ephemeral stuff still in our cultural memory," Lewin says, explaining how the memory of our experiences is just as vital as functional components. "How were people talking about this game? What was this game in its context and how did that evolve over time? It encompasses a lot more than just the game itself. It's really the whole experience."

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=One%20day%20I%20would%20like%20to%20show%20-%20if%20I%20have%20kids%20one%20day%20-%20hey%2C%20this%20is%20what%20PlayStation%20Home%20looked%20like!"]

Other forms of media, particularly movies, have been actively working on restoration for decades. For video games though - especially ones housed in online servers - the importance in relative terms has only recently been recognised.

"Unfortunately, we have it pretty difficult with video games compared to other forms of media," says Lewin, clearly frustrated by the situation.  "We are dealing with the lack of ability to play these games In the future if we don't have the correct tools. Something like a Super Nintendo might stick around for a very long time - they're pretty hardy systems - but they're not going to stick around forever. And we need other ways, other than having an old piece of hardware to be able to use some of these mediums. So with something like art, or books - a purely textual, visual medium - you don't really have this sort of issue. There's a lot less going on with a still image, or even a moving image than there is with a playable, interactable thing that may require some sort of software emulation or otherwise to continue to access."

"The way online server games work, it's much, much harder," says Nagato. "There's a lot of data that has to be previously archived, without actually taking the hard drive from  a console and dumping that and revamping it. Or basically taking that old data and revamping it by decrypting it and all of that fun stuff. Where reverse engineering comes into play is trying to figure out how to get the game and client server to work and how to get those two systems communicating"

Despite the challenges of reverse engineering PlayStation Home, substantial progress has been made by Nagato and the Destination Home team. As of this article's publication, they've managed to restore and host over a dozen of spaces, mini-games, and the complete avatar customisation tool. Yet despite all the incredible progress, the project is still missing the vital ingredient, the key element that brought PlayStation Home to life: the community.

home-6

"With online and community based games, it's very difficult to preserve the entirety of the experience," Lewin says. "Not just from a technical perspective, it's based on how many people are still playing, and kind of how the context of it changes over time. So playing PlayStation Home in 2021 is going to be a very different experience. Even if you're able to keep everything else exactly the same, it's going to be very different from how people might have experienced it in 2009."

"What made Home Home was the actual community, really getting to communicate with other people. It was like going to like a virtual New York City," says Nagato, a New York resident himself. "It was like actually meeting people from different cultures and different spectrums, so that's what I really enjoyed about Home the community."

"The ultimate goal is to get an online client working for the PlayStation 3," he explains. "Once I see another person in the lobby, I say hello and we can actually say hello together. That's something for our team - that's the grand day."

Part3

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%E2%80%9CWhen%20Dreams%20was%20announced%20I%20was%20like%20%E2%80%98I%20want%20to%20make%20a%20PlayStation%20Home%20thing%E2%80%99."]

Reverse engineering isn't the only way people are trying to resurrect PlayStation Home. There's also an ongoing effort to recreate the social space within Dreams, the creation tool developed by Media Molecule and released in 2019.

"When Dreams was announced I immediately started a notepad on my phone and writing ideas of what I wanted to create," reveals iAnony, the creator behind the Dreams project. "I was like 'I want to make a PlayStation Home thing'."

home-5

Despite perhaps lacking the technical knowhow that the Destination Home team possesses, iAnony decided to try to keep PlayStation Home alive in his own, perhaps equally creative way.

"I was a massive LittleBigPlanet creator," recalls iAnony. "So even back in a Little Big Planet, I attempted to do a PlayStation Home type of environment. But it's very different in that game because it's a 2D platformer.

"So I jumped into [Dreams'] create mode and was like 'I'm gonna make Harbor Studio', the very first apartment in PlayStation Home. I put the blocks down and I shaped it. I'm like 'This is actually pretty easy to do!'. After the Harbor Studio, it just spiraled."

Despite basic 3D space creation appearing easy on the surface, iAnony decided to go above and beyond for his recreation. Not content on just building an illustration of the experience, he tried to capture the essence of what he loved about PlayStation Home.

"Every time I think about PlayStation Home, it's being able to customize my home," he says. "Have my friends come over, check it out, and then customize while they're there and drop furniture on them and it'd be hilarious!"

"That's the first thing I did in Dreams. I made the Harbor Studio and when it was done I was like, 'Alright, let's make the couch, and then let's make it so that we can move the couch!'."

Dreams Gif_small

But iAnony didn't stop there. When his replica of PlayStation Home started gathering attention in the Dreamaverse - Dreams' online user generated curation tool - he began investing more and more time into the project, including adding any functionality where he could.

"I added things like the cash system that obviously wasn't in Dreams, but I want people to be able to get a virtual job in the game to earn money doing tasks," iAnony explains. Right now I have the fountain game in the middle of Central Plaza, where you fly the UFO and get the collective bubbles, it's very simple. I also have a cheat code, if you can figure it out. It's in the main menu of the Dreams, the very first level, and you can get infinite money if you do it!"

Despite all progress though, iAnony has inevitably stumbled into the same issue Destination Home has. To fully replicate the original PlayStation Home Experience, you need the community.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=I%20like%20recreating%20it%2C%20but%20I%20also%20feel%20like%20single%20player%20isn%E2%80%99t%20the%20point%20of%20it."]

"Dreams was supposed to have multiplayer at some point, and it still doesn't, so I'm kind of holding back on it until that's available," says iAnony, seemingly slightly frustrated at the tools holding back his long-term vision. "I feel like that is a massive part of PlayStation Home. It's showing your friends 'Look what I have, look at the furniture I have, and the house I have!' Even though back then it was real money you were spending. Now It's like 'Look what I earned within the Dreams level!' It's kind of hard to say where it's going from here until that's available. I like recreating it, but I also feel like single player isn't the point of it."

Part4

There's no doubt there's still technical hurdles for both Destination Home and Home in Dreams to overcome. And even if those are overcome, there's still the question of whether a community can ever function again like it did in PlayStation Home at its peak. One thing that is unquestionable, though, is the passion for the project.

[poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=For%20me%2C%20it's%20like%20a%20passion%20project.%20So%20I%20will%20be%20doing%20this%20regardless.%20even%20with%20no%20one%20watching%20at%20all."]

"This would be literally the best time to have Home, because everyone is stuck in the house, can't really interact," Nagato says, referring to 2021's real world pandemic and lockdown circumstances. "I would literally go on Home right now. I'd probably be in the playground, just listening to music and playing the horse game or something. Or just talking to people."

"Working on this project is something that I'm doing surely for fun, I enjoy working on it every day," he says. "So for me, it's like a passion project. So I will be doing this regardless. even with no one watching at all."

The reality, though, is even if these projects never fully come to fruition, their current state still has important value. PlayStation Home is a snapshot in time; a relic of an era that, at its best brought people around the world together in a 3D social space on console for the very first time, and at its worst normalised flagrant use of microtransactions and advertising. But video game history isn't just a record of the success stories, it also documents the mis-steps and failures. It's about how the medium evolves, and as more time passes it's more important than ever to make sure these stories are preserved.

home-4

"If you go into a bookstore right now, like a Barnes and Noble or something, and you look at the shelves that are for the video game section, there's about three or four books that are actually telling a story about video games," says Lewin. "And then if you go over and you look at the music section, or the movies and film section, there are just  hundreds or thousands of biographies and history books and just interesting stories that people are telling about these mediums. The Video Game History Foundation really wants to help usher in a world where people are celebrating video game history and continuing to treat this like the really cool art form and cultural medium that it is."

Fantastic work by companies like The Video Game Foundation is already being done, but these are just the first steps in preserving an art form for generations to come. And despite all of PlayStation Home's flaws, its moment in time has as much historical value as any other generation-defining piece of media.

Large companies understandably treat their platforms as commodities, and they are unfortunately easily discarded when they've served their commercial purpose. But for the fans, PlayStation Home is where they grew up. It's where they learned about different cultures, and formed lifelong friendships. Those fans want to cherish these memories, and if companies won't preserve it, then it's down to the people.

PlayStation Home may be gone, at least in an official capacity. But PlayStation Home will continue to live on in the passionate community that grew from it.

"People would just tell me 'Leave that game in the past', 'Get a PS4' or whatever." Nagato says. "But for me, that game was something really profound in my life, and it's really about the community base for it. That's what made Home, Home."

[poilib element="accentDivider"] Dale Driver is an IGN Senior Video Producer, and he'd like to thank Nagato and Destination Home, Kelsey Lewin and The Video Game History Foundation, iAnony and Eric Sapp for the incredible artwork. Follow Dale on Twitter.

Monster Hunter Rise: 52 Essential Tips and Tricks for Getting Started

Posted: 27 Mar 2021 11:00 PM PDT

Monster Hunter Rise: How to Find and Unlock All Sub-Camp Locations

Posted: 27 Mar 2021 08:02 PM PDT

Monster Hunter Rise: April 2021 Free Update Adds Apex Rathalos and Chameleos

Posted: 27 Mar 2021 12:29 PM PDT

Monster Hunter Rise's first free title update will arrive in late April and will add Chameleos, Apex Rathalos, an unlocked "Hunter Rank" cap, and more. Capcom revealed the details of Title Update Ver. 2.0 in a blog post, while also hinting that some additional monsters and a "few other related features" will be added as well. Apex Rathalos appears to be part of a Rampage hunt, which are a blend between traditional Monster Hunter gameplay and a tower defense game. Apex monsters, like the Apex Arzuros, are super strong versions of monsters that sometimes cap off these challenges. Title Update Ver. 3.0 was also teased and, while it currently has no release window, it promises to "feature additional monsters as well as an additional ending to the Monster Hunter Rise story arc." In our Monster Hunter Rise review, we said that it "mixes classic Monster Hunter ideas with some of World's best improvements and a whole bunch of clever new mechanics of its own." For more on Monster Hunter Rise, check out our full Wiki guide to learn how to become a better hunter, 24 things Monster Hunter Rise doesn't tell you, and our full beginner's guide if you are new to the series. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2021/03/23/monster-hunter-rise-review"] [poilib element="accentDivider"] Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com. Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

100 Days Since Cyberpunk 2077 Was Removed from the PS Store, and Mysteries Still Remain

Posted: 27 Mar 2021 12:00 PM PDT

Today marks the 100th day since Cyberpunk 2077 was removed from the PlayStation Store after its ignominious launch – and the plans for relisting the game for sale on PS4 and PS5 remain as hazy as they did when the announcement was first made, with both Sony and CD Projekt Red notably silent on the issue. As a quick refresher, Cyberpunk 2077 launched with huge performance issues, particularly on last-gen consoles, and Sony subsequently announced the decision to remove Cyberpunk 2077 from sale on PlayStation consoles late on December 17, 2020. In an initial statement, Sony offered refunds for the game and added, "[Sony Interactive Entertainment] will also be removing Cyberpunk 2077 from PlayStation Store until further notice." That implied that the decision was Sony's, but a later statement from CD Projekt Red said that the decision had come out of a "discussion" with Sony about refunds. We've never heard definitively whose decision it was to remove the game from sale. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/cyberpunk-2077-for-xbox-one-and-playstation-4-review"] No specific reasoning was given for the game's removal either (for reference, it was never removed on Xbox, but refunds were extended), although speculation suggests that the decision allowed for Sony's somewhat restrictive refund policies to be worked around. Whatever the underlying cause, the removal was a totally unprecedented move for a game as high-profile as Cyberpunk, and brought with it a number of other questions, most of which remain unanswered more than three months later. Chief among those questions are, "When will it return to sale, and what will it take for that to happen?" Neither Sony or CD Projekt have discussed specific answers to those questions since December, with the closest we've gotten coming from that CDPR statement: "We are working hard to bring Cyberpunk 2077 back to PlayStation Store as soon as possible." IGN contacted both Sony and CD Projekt Red ahead of the milestone date to ask about the plans for having the game relisted, and received no reply from either party, despite multiple requests. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/cyberpunk-2077-whats-new-in-night-city-patch-12-part-1-trailer"] In terms of clues, the best we have to go on is CD Projekt Red's previously stated roadmap for updates to the game. When it first apologised for the state of the launch version, CD Projekt set a timeline including two major patches, which, taken together "should fix the most prominent problems gamers are facing on last-gen consoles." The second of those patches, version 1.2 was subsequently delayed after a cyberattack on the studio, but we have recently heard about its changes, meaning it is likely close. It's possible that, if the last-gen versions are deemed up to scratch, the game could be returned to sale on PlayStation once the patch arrives. However, it may also be that Sony will choose to hold a relisting until the game is updated on PS5 as well. A next-gen version of the game - bringing it closer to the PC release - is planned for the second half of 2021, with free upgrades to those who bought the game on last-gen. It's possible Sony (or CD Projekt Red) would want to relist the game once it's in what should be its final form. That there's speculation about this at all is fairly astonishing. That CD Projekt Red would remain silent about when players can buy its marquee game again on the world's biggest gaming platform, and that Sony wouldn't want to tell customers when a game that, despite huge controversy, already sold more than 13 million copies would be back on its storefront seems, frankly, odd. Cyberpunk's development and release has, of course, been an unpredictable journey already, but the lack of details in this chapter of that story is unusual, even among the rest. Whether it speaks to corporate cageyness, disputes between the two sides, or other issues that haven't been made public is impossible to guess. That silence makes it hard to predict where we go from here – we could see the game return to sale tomorrow, or we could see it take another 100 days. There has, quite simply, never been a case quite like this in gaming before – here's hoping it's been enough of a lesson to stop it happening again. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Watch Dogs Legion Complete Walkthrough

Posted: 27 Mar 2021 12:00 PM PDT

Monster Hunter Rise - How to Unlock Second Submarine: Cultural Exchange Guide

Posted: 27 Mar 2021 11:27 AM PDT
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