Talk Playstation 3 News

Eric Boltjes, Head of Multiplayer Design for Killzone 2, sat down with the people at the PlayStation Blog and answered some questions.

He announced Guerrilla will finally make it possible to join a friend in a game and in the same faction as well. But it comes at a cost.

The ‘Join Friend’ option has been changed so that the player can automatically join a friend’s faction and squad – even if faction balancing is on.

This might cause some trouble as clans will try to exploit this option by helping out their friends. We wonder how much the imbalance will be.
Guerilla Games has also enabled the ability to manually switch from factions if you’re in a team with more players then the other team. Switching the other way around won’t be possible. Also players who switch will hold onto their points (sound logical).

For Skirmish mode they have enabled all badges to be active so people could get use to what the different badges offer and precisely do. Many people have said this should have been available from the start to counter certain player advantages and more importantly be activated on Warzone as well. Some of the badges were also tweaked. The Assault Class for example has been made a bit weaker by dropping the Armor ability from 100 to 50 hit points.
The Tactician Badge’s secondary ability (requesting air support) has also been tweaked to make the Sentry Bot more useful. It can aim more accurately now, and its health is a little higher as well.

For the controller a new option will be added

When ‘High Precision’ is switched on, it makes the analog sticks more responsive to small movements. Turned off, the controls behave exactly as they did before the patch. It’s not a radical overhaul of the control system, so the layout and the ‘weight’ of the controls remain the same.
It’s switch it on by default for new players. Existing Killzone 2 players will have the option turned off by default after patching.

The last thing Eric Boltjes talked about was the spawn invulnerability. With custom or mission based (Capture and Hold) spawn spots you will now be vulnerable from the moment you spawn while spawning from the base spots will still give you temporary invulnerability.

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A post made by the Socom team informed people that they are still responding and acting on comments, questions and suggestions.

The first good news they had was that the on-line player counts increased by 50% since the 1.30 patch. Hours per player stats were also up by 33% making this SCEA’s number 1 online title.
In the next upcoming patch we can expect them fix a slowdown seen when managing large clans and a number of other functionality, stability and non-English language fixes. Also in the works are Clan Ladders, Tournaments and another community requested bundle of fixes.

Here is the rest. (more…)

Problem is, we don’t know what it did. The download didn’t take long for us’, so did the install to 1.01.
So start up your game and take a long around and tell us what you discovered it might have done, while we wait on a reply from EA/DICE.

As most of you were still wondering when then the update for Socom: Confrontations would be out, Seth Luisi shed some light on a possible release date. He hopes that the update will be available to us before January 13th 2009.

But this all depends on when the SCE Format QA team judges it to be ready for public release. The QA staff of Slant Six Games will be working during the holidays to further prepare a final candidate for final acceptance testing. But since the SCE team is free for the holidays this is the reason why the update will be out in 2009.
Seth Luisi hopes that this patch will finally solve a lot of the stability issues including the well known “heart attack” bug.

Once this update gets out and doesn’t have any major problems, we hope that Socom: Confrontations will finally be distributed to users outside North America.

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More on patch news, Psyonix Studios will have a patch out today. But there is more, the game has received a price drop of $5 making it $9.99 to any willing customers.

Expect the update to contain the follwing things:

• New “Cosmic” arena
• Improved performance in network games
• A server browser has been added during matchmaking
• Players can now view leaderboards during matchmaking
• News updates appear on the online page
• Meters added to evaluate players’ connection speed
• Headsets can be plugged-in or swapped during gameplay

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You read it before, but here is some more information from the Playstation Blog.

At this moment the Home servers are down (from 12 midnight PST) and the maintenance will take about 6 hours to finish.

During this maintenance, SCEE will update Home to 1.04. The update will temporarily disable the voice chat feature within Home, but your still able to use the phone feature to voice chat with your friends, while in Home.

Playstation encourages their users to make use of any keyboard or latest released Wireless Keypad for text chat.

Hopefully the heavy login problems for the people in Europe will be minimum to none after this update.

P.S If you can’t wait you can start by downloading the update now, though we don’t advise it as there might be last minute changes to the update.

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It was known that Fallout 3 would get trophies in an upcoming patch when talked about in in November.

That patch is out now and available worldwide to fix some errors and finally add those much demanded trophies.
The fix was aimed for the bug that caused your Playstation 3 to freeze every time you got a notification of a message or a friend logging on.

Check the trophy list out.

TedTheDog posted some info about tomorrows release of Home Open Beta on the Official EU Playstation forum.

Home will be offline for a while so don’t try to hammer it. Once its back online we will be running version 1.03 and all those with the current version will be offered a patch. The patch simply supports the server changes being made to support Open Beta.
The age limit will be lowered from 18+ to 16+ (Sigh)
You will be able to download Home off the Playstation Store after you have opted to install it, you will find it under PlayStation®Network on the XMB.

Only one sad thing the Red Bull Air Race will not be included tomorrow, but will arrive a few days later.

And some last words from Ted

Please remember, this really is a Beta

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Originally slated to be out on Nov. 20th, people on the IGN boards posted that the patch is available now.

Earlier we posted a screenshots showing of the improvements that we could expect but now we have more info. The patch we be around 222MB big and has the following improvements:

• Enables Add On Content functionality for the Challenge Rooms and New Game Plus – Add-On Content required to use this functionality
• Big Daddy Bounce, Elite Bouncer, and Other Textures Appeared Pixelated – Fix for an issue where large blocky pixels would show up whenever viewing the Bouncer and Elite Bouncer variants of the Big Daddy. Also fixes various other texture pixelation including weapons.
• White Bars – Fix for an issue where white/discolored bars would show up at the right and bottom sides of the screen during the plane crash / water scene at the beginning of the game.
• Dark Big Daddy After Resurrection – Fix for an issue where Big Daddy would occasionally turn black after the player dies and is then resurrected.
• Shrinking Fire Particles – Fix for an issue where some fire particles would shrink every time they were retriggered.
• Big Daddies Gushing Abnormal Amounts of Blood – Fix for an issue where Big Daddies would gush abnormal amounts of blood after being killed by a critical hit while having more than 10% health (ie, from another Big Daddy’s gun).
• PS Button Crash – Fix for an issue where the game would crash when PS button hit during hacking when vsync turned to off

(more…)

After reporting about the bug in WipeOut HD many people were worried about purchasing the game. Either because they were worried that their PS3 would get stuck known with games like Uncharted, or they couldn’t play online because of their huge friends list.

WipeOut HD Screenshot 03

Studio Liverpool has (finally) released a patch for the friends list bug where you weren’t able to play online (or had major slowdowns in menu’s). When you start up you WipeOut game you will be requested to install the patch.
There some bad news though. If you had issues with the game, you will be required to manually delete your save file after installing the patch. This means you will lose all you lap times, team loyalties, single-player stats and options.
You will however not lose you trophies and leaderboard scores.

So question to our readers, it is worth losing all you stats, lap times and team loyalties to finally play online with you friends? My opinion is if you have more then 50 of them who own WipeOut HD you do, if it’s less, delete some till you have around 40 patch up try the game and see if it works. Don’t forget to message your friends to re-add you, as it would be crazy to re-add them all yourself.

Update: Seems the patch did more then only fix the friends list bug. It also improved the Music Playback, Custom Playlist playback, online stability and accurate tracking of tournament scores.

Another fix was the ability to switch between Tournament End Race results in Online Multiplayer using the square button.

You can read about these fixes yourself in the Online section under the announcements tab.

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After starting up MGO I was confronted with an update. So I went to check the website and found out that they have fixed the following issues:

When a host leaves a game, the position of host is automatically forwarded to someone else. When someone else filled the free 16th slot, the player would be invisible to the new host.

The game would sometimes freeze if a player would invite a Clan Member while in Survival mode.

The day of the week of “Match Time” was not correctly displayed when viewing the rules in the Survival Lobby.

The following game specifications have been changed:

• The motion of reloading the shotgun cannot be cancelled by equipping a box or changing weapons.

Change of weapon specification:

• Saiga 12’s cost changed from 8000DP to 5000DP.
• G3A3’s cost changed from 5000DP to 4000DP.

Change of skill specification:

• “NARC” Lv2’s cost from 1 to 2
• “NARC” Lv3’s cost from 1 to 3

*With this change, all skills will be temporarily removed, but players will be able to put them on again with the existing skill points they have.

So what do you thing of these fixes, let us know.

After reporting that the beta of SOCOM: Confrontation had some difficulties they whipped out a patched within 3 days to solve a majority of these problems plus adding a few more things.

Seth Luisi let know, the game servers will be unavailable during the maintenancea on September 9th at 5am PDT, 1200 GMT. The server maintenance is not expected to last longer than 1 1/2 hours.

Here is a small list of what got done:

• Adds support for European EULAs.
• Adds support for dedicated servers located in Europe and Australia.
• Addresses a number of stability and late joining issues.
• Reduce the volume of the proximity chat by 50%.

Also expect more updates to come both server side as client side.

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Seems luck is not with the Madden series on the next-gen consoles. So far EA Sports has not been able to deliver a single edition of Madden for the 360 and PS3 without freeze issues and online disconnects to name few with the release of the game.

After the previous two patches a freezing problem seems to be popping up every now and then during play calling or highlight screens which would halt the game.

Ian Cummings, Senior Designer for Madden 2010 commented by saying

the team has been working on a new patch, and has been furiously trying to work on the stability of the game, as well as tracking down what was causing the problem.

Players should save and reboot their game after they’ve started a game if players like playing multiple matches at a time, or save and exit a game to start a new one

Despite these issue not everybody on the Testing team could reproduce these problems. For example people who played one game at a time and saving/rebooting afterwards, have had zero crashes.

Gamers should expect another patch in less then a few weeks.

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Harmonix let know on there forum that a fix is on the way for the PAX pack which was released onto the Playstation store a couple of days ago.

It seems the issue was caused by the songs ‘Livin on the Corner of Dude’ and ‘Catastrophe’ (fitting title) by MC Frontalot.
People who downloaded these songs or the full pack including these could not play the content.

Harmonix have resubmitting the tracks to Sony and hope they fix up content on the PlayStation store as soon as possible. Users will then be able to replace the broken tracks by re-downloading this content for no additional charge. If you don’t feel like re-downloading this content and can wait a week, the title update that is launching on september 9th will fix it automatically.

Your probably wondering what this ‘title update’ is that will be on the Playstation Store this thursday.
It is an export feature which enables you to use songs from Rock Band 1 in Rock Band 2. It will also patch the use of the Guitar Hero III Les Paul PS3 Controller with RB1 on the PS3.

Source, via PS3Fanboy

On the official 2K forums Elizabeth one of the official Community Managers posted the (provisional) 1.20 patch notes for Civilization Revolution.

Here are some of them:

Wonder and Artifact Pack Functionality
New Wonder and Artifact Packs appear in the single player game and have full Civilopedia entries accessible inside the game and on the main game menu when installed. These new Wonders and Artifacts do not appear in multiplayer games.

Multiplayer Map Functionality
After the user has downloaded a Multiplayer Map Pack and the user creates a multiplayer game via Player Match or LAN Game, an additional Game Type is available – Scenario. This Game Type allow players to select from among any of the multiplayer maps they current have available to play their game on.

The multiplayer lobbies have also been updated to display what map a game is playing. If a player in the lobby does not have the map that is being played, they will not be able to join that game and an icon and message will appear that states they are unable to join the game.

Joining Settlers to Cities
Previously, when players moved a settler unit into a city, they could had the option of that unit “Joining” the city, automatically giving it a full population point. Now, to prevent exploits, when players join a settler to a city, that city will only receive a set amount of food, meaning that in the later game, they will not provide a full population point to a city, only help it grow.

Instant Upgrades thanks to Retreating in MP Games
Previously, whenever a player retreated from combat, their opponent’s unit automatically received an upgrade. To prevent exploits, this feature has been removed from multiplayer. Now when a player retreats from combat in a multiplayer game, it counts as a victory for the defender, but the defender will not automatically receive an upgrade just because their opponent has retreated. If the retreating unit, for example, is stronger than the defender, or the retreat is the defender’s third victory, the defender can still receive an upgrade, but they do not always receive an automatic upgrade. Retreating still provides an automatic upgrade to the defending player in single player.

Disbanding Militia Units
Previously, whenever a player disbanded a militia unit, they received gold for them. To prevent exploits, disbanded militia units now provide zero gold. Now when a player retreats from combat in a multiplayer game, his opponent’s unit receives nothing.

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