Games

[Heell]

Panopticon, a new game developed by SCEJ. There was a video revealed today and more info will become available on May 21.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPaNS1gqBKM
Website: http://www.jp.playstation.com/scej/title/panopticon/

[Amor fati]

Updated trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho5OR6Xl1xY

Game is now titled "Freedom Wars" and is for the PlayStation Vita according to the trailer.

[Bread]

Impressive trailer. And Panopticon is a better name.

Screens grabbed from here: http://www.siliconera.com/2013/05/21/in ... r-freedom/

Quote from http://www.the-magicbox.com/1305/game130519c.shtml (which has the same screenshots):

Sony announced that the "Panopticon" teaser they revealed last week is a new PS Vita action game called Freedom War, which is a "recovery multiplayer action" game, support 8 players cooperative or competitive play via Ad-Hoc or WiFi. Freedom War also makes use of the GPS and NEAR function of the VITA to help you locate nearby players.

The story takes place in the near future year of 102013, in which the world is in ruin, human lives in constructed cities called "Panopticon", they cannot survive outside the cities. With dwindling resources, the government forced a lot of citizens to become war volunteers to help take down giant monsters raise from the ruins called the "Abductors", and recapture resourced taken by the monsters.

[Bread]

New screens and info on the structure and plot:
http://www.siliconera.com/2013/07/22/fr ... ree-parts/

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[Amor fati]

http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/20/51250 ... -companies

Despite originally being shown off back in May, not much is really known about Freedom Wars, the Vita title currently being produced by SCE in Japan. It's a multiplayer action game; it boasts a weapon system a bit reminiscent of Monster Hunter and it's set in a dystopian future where people are born with million-year jail sentences and must fight huge monsters to win their freedom.

This week's issue of Famitsu magazine lifts the veil a bit by printing an interview with people from all three companies behind the Freedom Wars project: SCE Japan, design team Shift (maker of the God Eater series), and game developer Dimps (best known recently for helping out on Street Fighter 4).

How did this team-up get off the ground? "It's kind of a long story," replied Sony producer Junichi Yoshizawa. "This has always been a dream of mine, but as someone involved with entertainment, I've always wanted to start a real sensation. My company's tasked me with producing an original game that will promote hardware sales, so I looked for people that would help satisfy both motivations of mine."

Yoshizawa decided that the game would have to involve multiplayer action on the Vita without overlapping with other first-party games in the library. So he called up Toshiyuki Yasui, game designer at Shift, for advice. "I felt like I really had the gauntlet laid down before me," Yasui recalled. "But it was also a wonderful chance to do something I had never done before, so I took the opportunity to really think deeply about it as a game designer."

What Yasui came up with was a game concept that'd be easy for anyone to join the fun with, whether they're a hardcore participant or just someone killing a little time. Along the way, he hit upon the concept of Panopticons, in-game city-states that serve as the virtual representations of real-life regions of the world.

"We haven't announced details yet," Yasui said, "but in this game, every prefecture in Japan is assigned a city called a Panopticon. You have these city-state battles going on, with (for example) people fighting for points in the Kanagawa and Kagoshima Panopticons. You can join in just for a bit in a really approachable manner, or you can go for a more long-span approach, join a battle where a victor's declared once per day."

"People play games in a multitude of ways nowadays," Yoshizawa added. "Some people break out a smartphone game if they're just taking a train to the next station, and some people play for a whole hour. So I wanted a way you could play for assorted spans of time, whether it's a minute, ten minutes or an hour."

Sony isn't giving out a lot of gameplay details yet, except to say that you'll have a range of short- and long-range attacks, as well as a device called an ibara (Japanese for "thorn") that you use to rescue civilians from monsters or other players. There'll be a few multiplay modes available, each supporting up to 8 players at once - and since each player has a fully customizable android partner called an Accessory, every battle actually involves up to 16 characters.

"I think everyone on the dev team was like 'Can we really do this?' at first," said Dimps director Takashi Tsukamoto, "and my only response was 'I don't know, but we have to'. It isn't easy, but the more I hear about what Yasui wants to do with the story, the more I think that nobody's done it before and that it could be really cool. So we're all working together as a tightly-knit team right now."

"There's a lot of volume here, to the point where I don't know if we'll be able to reveal all of it before release," Yasui said. "It's a game themed after oppression and freedom -- what kind of freedom can you expect at the end of your million-year sentence? You'll just have to see for yourself what lies beyond that."

Freedom Wars is due out next year sometime in Japan for PS Vita, and Yoshizawa noted that it'll be available for play to the general public at an event they're planning around the end of the year.

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New Japanese trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02T_Xph3w6Q

[Amor fati]

http://www.joystiq.com/2014/04/14/vita- ... -the-west/

A year after being announced for Japan, multiplayer action game Freedom Wars gets a surprise confirmation that it's coming to North America and Europe later this year. Co-developed by Devil Dice and God Eater 2 studio Shift and Sonic veteran Dimps, Freedom Wars blends unusual sci-fi with fast-paced combat for up to four players ad-hoc and eight players online.

Players take on the role of people suffering a dystopian totalitarianism, where the world is depleted of resources and population growth. These people are born into a sorry life of imprisonment and a rather harsh, somewhat impossible 1 million year sentence. They are doomed to spend their lives in penal communities called Panopticons, which as they sound are filled to the brim with surveillance.

To become free of their lengthy incarceration, players complete rescue missions with their friends to reduce their sentences, bit by bit. Maybe not the most well-thought out regime, but it makes for an interesting-sounding game. Freedom Wars is due to hit Japan on June 26, while today's news didn't bring word of a concrete date for the West.

Announce trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVpr9qApxhE

[Gaius]

Story trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcGDRGZ960s

The game also had strong first week sales in Japan: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=847928

Biggest PS Vita opening week sales: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread. ... t119220812

01. [PSV] God Eater 2 (Bandai Namco Games) {2013.11.14} - 258.826 / 387.305
02. [PSV] Freedom Wars (Sony Computer Entertainment) {2014.06.26} - 187.890 / NEW
03. [PSV] Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA f (Sega) {2012.08.30} - 158.009 / 217.028
04. [PSV] Persona 4 Golden (Atlus) {2012.06.14} - 152.499 / 256.494
05. [PSV] Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment (Bandai Namco Games) {2014.04.24} - 136.736 / 193.350
06. [PSV] Final Fantasy X / X-2 HD Remaster Twin Pack (Square Enix) {2013-12-26} - 134.645 / 219.329
07. [PSV] Toukiden: The Age of Demons (Koei Tecmo) {2013.06.27} - 127.744 / 232.577
08. [PSV] Super Robot Wars Z 3rd: Jigoku Hen (Bandai Namco Games) {2014.04.10} - 125.048 / 151.117
09. [PSV] Soul Sacrifice (Sony Computer Entertainment) {2013.03.07} - 105.863 / 190.592
10. [PSV] Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F 2nd (Sega) {2014-03-27} - 103.581 / 131.877