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Hint at Sony Bend's PS4 Game

Dead Don't Ride sounds like something David Jaffe would make.


Anyway loved Syphon Filter and I thought Uncharted Vita was the second best Uncharted game.

Super interested in what Bend do. They seem like a super talented team in the Sony stable that a lot of people forgot existed.
 
Is this the first original Sony Bend project since Syphon Filter?

To be released... Yes.

Well Sony Bend, out of all Sony studios, kinda need to play it safe for a new IP. Having had a few cancelled Vita games, and not a game since 2012, you really don't wanna see lay offs like Santa Monica? It's the harsh truth regarding AAA games nowadays -- particularly new IP's. The indie scene is where the innovation is happening IMO.

They were never a big studio in the first place. Maybe had at most 80 people working on full production projects. Outside of that, they are not close to the scale of Santa Monica studio. The reasons there were so many layoffs at SSM were mainly due to bad management of some of their projects (for instance the new IP created under Stig).

Doesn't sound like my cup of tea but ehi, at least it's a news from Bend. I almost had a bad feeling about them. You know. Studio Liverpool kind of feeling.

Full production since 2015? Pretty late considering their last release, Uncharted for Vita in 2012, don't you think? It must be something very big for them.

The thing with Studio Liverpool is that their games, despite being very good and critically acclaimed by journalists and gamers, they struggled sales-wise with each new entry (more or less the same thing happened to Evolution studio). Also, since the Uncharted on Vita in 2012, they must have worked and prototyped on a bunch different projects, 2 of them being Vita games: one being a sequel to Uncharted Golden Abyss and an InFamous game. They tried to create new IPs also, but it didn't work out. Projects got canned.

Very big you say? It's their first home console game since.... I guess the last SF. Hopefully, their next game will get them some attention from the media and the public (outside of Kinda Funny... :P).

I think they had another vita game or something and that got canned, might be remembering wrong.

You are not wrong, since they tried to work on 2 Vita games. The first was a new Uncharted for PSV and the other was InFamous. Both got canned or stopped before any substantial work was done.

source (read below):
Was this posted? Didn't see a topic.

Reddit user 'athey', who worked at Sony Bend for several years, mentioned all of this. (Former Sony Bend artist, Athey Moravetz)

Here are the tidbits.

http://www.reddit.com/user/athey/

Source: worked at Sony Bend for 8 yrs

On the new project:

'I know what they’re doing, but even if I don’t work there anymore, I don’t think it would be kosher to go running my mouth off.
Hard to say if you should be excited. There’s a group of super talented guys there, and pretty much every project has been chaos till the last 6 mo when they usually work super hard to pull it together.
But there’s a lot of burnout right now. Lots of talent has left over the last year
'.

On a nixed Uncharted and Infamous pitch:

It was going to be another Uncharted game but naughty dog was worried about franchise burnout with so many games coming out so close together, so they nixed it. We spent like a whole year dicking around with different ideas and pitches after that before I left the studio. We started and threw away so many demos during that year.

Sony really wanted another Uncharted from us and tried to convince Naughty Dog to let us do it. They wanted more content for Vita.
And we did make an infamous pitch at one point, too. I think that was the first pitch and demo we made after the uncharted project was canned. The infamous game would have been a vita title too.

We did a couple new IP pitches. One was steampunk but that didn’t make it very far. There was a really awesome futuristic sci if one that I really liked. We had an amazing future scifi city and a character that could run around and scale buildings with these jet boots, and it was awesome. We had a lot of assets done for that demo when it was canned. I was really bummed when that one got binned.

I left the studio about 2 years ago and that was when they were making the switch to Unreal 4 and PS4, instead of Vita. It was a bit of a waste since we’d put so much time and resources into making a vita engine and then only used it on one title. But a couple other first party studios used versions of our engine and we lent them support, so it didn’t totally go to waste.

I think Unit 13 from Zipper Interactive used our engine. Don’t remember who else did though.
I think the shift to PS4 was a desperate bid to get something greenlit. When you go through so many pitches and get one after another tossed out for various reasons, you start trying anything.


I recall it was always upper management, demographic, genre saturation kinda crap. Like, ‘someone is already making a game something along those lines that would come out 5mo prior to your GM date’, or ‘we’ve had too many games of that sort that didn’t sell well enough’, or projections for that kind of blah blah blah…

Also, kind of like the complaints about Hollywood only making generic formula action hits because they make money, rather than take a risk on something different that might not make money.
Same thing exists in games, obviously.
 
Twisted Metal reimagined as an open world game like Mad Max would be amazing.

OK I want this.

Yep. I definitely want this.

TM PS3 is my favourite car combat game by far.
To be released... Yes.



They were never a big studio in the first place. Maybe had at most 80 people working on full production projects. Outside of that, they are not close to the scale of Santa Monica studio. The reasons there were so many layoffs at SSM were mainly due to bad management of some of their projects (for instance the new IP created under Stig).



The thing with Studio Liverpool is that their games, despite being very good and critically acclaimed by journalists and gamers, they struggled sales-wise with each new entry (more or less the same thing happened to Evolution studio). Also, since the Uncharted on Vita in 2012, they must have worked and prototyped on a bunch different projects, 2 of them being Vita games: one being a sequel to Uncharted Golden Abyss and an InFamous game. They tried to create new IPs also, but it didn't work out. Projects got canned.

Very big you say? It's their first home console game since.... I guess the last SF. Hopefully, their next game will get them some attention from the media and the public (outside of Kinda Funny... :P).



You are wrong, since they tried to work on 2 Vita games. The first was a new Uncharted for PSV and the other was InFamous. Both got canned or stopped before any substantial work was done.

source (read below):
God dammit Sony.

I probably would've bought both those Vita games too... another Uncharted and Infamous... damn.
 
Road Rash reboot! With zombies!

road-rash-6.jpg
 
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