Latest news with #GhostOfYōtei
Metro
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Ghost Of Yōtei has its own limited edition PS5 – here's where you can buy it
Sony has announced two new PlayStation 5 consoles that come with Ghost Of Yōtei, ahead of its launch this autumn. In case you missed it, Sony held another of its State Of Play presentations last night; one centred entirely on its next major PlayStation 5 exclusive, Ghost Of Yōtei, which is scheduled for October 2. It wasn't a particularly long showcase, clocking in at only 20 minutes, and while new details were shared, like improved combat and optional modes meant to emulate Japanese film directors Takashi Miike and Shinichirō Watanabe, it very much looks like more of Ghost Of Tsushima. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the presentation was that the game will launch with not one but two new PlayStation 5 console variants, that are included in limited edition bundles. Both versions feature the same design of Mount Yōtei, a real-life Japanese landmark that features prominently in the game, with one being coloured gold and the other being black. According to the PlayStation Blog, the former is inspired by kintsugi, an art form that involves reparing broken ceramics with gold and lacquer, while the latter is inspired by black ink paintings, also known as sumi-e, and the basis for Ōkami's art design. Each console comes with a matching DualSense controller, with protagonist Atsu depicted on the touchpad, as well as a digital copy of Ghost Of Yōtei and the pre-order content (which consists of an in-game mask for Atsu to wear and seven new PlayStation Network avatars). Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for a unique take on the week in gaming, alongside the latest reviews and more. Delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning. At the time of writing, the limited edition bundles for Ghost Of Yōtei aren't available for pre-order, with Sony only saying that pre-order details will be shared at a later date. What we do know is that while the gold bundle will be sold through the PlayStation Direct store and other select retailers, the black bundle will be exclusive to PlayStation Direct. While these bundles are obviously meant to attract new PlayStation 5 owners, Sony will be selling console covers with the gold patterns separately. So, if you already own a PlayStation 5 but really like the design of the new ones, you don't have to invest in a new console. Unfortunately, Sony is only offering suitable covers for the newer slim and PlayStation 5 Pro models, meaning those who still have the original bulky model are out of luck. Plus, for whatever reason, it seems console covers with the black pattern won't be sold separately. More Trending Both the gold and black DualSense controllers will be available as individual purchases but, just like the consoles, the black one will be exclusive to PlayStation Direct. Sony hasn't shared prices yet, but you can bet these bundles won't be cheap. For what it's worth, the Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 bundles on PlayStation Direct are £339.99 for the digital edition and £434.99 for the standard edition. However, the consoles are the usual white ones, so Sony will almost certainly charge extra since these Ghost Of Yōtei bundles feature fancy new designs. Not to mention Sony bumped up the price of the digital console from £389.99 to £429.99 this past April. As for the console covers, based on the ones Sony already sells, they could cost anywhere from £44.99 to £54.99. Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Ghost Of Yōtei pre-orders go live as release date announced MORE: Ex-PlayStation boss takes on troll criticising Ghost Of Yōtei female protagonist MORE: PS5 is more profitable than all other PlayStation consoles combined
Geek Culture
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Culture
'Ghost of Yōtei' Developer Striving For Authentic Depiction Of Hokkaido And Ainu Culture
Ahead of Sucker Punch Productions' highly-anticipated RPG sequel Ghost of Yōtei's launch in October this year, co-creative director Nate Fox has shared insights into the team's research trips to Japan, emphasising the respect paid to portraying the time period in-game as authentically as possible. This comes from the latest entry in a series of PlayStation blog posts, where Fox described their trips to Japan to learn more about Hokkaido, the setting of the game, and more specifically, the Ainu culture, an indigenous group primarily inhabiting the area. The Sucker Punch team at Matsuamae Castle, Hokkaido 'When setting a game in Hokkaido, we knew a crucial element was doing our best to represent Ainu culture in a respectful way.' Fox wrote, 'Thankfully, we'd connected with an Ainu cultural adviser before setting out on our reference gathering trip [and] travelled up a nearby mountain and got to know each other while foraging for vegetables.' 'That night we resolved to put foraging into our new game, we wanted players to be able to share the experience we were lucky enough to have experienced.' According to Fox, the team also spent some time in the Oshima Peninsula, which was the domain of the Matsuamae clan in the 1600s, noting that even today, the Wajin people, the main ethic group in Japan, seldom live as far North as Hokkaido. 'We've tried to mimic that quality in the game, leaning into areas of wilderness between homesteads,' he added. The team also visited the Nibutani Ainu Museum, which helped them 'get a sense for sorts of objects [seen] in the game and how they were used,' alongside learning about Edo-period Japan by visiting places in Honshu such as Nikko Toshogu Shrine, to which they received a blessing for the game from the enshrined deity, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Despite the game being a few months from release, it's already clear how much respect the Sucker Punch team has paid to portraying the games setting as accurately as possible, a move that will surely serve to enrich Ghost of Yōtei's world when the game launches on 2 October 2025 for the PS5. Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise 'duds' like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3 . He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying. Ghost of Yotei Sucker Punch sucker punch productions
Metro
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Why is nobody talking about the PS5 anymore? - Reader's Feature
A reader worries that Sony's strange behaviour over the last few years has seen the PS5 become sidelined and ignored compared to other formats. For years now, I've been reading people, both here and elsewhere online, asking what has happened to Sony and why they're acting the way they do now. The lack of showcases, the general lack of communication, the obsession with live service games, and the reduction in new single-player games… it's obvious to everyone and yet we've never had an explanation or an acknowledgement from Sony that anything unusual is happening. I think it's pretty obvious that we're not going to get one either. Sony are just going to carry on being weird and pretending that's what they were always like. They've been like this for well over two years now, so anyone buying a PlayStation 5 in that time will never know anything else. There is a problem though – well there's multiple, obviously – but the thing I can't help but notice at the moment is how little people talk about the PlayStation 5 anymore. The Switch 2 is eating up a lot of bandwidth right now but it's not just that. The PlayStation 5 feels played out, a disappointment and unexciting, just part of the gaming furniture and nothing more. The Switch 2 launch is coming up, but people have been talking excitedly about it for months now. A new console is obviously a rare thing, that's always going to draw attention, but the PC as a gaming format has also been a big topic for the last year or so. It's far more popular than I have ever known and now seems to be the default format for games, rather than any console. That's the position the PlayStation 5 should have but it's not really how it's turned out. You could argue even the Xbox has been more a topic of conversation recently, even if that's in a negative way. But at least people don't forget it exists. It looks like we probably won't get a PlayStation showcase this month, since they've already missed their usual May slot, and the rumours say maybe not one until September. That's ridiculous. Not only do we know virtually nothing about Ghost Of Yōtei, but there's nothing confirmed for next year yet, except Saros (had to look up that spelling). Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and Marvel's Wolverine don't have any year confirmed yet and that's all we know about in terms of games made by Sony themselves. I'm not going to speculate on why this is happening or when it might end, because frankly I haven't got a clue, but I do know that it's having a very negative effect on PlayStation's reputation, in a way people aren't talking about enough. The PlayStation 5 just seems invisible now, something that's always there but which nobody cares about and definitely something nobody is excited about. Will this change if they announce a new game? Well, it didn't with Ghost Of Yōtei. You could say that's not really their biggest franchise, and you'd be right, but the longer Sony carries on in zombie mode the harder it is going to be to get anyone's attention. It won't be long before it needs The Last Of Us Part 3 or God Of War 3 before there's any kind of a reaction, but I don't see those games happening anytime soon. Sony is so out of touch they think fans will wait forever for whatever news they can be bothered to tell us, and then we'll be amazed and excited, but I don't think that's true anymore. More Trending The PlayStation 6 seems to be only a year away and the sad thing is that means the PlayStation 5 is just going to fade away, forgotten and underused. How can a console be this successful and yet be such an utter failure and disappointment at the same time? I wouldn't have thought it possible and yet here we are. By reader Corsair The reader's features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro. You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@ or use our Submit Stuff page and you won't need to send an email. MORE: The original Switch is still a better option than the Switch 2 - Reader's Feature MORE: MCM Comic Con is still worth it for gamers even without EGX – Reader's Feature MORE: Why I'm taking a week off work for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch - Reader's Feature
Metro
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Games Inbox: Is there going to be a PS5 State of Play this summer?
The Thursday letters page worries what will happen if the new Marvel games are flops, as one reader laments the slow death of physical games. To join in with the discussions yourself email gamecentral@ Summer schedule I really hope that Sony is planning to make more first party games but I have a feeling there's no going back to how things were. It's been too long and too much has changed, including Sony still selling tons of PlayStation 5s even without any proper exclusives and Xbox going multiformat. I think it's reasonable to hope they will do more though. We can't stop them making any more live service games but they do seem to at least be slowing down a bit. The problem is that slowing up doesn't mean they'll speed up with single-player games instead. They could just end up making less overall, like they have over the last few years. We've got Ghost Of Yōtei this year, which I'm not super excited about (I'd had enough of the last one by halfway through) but I am very interested in seeing Returnal follow-up Saros next year, so hopefully things are slowly turning around. I want to be optimistic, but the problem is there's no sign of Sony having a not-E3 State of Play showcase this summer. The past two years they've had it at the end of May and I think we've probably gone past the point they were going to announce it if it was happening. I hope I'm wrong, or maybe it's later in June for some reason, but it doesn't look good. RaeBonn Your story is another castle I see the Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel has had its name leaked as Super Mario World. I'm not sure your average Joe is going to get that reference, but would they actually bother doing an adaptation of the game's story? Does the game even have a story? I've beaten it twice and I honestly can't remember. Looking at Wikipedia, apparently it was all in the manual and basically Bowser kidnapped Peach and some dinosaur eggs. There's so little to work with I really have no idea what direction any of these films could do to justify themselves as anything other than a cash-in. The Paper Mario games are the only ones with an actual plot, but even then that's not what's good about them. Austin Risky business I've got a bad feeling about these upcoming Marvel games. I imagine Wolverine will be fine, but that Iron Man game will be almost two decades too late by the time it comes out. And I can't believe many people are interested in a Captain America and Black Panther team-up set in World War 2. Normally I'd just shrug my shoulders and write it off as an incoming flop but nowadays that means the whole studio could go down and how many hundreds of people are working on these two games? I'm not exaggerating either. Consider what happened to Firaxis after the (excellent) Midnight Suns flopped. All the lead developers left, the studio was fractured (I don't think it was a coincidence that Civilization 7 was a rare dud), and now we'll never get an XCOM 3. I don't know these developers behind Iron Man and the other one as well, but I do know that lots of jobs are now in danger, just because EA was late jumping on a bandwagon. Cerates Email your comments to: gamecentral@ Reliable reputation Glad to hear GC got Power Stone back and I like the sound of all the effort Capcom put into the collection and the reasonable price. I've never really been into fighting games, so it's not really of interest to me. But it Does make me think better of Capcom, for when something else I am interested in comes up. I wish this was something other publishers thought of, especially as Capcom is doing so well, financially speaking, at the moment. But unfortunately EA and Activision, and even Ubisoft to a degree, just rely on their big franchises and don't really put out much else anyway. Sony is another example of doing this well, because their reputation for first party games really wasn't that great until the PlayStation 4. They just built it up and became someone to rely on. Them throwing that all away now is so strange. Griefer Money issue I've been thinking for a while now about this, but Sony could take Xbox out the console market with just one sentence. You can put Game Pass on PlayStation. There wouldn't be any need for an Xbox and we know Phil wants it on there. Why Sony won't do that I'll never know. It's a win/win for Sony. You never know, Sony might allow them sooner or later and Xbox can go the way of Sega, just with a hell of a lot more money and just to make games. David GC: They won't do it because they make more money selling games on their store. Although they may change their mind in time, because they've begun to make more selling microtransactions than actual games. And another thing You know, I have been witnessing quite a bit of clamour over the last few days. More or less a lot of complaining and quite a stir of negativity. I've seen GTA 6 fall surprisingly prey to this. Either people have issues with the inevitably violent content, the sex or the aged fable of controversy. My take is my bond and I say that I gladly welcome the gratuitous violence, the sex, and the glory glitz of Leonida. Because I've waited over 12 years for an evolution and no echoes of bemusement will deter me from my course of securing the collector's edition as soon as possible. If that includes a statue or early access I will be immensely satisfied. My second point is the Nintendo Switch 2. I've already mentioned that I secured the Mario Kart World bundle from Amazon and I acknowledge the bricking controversy. But modding isn't my cup of tea, so Nintendo has nothing to worry about. I'd rather emulate PlayStation 2 games anyway. Thirdly, the PlayStation 6. It matters not the price, storage, exclusives or specs. I'm buying this system, as I did the PlayStation 5. Day one. If it arrives in 2027, the merrier it is for me. I will very much take great stride in playing Horizon Zero Dawn 3 and many other titles. Shahzaib Sadiq Mum's the word I was wondering when we might get some concrete thoughts about the Switch 2 launch games? Is there an embargo about when Switch 2 games are able to be reviewed? Or perhaps there is an embargo on when you can talk about an embargo, nothing from Nintendo would surprise me. Mark GC: There's always an embargo on when we can talk about an embargo, but especially when it involves Nintendo. Facing defeat I know the war was lost long ago (shops stopping second-hand games was the end, as far as I see it) but it is so tragic to see how small a part of gaming physical copies are now. I don't know anyone, amongst my friends or family, that buys physical copies anymore and what would be the point anyway, when they're not even stored on the disc?. Perhaps it was inevitable, since even if the initial game is on the disc it gets distorted and expanded by updates the second you put it in a console but it's the fact that there's literally no benefit to digital. People talk about convenience but what convenience? Not having to change discs is just silly and lazy. And it takes time to buy a physical copy? I could drive to the shops and back quicker that it takes me to download a modern game. Not that I'm in the habit of paying out £60 on a whim, that I suddenly decide I have to have a new game right then and there. Gaming got infinitely more expensive as soon as it became more difficult to sell on your games, especially with eBay's new payment rules. But apparently nobody cares. Maybe everyone else is a millionaire all of a sudden, and I didn't get the memo, but the death of physical is just handing more control to publishers and taking more cash out of the wallets of ordinary people. Rufus Inbox also-ransJust watched the Borderlands movie on Amazon. It's no Fallout or The Last Of Us but it's not that bad. I particularly liked Jack Black as the annoying android Claptrap. They should make a Brütal Legend movie – it would have a great soundtrack. Think I will check out the Like A Dragon movie next. Johnny Alpha SD Currently playing: Doom Eternal and Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Thanks for the heads-up on Very, I managed to get my bundle with a camera so I'm very excited now. I went back and checked and it's still live though, which seems weird given no one else has any stock at all. Boysie More Trending Email your comments to: gamecentral@ The small print New Inbox updates appear every weekday morning, with special Hot Topic Inboxes at the weekend. Readers' letters are used on merit and may be edited for length and content. You can also submit your own 500 to 600-word Reader's Feature at any time via email or our Submit Stuff page, which if used will be shown in the next available weekend slot. You can also leave your comments below and don't forget to follow us on Twitter. MORE: Games Inbox: What will the GTA 6 collector's edition be like? MORE: Games Inbox: Is it weird to not like GTA games? MORE: Games Inbox: How extreme will GTA 6 in-game sex and violence be?
Metro
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Ghost Of Yōtei this week is where PlayStation officially gave up
A reader is unimpressed by the way in which Sony unveiled Ghost Of Yōtei's release date and feels it hints at a grim future for PlayStation. We all know that Sony has been acting strange for years now. We got about two normal years out of them, when the PlayStation 5 first launched, and then they basically went crazy. Suddenly all they were talking about were live service games, then they stopped talking about anything at all, and then they stopped releasing anything either. There were basically no big PlayStation first party games last year. Yes, they had Astro Bot, which won lots of awards, but it didn't sell all that well and by Sony's own words was not a major release. This year is just as bad. We're at the end of April and the only things they've had out are an ultra expensive The Last Of Us compilation and Days Gone Remastered. The only thing they've got coming up is Death Stranding 2 (which they didn't make, so isn't really first party) and, so we learned this week, Ghost Of Yōtei in October. We haven't heard anything about Ghost Of Yōtei since last year and then this week we got a new trailer, a release date, and pre-order details. How was this unveiled? Via a new State of Play? Or maybe a showcase dedicated to the game? At least it must've been a part of some other preview show, right? No, they had a tweet. And then later there was a short PlayStation Blog. That's it. I'm just sick of this. Why is Sony like this now? Why do they seem to hate being a games publisher? Why do they hate talking to their fans so much? Why do they love doing nothing instead? Everything is a minimum effort. The announcements, the number of games coming out, the way everything is presented… it's a bizarre mix of laziness, arrogance, and a total lack of energy. I don't know what it is Sony execs would rather be doing, but it's certainly not selling video games. How Sony got like this is a mystery but it's hardly the most important one. The real question is are they ever going to get out of this weird funk they've put themselves into and if not what happens next? If Microsoft hadn't imploded before them then PlayStation would've been in real trouble but instead they've been rewarded for their incompetence and laziness with the easiest ride in gaming. Yes, Nintendo is going to beat them with the Switch 2, that much is obvious, but Nintendo doesn't do what Sony does. Gaming cannot just be Nintendo and PCs. Or maybe it can? Maybe Sony's inaction is pushing us towards that one format future that at one time seemed so desirable. I don't think it is, because Sony is living proof of what happens when you have no competition, but I think it's going to happen anyway. My prediction is that Nintendo will continue to be a success doing its own thing, but that PC will continue to gain ground until Sony just quietly give up on consoles and go third party like Xbox. I imagine it'll be a slow decline, that gradually begins to seem inevitable until, like Xbox, in the end nobody really cares all that much. More Trending It'll be a sad, pathetic end for PlayStation, but it'll be no less than Sony deserves based on their recent inaction. I wish it wasn't true, but I really can't see any other way this is going to end. By reader Ashton Marley The reader's features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro. You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. Just contact us at gamecentral@ or use our Submit Stuff page and you won't need to send an email. MORE: Nintendo Switch 2: the best and the worst of the new console – Reader's Feature MORE: Getting married won't stop me playing video games - Reader's Feature MORE: How my partner finally learned to love video games - Reader's Feature
