A Host Of VR Games And Mortal Kombat XI Head Up Sony’s First ‘State Of Play’

Despite both not having PlayStation Experience last Fall and telling everyone in advance they would be skipping E3 for this year, Sony came up with another way of bringing information to avid PS4 fans everywhere.  Announced last week, Sony’s State of Play is meant to be Sony’s version of the Nintendo Direct, taking a variety of games releasing somewhat soon and showing them off to gamers everywhere.
This first installment of Sony’s “State of Play” lasted roughly twenty minutes, and included a handful of new announcements and updates on existing games. Some of the bigger highlights included…

Marvel Games now has an Iron Man VR project up and running, courtesy of the people at Camoflaj and Sony Interactive. The game seems to be just as interested in giving us moments with Iron Man as it does with the man behind the armor himself, as Tony Stark fights against enemies from his past to try and save the world. How long or involved this story will be remains to be seen, but there’s doubtless more information to come, as the game seems to be scheduled to release later this year.

Naughty Dog’s classic racing game follow up to their beloved PS1 platformer franchise makes a return with Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled, courtesy of Beenox and Activision. Complete with upgraded graphics and much of the content from the 2003 Crash Nitro Kart (including it’s combat modes), it’s also been confirmed the PS4 version of the title will receive exclusive “retro” skins, karts, and tracks. CTR: Nitro Fueled is due out on June 21st.

ReadySet Heroes is a couch co-op focused multiplayer game, where players team up to fight their way through dungeons, collecting loot and beating down bad guys together.   Though the game is co-op, players are competing against other teams going through a different version of the dungeon, and will eventually fight against one another in a brawl mode once both players have completed the dungeon.

When it was originally announced, Blood and Truth stood out from most VR titles for feeling like it was a VR title offering a traditional first person experience, and that hasn’t changed. Coming from the people at Sony London Studios, Blood and Truth follows Ryan Marks, a soldier working to save his family from a group of dangerous criminals.  Blood and Truth looks to have a ton of exciting set pieces for players to shoot, stab, and sneak their way through, and it’s coming out on May 28th.

A major part of this State of Play was showing support for their VR peripheral, and one of the best titles involved in that was this.  Steel Wool Games and Lionsgate are bringing the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise to VR, as “Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted”. The game appears to be an augmented version of the original title, designed to get the most out of the change in format.  The game will release later this Spring.

First shown during Sony’s 2017 Paris Games Week, Concrete Genie is a title from Pixelopus about a young boy named Ash trying to bring life to his dreary hometown of Denska.  Ash frequently finds himself bullied by other kids in Denska, but fortunately for him he has a magic brush which allows him to create new friends with his art.  This game was originally scheduled to release some time in 2018, but it’s been delayed to Fall 2019 now, with no firm release date given.

Days Gone’s story has been largely shrouded in mystery aside from the gameplay we’ve gotten of the first two hours, but this trailer changes a bit of that, as we learn what’s happened to Deacon’s wife and how he and his friend Boomer fit in to Bend’s world of not-zombies. It’s hinted that some of Deacon’s story will involve tracking down his wife, while the rest will be him learning how to trust people and fit into a community once more.  Days Gone releases April 26th.

Ending this first video is a deeper look at the story to the upcoming Mortal Kombat XI. This one further emphasizes the past versus present action, with most of the trailer centering around all the Mortal Kombat mainstays discovering just how different they’ve become after years of fighting gods, monsters, demons, and wizards from other dimensions.
That was it for Sony’s first State of Play. It was a short video, but they’ve already gotten down Nintendo’s knack for pacing. They never wasted too much time on any one game, giving the proper amount of focus to major titles while also mixing in smaller games.  There will be a lot of people who’ll see this and be disappointed, but ultimately this wasn’t ever going to be what it is to Nintendo; they’ve had several years to hone this into a fine art.  Moreover, the entire reason for Sony’s shift in announcing games came because they were simply out of major new titles to display. Short of showing off PlayStation 5 games, it’s difficult to expect more from them at the moment.
But there’s still plenty more to come that we do know about: Days Gone, Death Stranding, The Last of Us Part II, and Ghosts of Tsushima.  As Sony becomes more comfortable with this format, we should expect to see more about these games, buoyed with smaller games, until the eventual reveal of the PlayStation 5. In the meantime, this was a great first start, and hopefully they reach out to more third party developers to boost the profiles of these–we could use more quarterly updates either alongside or in the place of E3.