Hey PlayStation Nation! We’re a few weeks away from the release of Crysis 3, the premier sandbox shooter of 2013. In order to give those fans that can’t wait any longer a preview of what’s to come, we’re launching a worldwide cross-console beta. The Crysis 3 beta will be available for download on PlayStation Network on Tuesday, January 29th and lasting until February 12th. Get ready to suit up!

The beta is designed to give you a taste of the full Crysis 3 multiplayer experience, and help the development team collect your feedback. Read on for answers to some common questions regarding the Crysis 3 Beta, and for more information visit www.crysis.com.

What modes will be playable in the beta?

Hunter Mode: This multiplayer game mode is all about survival of the fittest. There are two teams, initially comprised of two permanently cloaked “Hunters”, and up to 14 CELL troopers awaiting extraction. Each trooper slain respawns on the Hunter team to prey on their former allies, building to a frenetic climax. If any of the troopers survive the round, the hunters lose. Whichever way you play, Hunter Mode delivers a heart-pounding test of strategy and survival.

Crash Site Mode: This multiplayer game mode is the ultimate King of the Hill-type experience. An Alien dropship deploys a pod at random around the map. Players on each team must remain near the dropped pod in order to capture the zone and accumulate points. Each alien pod holds two shields players can utilize defensively as weapons. In addition, each Crash Site map will have a “Pinger,” a CEPH-constructed walking weapon of mass destruction. But be careful: other players can hijack the Pinger while you’re inside!

What maps will come with the beta?

Museum: Roam the dark Ruins of Museum in downtown Manhattan and use the verticality to your advantage.

Airport: Close to the financial district, nature has taken over buildings and planes in this open fields area.

The full game has 10 more maps and six more game modes that are not to be found in the Open Beta.

How do I install the Open Beta on PS3?

The Open Beta will be located for download and installation on PSN in the demos section.

Where do I go if I have a problem, comment, or question?

The Crysis 3 forum at MyCrysis.com is your first stop. There will be threads for each problem as well as for comments; please post in the correct forums. You may find the answer to your problem already posted by someone else in the community or answered by one of the developers. When posting a new problem, please include as much detailed information as possible in order to help us understand the issue and resolve it.

What state is the game in? How close to final is the code I am looking at?

This is an Open Beta, which means most areas of the game are nearly complete; however, we are still looking at balance and polish. Feedback is always welcome.

Do my comments about balance or gameplay matter?

Absolutely. We will read every post. Keep it constructive and keep it civil, but keep it coming!

Is there single-player content in the Open Beta?

No, the Open Beta is only multiplayer content. The goal of the Open Beta is to serve as a final testing of the game’s backbone and features, and to give fans and the curious out there a chance to play the game before it is released.

Friends of PlayStation.Blog,

You’ve likely read or seen the many posts over the past month regarding the God of War: Ascension Multiplayer Beta. At first it was available only to participants of the “Rise of the Warrior” experience on the God of War website (which is now relaunched, new and improved, and ready to dole out even more extras for series fans). Then it was only accessible to PlayStation Plus members (as if they needed any more exclusive content, what with their free Instant Game Collection and countless discounts).

Now, we’re excited to announce that we’re opening up the Ascension MP Beta to all PlayStation Network users for a very limited time. Starting now and lasting through the holiday weekend—provided you’ve got a PlayStation 3 and a valid North American PlayStation Network account—you’re in!

Think of it as a sampling—nay, a slice—of the benefits and rewards showered upon PlayStation Plus members month after month. Wish you could have played the Beta for longer than a few days? Wish you could get more first looks and early access opportunities for amazing PlayStation content? Join PlayStation Plus!

As we said, we’re going to sneak you in to check out the PlayStation Plus God of War: Ascension Multiplayer Beta. Simply redeem the universal voucher below and join the action!

We want to get as many people as possible into the MP Beta, not only to really give those servers a good beating (it’s nothing personal; they just have that kind of face you want to punch/stress load), but also because we want everyone to discover the exciting, frantic multiplayer experience that gamers are raving about. So please, spread the word (and the code) and let’s see how many people we can thrust into the frenzy!

As we’ve shared before, here’s what you can expect when you jump—nay, LEAP—into the fray:

God Allegiances

• Zeus and Ares (2 of 4)

Modes

• 8-player – Team Favor of the Gods or Capture The Flag
• 4-player – Free For All
• Favor of the Gods (Deathmatch)

Maps

• Desert of Lost Souls (large map) & Forum of Hercules (arena)
• Vast amount of weapons, armors, magic, relics, and God items to customize and earn
• Level 30 cap
• VoIP (bust out those headphones and mics; team strategies are crucial, especially in CTF)

Here’s the wealth of additional content not in the Beta that will be in the final game March 12th:

• God Allegiances – Hades and Poseidon
• A third, to-be-determined In-Game Weapon Class
• More Large and Small maps created from signature God of War locations
• The ability to customize your Warrior as you unlock all the weapons, magics, armors, relics, and God items from the four allegiances — and level them up!
• An unannounced fourth multiplayer mode

Need help achieving godly multiplayer skills? Check out the Book of Divine Wisdom, a multiplayer strategy booklet created in partnership with the fine folks at Penny Arcade. Want to learn even more about the Beta? Click here.

See you online!

2013 is already shaping up to be a fantastic year for PlayStation Plus members with another strong offering in the month of January. Hopefully, you’ve been enjoying NBA Jam: On Fire Edition on your PS3 and playing Chronovolt on your PS Vita, both free to PlayStation Plus members.

This week, we’ve got some epic multiplayer action with the God of War: Ascension Multiplayer Beta, as well as Mega Man 9 and 10 joining PlayStation Plus. Read on to find out more.

Don’t have PlayStation Plus? Go to the PlayStation Store on your PS3 or PS Vita or click here to get access.

January 8th PlayStation Plus Update

God of War: Ascension Multiplayer Beta (PS3)

Access for Plus members

PlayStation Plus members get to be one of the first to delve in to what’s sure to be one of the most epic multiplayer experiences of the year. God of War: Ascension’s Multiplayer beta is offering up the signature Team Favor of the Gods mode and the yet-to-be-seen Favor of the Gods mode. In both modes, you’ll fight to reach the requisite number of favor points from the Gods, earning points via kills, bonus brutal kills, opening chests, capturing domination points and, if you’re skillful enough, performing executions using the Spear of Olympus. Check out the Beta page for tips, scoring details and more. Make sure you also click the link below to leave your feedback with the rest of the God of War community. Note: you must be a PS Plus member, or have been selected to be in the Beta previously in order to get access to this forum space.

Click here to visit the God of War: Ascension Beta Community Forum

Oh, and make sure you snag a free God of War “Eye of Kratos” avatar as well; it’s free and exclusive for PS Plus members. If you’re reading this on Monday morning, you may also want to tune in to IGN.com’s livestream from 12:00pm to 2:00pm PST. Click here to check out the action!

Mega Man 9 and 10 Combo Pack

Free for PS Plus members

Mega Man 9 and 10 were new and bold steps for a series that’s as beloved as Mega Man. Many gamers grew up on classic Mega Man games and yearned for a new 2D adventure but with the rock solid mechanics of the originals. Capcom delivered by going back to its 8-bit roots to deliver a classic Mega Man experience with all-new levels, weapons and bosses. IGN calls Mega Man 9 alone a “… mastery of 2D platforming.” Check out both Mega Man 9 and 10 for yourself; free for PS Plus members.

Eufloria

50% Discount for PS Plus members (Original price: $5.00; PS Plus Price: $2.50)

Eufloria takes the hook of controlling massive armies in real time strategy games and applies it to a massively-micro scope that asks you to take over new territories (dubbed Asteroids) all for the sake of a mythic group of beings called The Growers. If you’ve ever had any sort of fun with the strategy genre, give Eufloria a download to find out why GamesRadar.com hailed Eufloria for its “beautiful stylized graphics and RTS gameplay that works great on the PS3 controller”.

NCAA Football 13: Recent Winners Pack

Free for PS Plus members

NCAA Football 13 delivers an authentic college football experience with an insane amount of realism on the virtual gridiron. If you can’t get enough of the gameplay, you’ll be happy to know that you can pick up the Recent Winners pack, free with your PS Plus membership. This pack will unlock Tim Tebow, Mark Ingram, and Matt Leinart for use in Heisman Mode.

We’re just getting started for January’s PlayStation Plus content, so we’d love to know more about what your favorite content was from the updates last month. NBA Jam: On Fire Edition and Chronovolt are being tracked for January’s Plus updates, so you’ll see those options at the end of this month.

Tell us what you think of this week’s update in the comments below and don’t forget to vote by using the links near the top of the post. You can also delve into the PlayStation Community Forums in the PS Plus space to continue chatting about PS Plus, find other great topics to contribute your thoughts to, or start one for yourself. See you in the comments!

Today, we’re happy to announce that the PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale Beta will kick off for PlayStation Plus members on PS3 tomorrow, October 16th and expand to everyone October 23rd through PlayStation Store! What’s more, as a special treat, PS Vita users will be able dive right into the multiplayer beta starting tomorrow – no Plus subscription required. The Beta will support Cross-Play, so PS3 and PS Vita owners will be able to fight with and against each other.

So what will be in this limited Beta?

• You’ll be able to play as Kratos, Sweet Tooth, Colonel Radec, Sly Cooper, PaRappa, and Fat Princess.
• You’ll be able to play in both the Metropolis and Hades stages.
• You’ll be able to try out four-player online tournaments and 2 v 2 online tournaments. For the 2 v 2 games we’ll be supporting friend invites, so you and a friend can fight another team online.

This, of course, is only a tiny fraction of what PlayStation All-Stars has to offer, but we thought you’d love the chance to try it early and see what all the buzz is about. Be sure to hop on quickly as we’ll be ending the Beta on October 30th!

But that’s not all. As you know, we have a pre-order program running right now that unlocks a set of exclusive costumes in the game. Today we’re happy to unveil the rest of the costumes you’ll be getting with your pre-order of PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

Unlocked with your pre-order at participating retailers, these costumes will work for both the PS3 and PS Vita when it releases on November 20th, so be sure to reserve your copy today. And don’t forget: PlayStation All-Stars features Cross-Buy support, so if you purchase the PS3 version, you’ll get a downloadable PS Vita version for no extra cost.

With Beta access beginning tomorrow, we look forward to getting your feedback on the game and seeing what you think of this highly anticipated title. Spread the word and we’ll see you online!

The LittleBigPlanet Community is about to get a very special treat! Very soon, many of you will have the opportunity to participate in the LittleBigPlanet Beta on PS Vita, where you will get an exclusive sneak peek at Sackboy’s most thrilling adventure yet!

The goal of the Beta is to get feedback on the overall experience from the folk that understand it like few others – and that means you!

For a chance to take part in this exclusive event, head on over to the sign-up to register your interest right away!

http://lbpvitabeta.us.playstation.com/

It’s hard to believe that Resistance 3 is coming out next week! It’s been an amazing journey for those of us at Insomniac Games, we’ve spent the last three years ensuring this is our most polished, focused, and consistent entry in the Resistance franchise. We’re very excited to share it with you. As we get close to release, it’s time to show you our very last Dev Diary – this one focused on the high-tech weapons created or influenced by the Chimeran invaders. We were extremely pleased to work in collaboration with the PlayStation.Blog on these diaries, and we hope you love them as much as we do.

As you may know by now, the Resistance 3 Multiplayer Beta is winding down on September 4th, but we wanted to get one last blast of testing on our servers, so we’ve made the beta available to all on the PlayStation Store. We also wanted to acknowledge that while the R3 beta wasn’t always smooth sailing, we totally appreciated those of you who helped us test the game and stuck with us through the rough patches. We’ve announced a Beta Player Appreciation program – if you download and play a few rounds of the Resistance 3 Beta before it ends on September 4th, you’ll receive a couple of cool rewards for the final game. Check out our announcement about the Beta player appreciation program for more details. We’ll be continuing to update and tweak Resistance 3 with new patches and updates, as well as DLC in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

That’s all for now, we have a few more exciting things to show you here on the PlayStation.Blog in the next couple of days, so keep coming back for more. And in the meantime, check out all the latest breaking news on Resistance 3 by following Insomniac Games on Twitter, Liking us on Facebook, or joining the conversation at MyResistance.net.

In celebration of our gold announcement, we wanted to give you the first look at a brand new gameplay trailer from Resistance 3. For those of you who have followed R3 since the announcement of the game at GamesCom last year, this trailer brings things full circle. I don’t want to spoil it, so take a look below:

Hope you enjoyed the trailer, and now that we’ve gone gold, we thought this would be a good time to mention that we’ve packed the disc full of extra goodies. When you pick up your copy of Resistance 3, you’ll also be getting access to playable PlayStation demos for titles like Killzone 3, MotorStorm Apocalypse (both in 2D and 3D!) and inFAMOUS 2, as well as a host of trailers and developer videos from some of your favorite PlayStation titles, including UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception, Starhawk, God of War: Origins, and SOCOM 4. We’re also sprinkling in lots of content from our friends over at Sony Pictures and Sony Music, including movie trailers and music videos from leading artists like Ozzy Osbourne, Incubus, Foo Fighters, and AC/DC. So lots of good stuff to check out.

We hope you’re ready for the game’s launch on 09.06.11 and have got your copy pre-ordered! In the meantime, to stay up to date on all the latest news and updates about Resistance 3, be sure to follow us on Twitter or join the conversation at MyResistance.Net.

See you in the beta!

Many of you have been getting very excited about the chance to play Resistance 3′s competitive multiplayer modes online when the Resistance 3 Public Beta launches. Today, we’re happy to give some additional info about the launch dates for the beta.

For those of you who have received Early Access to the Public Beta via specially marked packages of SOCOM 4, we will be opening the beta to you at some point on Thursday, August 4th. Your existing codes will be able to be redeemed via the PlayStation Store and the Redeem Code button. PlayStation Plus subscribers in the U.S. will also be invited to join the beta beginning on August 23rd. If you’re a subscriber, all you’ll have to do is navigate to the PlayStation Plus section of the PlayStation Store to download the beta.

The Resistance 3 Beta includes two of our major maps in the game, the Seaside of Glamorgan, Wales, as well as a Trainyard in Bogota, Colombia. The Public Beta includes two of our five multiplayer modes, Team Deathmatch and Chain Reaction (the other three are Deathmatch, Breach, and Capture the Flag). You can level your character up, buy and upgrade weapons and abilities, customize your loadouts and unlock new character skins. We have capped the level in the beta at 20, so you won’t be able to get the full range of abilities, modes, maps, and weapons until the game launches in September, but we hope you enjoy this taste of the experience while helping us test our online infrastructure.

The beta will continue beyond the Early Access period, and we’ll be announcing additional ways to get in as we get closer to Resistance 3′s launch date. Can’t wait for Early Access? Some of our media partners will be giving out codes next week that will let you join the beta a couple of days early. We’ll also be giving out some early codes on our Twitter and Facebook account, so follow or Like us!

That’s all for now! We look forward to playing against you in the Resistance 3 Multiplayer Beta next week.

Wow, this was a massive week for UNCHARTED 3! We kicked off the week on Monday by updating the available gametypes in the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta to provide more variety from the prior week.

Then, starting Tuesday, the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta was opened up for wide PSN access. The Beta is totally free and available from now until July 14th – there’s no excuse not to hop in and play at least a few matches!

One day after the Beta went fully public, we passed one million unique players in the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta. Not only that, but the player count is growing with each passing day! We couldn’t be prouder of our community coming out in such numbers to play in the Uncharted 3 Multiplayer Beta.

Next week is the FINAL week in the Beta – we’ll be shutting down the servers on Thursday, July 14th – so be sure to get your fill of UNCHARTED 3 before it goes away for a few months. This will also be your last week to hit the requirements to receive the rewards we’re offering that will be active for the retail version of UNCHARTED 3 — rewards such as UNCHARTED 3 PSN Beta Tester Avatar, Treasure Hunter’s Starter Pack, in-game cash on day one and more.

On Sunday, July 10th, we’ll be updating the available gametypes and maps in the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta according to the schedule we released. We’ll be adding the never-before-seen Yemen map and it will be your first opportunity to play Co-op Adventure!

Don’t forget to visit the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta feedback forum and leave us your thoughts on the Beta and any issues you may have encountered. We’re counting on you to help us make the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer experience the best it can be!

Plus, head to your local SUBWAY restaurant in October for an exclusive opportunity to get access to the FULL UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer experience BEFORE UNCHARTED 3 is released! We’ll give you full details here on the PlayStation.Blog closer to October.

We’re exceptionally excited as today is the day the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta becomes available to everyone on PSN! By the end of today, anyone and everyone with access to the PlayStation Store should be able to view and download the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta – no codes required!

As we head into the second week of the UNCHARTED 3 Beta, we’re updating the available gametypes to the following:

July 4 to July 9

Gametypes: Team Deathmatch, Free For All, Team Objective, Hardcore, Co-op Hunter Maps: Airstrip, Chateau

You’ll notice Team Objective and Co-op Hunter as new additions for this week. I’ve been liking the Co-op Hunter gametype lately – the twist of adding in human players into what seems to be a Co-op mode is quite intriguing. You can catch some clips of Co-op Hunter in action in the video below, or on our YouTube channel:

Along with the update to the available gametypes, we’ve updated the video playlist for UNCHARTED TV to add one awesome fan created video. We’re always on the lookout for great fan created content – if you’ve got something in the works, drop us a line on the UNCHARTED 3 Fan Created Content forum on NaughtyDog.com.

You’ll also want to check out yesterday’s IGN article as they caught up with Robert Cogburn, our multiplayer game designer, to get a temperature check on the first week of the Beta – and what’s the deal with players leveling far beyond the level cap of 25 originally mentioned back when the Beta started. Robert also revealed the astounding 600,000 unique players that participated in the first week of the Beta – we’re looking forward to seeing that number grow quite a bit now that the Beta is available as a public download!

If you didn’t catch the patch notes last week and were wondering what was contained within the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta 1.01 patch, we’ve listed all of the updates below:

Relevant minor updates prior to 1.01

• Temporarily removed Plunder gametype from matchmaking
• Added in Free For All to replace Plunder
• Temporarily disabled Facebook integration

Gameplay

• Removed Yemen from map rotation in Free For All. Yemen will return during its regularly scheduled week.
• Temporarily removed Cursed from Power Play rotation.

Technical

• Fixed issue where a crash would occur when backing out of multiplayer.
• Fixed frequent slowing of framerate that could lead to the Beta freezing.
• Fixed a crash involving Emblems.

Don’t forget to leave your feedback on the Beta in the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer Beta Discussion forum – we want to hear your likes, your dislikes and any issues you have experienced. We’re counting on our community to be extremely vocal to help us shape the UNCHARTED 3 Multiplayer experience to be one of the best!