Today we’re excited to announce that, next month, we’ll be releasing all of Skyrim’s add-on content on PlayStation Store. The 1.8 title update will also release just prior to the launch of Dragonborn. We’ll keep you posted as release dates get finalized both on our end and with Sony for each and its various languages. Last but not least, each add-on will be 50% off during its launch week on PSN.

Ready to learn more about the content you’ll be playing? Here’s a quick overview:

Dragonborn

In Dragonborn, you’ll journey off the coast of Morrowind, to the island of Solstheim. Encounter new towns, dungeons, and quests, as you traverse the ash wastes and glacial valleys of this new land. Become more powerful with shouts that bend the will of your enemies, and even tame dragons. Your fate, and the fate of Solstheim, hangs in the balance as you face off against your deadliest adversary – the first Dragonborn.

• Explore Beyond Skyrim – Leave the province of Skyrim and travel to the coastal island of Solstheim. Encounter the Dark Elven settlers of Raven Rock and the native Skaal, as you unravel the mystery of a Dragonborn’s return.
• Become the Ultimate Dragonborn – Harness the power of the Voice as you face off against the first Dragonborn. Wield new shouts and spells including Dragon Aspect – allowing you to summon the inner power of a dragon to deliver colossal blows and strengthen other shouts.
• New Powers – Discover dark powers as you journey into a new Daedric realm. Collect books of forbidden knowledge and choose new paths for your skills and abilities.
• New dungeons, creatures, weapons, and more – Suit up in Bonemold and Chitin armors and wield Stalhrim weapons as you navigate through a myriad of dungeons. Battle formidable foes like Ash Spawn, Rieklings, and more.

Hearthfire

In Hearthfire, you can purchase land and build your own home from the ground up – from a simple one-room cottage to a sprawling compound complete with an armory, alchemy laboratory, stable, garden, and more. Use all-new tools like the drafting table and carpenter’s workbench to transform quarried stone, clay, and sawn logs into structures and furnishings. Even transform your house into a home by adopting children.

• Choose Your Land – Choose from property in the salt marshes of Hjaalmarch, the forests of Falkreath, or the vast tundra of The Pale. For the more ambitious landowner, purchase multiple plots and start building a real estate empire.
• Customize Your Home – Expand your home with a variety of room combinations including an armory, alchemy tower, kitchen, trophy room and more. Grow plants in your new greenhouse, cultivate slaughterfish in the fish hatchery, house your Arcane Enchanter in the enchanting tower, or display your latest conquest in the trophy room. Add additional features like stables, mills, smelters, gardens and more.
• New Objectives and Interactions – Guard your home from unwanted visitors like marauding kidnappers, armed bandits, and skeever infestations. Turn almost any follower into your personal steward to improve and protect your home. Or if you require more help, hire a personal bard or carriage driver to ease the burdens of home ownership.
• Adoption – Transform your house into a home with Hearthfire’s all-new adoption system. Adopt children and discover new ways to interact with your family. Play games with the kids, allow them to have pets and gain new bonuses from having a family.

Dawnguard

In Dawnguard, you’ll face the Vampire Lord Harkon, who has returned to power. By using the Elder Scrolls, he seeks to do the unthinkable — end the sun itself. Will you join the ancient order of the Dawnguard and stop him? Or will you become a Vampire Lord yourself? Featuring an all new faction questline and locations, the ultimate choice will be yours.

• New Weapons, Armor, Spells and Shouts – Join the Dawnguard and wield all new crossbows and craft your own arrows, bolts, and Dragonbone weapons. Use new weapons, armor, spells and shouts, including the Soul Tear shout – that rips the souls from your enemies and turns them into your minions.
• Become a Vampire Lord – Side with the vampires and become a Vampire Lord yourself. Hover across the ground, turn yourself into bats, levitate your enemies as you drain their life, and more. The Vampire Lord features its own upgradable perk system.
• Werewolf Perks added – Playing as a werewolf now has its own upgradable perk system including Bestial Strength, Animal Vigor, and Savage Feeding.
• New Locations and Creatures – Choose from two new fortresses to upgrade and call home, Castle Volkihar or Fort Dawnguard. Discover lost valleys and travel to a new realm of Oblivion, the Soul Cairn. Battle new creatures including Death Hounds, Gargoyles, Armored Trolls, and all new vampires and dragons.

Hey there, Anthony Burch from Gearbox here! Sir Hammerlock had told me that in the past he wrote his PlayStation fans a letter, so naturally when I mentioned I was writing this blog post he jumped at the opportunity to do it for me. Sucker! He’s all book smarts.

An Addendum (the nitty-gritty details):

Sir Hammerlock’s Big Game Hunt is the third of four add-on content campaigns for Borderlands 2 and is available individually for $9.99 or as part of the Season Pass. The fourth add-on content campaign will be available by June 2013 and is also part of the Season Pass.

Arriving exclusively for Gran Turismo 5 this Tuesday, the 2014 Corvette Stingray DLC will be available for free through PlayStation Store.

Officially announced at the LA Auto Show last November, Polyphony Digital and Chevrolet worked very closely for months in developing an exclusive firsthand driving experience of the Corvette C7 in Gran Turismo 5. Since its introduction, nearly 500,000 people around the world have driven the camouflaged Corvette Test Prototype. And now, only just the day after the Corvette Stingray’s world debut at the North American International Auto Show, the DLC will be available exclusively through PS Store starting Tuesday.

During the creation of the virtual Corvette Stingray, careful attention was paid to the tiniest details of the new design inside and out, as well as to the enhanced performance and driving characteristics — right down to the shift schedule for the 7-speed manual transmission.

The Corvette Stingray will produce an estimated 450 horsepower and 450 ft. lbs. of torque, is capable of accelerating from 0-60 in less than four seconds and will achieve more than 1g in cornering grip. It will also be the most fuel-efficient Corvette ever, exceeding the EPA-estimated 26 MPG of the current model.

For more information and video content, check out www.one13thirteen.com. Enthusiasts can join the conversation about the next-generation Corvette and keep track of new announcements on Facebook and Twitter.

Escape Plan‘s Director’s Cut DLC for PS Vita is out today, with new content for everyone! Patch 1.04 also goes live with the new direct controls, and we’re adding new visual stimulation for you costume fans.

After working on the project for over a year we decided to bring back some of our favorite level designs, and needless to say, we love a challenge! This is why the Director’s Cut pack is filled with the most devious and evil tricks that Bakuki ever conceived. Including the Slap-a-ma-tron 9001, and a butt-ton of mind-bending puzzles.

Continuing tradition, we have added four new costumes to the dressing room. Dress Lil and Laarg in a new spectrum of costumes such as Timeless and Lost Clause, with Halloweeners and I’m with Cupid unlocked by playing through the 21 Director’s Cut levels.

We’ve also added a new poke control to allow the player to stop the selected character with the ease of a button, as well as adding the directional pad to start the character’s march. Using your feedback we’ve done our best to get the game to be yours as much as it is ours. Let us know what you think!

Everyone will get the Timeless and Lost Clause costumes with Patch 1.04, as well as the new controls. However, only Director’s Cut buyers will get access to the new levels, trophies and remaining costumes.

Escape Plan Director’s Cut will be available in the PlayStation Store for $4.99 with today’s update.

For those who haven’t experienced the touching adventure of Lil and Laarg, you can play through 16 of the zany levels of the original game by downloading the Escape Plan Demo currently available on PSN. Be sure to try it out and, as always, provide feedback in the comments below. We love hearing it!

For multiplayer, we consider Mass Effect 3′s offerings to be more of a service than a product you purchase. We always said that we wouldn’t do multiplayer in our games unless it was done properly, and supporting it fully well after launch is something we are committed to. The ideas behind Resurgence, Rebellion and Earth were simple: we want to keep the community engaged in our game, keep the content fresh, and most importantly, we want to foster a level of progression that is synonymous with Mass Effect. Fantasy fulfillment has always been something that is extremely important to us, even in multiplayer. Allowing players to do awesome things in the Mass Effect universe that work well outside of Commander Shepard’s narrative is important. Adding amazing new weapons like the Cerberus Harrier or classes like the N7 Shadow were all about that.

Of course, story-based DLC has always been a part of the Mass Effect pedigree. At BioWare, it’s part of our culture to create emotionally charged stories for our fans. We always aim to deliver an impactful narrative while offering the player’s choice. This is challenging, but it is also extremely rewarding for us. As mentioned before, when we shipped Mass Effect 3, we knew there were many opportunities within the universe for us to tell new stories. Mass Effect 3: From Ashes, our first single player DLC, is a great example of how we were able to visit a new era in the Mass Effect universe. From Ashes also allowed our fans to gain a new squad member with Javik, something that has become signature in our previous DLC packs.

And that’s why Mass Effect 3: Leviathan is so exciting for us! It gives us the chance to jump back into Commander Shepard’s story, and to continue exploring some of the themes that are important to the trilogy, including the origin of the Reapers. We wanted to make sure that we delivered content to the fans that was unlike anything we had ever done before. Leviathan is all about exploration and mystery. Players don’t know where the story will take them next, and they’re pushed to explore these new fantastic locations that they’ve never seen. In addition to these new worlds, Leviathan is full of great new characters that help Shepard unravel the mystery of Leviathan. Players get to interact with these characters through more than 2,000 new lines of recorded dialogue and dozens of new cinematic sequences. If it’s combat and gameplay that you’re after, Leviathan delivers on that too. Players will dive into an adventure that will challenge their abilities, and they’ll be given the chance to unlock two weapons previously only available to pre-order customers earlier this year.

We’re proud to bring Mass Effect 3: Leviathan to our fans. Grab it when it goes live on PSN later today, and let us know what you think!

Annihilation — the third pack of DLC maps for Call of Duty: Black Ops – comes to the PlayStation 3 late tonight after 2am Pacific Time. The DLC offers four new multiplayer arenas and a new jungle-based Zombies survival experience in Shangri-Li. In celebration of the big release, developer Treyarch has deemed that the double XP will flow all weekend long. I’ll be hosting a gameplay session this Friday night to soak some of that up myself, and my favorite game type is Domination. Truth be told, I’m not that good a shot, so objective-based modes like this one let me help the team and keep leveing up even if I’m nowhere near the top of the K/D ratios.

In that spirit, I wanted to offer some tips for the four new maps. I don’t know if we’ll meet up on the same team or on opposite sides of a red dot sight, but I’m willing to take that risk in the name of having fun…

Drive In

I like this map a lot. Snipers perched in the projection room and in the screen will no doubt trade fire over the B flag in the middle of the map, but that also makes them susceptible to backstabs and grenades while they’re preoccupied. If you sneak up behind them, beware their defensive claymores. If you prefer to play defensively yourself, the box office near A is often underutilized as a hiding spot; you’ve got a good view of the flag and the most popular paths for advancing troops, so don’t be afraid to crouch in the ticket booth and guard your flag. Since all three flags fall in a line (more or less), consider Napalm Strike as a killstreak reward; if you drop a bit of linear fire, you can often shut down A & B or B & C and force the opponents to the edges of the map. Oh, and while you’re off to the left side, stop in the arcade and check out the pinball machines for a nice in-joke.

Hazard

This golf course is a sniper’s dream – the gazebo over A and the bridge near C give you clear lines of sight all the way down the fairway. As a result, expect B to be a nightmare to capture, especially since it’s easily attacked from the left or the right side as well. Gas grenades are great defensively at B, so consider a loadout with Tactical Mask to counteract that if you’re trying to capture. Personally, I prefer to try to control A and C and wait it out; sneak a claymore in near the chess table at C to help conceal it, and use the shadows at A to your advantage on defense.

Hangar 18

This level’s flags are spread out in a wide triangle pattern, with the B flag directly under the nose of the SR-71 Blackbird. B is particularly hard to capture because it’s so exposed and can be protected by long-range fire – there’s a building directly above on the A side that’s perfect for someone with a sniper or assault rifle, not to mention the tarped shipping crates that provide both height and cover for guards. But while everybody’s paying attention to the nose of the plane, don’t neglect its engines – flanking from the hangar itself (especially if you lead with a flashbang or concussion) is usually quite effective.

Silo

Silo can be overwhelming, as there are many blind corners and unusual pieces of cover – those cement cylinders, for instance. There’s a fair amount of verticality to the map; it doesn’t immediately look like Kowloon, but with several ladders, staircases, and scaffoldings to climb, it kind of plays like its Russian cousin. Plus, its highs are very high, giving snipers excellent views of B. However, A and C are less open from the most popular sniper perches – each has a tall wall between it and the middle of the map – so load up with shotguns and SMGs and storm them. The best team balance I’ve seen for Domination is two dedicated snipers and four roamers/cappers, working together. You really need teamwork on this one to be effective.

Above all, regardless of what map you play, use your voice! Most Domination games can be aided by simple status reports – every player can act as a scout. If three people took you out at A, say “Three at A” to prepare anybody else on your team. Simple, direct intel like that is always appreciated by teammates who want to work together.

Enjoy the new maps, enjoy this weekend’s double XP, and jump in for my Friday night session if you can; my PSN ID is OneOfSwords.

Available for ALL 30 MLB Teams, the MLB Dynamic Stadium Themes feature dynamic weather effects including changes depending on the time of day. Ambient crowd movement, waving flags, stadium-specific details and a fluid baseball stitch in your team’s colors make this the ultimate way to experience your favorite team’s home field!

The Phillies Dynamic Stadium Theme, Citizens Bank Park, features a moving Liberty Bell just like in real life. Minute Maid Park in Houston is highlighted by the outfield train that runs every time the Astros hit a Home Run. Yankee Stadium has special LED signage.

To get your MLB Dynamic Stadium Theme log on to the PlayStation Network today and search “MLB The Show.” The MLB Dynamic Stadiums Themes are available for ALL baseball fans, as well as owners of the Most Realistic Baseball Game Ever, MLB 11 The Show.

For all you San Francisco Giants fans, we are offering a Special Edition San Francisco Giants Dynamic Stadium Theme including World Series Champion artwork and a rotating World Series Trophy.

ALL 30 MLB Dynamic Stadium Themes are available for $2.99. Get your MLB Dynamic Stadium Theme today!

As the title suggests, Ezio’s old friend and confidant is in trouble. Now Ezio has taken upon himself to rescue Leonardo Da Vinci. The Da Vinci Disappearance will include eight missions, which will be accessed through markers on your map of Rome (similar to the Copernicus Conspiracy). Ezio will also travel to two new locations and meet Leonardo’s assistant, Salai (who may not have as high of moral standards as Leonardo).

But we didn’t stop there, as we’ll be making updates to multiplayer, including adding four new playable characters. Check out our new trailer showing off some of the new assassins that will be available:

The Da Vinci Disappearance will also include one new map and two new modes. The new map will bring the battle of assassins to Alhambra, a multi-leveled Spanish city featuring outdoor and indoor areas. Also, we’ll be bringing a classic free-for-all death match mode called Assassinate and team mode called Escort where teams must protect/assassinate a VIP target.

Look for The Da Vinci Disappearance to go live on the PlayStation Store tomorrow. Also, be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more Assassin’s Creed updates.

Later today, the Dead Space development team will be bringing an all-new experience to your PS3 with Dead Space 2: Severed! Dead Space 2: Severed will follow the story of Gabe Weller, one of the characters from Dead Space: Extraction, as he travels through the Sprawl on a mission to find and rescue his wife, Lexine. Gabe, who is a security officer by trade, will fight his way through the Titan Mines and the Hospital in a journey that will offer lots of new and exciting game-play for the Dead Space community.

Given that Gabe Weller is a security officer by trade, we wanted to create an experience that focused on his skill-set through pacing, game-play mechanics, as well as combat & level design. Gabe Weller will start off with a Pulse Rifle and a Seeker Rifle as his default weapons which will give players a new way to approach combat – he’s equipped to take the action to the Necromorph forces. From the beginning of the Severed experience players should notice the difference in game-play, and there will definitely be a number of curve balls for players throughout the chapters. One of the most exciting additions to the game is the “Twitcher” which was a character from the original Dead Space game who has returned in Severed – he’s extremely fast, eerie, sporadic, and difficult to dismember.

The development team has definitely worked long and hard on Severed in order to create an experience that’s frightening, packed full of action, and a ton of fun to play. We really hope that you enjoy playing Severed, and we’re looking forward to seeing how many people can earn all of the new Trophies within Severed!

Thank you for your continued support!

Dead Space 2 gets an afterlife tomorrow with the PSN release of Dead Space 2: Severed. This downloadable expansion picks up where PlayStation Move-enabled shooter Dead Space: Extraction left off, with (spoiler!) the escape of security officer Gabe Weller and surveyor Lexine Murdoch from the doomed colony of Aegis VII. Fate ultimately brings the pair to another very bad place: the Sprawl, otherwise known as the source of Dead Space 2’s Necromorph outbreak. While Issac Clarke is busy tracking down the Marker and battling his inner demons, Gabe is pursuing a more personal objective – locating Lexine, who’s been abandoned somewhere in the dark recesses of the station. Played through Gabe’s eyes, Severed brings a different perspective to the events of Dead Space 2 and fleshes out the backstory of both characters, complete with a few twists and turns for good measure.

I went hands-on with the first chapter of Severed in a guided tour narrated by Dead Space 2 Producer Scott Probst and Executive Producer Steve Papoutsis. Decked out in high-tech armor and packing a suped-up pulse rifle and ultra-precise Seeker Rifle, Gabe Weller is a bit more battle-ready than series everyman Issac Clarke. “We tailored the level layout and combat design around the fact that Gabe is a security officer,” Producer Scott Probst explains, “which makes Severed somewhat more action-focused.” Severed’s faster, more aggressive pacing is noted in its hair-raising battle sequences, and accelerated even further with the addition of a new Necromorph breed: the Twitcher.

Twitchers were introduced in the original Dead Space, and their blistering speed and spastic movements quickly made them among the game’s most-feared enemies. “Twitchers became fused with a Stasis module and it had an adverse effect,” Executive Producer Steve Papoutsis recalls. “Rather than slowing them down, it sped them up.” Though Twitchers were conspicuously absent in Dead Space 2, Severed drags these terrors back into the spotlight. The Twitchers in Severed live up to their name, bobbing and weaving around shots with unnerving ease. Combined with the brisker combat pacing, the Twitchers help give Severed a steeper difficulty that will keep Dead Space 2 veterans on their toes. “You’re getting a challenge, but you’re also getting a different experience,” Probst adds. “We wanted to offer something new and cool from a gameplay perspective.”

While the stronger action hook is a welcome change of pace, I suspect many players will ultimately play Severed to learn what happened to Gabe and Lexine after the events of Dead Space: Extraction. “It’s definitely worth playing Extraction before playing Severed,” Papoutsis notes. “But it’s not required. This story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” Of course, PS3 owners have no excuses – Extraction is included with the limited edition of Dead Space 2. Whether Dead Space 2 will see further downloadable episodes that will expand the Dead Space fiction in other ways remains an open question. “We’ll see what people want,” Papoutsis says. “It depends on people’s appetite.”

Dead Space 2: Severed hits the PlayStation Store tomorrow for $6.99 with two new single-player chapters and new Trophies.