Watch now as U3’s lead designer Richard Lemarchand tells us more about this villainess, as well as the talent behind the role. He goes on to tell us about the positively jaw-dropping implementation of 3D, and how its development pays dividends even to players who don’t yet possess a 3D display.

Did you hear Richard use the word “stereoscopy” in a sentence? It speaks wonders of the English schooling system.

Stay tuned for more Resistance 3 news here on the PlayStation.Blog.

Last week, Naughty Dog and SCEA held a packed-to-the-rafters press event at the PlayStation.Blog lounge at GDC 2011 focusing on UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception. The anticipation from the invited press was palpable as they all filtered into the PlayStation.Blog Lounge – afterwards, word on the street was that we delivered.

Evan Wells, Christophe Balestra, Richard Lemarchand and yours truly were to give the demo and speak with the press – the embargo just lifted this morning, so be sure to visit your favorite gaming media outlet for their take on the event and the reveals.

We kicked off the press event with the first-ever demo outside of Naughty Dog halls of UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception in stereoscopic 3D. We chose to present a portion of the burning chateau sequence we premiered in late December. Since most people would already be familiar with the way the sequence looked and played, we thought it would make all the more evident the stellar work the Naughty Dog team has put into making the 3D presentation part of the core Naughty Dog Engine. In my opinion, with this small snippet of gameplay we’ve proven that we’re able to perfectly retain all of the spectacular visuals and effects that you’ve come to expect from an UNCHARTED game into the 3D presentation. Playing in 3D gives you some added benefits to gameplay as well, such as improved aiming around corners and an excellent read on depth for all traversal sequences, no matter how tricky. Unfortunately, until you get to see UNCHARTED 3 running in 3D at an event or in your home this November, you’ll have to rely on impressions from our attending media for how good it looked and played.

The real meat of the press event was the unveiling of the central antagonist that will try to foil Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan at every opportunity – meet Katherine Marlowe in the video above.

Marlowe is definitely not one you want to get in the way of, or worse, double cross! To give you some background, Katherine Marlowe is the coldly calculating leader of a secret society whose roots date back over four hundred years to the court of Queen Elizabeth I. She has a long-standing rivalry with Nathan Drake over Sir Francis Drake’s ring – something they both contend is rightfully theirs and is also the key to an ancient mystery. As you can tell from the cutscene above, Marlowe is a much more cerebral enemy than Drake has confronted in the past, using both psychological and physical tactics to get what she is after. Marlowe also has the assistance of her team of highly trained agents in this secret society – they are far more elusive and dangerous than the hired guns Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan have faced in the past.

Additionally, we’ve uploaded a set of stills from the cutscene, a high-resolution render of Katherine Marlowe and concept art of the agents and thugs Nathan Drake and Victor Sullivan will face in UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception.

We hope you’ve all enjoyed meeting Katherine Marlowe in our GDC 2011 reveal. Stay tuned as we still have a ton of information we want to reveal – with little to no spoilers! – over the next eight months leading up to UNCHARTED 3’s PS3 release on 11-1-11.

Competitive multiplayer has always been the core of the SOCOM franchise, and SOCOM 4: U.S. Navy SEALs takes it further than ever before with modes and options that both new recruits and veterans alike will enjoy. We’ve previously covered three of our four competitive modes — Suppression, Last Defense and Uplink — and today we’re excited to unveil our fourth mode, Bomb Squad.

In Bomb Squad, Insurgents have planted a number of bombs around the map and the Spec Ops team must defuse them all before time runs out. What makes Bomb Squad special is that it features the unique Bomb Technician character, played by one member of the Spec Ops team, who is charged with defusing the explosives. He carries both an automatic shotgun and a mobile grenade launcher and is very heavily armored, making him a deadly force on his own; that said, the technician is still an open target any time he turns his back to defuse Insurgent bombs. Succeeding in Bomb Squad requires tactics, teamwork, patience and confidence to get the job done, all pillars of the overall SOCOM experience.

When can you get your hands on Bomb Squad, you ask? Well, you’ll be able to try out all four of our modes on two maps in our upcoming beta! The SOCOM 4 Multiplayer Beta will include each of the game’s competitive multiplayer modes — Suppression, Last Defense, Uplink and Bomb Squad — all playable on the maps “Port Authority” and “Assault & Battery”. And of course, you’ll be able to play each of our modes in either of their Standard or Classic variants.

The SOCOM 4 Multiplayer Beta will roll out in four separate phases. It’ll begin with a small, private group and then expand weekly from there until it’s freely available to everyone! Here’s the schedule for each of the beta’s rollout phases:

• On March 15th, a private beta goes live. We’ll be contacting eligible players soon.
• Beginning March 22nd, PlayStation Plus members will gain access to the beta.
• On March 29th, anyone with a beta code included with Killzone 3 gains entry.
• Starting April 5th, the beta will be freely downloadable to anyone via PlayStation Network.

The beta is scheduled to run until April 13th, at which point the servers will be taken down in preparation of SOCOM 4′s retail release on April 19th!

Resistance 3 will feature 16-player Human vs. Chimera deathmatch and objective-based modes set in locations across the globe. That may seem somewhat jarring after the 40 and 60-player mayhem in RFOM and R2. Rest assured though, our biggest motivation in determining our new player count was the fun times that we and the community had on maps like RFOM’s Busyard and Rooftops, as well as the Bayou House and San Francisco maps in Resistance 2.

Resistance 3 will offer a very deep and customizable progression system. Players can create their own progression paths through multiplayer, spending their hard-earned points to customize loadouts that fit their unique playstyle. We learned a lot from Resistance 2 co-op in terms of giving players the ability to create specific roles in a team and level up different abilities – which you will see with the various active tactical and support abilities, as well as the new personal and combat attributes.

For instance – each player can choose and level different support abilities – such as a Bubble Shield, Ammo Beacon (give ammo to teammates) or Radar Beacon (enhance your team’s radar). There are also tactical abilities you can use against your enemies, such as the Doppelganger (projects an image of you nearby to distract enemies) or Dash (an explosive burst of speed to evade enemy attacks).

Furthermore, each player can select and level a personal attribute and a combat attribute. These range from the ability to have leapers bust out from your corpse, to start with more weapons in your arsenal, to reloading or firing at a faster rate. You will be able to truly customize your character loadout to fit your own unique playstyle in Resistance 3.

We’ve been working on this new direction for close to two years now, polishing and refining our maps. We’re having a ton of fun playing Resistance 3 in the office every day. We will be bringing a multiplayer beta to PSN later this year, so stay tuned to our newsletters (Check today’s for the first news on Insomniac’s Community Day on March 29th!), Full Moon Show podcast, Twitter feed and Facebook page for all the latest updates!

Hi Gamers, John McCutchan, Senior Engineer with SCEA’s Developer Support team, here to tell you about an exciting initiative we’re unveiling for PlayStation Move during GDC this week. Later today, I’ll be giving a presentation on Move.Me, a new software application that provides academics and hobbyists access to PlayStation Move’s technology, enabling them to create entirely new applications using a PC, the Move motion controller, the PlayStation Eye, and the power of the PlayStation 3 system. We know many of you might not be able to make the trek to San Francisco for the show, so we wanted to give you a quick overview of Move.Me here.

When we launched PlayStation Move last September, we knew it would set a new benchmark for precision in motion controlled gaming. Even before PlayStation Move was publicly available to all of you, we were talking about the device’s potential implications for academics and researchers. While visiting conferences like Games for Health and SIGGRAPH last year, these same researchers and academics expressed strong interest in utilizing PlayStation Move’s cutting edge technology for their own purposes. Move.Me is the result of these conversations, and is an opportunity for PlayStation to inspire new, revolutionary applications in other fields beyond gaming.

So, what exactly is Move.Me? In short, Move.Me is a server application that runs on the PS3 system. It allows anyone with a PS3 to experiment with motion controls and is officially sanctioned and supported by Sony Computer Entertainment. Move.Me sends the complete state of the PlayStation Move and navigation controllers to the PC, giving you the exact same data that licensed developers typically have access to.

What does this mean to you? We see Move.Me as an opportunity to satisfy the need for new, innovative interactive technology in fields like academia, healthcare, and more, as well as to support new developers and inspire applications that we could never have imagined. We hope it will be used to discover new ways of connecting individuals with information, and maybe even discovering a new healthcare application or two. We know that some of you out there are aspiring software developers yourselves and we’re eager to see what kinds of applications Move.Move inspires. Maybe an aspiring developer like you will create the next big thing with PlayStation Move!

Until today.

Sandbox games like inFAMOUS 2 are a ton of fun. There’s a whole city to explore, and we provide lots of stuff to do in the city… but no matter how many missions and mini-missions and systemic opportunities and branching story lines we add to the game, eventually the story ends.

We thought inFAMOUS 2 would be better if it didn’t end—if you never ran out of missions and mini-missions to play and things to do. So… we spent the last two years adding a User-Generated Content feature to the game. With User-Generated Content, inFAMOUS 2 players can build new missions, then share them with the world. I think you’ll all quickly discover that while building missions is a lot of fun, seeing people play and enjoy those missions is even better!

There really aren’t a lot of limits to the sorts of missions you can build. Sure, you can build the sort of missions that will ship on the inFAMOUS 2 disk. Mission creators have access to the same set of characters, creatures and props—so if you want to set a pack of Hive Lords rumbling after Cole through the streets of New Marais, you can do it. If you want to have Cole and Zeke face off against Nix and Kuo, you can do it.

If you want to bend the rules of inFAMOUS 2 to create new kinds of missions, you can do that too. Wish I2 had pure stealth missions? No problem, you can create stealth missions. Looking for more of a challenge? Try taking away some of Cole’s powers—see how the player does facing a platoon of Militia wielding only his Amp. Or add an old-school platforming challenge, or a race, or… I could go on all day.

It’s pretty easy to do missions that are more like mini-games, too. Skeet shooting? No problem. Disc golf? Assuming you’re happy tossing around cars instead of Frisbees, sure. How about a mission where Zeke just tells you bad jokes until you shoot him? Um, yeah, you can do that, too.

Building missions is only half the story, of course—we make it super easy to upload your missions to the network, so other players can see your cool new missions.

User-generated missions show up in the world just like regular missions. When you walk up to them, you see the PSN tag of the mission creator, plus extra information like the mission’s current rating. And back at Sucker Punch headquarters, we’ll be watching—missions that get high scores will get promoted to the Sucker Punch Featured Missions list, and those missions will end up just about everyone’s copy of New Marais.

We think this is a neat opportunity for people to become famous for the missions they build. We know there are lots of creative people out there, people who love third-person action games like I2, and have great ideas about what they’d do with the game if they had the chance. Well, now we’re giving you that chance! Let’s see what you can do!

There will be a limited public beta of inFAMOUS 2 UGC starting in early April. We’ll be announcing how to sign up for the beta on March 14… watch infamousthegame.com for more details! And be sure to watch the video above to whet your appetite…

This update is significantly different from what you, the PlayStation Home community, have come to expect from past core client updates. While versions 1.3 and 1.4 brought user-facing features like Voice Chat, Cross Game Invites, Navigation Improvements, In-Store Previews, New Item Types (such as Active Items and Companions), Optimized Load Times and Universal Game Launching, PlayStation Home v1.5 is packed with tools and features that will enable developers to expand the types of games possible on the platform – from first-person shooters with real-time, peer-to-peer multiplayer to kart racers and more. These new developer tools also allow for richer graphics and an overall improvement to frame-rate, which is something on top of everyone’s wish list.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding – which is why we want to take this opportunity to show you how PlayStation Home v1.5 will impact your in-world experience. Behold SodiumTwo, the follow up to Lockwood Publishing’s massively successful tank combat game, Sodium One. The game, which is scheduled for release in conjunction with the 1.5 update, takes advantage of v1.5 and features heavily customizable jets squaring off in fast action multiplayer races at supersonic speeds. Check it out!