Hey everyone, I’ve got some exciting news out there for all you PlayStation Network downloadable gaming fans! I am happy to announce that Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE) and PopCap have teamed up to bring our hit casual game titles to PSN and PLAYSTATION 3 for the first time ever! This collaboration has been a long time coming, so we’re happy to finally be able to talk about it with you guys.

Our first title is none other than the classic online puzzle game Bejeweled 2. Many of you may be familiar with the franchise – it has won dozens of awards and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. It’s our biggest franchise at PopCap and our most successful title, which is why we chose Bejeweled 2 as our first title for PSN and PS3. The game is a natural fit for the platform – it plays great, looks great and is as compelling as ever. And there is a ton of gameplay in Bejeweled 2 – four different game modes, more than 60 puzzles, power-ups, high-definition graphics and much more. And if you’re like me, you’ll sit there for hours playing late into the night, wondering why you’re unable to pull yourself away!

The team at SOE has been fantastic to work with, and they share our vision of making the best versions of our games possible, with features that are specific to the PS3 platform. For Bejeweled 2, that means exclusive stuff like Trophy support and PSP remote play, which you’ll only find on PSN. We’ve got similar exclusive features (and some surprises) planned for future games and franchises that we plan to produce as part of this alliance.

And this is just the beginning. Teams at PopCap and SOE are hard at work developing several more titles for PSN, to be announced soon. We are so psyched to finally be on PS3 and can’t wait to see you online.

Greg Canessa

JEOPARDY!, as you may know, is one of the most popular game shows on television and is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season. During my time here at SONY, I have had the good fortune to work on several games based on JEOPARDY!, including multiple versions for PCs and mobile phones, as well as skill-based and ITV versions. The PSN version, however, is easily the best looking and marks the first time we have been able to include real-time multiplayer capabilities.

While having multiplayer games was one of the key features we wanted to include, we also needed the game to look like the TV show. Everyone on our team worked on dual monitors, and it was common to see the TV show running on one monitor with the game engine or Maya on the other. Here are a couple of screen shots for comparison:

Some features of the game include:

• More than 2,500 clues and categories randomized for multiplayer games.
• Single-player games versus AI with three levels of difficulty (Average, Smart and Genius).
• Online and offline multiplayer games.
• Voice chat for online multiplayer games.
• Expansion packs with new content (coming in 2009).

During the course of production, we worked closely with the producers of the TV show to make sure that we could bring you a fun game that is true to the JEOPARDY! brand. However, I have already seen a few forum complaints in regards to the game trailer about the game being multiple choice. We made this design decision so that single-player and multiplayer games would have a quick pace to them. I have played the PS2 version of the game where players had to use the DualShock to type in responses. This input mechanism felt tedious in single-player games and would be just downright painful in multiplayer games. We looked into the idea of using voice recognition, which would have been a lot of fun. The PS3 has the power to do it, and we saw great middleware that would have made it all possible. However, we felt that by making the game require a Bluetooth headset, it would limit its accessibility. Maybe in the next version…

Also, I want to point out that the game does not give you the choices until after you buzz in. This means that players commit to dollar amounts upfront before getting a chance to see the responses. This adds a bit of risk to the game, and players who continually buzz in first, thinking it will be easy to select the right response, might find themselves in third place more often than other players.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great time playing JEOPARDY! on the PS3. I look forward to reading your comments (even the negative ones – well, maybe I do not look forward to them, but I certainly will read them) and will do my best to respond to frequently asked questions when I can.

PS – Wheel of Fortune is already in production. More on that coming soon ….

It was a bit loud in the hall, so apologies for that.

Feel free to post questions below, but since the SOE team is still in San Diego, don’t look for them to jump in with answers quite yet. As Jens states in the video, we’ll have more on DCUO here on the blog – and I’ll make sure that the team sees your questions.

If you’re planning on attending Comic-Con between now and Sunday, feel free to go drop by the SOE booth (#4319) to go hands on with DCUO.

We get a lot of questions about how the SOE Seattle studio got started… In 2005, a few of the core Mythica development team broke away from the Microsoft games group to form a startup company called “FireAnt Games.” Our primary goal when we founded the company was to bring the MMO space to more of the mainstream gamer audience. Specifically, we wanted to target the shooter audience and the console gamer. Well, it happened that SOE was thinking the same thing, and they asked us to start up their Seattle studio. More than 3 years and 80 people later, we are well into building The Agency. Our goal is to deliver an online world where players can “live the life of an elite agent,” full of the over-the-top action, exotic locales, and extravagant lifestyles the spy genre is known for.

We just held an open house event here at our Seattle studio for folks attending the ION Game Conference. It was a blast! We showed off some of the amazing art our talented crew has been generating in a never before seen art gallery, and we introduced The Agency to a bunch of new people. Of course, we also showed how you can take some everyday frozen water and turn it into an amazing Agency sculpture capable of delivering some hard spirits. A warning I gave during my introduction threatened to become our new tagline: “Don’t lick the gun.” (I personally think this is good advice in general, regardless of what the gun is actually made out of.)

You can get a more detailed behind the scenes peek at what went down at the SOE Seattle open house on G4’s X-Play, tonight (May 19th) at 8:00pm EST. You can also view our most recent trailer for The Agency on their website.

I look forward to keeping everybody informed on The Agency’s development right here on the PlayStation.Blog, please look out in the future for more posts from me and my team. Thanks for reading!

This message will self destruct in five…four…three…

]]> http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008/05/meet-soe-the-agency/feed/ 64