Wheels of Destruction originally had five different maps. It was enough for the start, as each map had a very distinct configuration and size, but we expected our players to want more. Hence, our first DLC, “Moscovian Mayhem,” contains a new map of post-apocalyptic Moscow, where the players show their skills among the ruins of the Kremlin. The goal with this DLC is to create a fresh experience for players, so this map was created with completely different set of objectives in mind, resulting in a map designed for a radically different “feel” compared to the other maps. Everything’s different: size, topology, and, most importantly, the number of power-ups that fill the level.

Exclusive for the PlayStation Blog readers, here’s the level map with a bunch of hints on how to play it.

We’ve anticipated a solid amount of feedback from the player community we’d like to address. Some of it was expected – the players wanted more content–and we were prepared to deliver. However, some players also have troubles with mastering the controls. We’ve mustered our engineering team to suggest controls that would better suit fresh players. The main challenge remains unchanged, as players still need to control the car, with its size and inertia, while simultaneously controlling the weapons. We sifted through various versions before finally finding one that suited everyone – and we’re happy to offer it to you, our players!

Besides the new map and configurations, this DLC brings quite a few changes to auto-matching and bot AI to make the game even more comfortable. For example, you won’t be alone in either a Ranked or Unranked game, since there are warm-up bots to keep you company while other players are joining the game. Even then, the behind-the-scenes technology has been greatly improved to help make sure players won’t be playing against bots for too long.

In this edition, host Christina Lee highlights the new maps being released in the UNCHARTED 3: Drake’s Deception Map Pack. Check out highlights of the four new multiplayer maps featuring new terrain, improved gameplay and even more amazing environments.

For vehicle combat fans, the new PSN exclusive Wheels of Destruction is a fast-paced and strategic multiplayer combat racing game that allows players to switch classes within a match. Also featured is a look at the immersive interactive experience of Datura (from the Linger in Shadows team) which incorporates the PlayStation Move motion controller to investigate a mysterious forest, solve puzzles and, well, much like ‘Linger’, requires that you just check it out for yourself.

The Top 10 features the most popular downloads of March and new video releases highlight Tom Cruise running very fast again in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Mark Wahlberg being good bad guy in Contraband

Watch this edition right here on the PlayStation.Blog or download HD, SD, and PS Vita versions from the PlayStation Store after today’s update.

We hope you enjoy this quick look at what’s happening on PlayStation.

It’s official: Spring Fever has been elevated to a full-on pandemic and gamers everywhere are showing symptoms. Case in point: our week-one title Journey has become the fastest-selling PSN title ever released by SCEA! Due to the overwhelming response to Spring Fever, we are delivering a bonus week packed with more special offers, starting with the multiplayer car combat game Wheels of Destruction and a 20% discount for PlayStation Plus members!

Wheels of Destruction‘s vehicular mayhem gives you tons of awesome weapons to decimate your enemies in the multiplayer arena. You can learn more about Wheels of Destruction in a series of dev diaries and videos here.

If automotive ultraviolence isn’t your bag, we hope you got a chance to check out PSN’s fastest-selling game Journey, an immersive online adventure that has enchanted gamers and critics alike. Journey is one trip you won’t want to miss, providing a deeply personal experience in which your path crosses with other players in unusual ways. You’ll also want to explore the eerie puzzles of Closure, last week’s highly reviewed Spring Fever entry.

Also arriving with this final week of Spring Fever is a deep 30% discount for Mortal Kombat content, with PlayStation Plus subscribers getting a whopping 50% off! Choose from any of the DLC packs for WB Interactive’s 2011 fighter Mortal Kombat, or pick up Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection and Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe! They’re a bloody good time.

Read on for the full list of this week’s Spring Fever releases.

Wheels of Destruction

• PS3 Game (Reg. $9.99, PS Plus $7.99)

Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection

• PS3 Game (Reg. $9.99, Sale $6.99, PS Plus $4.89)

Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe

• PS3 Game (Reg. $19.99, Sale $13.99, PS Plus $9.79)

Mortal Kombat

• DLC Warrior Bundle (Reg. $14.99, Sale $10.49, PS Plus $7.34)
• Warrior Freddy Krueger (Reg. $4.99, Sale $3.49, PS Plus $2.44)
• Warrior Kenshi (Reg. $4.99, Sale $3.49, PS Plus $2.44)
• Warrior Rain (Reg. $4.99, Sale $3.49, PS Plus $2.44)
• Warrior Skarlet (Reg. $4.99, Sale $3.49, PS Plus $2.44)
• Klassic Skins Pack 1 (Reg. $4.99, Sale $3.49, PS Plus $2.44)

The weapon system in Wheels of Destruction is beautifully familiar yet dynamic and designed to keep the game balanced. Players who know class-based shooters like Unreal Tournament and Team Fortress 2 will instantly feel at home. The game has four weapon types, each with primary and alternate fire conveniently selectable on the d-pad. This simple and intuitive system actually provides 11 unique ways to decimate opponents.

The Gatling gun is the initial weapon that everyone has from the start of a match. Available to the player throughout, it never runs out of ammo but is relatively weak and imprecise. However, its alternate fire is tremendously powerful – it’s a very short-ranged spread shot shotgun with massive force. Players with great skill and a bit of luck can land an instant kill shot but, most of the time, you’re better off hunting for new weapons.

The next gun is almost as accessible and familiar – the rockets and mortar. Like many games, the rocket is pretty straight-forward. It’s not necessarily a ‘noobtube,’ but it doesn’t take much strategy to get in a quick kill shot.

Opponents can certainly dodge these advances, but the mortar is a bit harder to avoid. This alternate attack lunges a rocket into the battle and creates a massive blast, hurling all affected vehicles into the air – allies included. Stunning your enemies can come at the cost of stunning your allies, but it goes a long way in a skirmish when enemy defenses are compromised. A cool tip: Expert players can master the mortar jump. Fire into the ground while accelerating to gain vantage points whenever jump pads and ramps aren’t close by, or use the mortar to knock someone off their ill-gained vantage point.

The flamethrower shoots catalytic additives that will happily melt metal. Cake on this plasma, and the damage per second improves exponentially. Keeping a predatory vehicle in the stream can be quite the task, though. Slower, heavier vehicles are the most vulnerable to the fury of flames. The fire ring, the flamethrower’s alternative fire, lights up all opponents within a set radius. This spread isn’t too vast — nor is it all that destructive — but players can fire haphazardly into a crowd, dusting off the smaller enemies. Both flamethrower and fire ring ignore enemy shields, so an opportune attack with this weapon can be perfect. If an enemy doesn’t die, the heat will drive their electronic circuits crazy and aiming becomes impossible while they burn. If you find yourself on the receiving end of an inferno, quickly pick up a repair power-up and you’ll be good to go.

The rail gun is a weapon for true experts. It allows players to take out an opponent with a single surgical hit spanning the entire map; a player equipped with a rail gun in a strategically sound vantage point and has the battle field in their possession. The rail gun has a lengthy recharge, and a single shot turns all the attention to that player, but it’s worth it all for one great, tide-turning shot. The rail gun’s alternate shot is the BFG. Players can obliterate four to five opponents with a lucky shot. Because it’s an experimental prototype of a new future weapon, its behavior is not always predictable. Don’t waste it.

Players should find that the weapon system is varied yet simple. By having an accessible set of weapons, we allow the player to find a setup that’s comfortable for them. Ultimately, skill is always the winning factor – that’s how we built the game.

At the beginning, our weapons were at a fixed crux to always shoot forward as the car moves. As a result, you could either shoot while at a standstill, or shoot in every direction, when rotating the car or chasing someone. Everything became a merry-go-round where ‘A’ chased ‘B’ and shot at him, while ‘B’ was chasing ‘C’ who in turn was chasing ‘A’.

We knew we needed another approach. The tried-and-true approach is the have the left stick control the vehicle and the right stick control the camera and the direction of weapon fire.

This immediately resulted in lower game speed. It's rather difficult to drive somewhere while watching from the side, or backwards. You’re driving into a wall within seconds. Ultimately, everyone ends up standing in their own corner, shooting at everyone. After you kill an enemy, you get a chance to move somewhere else, until you meet some other opponent.

So I asked our development team to implement some non-standard controls I came up with. From the second our mechanic was being drafted, we knew it’d find that sweet spot we were looking for. The triggers handle the gas and brakes, and the left stick controls the aiming and steering. The cars can only turn so fast, but the gun will track along with the camera and snap onto enemies with aim assist. To help influence the handling, players must drift, jump and boost.

This mechanic is fresh and takes some getting used to, but we fully expect the gamers to get the hang out of it. In the office, it took us only about 20 minutes for it to feel as natural as such genres as twin stick shooters and FPS games feel to us now. It became intrinsic to the experience.

In all our game trailers, all the cars are controlled by real players; there is no extra animation there. Check the Scout at 0:35 in the trailer above -- the blue Scout rushes ahead and follows the enemy with his machine gun, firing all the time. There is no auto-aim; it's a player who drives by intuition with a control scheme that fits the needs of those in a crush-or-be-crushed deathmatch. That's your typical Wheels of Destruction encounter.

Earlier in the development cycle, considered expanding this concept further still with unique characters. However, that idea ended up on the cutting-room floor for several reasons. When presented with too many choices, players tend to fall into an “analysis paralysis” worse than prom night. Too much time spent “mini-maxing” skill trees can take the player out of what we want to be a fast-paced experience.

When you’re playing a single-player game, it’s natural to want to make your character your own. But with Wheels of Destruction we’re interested in creating a visceral online game with solid matchmaking based on raw skill. You boot the game, choose your class and game mode, and in no time you’ll be in the middle of a vehicular battle royale. To support this tempo, you need to be able to make quick choices.

This mindset of on-the-fly decision making led us to another conclusion altogether. Much like the multiplayer shooters we all know so well, players will be able to change their class on the fly like a weapon loadout — a key feature, as the battlefields in Wheels of Destruction are constantly evolving with different needs.

Our class-based system also enables players to experiment and never become too embedded in any one play style, as each car boasts different stats in areas such as speed, rate of fire, and armor. There’s also a separate vehicle class that sets itself apart with exclusive tactical functionality — we’ll be announcing more details on that soon.

Watch the new trailer to see how our Heavy vehicle class bullies his opponents on the battlefield, or catch our with our previous video showing off the nimble Scout class.

Before we got anywhere, we had to pick a platform, and going PSN exclusive was an obvious choice for us. Sony’s platform has become much easier to develop on, and the fact that we’re able to self-publish goes a long way in retaining our mindshare over the game. We wanted to know that every bit of perfection and every flaw was of our own design.

Once we had our platform in mind, we began searching for an engine. After trying as many that came through our doors, we found our place with the Unreal Engine, thanks to its great graphics and smooth asset production pipeline. We wanted to make the most out of the tools we had at our disposal. Our ideas were grand, with levels five times larger than what production suggested we’d be able to accomplish. We knew that a fine balance had to be made to have the world feel large while still allowing the vehicles to conquer the terrain. Cars cover a lot of ground, eliminating opponents from unbelievable distances. By staying true to our epic ideas, we could make the game more tactical and the speed feel more real.

The engine allotted us an abundance of opportunity. High-quality textures, visual effects and a robust physics engine made Unreal not only a development tool, but an inspiration. The PhysX library that’s built into Unreal Engine gave us the idea to create a world with quite lofty physics…literally. Having cars soar above enemies effortlessly allowed the game to not be constricted to the established laws of car combat. With the physics we’ve created, players can feel the thrill of driving while having the tactical flavorings that high-flying jumps allow.

We spent a lot of time thinking about how to make a game that was accessible yet deadly competitive. What we conceived became an arcade-style death pit of a car combat game, yet with precise control. This allowed us to build a game that was, as many state, “easy to learn, hard to master.” The game plays blazingly fast and allows players to shoot accurately using a unique control scheme built around controlling the vehicle with a single analog stick. The resulting dynamical combat is something we haven’t seen on PS3 before.

One of the last mechanics we solidified was the class system. We wanted every person who plays to find a style that best fits their gameplay. By taking a classic approach, classes like the scout (a speed class) and heavy (a tank class) became more identifiable. Everyone could be on an even keel and still have a car that played in a unique and specific way. Better yet, this allowed us to give players the option of choosing and switching classes throughout a match, much like a loadout.

Throughout development, we were seeing anywhere from 150-200 lethal encounters per match; every five seconds, an opponent is getting wasted off its wheels going 150mph. This was a pleasant set of data for us to come across, as one of our paramount goals in this game is to create a visceral online tournament. We were thrilled to see that our stress on high speed, soaring heights and large maps made for a game that was solid with sturdy netcode and a fluid framerate.

The game’s almost here. It’s rife with weapons of every combination, car classes that define the pace of the battle, and metal sinew to the brim. Developing this game has been a huge experience in all the most obvious and inobvious ways. Whether it’s tweaking the balance until our fingers are numb or having a discussion about what super fun trophies we could throw in, it’s been a fantastic ride. I’m really excited to start playing with people.