Metrico+: How Digital Dreams is Bringing a Unique, New World to PS4

[PlayStation®]

Not too long ago, during Gamescom, we announced that we’re currently working on a total remake of our puzzle platformer

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(PS Vita) for PlayStation 4 (Metrico+). We’ve had tons of questions of what exactly Metrico+ is, so we’re here on PlayStation.Blog to give you an in-depth look.

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Metrico+ features a lot of new content, as well as refined and improved graphics. We also worked on the storyline and added tons of other new features. It’s basically a new game! And we’re planning to release it in the first quarter of 2016.

In this post I’d like to elaborate on some of the changes and fixes we made. We loved that Metrico was exclusive to PS Vita. That’s why for the bigger part we want players to feel like the PS Vita version is still a unique experience, and the PS4 version will be a new experience, taking the best parts of the Vita version and building on them with lots of new and improved features.

For those who aren’t familiar: Metrico is a new world. A unique world for you to explore, which consists of all sorts of infographics like bar diagrams, pie charts and line graphs. These infographics constantly change based on your actions, movements and input. The goal of the game is to experiment and find out how each infographic within certain puzzles react, solving these puzzles in that manner.

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When we started development of Metrico+, we knew it was impossible to re-use a lot of the content from Metrico since certain mechanics utilized specific PS Vita hardware features. There are six worlds in Metrico, and particularly the last few worlds use PS Vita’s hardware features extensively. DualShock 4 has a built-in gyroscope — a technology that one of Metrico’s worlds heavily relied on — so maybe that world would have been possible on PlayStation 4. However, since we’re also releasing on other platforms, this was quickly discarded and new solutions were needed. Furthermore, simply mapping mechanics built around specific PS Vita hardware to different inputs would result in an incoherent, disjointed experience on the big screen.

That’s why we had to design two entirely new worlds with their own unique mechanics for Metrico+, while also replacing puzzles in other worlds that relied on now-unavailable mechanics. These worlds needed to be filled with fun, challenging puzzles that utilize these new mechanics and the parameters/variables that accompany them.

Thus, we went back to the drawing board and came up with a whole bunch of different mechanics, each one crazier than the last. Prototyping these took quite some time, but we had a lot of fun doing so. In the end, I feel we did a good job: everybody that played and tested Metrico+ so far loves the new mechanics.

Given Metrico+’s explorative and experimental nature, we don’t want to spoil too much about its new mechanics. We’d like you to find out how they exactly work for yourselves, but we do want to tease you a bit with these two GIFs. Can you tell how they work and what they do? And if you’ve played Metrico, can you come up with all of the consequences they might have?

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Of course, we also took the time to really look at the criticism we received and make a lot of changes based on it. We added more eventful moments and platform puzzles for better pacing throughout the game; made changes to our adaptive music system to be less annoying to players getting stuck longer than usual, and we went all-out and improved the visuals a whole lot in order to make them look good on a big screen. Metrico+ is even more fun to visit now. We’re also completely redoing the character animations.

A question that might be on your mind now is: ‘will I get Metrico+ for free if I already downloaded Metrico?’ All I can say now is that we’re looking into this. Metrico+ is essentially a new game with a similar title, but with 2 entirely new worlds with lots of new challenging puzzles, completely revamped graphics, a new storyline, different trophies, and lots of other new features. That being said, a bunch of the original puzzles are still in place in some shape or form so we wouldn’t feel entirely comfortable charging full price again either. We’ll know more in the not so distant future.

Meanwhile, we are really excited that we’re showcasing Metrico+ for the very first time in the States at this year’s PlayStation Experience, happening this weekend in San Francisco. Come visit us if you’re around to check out Metrico+ and let us know what you think!

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