Last year, the announcement of the closure of Gravity Rush 2’s online services on the game’s 1st anniversary came as a surprise to fans. It’s not that we didn’t know that the game hadn’t been as successful in terms of sales as the other PS4 exclusives, but nobody expected to see the online services go down so soon, especially given the fact that the game’s online functionality is entirely asynchronous. It’s for this reason that we started our #DontForgetGravityRush campaign in December last year. To what extent this contributed to the announcement in January that Gravity Rush 2’s online server closure would be delayed by 6 months isn’t clear, but we’d like to think our words reached Sony. These are just some of the tweets from fans back then, asking Sony to keep the servers online.
Now that we’re once again approaching the closure of the game’s servers, we’ll be making efforts to convince Sony once more to continue to support the game and keep the servers online. Because once the servers go down, the game will never be the same to new players. They won’t be able to upload and review other players’ photos, send challenges to other players, find ghosts of fallen players in the Delvool Trench Mine, or unlock in-game items with Dusty Tokens. They won’t be able to compare their score on the online rankings, and they’ll be pretty much unable to obtain over 50 in-game items which are unlocked by finding Treasure Chests, which are incredibly rare when playing offline.
And if Sony really must close the servers, they can still help minimize the impact on the single player experience of the game. In particular, these two changes would make sure that players can still unlock all the content that was previously obtained through the game’s online features.
- Unlock the Dusty Token items for new players instantly.
- Dramatically increase the spawn rate of Treasure Chests when the game is played offline. When the players isn’t in a mission, it would be very helpful if treasure chests appeared more frequently until the player has found all 58 Items. Otherwise, it’d be near impossible for players to collect those items.
It would also be nice if we could retain the game’s leaderboards, given that Gravity Rush Remastered actually still has those. But unlike the two changes requested above, their absence wouldn’t impact the single-player.
If anyone at Sony Interactive Entertainment reads this, I hope they’ll consider our request. Regardless of what happens, we’re thankful that they made the Gravity Rush games to begin with. But we don’t want these unique games to be forgotten so soon as they’re overshadowed by more successful PS4 exclusives. Keeping the game’s original experience intact, or at least making sure people can unlock all the game’s content even without the online servers, would also help us convince people to buy the game in the years to come.