Even more new info from
Shougai PSO and the latest
Dengeki PlayStation!
Development details
* The ideas behind
PSP were all coming together before the original
PSU went on sale in Japan.
* Development of
PSP was outsourced to Alfa System due to SonicTeam focusing on the development of
AOTI.
* The actual programming of
PSP began around February of 2007.
* SEGA and Alfa System made sure to collaborate with each other to share ideas.
* One idea of Alfa System's was to use a 2D display for certain things such as cities, your room and some dialog sequences.
Story mode
* As stated before, the game offers multiple endings. There will be a total of three different endings.
* Alfa were put completely in charge of organizing the story.
* Your first time through the story mode is estimated to take around 15-20 hours.
* After clearing the game once, your character level will carry over to your second play-through. Your items, however, will not.
* When your character data rolls over to your second game, it will not affect your original character data. (Sounds like it simply creates a second save file or slot.)
* No more "Game Over!" If incapacitated, you'll simply start from the beginning of the mission. All EXP and items you gained before incapacitation will remain intact.
* There will be a total of eight character slots for story mode.
Multi-mode
* There will be a total of eight character slots for multi-mode. (This means that story mode and multi-mode characters will be kept separate. Not what I was expecting.)
Item details
* Equipment purchased from shops will have random elements and percents attached to them.
* Clothes and parts can be acquired through special missions instead of just buying them from shops. (There will be some costumes that are available only through certain missions.)
* New design staff members were brought in to "liven up" the current weapon designs.
* One major influence of the design team was the re-introduction of numerous old weapons. (I'm sorry, but that's just a bit counter-productive, right? If they were supposed to bring in new stuff, I'd expect them to
not fall back on old
PSO weapons, but instead design some
new stuff...)
* Most items cannot be exchanged with other players. Weapons fall into this category. Clothes, parts and recovery items can be exchanged, however.
* One
PSO weapon being brought back is the Prophets of Motav.
Item drop details
* The party leader's Guardian type will determine the types of items that drop in missions. Hunter-types will see more striking weapons while ranger-types will see more firearms.
* Elements and percents of dropped items will be random.
Enemies
* There will be only three new bosses in the game: Bil Degoras, SEED-Helga and
Vivienne.
Partner machines
* There will be eight types of partner machines: GH410, GH420, GH430, GH440, GH450, GH470, GH480 and GH490. There are no sub-types such as GH451.
* There will be a total of ten costumes for players to wear which match up with certain PM models' costumes.
Stats
* Character levels will cap at LV100.
* Photon arts will cap at LV30.
Mission details
* Certain missions will limit you on the number of players allowed.
Link-up with AOTI
* The Vivienne Fluge SUV weapon that will be given to players for importing their character data (I assume this will go only to CASTs, while Whitill Wing goes to everyone else) is a healing-type SUV. It also has other unknown "support effects."
* There is nothing in store as far as reverse-linking from
PSU to
PSP.
* Director Satoshi Sakai says that going in reverse like that was "difficult and impractical."
*
PSP will not link with the 360 version of
PSU.