Sad news for WhiteMoon Dreams’ PSVR exclusive shooter, Starblood Arena; it’s shutting down soon.
A note on the game’s official PlayStation page confirms the news. Sony is taking multiplayer offline on 25th July 2019. Starblood launched in early 2017 so its reign has been short-lived. The game is pretty much an online-only title, so it’ll effectively cease to exist. We’ve reached out to WhiteMoon for comment on the news.
This is sad, if perhaps unsurprising news. Starblood was a six degree of freedom (6DOF) shooter. You jumped into the cockpit of a customized death machine and battled it out with others in arena-style matches. We quite enjoyed it for its box-ticking fun but, even in our review, we found difficulty getting into matches.
“Starblood Arena isn’t a profound expression of the power of VR, but it’s hard not to appreciate a rock solid shooter that will provide hours of multiplayer battles for those willing to put the time in,” we said in our review. “Ultimately it’s a little too niche to become the definitive multiplayer PSVR game, and the struggles to get into matches aren’t going to please people that threw down $39.99 to play it.”
The game was one of the first PSVR titles to be made free for PS Plus members last January, but it doesn’t seem to have helped much.
Starblood Arena isn’t the first PSVR online casualty. Shortly after the headset’s launch in 2016 Sony shut down its Cambridge Studio, which made RIGS: Mechanized Combat League. The game is still playable but future DLC was scrapped and it’s been left to much the same fate. Such are the risks of multiplayer development in the fledgling VR market, no?
