Blacklight: Retribution Celebrates Anniversary With Free Goodies

We cannot believe it has already been a year since Zombie Studios launched the Blacklight: Retribution Beta on PS4 alongside the launch of PS4 in November 2013 as one of the first free to play titles on PS4. Players jumped in excited to know what the game was all about and eager to give us feedback.

We took that feedback and built it into the June release that ended beta. We wanted to come out of beta strong, and turned our attention to new content and released a flurry of new maps, weapons, gear, and even a hard suit. I could keep talking about what we’ve done, but I know what you really want to hear is what’s coming next — so I’ll get back to our release history after.

Coming Up

In our next release (Patch 2.07) we have re-worked the party system to further the goal of making sure it takes as few steps as possible before you are playing with your friends. Our players have let us know it is important and we have made it a priority to bring it to you.

Following Patch 2.07 will be the “Icestorm” (Patch 2.08) update which we are announcing for the first time here.

In Icestorm, a Valkyrie class transport has crashed in a remote and frozen part of the world while carrying an armament shipment that must be retrieved before it falls into the wrong hands. This update will include a new map, weapons and other items focused around survival while battling in a frozen barren wasteland.

With Icestorm we want to do something different, it will be the first of our larger content updates. We are building an entire content update around a single unified theme and scaling up the size of the update. We are all gamers here at Zombie and we want to let our team loose to create content they are excited about sharing with their fellow gamers. We want to reshape how we develop content for you, and Icestorm is our first step towards that goal.

A Look Back

In my first draft of this post I listed out everything we did and it just got kind of silly. If you have been away from BLR for a while, login and check out all the new stuff. To keep this from turning into a novel, here are the highlights:

Our first major map release post beta was “Outpost.” Set in a remote part of the world, Outpost is a place where the local populace has huddled together in a slum built on the crumbling corpse of an old radar outpost. The map was built around what we know players like best about BLR. Tight quarters with fierce combat with just enough space that a seasoned sniper can set up and do some work. The whole package came together as a fast paced map we are proud of.

Hot on the heels of Outpost came “Convoy,” set in the rabbit warrens that are the urban streets of BLR’s cities. An armored convoy has been ambushed while in transit through the heart of major urban center. The armor had nowhere to go but forward or backward so a fight was inevitable. The map features long sight lines broken by side streets, alleys, and a small park.

Next came the Gunman hard suit, the foil to our original iconic “Rhino” hard suit. The Rhino is a slow armored beast weighed down by its massive fire power and we like it that way, but we felt it needed a counterpart — something to balance out the equation. We built the Gunman to terrorize its opponents as a highly mobile but vulnerable weapons platform.

A Gift for Players New and Old

Zombie wants to thank our players for supporting Blacklight: Retribution and our studio. To do that we have come up with a 1 year anniversary gift for everyone. Below is a code for everyone to redeem on the main menu of BLR on your PS4.

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Once redeemed you will receive:

• 1 free permanent weapon receiver
• 1 free 30 day hero skin.

In addition, all players who log in between 11/13/2014 and 12/15/2014 will receive an anniversary title “Original Gamer.”

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