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What Might a PlayStation All-Stars 2 Roster Look Like?

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If Sony Were to Release PlayStation All-Stars 2 for PS5 What Might That Look Like?

Lately there have been more than a few rumours that a PlayStation All-Stars 2 might be in development for PlayStation 5, we like the sound of that!

Taking into account PlayStation’s up-to-date exclusive collection and all the new characters who come with that, I took a moment to consider how that could look and what the game could be like. I’m not the first person to make mock-ups like this, but I wanted to go a little further with it. Rather than just write my ultimate fan-boy list of favourite characters I wanted to think more deeply about my reasoning and how the game might play out.

The Roster

New Additions

As you can probably see, there are quite a lot of new faces in this mock-up roster, those are:

  • Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy
  • Astro Bot from Astro Bot Rescue Mission and various other titles.
  • Baldur from God of War’s Nordic Revival
  • Chloe Frazer from Uncharted 2, 3 and Lost Legacy
  • Cliff Unger from Death Stranding
  • Deacon St. John of Days Gone
  • Delsin Rowe from inFamous, replacing Cole McGrath from the original trilogy, though maybe he’d make an appearance too?
  • Ellie from The Last of Us
  • Higgs from Death Stranding
  • The Hunter from Bloodborne
  • Jin Sakai, the Ghost of Tsushima
  • Joel from The Last of Us
  • Khotun Khan from Ghost of Tsushima
  • Knack… from Knack
  • The new Nordic God of War with his trusty companion, BOY… I mean, uhh, Atreus.
  • Nadine Ross from Uncharted Lost Legacy and Uncharted 4
  • Raven from Gravity Rush
  • Sam Bridges and BB from Death Stranding
  • Spider-man, from Marvel’s Spider-man*

*It’s worth noting that Spider-Man is probably the least likely character of the entire list to be able to join the roster. His Intellectual Property is very valuable and closely guarded by everyone involved and he already makes an appearance in Marvel vs Capcom, which could make things difficult. However, if Sony were to include Dante or any other Capcom character (Jill Valentine??) perhaps they would have leverage in that dispute.

There are a lot of characters missing from the original roster and I have my reasons which I’ll come back to, but there’s no reason why Sony wouldn’t include all of them if they really wanted to.

Returning Classics

I chose only a small handful of the original roster to make a return, those characters are:

  • Jak and Daxter of Jak and Daxter
  • Kat (and Dusty) from Gravity Rush
  • Nathan Drake of Uncharted
  • Parappa the Rapper of Parappa the Rapper
  • Ratchet and Clank from Ratchet and Clank
  • Little Big Planet’s Sackboy
  • Sir Daniel Fortesque from the recently remastered Medievil

The main reason these returned are either because they’re still relevant with recent reboots, remasters or upcoming games. However, some of them – Parappa the Rapper, Jak & Daxter, Sackboy – return from personal bias that they’ll never not be thought of when you think “PlayStation Characters”.

Again, there’s no reason why more of the original cast might not return.

Non-Exclusives?

My roster relies heavily on the newer exclusive IPs PlayStation owns.

I know what you are thinking. Where is Crash Bandicoot? Why would you not include Crash Bandicoot?

Well, I tried to just stick to exclusives and Sony-owned IPs for now and since Crash’s little revival he’s been getting around a lot, so Sony may have some difficulties securing the license. Who knows, maybe they wouldn’t, though.

In the original PlayStation All-Stars, Devil May Cry’s Dante, Tekken’s Heihachi and Dead Space’s Isaac Clarke managed to make the cut, so there’s every chance that Sony could manage to secure Crash and even other exciting characters such as Borderlands’ Lilith, the original (better) Dante, or even Spyro the Dragon!

If Super Smash Bros hadn’t already called dibs on Persona 5’s Joker then we might have even been able to see that character in the list.

Didn’t Make the Cut

The characters I nixed can be found in the below list, along with something of a rationale…

  • Big Daddy from BioShock. Removed because the title is not exclusive so the rights would need to be re-acquired and the games are a little dated now.
  • Cole MacGrath and Evil Cole MacGrath from the original inFamous trilogy. Removed to make way for the new face of inFamous, Delsin Rowe. Cole could be a skin or even make it in the roster anyway.
  • Colonel Radec from Killzone. Honestly, I just never played Killzone and it doesn’t seem to have done well as an IP since the start of this gen.
  • Dante from DMC: Devil May Cry. This was an easy one to cut, the reboot of the DMC series was a complete flop and the “new” Dante is totally unlikable. Maybe they’d bring the original Dante onboard, but either way, they would need to re-acquire rights.
  • Emmett Graves of StarHawk… Who?
  • Fat Princess. Removed because I never actually knew who this was or where they’re from. The IP seems dated and no longer relevant but is still totally a possible candidate to make it into the game.
  • Heihachi Mishima from Tekken. Tekken kind of fell flat with Tekken 7 and it seemed like even the developers had stopped caring, which is my main rationale for removing them, other than Tekken not being an exclusive IP.
  • Isaac Clarke from Dead Space. Pretty dated third-party IP, we haven’t seen anything from Dead Space since last gen, so it just seems unlikely that we’d see Isaac return.
  • Spartan Kratos. I just envision this as being a skin for Nordic Kratos, but maybe they would have both as separate characters?
  • Nariko from Heavenly Sword. This IP disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived and I’m doubtful that Sony would bring back Nariko, but you never really know.
  • Raiden from Metal Gear Solid. Given Sony’s support of Kojima since the whole Konami fiasco, if they were to use Death Stranding characters I don’t see them securing the rights to any Metal Gear characters from Konami. On top of that, we haven’t seen Raiden for a very long time and Super Smash Bros already dibsed Snake.
  • Sly Cooper from Sly Cooper. Honestly, just because we haven’t seen him for a long time, other than a small pseudo-cameo in Ghost of Tsushima, but it’s very likely he could make the cut.
  • Spike from Ape Escape. Simply because the IP seems dated, but it is exclusive so I don’t see why Sony wouldn’t be open to bringing him back in.
  • Sweet Tooth from Twisted Metal. Again, just because we haven’t seen this IP for such a long time. It never really made sense to have them anyway as they were from a racing game… PlayStation All-Stars Kart Racer???
  • Zeus from God of War. Replaced with Baldur from the new God of War. Hey, maybe we’d even see Thor make an appearance if God of War 2 releases first.

I’ll admit to a lot of personal bias in these cuts, I know a lot of the IPs above have some hardcore fans which could be enough for Sony to bring them back.

The Gameplay

Should they Keep the Super Smash Bros Clone Gameplay?

Looking back at the original All-Stars, I just don’t think it was that good. If it didn’t have such a… well, “All-Star” cast, I probably wouldn’t have even considered looking at it. The gameplay was a lot like Nintendo’s extremely popular Super Smash Bros gameplay except it… just wasn’t as good. Sony changed a few things to try and make it different enough but without just doing a complete rip-off of the already pretty much perfected Smash Bros gameplay, it’s never really going to surpass it.

This got me thinking about what kind of gameplay might be better suited… What about a Hero Shooter like Overwatch or Paladins. Think about it…

Imagine 5v5 team-based gameplay, each character having skills from their games to use against each other from quick and skills to fully-charged ultimate attacks similar to the big-hitting moves from the original All-Stars.

Kat uses her gravity powers to launch Jin over into enemy territory, where he can cause some real damage with his Ghost Stance Ultimate attack but the enemy team is protected by a concrete wall thrown up by Delsin and Joel puts an end to the chaos with a hunting rifle shot.

Another exciting aspect of this concept is the stages themselves, too.

Just imagine swinging through the flooded streets of TLoU2’s Seattle as Spider-Man, offering support to your team-mates.

The platform-based stage style stolen from Super Smash Bros is great and all, but every stage is essentially the same, just with different visuals, hazards and platform layout. If Sony were to go for more of an Overwatch-inspired gameplay format then we’d have large, fully-explorable maps which can be heavily inspired by the original games and…. I don’t know, I think it would be cool to take Kratos to the world of Bloodborne. Just imagine the screenshot potential!

The Visuals

One last thing I want to mention which never really looked that great about the original All-Stars was how everyone retained their own visual style, having the extremely cartoonish Parappa the Rapper stood next to Uncharted’s realistic Nathan Drake was very uncanny.

That’s not to say they couldn’t make it work, but I feel like they may benefit from unifying the characters under a single art style. Similar to how Disney Infinity stylised all of their characters to feel like they fit in the same universe on-screen, but maybe not as heavily stylised.

Nintendo managed to do this in a very subtle way using a universal shader and texturing-style throughout Super Smash Bros, something Sony could benefit from doing if they were to revive this game franchise.

I’m very interested to know what your thoughts are, so let us know on Twitter @GetPlat who would be in your ideal roster? What would your ideal PSAS play like?