With Sony planning to remove Gravity Rush 2‘s online servers on July 18th, a question that often pops up is just what aspects of the game will be lost or negatively impacted by this move. In this article you can find, to my knowledge, the complete list of all the features and items that will be outright removed or very difficult to acquire when Gravity Rush 2’s servers are taken offline on July 18th. If you want to help prevent the server shutdown or at least get Sony to patch the game, do take a look at our #DontForgetGravityRush campaign!
Sending/Receiving Challenges
While there’s no direct multiplayer in Gravity Rush 2, the game still offers a way to compete against other players. When you successfully complete a challenge in Gravity Rush 2, you’re able to send your “ghost” data to another player (random or friend) , who can then agree to accept the challenge. Up to three ghosts can be challenged at the same time, and to win the challenge you’ll have to get a better score than them. These challenges can currently be accessed via the main menu, or from the challenge access points in the game world. Dusty Tokens can be earned by winning (or not placing last) in a challenge against other players. The more players you beat in a single challenge, the more Dusty Tokens you’ll earn.
It’s worth noting that the challenges have already been altered, as players only seem to get new challenges in a large batch around once every month. This means that if you send a challenge to a player, it can actually take up to 30 days for them to receive it. As a result, the experience has already deteriorated. When the servers are taken offline, the challenges will be gone entirely.
Online ranking
Both the worldwide Dusty Tokens charts and all of the 20 in-game Challenge leaderboards will be removed once the online servers go down. This means you’ll no longer be able to see how your score compares to the rest of the world. This is notable because Gravity Rush Remastered’s online ranking remains active.
Receiving and posting Treasure Hunts
This is the game’s most popular online mode, where you can search for the location of treasure chests by means of a photo taken by another player. When playing the game, you’ll receive Treasure Hunts from the game’s main menu (or you can find them by interacting with the “Gold” Kat avatars in the game world). If you accept a Treasure Hunts, you’ll be transported to one of the game’s many areas and you’ll be shown a photo taken by another player, giving you a hint as to where the treasure is located. You can think of the photo as the equivalent of a treasure map. To aid players in finding the treasure, you’ll hear a “beep” tone when you’re getting close. Find them, and both you and the player who submitted the photo will earn Dusty Tokens.
Treasure Hunts will be gone entirely when the servers go offline. This poses a particular problem as it’s not just Dusty Tokens that will be lost, because no less than 58 other items are also locked behind these treasure chests. I’ll elaborate on that further down in the article.
Receiving, posting and reviewing photos
Using the in-game camera obtained in Chapter 2, you can take photos in-game and then upload them for others to review. These appear as “blue” Kats throughout the game world. By interacting with them, you can review the photo by voting whether or not you like it. While you get Dusty Tokens regardless of which option you chose, the other player will only receive Tokens if you liked their photo.
When the servers are taken offline, photo reviews will also be removed entirely.
Earning Dusty Tokens and the corresponding rewards
As mentioned earlier on, the three main online modes all grant the in-game currency “Dusty Tokens” as a reward. There are 10 unique rewards that can be unlocked this way, including a talisman that allows for infinite shifting. In their announcement, Sony stated that “you will not be able to get any more tokens once service ends so make sure you get your hands on some rewards while you still can”.
Treasure Chest items (undocumented change)
As mentioned earlier on, there are a total of 58 unique in-game items that can be found in treasure chests. Without the online “Treasure Hunts” functionality, finding these becomes an unreasonably difficult task. One of our followers on Twitter examined how much time it would take to find the treasure chests when you’re offline. It took him around 50 hours to find 4 treasure chests, by specifically looking at locations where they appear. Personally, in all the time I spent playing the game since its release, I can say that I still wouldn’t have found anywhere near 58 Treasure Chests without the online Treasure Hunts. From my own experience some treasure chests didn’t always offer an item either, so in practice you’d probably need to find 60+ chests.
It doesn’t seem like taking down the servers anytime soon was really part of the plan during development, given this in-game message which specifically tells people to complete treasure hunts to find part of the furniture to decorate Kat’s home.
Below you can find a complete list of the items locked behind treasure chests:
Talismans
- Amaranth Treasure
- Aqua Treasure
- Carmine Treasure
- Celadon Treasure
- Cerulean Treasure
- Cinereous Treasure
- Coral Treasure
- Crimson Treasure
- Indigo Treasure
- Sable Treasure
- Scarlet Treasure
- Slate Treasure
- Taupe Treasure
- Turquoise Treasure
- Violet Treasure
- Viridian Treasure
Photo Items
- Bucket
- Fire Hydrant
- Flower Pot
- Gas Canister
- Hog’s Head
- Mailbox
- Planter
- Standing Sign
- Vending Machine
- Big Box (this is the name listed when you open the box, the photo item itself is actually called “Large Box”)
Gestures
- Backflip
- Donut
- Hip Attack
- Skewer
- Tongue Out
- Wink
Furniture (Available starting from Chapter 3)
- Antique Mirror
- Basket
- Bookshelf
- Candle Chandelier
- Cat Bed
- Dining Chair
- Hanger Stand
- Houseplant
- Kettle
- Modern Bed
- Mosaic Curtains
- Mosaic Mirror
- Phone
- Pipe Bed
- Polka Dot Curtains
- Polka Dot Floor Mat
- Ratty Bed
- Ratty Floor Mat
- Rimmed Mirror
- Rough Table
- Round Table
- Shaggy Floor Mat
- Stool
- Succulent Plant
- Frame Mirror
Talismans (Available starting from Chapter 3)
- Ultimate Explorer
Ghosts of the Fallen (undocumented change)
If you die in the dungeon-like “Delvool Trench Mine” challenges (consisting of 50 layers, each with their own challenge), your ghost would be left behind, along with half of the items you had collected so far. While you can retrieve those items from your own ghost once you go back to the place you died, other players can also find your ghost and collect those items (although this doesn’t appear to steal them away from you, as your ghost will still remain). When the online servers go down, you’ll no longer encounter ghosts from other players. Only your own ghosts will remain.
Future Outlook
While the single-player experience will be mostly intact, it’s easy to see that losing the online services still hurts the experience for new players. It can’t have been an easy task for the developers to implement these asynchronous services, and to see everything taken down so soon is certainly disappointing. Judging from the daily increase of users in the Dusty Tokens charts and the number of entries in the daily Challenge rankings, the number of users connecting to the online services each day is still in the thousands.
It’s not clear what the future will bring, but it’s reasonable to assume that once the servers are gone, they won’t be coming back. So if the game is ever made available in the monthly lineup of PS+ games, or if the PS5 ends up featuring backwards compatibility with PS4, it’ll be without the online functionality. For Gravity Rush 2, we won’t be seeing something like the Return to Yharnam event for Bloodborne, organized by its community revive the game’s online after the game became available on PS+. It’s really for this reason that it’s up to fans to make their voice heard now, while the servers are still active.
I have only began playing this yesterday :'(