Dreams release date rumours, news and trailers: Media Molecule showcase a tonne of weird and wonderful dreams at E3 2018

Dreams has been a rather strange title for Sony. Since it’s announcement back at PlayStation Meeting in 2013, we’ve seen it in steady development over time but are yet to really grasp what it actually is. It’s also slated for a 2018 release date but, now  E3 has been and gone and no news around a concrete release date for Dreams appeared, it all seems rather up in the air.

Thankfully, during Sony’s post-keynote E3 show Media Molecule sat down to show off just what it’s been up to since we last saw Dreams as Paris Games Week last year. On the whole, it’s still wonderfully bizarre and incredibly hard to wrap your head around its concept. However, it’s clear Media Molecule has built a powerful creation tool that should be valuable to the PlayStation community as a whole.

Here’s hoping it actually arrives before the PS4 gets shelved in favour of the PS5.

You can watch the E3 hands-on session in the video below.

Dreams on PS4: Everything you need to know

When Media Molecule’s Dreams was first revealed, it was an enigma. Amongst the pretty visuals and intriguing title, the lingering questions were: what do you actually do in the game?

With a 2018 release date on the horizon, more details about the latest project from the LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway studio are beginning to emerge. During a PSX showcase in December, a new trailer for Dreams was unveiled – offering a glimpse of the creation-tool-slash-game in action.

It’s all very mysterious, but the nature of Dreams also makes it hard to square as a simple game. It takes the creation side of LittleBigPlanet and runs with it to encompass a social network, a music editor, a film studio and a toolkit for making your own worlds.

Here’s our rundown of when Dreams is coming out, and what you’ll actually be doing in the PS4 exclusive.

Dreams release date: When does Dreams come out for PS4?

The current release window for Dreams is 2018. Given the lack of anything more specific than that, it’s likely Media Molecule will be aiming for the latter half of the year. The game is a PS4 exclusive, meaning you’ll need one of Sony’s machines to play it.

Dreams gameplay: How do you play Dreams?

In Media Molecule’s previous series, LittleBigPlanet, players could create and share their own levels based around the game’s platforming toolset. Dreams offers a much more expansive iteration of this philosophy, offering a way to create everything from short films to point-and-click adventures. You can think about it as a sort of self-contained game dev tool, with the titular ‘dreams’ being creative projects that can be shared and played via the PS Plus network.

The studio seems aware that players might feel a little lost with such a broad approach, and is including a single-player experience centred around three interwoven stories. As the studio explained during its December’s PSX panel, the three ‘dreams’ – including a platformer, a noir-ish point-and-click and a sci-fi action adventure – are designed to introduce players to different aspects of Dreams’ toolkit.

Dreams creator: How do you create Dreams?

Media Molecule has emphasised that it wants players to approach Dreams like a sketchbook and that the game allows a level of doodling that might not be possible in more professional development tools like Unity or Unreal. Simply put, this could be revelatory for how players think about design, giving enthusiastic minds a comprehensive palette for making their own worlds without a heap of coding knowledge.

As well as tools for making short games, Dreams comes with its own music editor for making player-created tracks. Players can also add collaborators to co-design and edit a project, a bit like a game-based Google Doc.

In the below video, Media Molecule’s art director Kareem Ettouney shows how the tools can also be used with PlayStation Move controllers. It looks like Google Tilt Brush, and you can imagine this approach working well with PSVR.

Dreams multiplayer: How do I play other people’s Dreams?

Dreams will be hooked up to its own social network, with a Pinterest-esqe board for curating favourite projects. Community picks will also surface exceptional creations, and involvement with Dreams’ social side will see players accrue a form of in-game achievement, Dream Stones.

Media Molecule’s Dreams has the scope to be a fantastic tool for making interactive worlds, balancing an accessible interface with a great deal of underlying complexity. Here’s hoping we hear more about the game in the coming months.