Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2017 i Edge

The evening before Ubisoft’s E3 conference, we sat in the function room of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles and watched as a procession of senior staff laid out, one by one, the games Ubisoft would be announcing the following day. Rare, you might think; risky, even, in an era where leaking information is so easy. But Ubisoft does it every year. With good reason, too. We weren’t just treated to trailers; indeed, we didn’t see many. Instead we heard about the thought processes behind each game, on how they were made and why. We were given context: something that is lacking amid the frenetic news cycle of an E3 or Gamescom, but which casts Ubisoft in a more accurate – and, yes, far more flattering – light. Ubisoft, uncommonly…

The Chinese Room’s award-winning adventure Dear Esther made its stage debut at London’s Barbican last year. The studio’s creative director Dan Pinchbeck played the game alongside a live narrator, with an orchestra performing Jessica Curry’s hauntingly beautiful soundtrack. Now, it’s going on the road. Here, Curry explains the process behind bringing this unique interactive performance to UK theatre audiences. Where did the idea for a live performance of Dear Esther originate? Jessica Curry: I went to this amazing British Film Institute event called Film, Archive and Music Lab, where they brought together international composers and producers. They took us to the Barbican to meet Chris Sharp, their contemporary music programmer. I got in touch with him after the week was up and said, “I’ve got a bit of a crazy idea. How…

Sara Abdel-Hamid produces and DJs under the name Ikonika. Her first album, Contact, Love, Want, Have, was released for revered bass-music imprint Hyperdub in 2010 and is shot through with videogame references, with track names such as Insert Coin and Look (Final Boss Stage); her latest release, Distraction, has a track called Not Gameplay Footage and a well-hidden, but very familiar sample: of Dyna and Tillo, the item-swapping crows from Dark Souls II. When we add Abdel-Hamid on Skype, we see her avatar is a Dark Souls character. After that, there is only one way this conversation is ever going to start. Sticking our necks out here – you appear to like Dark Souls. Why sample the crows? There’s loads of Dark Souls samples scattered around the album – loads of…

Somehow I’ve never got into playing videogames on my phone. I’ve owned a long succession of handhelds with actual physical buttons and, latterly, sticks, and have very fond memories of portable gaming on the GBA SP, the Neo Geo Pocket Colour, the PSP, the 3DS, the Vita, and so on. Indeed they are some of my fondest videogame memories altogether – a Christmas spent playing Advance Wars, a Greek holiday immersed in Metal Gear Ac!d. But playing games on a phone? It always seemed to be something that, you know, civilians do – people who don’t really know anything about videogames. Everyone was just mindlessly swiping on stupid fruitbased puzzle games on public transport while I did something more productive and important with my journey, like listening to Queens Of…

Developer Rare Publishe Microsoft Studios Format PC, Xbox One Origin UK Release 2018 Hop aboard, chug some grog, adjust the sails and check the map: having blundered merrily through previous demos, we’ve grown quite accustomed to pirate life in Rare’s cooperative adventure. So have a quarter of a million alpha testers. Indeed, it is already something of a sensation several months ahead of its full release, thanks to its accessible, and frequently funny, swashbuckling action. Considered design makes teamwork a requirement in the face of mild peril, with camaraderie a pleasant sideeffect. Perhaps it’s hard to go too wrong with a game that assembles a group of four firm friends on a quest to find some treasure. But this time, our demo presents a true test of Sea Of Thieves’…

The popularity of Dragon Ball Z has led to countless translations, spin-off series, endless merchandise and some 17 movies. It’s also inspired a glut of thoroughly average videogames, but Arc System Works’ forthcoming fighting game has already suggested it’s set to break that curse. Our latest session with this expertly presented game shows the dev team is not content with simply making a decent Dragon Ball tie-in: it’s also confident enough to make one that pushes some boundaries. It all stems from a desire to make Arc’s famously complex brand of fighting games more accessible. Bringing the appeal of Dragon Ball and the technicality of the genre together is a challenge, producer Tomoko Hiroki admits. “It’s not just about difficult controls or combos,” she tells us. “It’s about mind games…

Ubisoft Singapore was founded in 2008 by a small team from the French publisher’s Paris headquarters, the first phase of an ongoing effort to build a game-production network in the most rapidly developing parts of southeast Asia. In the last decade, the studio has grown to over 300 people while retaining its initial leadership – and its alumni have gone on to establish Ubisoft’s presence in the Philippines and Chengdu, China. Ubisoft Singapore appears in the credits for every Assassin’s Creed game after the first, and was instrumental in Ubisoft’s earliest forays into dedicated multiplayer with Ghost Recon Phantoms, a precursor in many ways to the wildly successful Rainbow Six Siege. Even so, the contribution of any given studio to Ubisoft’s overall effort is often hard to gauge for anybody…

Xavier Manzanares has been involved with the Rabbids brand for several years, but Kingdom Battle is his debut as lead producer. Here, he talks about gaining Miyamoto’s endorsement, and the challenges of working on such an unorthodox strategy game. It’s an unlikely collaboration in many ways. How did it happen? It started in 2014. There was already a good relationship between Ubisoft and Nintendo, and then we heard about the possibility of proposing a concept involving Mario. We started to dig into what we could do, and what the Rabbids could do, and how that would make sense. The team was really small at that time, but we’re all hardcore Nintendo fans and we thought about combining that passion with another passion of ours, which was turn-based gaming. We felt…

At the start of this generation, particle effects were everywhere – the industry seeming to collectively decide that the best way to use new console hardware was to make it break up big things into lots and lots of tiny things. Those days are mostly behind us, but on this evidence there’s a new bandwagon in town: HDR. So The Lost Legacy begins not in some undiscovered ancient ruin, but in a city at night – all the better to crank the light sources to the max and give PS4 Pro owners a visible return on their investment. Headlamps are blinding. Streetlights and open fires have a dazzling luminescence. And then there’s the Pink Lotus, an establishment plastered in shimmering, purple, neon signage. It’s all a little contrived, perhaps, even…

T rust us, it looks much better in motion. Nidhogg 2’s garish, grotesque visuals sit in jarring contrast to the first game’s minimalism, and that, you suspect, is precisely the point: there is no danger of you mistaking this sequel for its progenitor. The clean pixel work of the original is gone, replaced with a more detailed, but likely far more divisive, homage to the 16bit era. The extra level of detail is used to highlight, sometimes unnecessarily so, the slapstick humour this unconventional fighting game has always had in spades: melee kills are now carried out with a gleeful grimace on the victor’s face, while the Benny Hill-style sprints away from a pursuer are now even funnier with those fat little legs moving like the clappers. Few would say…

T here’s a simple pleasure to be taken in a nicely crafted spot of arcade shooting, a twitchy sortie of double-jumps and airdashes through waves of bullets and urgent techno soundscapes. Finnish studio Housemarque has built a reputation on that purity of feeling, and side-scrolling shooter Matterfall is its latest attempt to distill it further. Sure enough, it’s Housemarque through and through, with just enough panache and pedigree to propel you through its three short levels before you’ve had time to think about it too much. Not that the premise is particularly complex. Our hero Avalon has been drafted in to rid the world of an intelligent element gone wrong; naturally, this involves shooting first and entirely forgetting what a question even is, as the right stick directs bullets and…

Locations: Oxford, Runcorn Rebellion is one of the most enduring success stories of the UK game industry, celebrating its 25th anniversary in December. With a hand in comic-book publishing since its acquisition of 2000 AD at the turn of the millennium, it has a strong portfolio and remains firmly independent, with a 200-strong workforce across studios in Oxford and Runcorn. Are you hoping to fill specific roles currently? Yes, we’re expanding our in-house engine code, animation and web teams particularly but we occasionally hire people just because they are excellent, regardless of our immediate needs, so it’s always worth getting in contact What’s the studio working culture like? Relaxed and social, with open-plan studios encouraging actually walking around and talking to each other. Chris and Jason Kingsley, the studio founders,…

“Videogames are of the utmost importance as cultural assets, as a driving force for innovation and as an economic factor.” And especially handy for courting the youth vote in an election year, we suppose, Angela Merkel “The kids, when they play it, they need to feel like they’re me. They need to feel like they’re a superhero, saving the planets.” Footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic unveils his new game with a display of his famous modesty “To say that Yoko-san saved Platinum would not be an exaggeration. I cannot thank him enough.” We knew Nier: Automata was something special, but who would’ve guessed it would make Hideki Kamiya nice? “People pick Xbox because we have the biggest franchises, the biggest exclusives, whether you are a fan of Halo, or Gears Of War, or…

WEBSITE Capcom Fighters Network bit.ly/capcomfn Eighteen months after Street Fighter V’s launch, Capcom has updated the game’s online stat-tracking website, Capcom Fighters Network – a process that meant the company has cruelly killed off V League, a community-run website that offered a similar service. Expect stat-tracking, both of your own record and those of the playerbase as a whole, including a game-wide measure of character win rates over the preceding month. You can set a regular foe as a rival to keep tabs on their progress, do likewise with a big name using the Respect tag, and browse moveset frame data for the entire cast. Since its miserable launch, SFV has come a long way, though its community remains small. Services like this might not lure in new players, but…

At last, my son likes a videogame! Specifically, Splatoon 2. It was the Splatfest that did it, the eternal struggle between warring condiments proving an irresistible lure for a three-yearold. “Mayonnaise wi-ins,” he’d sing-song after every victory, delighted. He sat tight by my side, watching me play, for a good hour. This is unprecedented. It helped, I expect, that I went on a tremendous winstreak. I’ve always played well in front of an audience. There are obvious reasons why he was drawn to Splatoon 2: it is loud, happy and cartoonish, a game with a clear objective which revolves around splashing the place with bright, lurid colour. Or, more to the point, two colours. He is just starting to understand the notion of conflict; superheroes increasingly feature in his play,…

Developer Ubisoft Singapore Publisher Ubisoft Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Singapore Release 2018 While it’s one thing to coat a vehicle combat game in pirate paint, it’s another to encourage interactions between players that evoke that fantasy on the fly, or to use the theme to suggest strategies with real competitive applications. Skull & Bones’ strength isn’t that it’s a multiplayer pirate ship battle simulator; it’s that it could only be a multiplayer pirate ship battle simulator. The fundamentals will be familiar to anybody who played Assassin’s Creed III, Black Flag or Rogue – Ubisoft Singapore was responsible for the naval-combat sections in those games, and that expertise translates directly here. “What I saw was strong fundamental gameplay that addressed the fantasy of naval power and combat,” creative director…

The most literal expression of that idea is Sonic Mania (p118), a game made with such slavish adherence to its progenitors’ classic formula that it frequently feels more like a fan game than an official one. Blending remixed versions of old stages with all-new creations, it is the purest Sonic game in years; whether that’s a good thing is a question of taste, but as homages go it is beyond reproach That works for 2D games, whose chunky pixels have a classic, enduring appeal. But 3D is another matter, meaning Sega had to treat its other trip down memory lane this month a little differently. Yakuza Kiwami (p110), a remake of the first game in the series, is no mere up-res: it’s been necessarily rebuilt in a different engine, its…

D espite a superficial resemblance to the most recent generation of multiplayer shooters, Lawbreakers is defined by how many modern trends it rejects. Gone are rigid class archetypes: instead, Boss Key has populated its debut game with characters that combine team-assisting utility with deep movement and combat mechanics, with players encouraged to be as lethal as their skill permits, regardless of their chosen role. Gone, too, are paceslowing tug-of-war modes: this is a return to the unforgiving days of team Capture The Flag and King Of The Hill, spread across a handful of well-conceived modern interpretations of those ideas. Gone is any notion of camping or slow play: this is a team shooter with no snipers, no turret-builders, no reliable stationary defences and no mass healing, where massive central low-gravity…

RPGs often fall apart a bit when you stop and wonder what happens to NPCs in need. Do they just, like, hang around indefinitely, rooted to the spot, doing nothing until you come back? If so, then we can only apologise to some of Yakuza Kiwami’s helpless quest-givers. To the man caught short in a loo without toilet paper, we are sorry for making you wait five hours for the packet of tissues we promised you. To the lady hanging around outside Millennium Tower for us to finally, a dozen hours later, get around to retrieving her stolen handbag, we offer our humble apologies. We got distracted, OK? We know. We are the absolute worst. It’s also why we leave Goro Majima hiding in an outsized traffic cone outside a…

Just imagine the elevator pitch. Based on Volition’s success in turning increasingly absurd concepts into hits, it’s not surprising that its idea of a Saturdaymorning superhero cartoon with an adult edge got the green light. Sadly, the team behind Saints Row has stripped its latest open-world adventure down to the meekest of essentials, losing all semblance of flair and any meaningful connection to the series from which it so loosely spun. In lieu of 7am animated nostalgia, you get a straight-to-DVD, bargain-bin trudge. And about that ‘mature’ edge? All you need, apparently, is a single, repeated joke about a bad guy’s genitals, and a few sporadic fuck-yous to crank the PEGI rating up to 18. Agents Of Mayhem’s most redeeming quality is its titular roster of agents – an Overwatch-esque…

As fascinated as you probably aren’t by the state of creative writing within game development, there is, perhaps, only so much to say about it, and I think perhaps I’ve said all of it. So now it’s time to bow out with a kind of ‘too long; didn’t read’ summary of the last few years. We decided that dragging famous people into game voiceovers is only worth it if they’re perfect for the role. Nobody is or has ever been impressed by the ability of a developer to throw a large amount of money at a celebrity and secure them for a couple of studio hours on their day off. Then there was the fearless expedition into the world of female game characters. There were quite a few elements here,…

The collected works of Hidetaka Suehiro don’t exactly portray a man troubled by the confines of convention. Better known by his alias Swery65, Suehiro has mastered a craft of mystery games that are eccentric, mischievous and – whether by accident or design – sometimes thoroughly bewildering. With his next release, The Good Life, he is hoping to satisfy the cultural forefathers that established the whodunnit genre, after an unlikely journey deep into middle England. Suehiro’s work, curiously, had previously taken him to Hitchin, a modest UK market town that’s all timber-framed buildings, ancient churches and chocolate-box side streets. “I was really interested in how they were upholding English traditions while changing and adapting to the new generation,” he says of his stay in the Hertfordshire town. It reminded him, too,…

Hang on a minute, what year is it? Just months after launching Daytona Championship USA, Sega is at it again, proving there’s more to the arcade scene in 2017 than videmption machines and roomy VR set-ups. The game in question is Sega World Drivers Championships 2018, and within a week of its announcement it had already been the subject of location tests in Japan. While such tests are typically as much about marketing as they are gaining player feedback, here they were crucial, since the game supports cross-site multiplayer, allowing up to 45 players in different arcades to race each other in realtime – though multiple cabinets can still be linked together for purely local play. The action edges more towards the realistic end of the spectrum, with six-speed gearshift,…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to PlayStation Plus, courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment Not a hero To me, games are no longer the immersive experience they used to be. Granted, this is a subjective matter and this ageing gamer might have lost some of the enthusiasm, mental agility and leisure needed to enjoy a challenging deep dive. But I remain convinced that there is more to it. Firstly, the medium fell victim to its own success: there are too many big, triple-A titles vying for our attention. Over the space of a year or so, across various platforms, I acquired The Witcher 3, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Mass Effect: Andromeda, The Legend Of Zelda:…

Those of you who’ve spent time with a toddler of late will know that the pirate fantasy is a powerful one, that hits early. Who wouldn’t want to wear a daft hat and an eye patch, sailing the seven seas, hunting for treasure and making land-lubbers walk the plank? As a boys’ own tale it is right up there with superheroes, soldiers and so on, a vital step as we learn about goodies, baddies and the thrill of making mischief. Yet while the shelves of your local videogame retailer are full of tales of warring superpowers – in both senses of the word – the pirate’s life is only rarely explored. There was Monkey Island. There was Sid Meier’s Pirates!, and Galleon. And there was, um, well… not much else.…

O ur road trip across a huge, highwaystitched map of America is an unusual one, to say the least. We’re a giant perambulatory skeleton, bindle slung over the shoulder, advancing across the southern stretch of the country with unhurried resolve. We do have one thing in common with our fleshier nomadic predecessors: we are in search of a good story. Not necessarily a true one, mind. This is America, after all. And what a fascinating protagonist for a videogame it is. “The United States has a mythology about itself,” creator Johnnemann Nordhagen tells us. “We tell ourselves we’re the greatest country in the world, we’re the freest country in the world – we’re the only free country in the world. All these various things that are just obviously, blatantly untrue.…

Developer/publisher Heart Machine Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2016 For once, we’re rather lost for words. As we prepare to wind up our conversation with Alex Preston, we ask him what he’s currently up to. “We’re certainly working on things at this point,” he begins, before pausing. “I can’t stop working,” he continues, laughing mirthlessly. “If I stop working, I die.” Such is the stark reality of Preston’s existence. Born with congenital heart disease, he has been hospitalised numerous times. Before Hyper Light Drifter, he’d used art and film to channel his experiences with ill health; increasingly frustrated with his condition, he began to dabble in games and found a new outlet with which to express his feelings. “I didn’t start to get really serious until the…

Now here’s something we never imagined printing: Luigi is one heck of a sniper. But then you soon learn to expect the unexpected from Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. It looks like a Nintendo game, plays like a Firaxis game, sounds like a Rare game and is overstuffed with collectables like a Ubisoft game. There’s a bit of everything in there: XCOM, obviously, but also Super Mario World, a pinch of Fire Emblem, a dash of Captain Toad and some puzzles and gentle geargating that nod to Zelda and Metroid. Sure, the Rabbids play a huge role – and their brand of anarchic, absurdist slapstick has never been more effectively used – but perhaps the best thing you can say about Kingdom Battle is that it’s a Switch game you…

Lawbreakers is Cliff Bleszinski’s first game since 2011’s Gears Of War 3, and his first since leaving Epic to establish Boss Key. Here he discusses the challenge of launching a new shooter into fierce competition without the support of a platform holder as publisher What has launching Lawbreakers been like? It’s been good. It’s been slower than we expected, but that’s one of those things. Everybody’s so used to the traditional triple-A splash – you sell a million copies in week one and then slowly watch your playerbase go down over the following months. Whereas, y’know, we’re starting with a small core group of fans and engaging with them on the regular, continuing to work on new content, continuing to fan the flames of the small kindling that we have.…

E arly on, an NPC puts it better than we ever could. After seeing Knack, the gravel-voiced shape-shifter who starred in PS4’s worst launch game, dispatch a few waves of enemies in his signature bland, buttonbashy style, an onlooker observes: “It’s hard to believe you saved the world. All you know is three punches and a kick.” It’s a surprising, somewhat endearing note of self-awareness, but should not be read as a mea culpa, as if SIE Japan Studio is openly copping the blame for the first game’s litany of flaws. Almost four years later, this sequel commits many of the same sins as its predecessor; it has a few to call its own, too. But at least our hero has some more moves this time Plenty, actually. There’s a…

S o your schoolmate’s dad who worked for Nintendo was right after all. Here is, to all intents and purposes, a 16bit Sonic game on a console belonging to Sega’s biggest rival of the time. It’s a Mega Drive game in look and in spirit, made by a group of developers that grew up with Sega’s mascot. It soon becomes clear that this team has a profound understanding of how those old games worked. Yet it’s a double-edged sword: Mania carries the ring of authenticity, but it’s faithful to a fault. Its project leads cut their teeth in the fangame community, and so it’s no surprise to find Mania wheeling out the hits – albeit in remixed form. Sonic & Knuckles’ Flying Battery is there, as is Sonic 2’s Oil…