Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2015 i Edge

Faced with the Pointless category of Videogame Publishers Renowned For Taking Risks, you’d stand a pretty good chance of advancing to the next round if you plumped for Activision. With a Call Of Duty game arriving for the big winter holiday sales season of every year since 2003, the company has built a reputation for identifying what works, and then giving us some more of it, albeit with twists to the ingredients. Apparently the FIFA bods over at EA Sports could hardly process the news when they were told to surrender the game industry’s Most Likely To Announce A Sequel trophy after having the category sewn up for so long. Against this backdrop, Guitar Hero Live manages to be a surprise on multiple levels. Unlike 2008’s Guitar Hero World Tour,…

Our fourth Get Into Games Challenge, in association with Unity and Abertay University, is now officially open for entries. This year’s theme is ‘loot’. You can interpret the theme however you wish. Perhaps you’ll construct a game about gathering riches, or escaping from the burden of a fortune, about theft, or one based on finding a single valuable item from among a sea of junk. It’s entirely up to you, but as ever, we’ll be seeking the most creative interpretations of the theme, technical merit and originality in your entries. We’ll draw up a shortlist of the best games once the competition has closed, and those will then be judged by the Edge team as well as a panel of game industry notables. This year, that group includes Doom and…

WEBSITE Phoboslab www.bit.ly/wipeoutview Twenty years ago, Dominic Szablewski attempted to write himself into Wipeout history. Well, he tried to get a billboard to display his name. That endeavour failed, but he recently decided to return to the game’s code and have another rummage. This time, he managed to extract all the texture and model data, and reassemble the lot. The result is this website, which features every original track and allows you to switch between free and fly-through cameras. The latter, while mostly good, sits a little higher than the original camera, exposing the absence of geometry in places the eye couldn’t wander previously. Of course, you can indulge this prying further in free-cam mode, and it’s fascinating to see just how sparse the track builds are – we’ve already…

Taken in the pop cultural sense, a spoiler is information about a work that, if encountered, will reveal key elements of the plot. But there’s another use for the word ‘spoiler’ that’s found in the world of automotive and aviation design. In its automotive sense, a spoiler is a device that alters (or spoils) the movement of air as a vehicle passes through it. Its purpose is to increase the streamline flow of air over a car to reduce drag. Such a mechanism offers several benefits, including improved handling and increased fuel economy. The two senses of ‘spoiler’ do have something in common: they diminish the value or effect of something. In the case of an automobile, air turbulence is spoiled by the apparatus. In the case of pop culture,…

Publisher EA Developer DICE Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release November 17 (US), 20 (UK) Few games come more freighted with expectation than DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront reboot, the firstborn of EA’s ten-year partnership with Lucasfilm and Disney. For starters, this will be the first heavyweight Star Wars title since Disney acquired Lucasfilm and terminated a number of troubled but promising projects, among them Star Wars 1313 and First Assault, as well as LucasArts’ development arm. DICE must also reckon with Episode VII, due out the following month, which is surely aiming to wash away all memory of the prequel trilogy. So this Battlefront must set the tone for the new film while pulling its own series out of a tailspin, a storied hiatus that has lasted a…

Publisher/developer Blizzard Entertainment Format PC Origin US Release TBA StarCraft II is hard. That’s the cornerstone of its appeal as a competitive game, and the reason that – prior to the rise of the MOBA – it was really the only eSport to gain serious and sustained international traction. But its importance to the scene is fading. While Blizzard’s RTS has never been in danger of sputtering out entirely, the past few years have suggested that competitive StarCraft has finally found the limits of its fanbase. Its growth has stalled a few leagues short of League Of Legends, and as its most prominent personalities dabble in making new names for themselves in other arenas – some heading to the game’s upstart stablemate, Hearthstone – there’s a sense of momentum arrested.…

Jake Kazdal didn’t always know what he wanted to do with life. Having worked as a game counsellor on a Nintendo hotline in his teens, he left college with a little experience of the industry, and so began to petition a contact he’d made at Enix for a job. During a sustained campaign of bugging the Enix man, Kazdal’s contact got promoted, and so the artist found himself completing the loop by taking up the guy’s old role on the hotline. But while it was a second job related to his passion, Kazdal hadn’t yet drawn the link between his artistic talents and a career in game development. Then Enix subscribed to a magazine called Edge and all that changed – Kazdal pored over the job ads in the back…

Wales Interactive has come a long way since 2012. In just a few years, the team from Pencoed, Bridgend, has expanded its focus from mobile games to PS4, Wii U and Xbox One; put out several interactive kids’ books; and been recognised with some 12 awards, including a Cymru BAFTA. The 13-strong outfit has also become a regular sight at gaming expos worldwide, having most recently put in an appearance at the Xbox Lobby Bar at the 2015 Games Developers Conference in San Francisco. Before Wales Interactive, development studios by the banks of the River Severn weren’t exactly thriving. But the global attention the studio has engendered has built more than just its own reputation, leading the Welsh government to allocate more funding to developers and creating opportunities for studios…

Few genres can match fighting games for staying power. It’s hardly the only type of game template to span three decades, but which others have held so true to their original vision and form? In fighting games, advances in processing power have led simply to greater audiovisual fidelity, and 25 years of lessons learned have not resulted in dramatic changes of tack, but increasingly complex systems. Button layouts, command lists and presentation are all unchanged and that, surely, is central to their enduring appeal. You might come to Mortal Kombat X having not played a game in the series for years, but your old techniques will still work. Scorpion’s spear, Sub-Zero’s ice ball, everyone’s uppercut: all are performed as before. Noble as this genre-wide adherence to a vision that’s a…

Boy, do we miss Bloodborne. We miss its busy scenery and complex geometry, despite this remake boosting Dark Souls II’s resolution on consoles to 1080p. We miss its darkness, despite this re-release’s partial restoration of the lighting system pulled from the original version. And we miss its pace, with our first hours back in Drangleic feeling like we’re swimming through bricks, despite the increase to what, on PS4, is a mostly stable 60fps. FromSoftware has done a more comprehensive job than most in updating a classic, but nonetheless Dark Souls II was aged instantly and dramatically by the release of Bloodborne. While the eyes and hands adjust before long to the look, feel and pace, we find ourselves still pining for Bloodborne’s healing system to the very end. With its…

John Henry is a folk hero who inspires many emotions, poured out in ballads, stories and plays across decades. One hitherto-absent reaction to such works is a desire to gag the most recognisable victim of superman syndrome ever. It took Code Name: STEAM – a turn-based squad strategy game from Fire Emblem creator Intelligent Systems – to achieve that. It wouldn’t be easy, mind, this legendary hulk bulked up by the boiler on his back and the steam-powered armaments in his hands, plus two mechanical limbs. Yes, this patriotic comic-book reinvention is hardly faithful to the source, but it does look the part, and the same goes for his league of extraordinary teammates. The horrors begin when they open their mouths. “Musta heard me clankin’ around,” he booms with mind-numbing…

Publisher Ubisoft Developer In-house (Montreal) Format 360, PC, PS3 Release 2010 Ubisoft makes a lot more than just Assassin’s Creed, but where would it be without Altaïr, Ezio, Connor and the rest? More pertinently, what would its games look like? In the eight years since a hooded avatar first leapt from steeple to haystack, Assassin’s Creed has not just become the most important line on Ubisoft’s balance sheet, but also a driving influence on almost every design document that spools from its printers. Whatever the setting or central mechanic, if the company is making an open-world game then Assassin’s Creed will run deep in its DNA. And it does make a lot of open worlds. Introduced in the first Assassin’s Creed, the formula of capturing – or, in Altaïr’s case,…

Early on in the previous generation, DLC was a fair proposition: extra content for your favourite games, made in the downtime between projects, and sold on an entirely optional basis. “I think adding to game worlds after release is glorious,” says Dan Marshall, creator of The Swindle at Size Five Games. “Anything that stops that empty, gut-wrenching feeling of ‘it’s over’ as the credits roll on something you loved is a great thing.” And so we got fresh maps for Call Of Duty, massive new campaigns for Fallout and Mass Effect, a screwball zombie spinoff to Red Dead Redemption, and a side story to BioShock 2 that was perhaps better than the game itself. There were speed bumps along the way. Right from the get-go, Oblivion’s bizarre horse armour was…

As game development becomes an ever broader church, it’s fitting that this year’s Develop, taking place July 14–16 in its traditional home, should encompass an extraordinary diversity of experience, its lineup designed to cater to all who make the pilgrimage to Brighton. Take, for example, the ever-popular business track. This year, Google’s Ross Brockman will wade into the murky waters of monetisation, discussing how to make the most of in-app purchases and advertisements to keep the money rolling in. On the other hand, design and production consultant (and UKIE board member) Ella Romanos will deliver a talk with a different focus: how to get funding to make your game in the first place. Google is represented elsewhere, too, as part of the event’s opening Evolve day, which is, as ever,…

Game Tekken 7 Manufacturer Bandai Namco After a limited location test release in Tokyo and Osaka, the latest instalment in the Tekken series was unleashed across Japan on March 18. The first game in the series to use Unreal Engine, Tekken 7 also introduces online play and now local players not only have their own screens, but also the option to choose which side of that screen to fight on. There are two major new mechanics in the form of Rage Art and Power Crush. The former allows players in the red to forfeit the usual attack power increase in exchange for a flurry of several unblockable moves that slices 30 per cent off of their opponent’s health bar. The latter allows you to continue planting hits even while you’re…

Headset abuse This is a contentious issue that I feel has been poorly addressed by developers and the media. After all, how harmful could VR be? It’s easy to dismiss such a question as another example of someone railing against games; maybe a gamer who’s been ‘turned’ by anti-game propagandists. And yet… I was pretty upset at enacting the torture scene in Grand Theft Auto V. I’ve completed that game twice. The first time, I was horrified. The second time, the knowledge of the scene hung over me like a dark cloud. I’m not sure I can do it again. And I certainly couldn’t have completed it if I’d played GTAV in VR. If I torture a man in a videogame, I see the edge of the TV screen. I…

Delighted as I was to learn that Bloodborne had sold a million copies within a couple of weeks of release, I was also a little worried. It felt a bit weird seeing such a big marketing campaign around a game which, to put it mildly, isn’t exactly for everyone. Bloodborne is no triple-A blockbuster, no scripted, press-X-to-murder rollercoaster. That’s precisely what makes it so special, of course, but it is a game that has to be learnt before it can be loved and, these days, there’s not so much of an appetite for that sort of thing. I worry that Bloodborne may turn from one of PS4’s fastest-selling games into its most quickly traded in. It got me thinking, like most things do, about music. In a few pages’ time…

Publisher TBC Developer Compulsion Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release TBC Survival games are hardly in short supply, nor are projects with a fetish for British iconography. But with its follow-up to Contrast, Compulsion Games has blended these two overworked ideas into something enticingly different. So whereas most recent examples of the genre tend to be populated by enemies liable to kill you on sight, We Happy Few allows you to hide even under direct surveillance by modifying your behaviour. “I wanted to work with paranoia,” creative director Guillaume Provost tells us. “That’s one of the elements I felt was under-tapped in games from a mechanical standpoint. We looked at different genres, and different games within the [survival] genre, and we wanted to create a society that…

Publisher SCE Developer Heavy Spectrum Format PS4 Origin UK Release TBA Hard to believe as it may be, it’s been 26 years since the original Shadow Of The Beast launched on Commodore’s Amiga. In videogame terms, that’s ancient history, Reflections’ bizarre and punishing platformer lost in time. For many, it’s now little but a vague memory, if they know of it at all. For Heavy Spectrum CEO Matt Birch, however, it has remained fresh in his mind since he discovered the game as a 16-year-old in St Helens. So when he had the chance to pitch an idea to Sony’s XDev, the division built for the express purpose of collaborating with external developers, it was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. It says much that out of all the concepts…

Someone on Activision’s investor relations team has a cruel way with puns. When, in 2011, the publisher announced that it was putting the Guitar Hero series on hiatus – and that around 500 people were losing their jobs, the majority as a result of that decision – it said its music game business unit was being “disbanded”. The publisher had only itself to blame. Activision had released 14 console games bearing the Guitar Hero name in five years, had ported it to smartphones and the arcade, and spun it off into a band game. It was the sort of release schedule that would turn even the world’s hottest band into its most hated. Warriors Of Rock, the closing act in a series that made Activision some $2 billion, launched in…

In videogames, a change isn’t just as good as a rest, it’s frequently the only option. Bound to their annual release schedules, games in established series have to justify their existence: why should you buy the new one when you’re perfectly satisfied with the one you’ve already got? Sometimes it’s an easy job: FIFA adds the new season’s teamsheets, Assassin’s Creed hops to a different setting. It’s about the difference between a feature and a gimmick, and it’s a finer line than you’d think, going on this month’s new releases. In theory, Mortal Kombat X should have it easy. It’s the debut on current consoles of a long-running, widely loved fighting game series; all it needs is a few new characters, some tweaks and additions to the established cast, and…

Will the circle be unbroken? It’s the question that haunts Pillars Of Eternity’s Dyrwood, where children are being born without souls after a fateful war with a god incarnate, but it’s also the one that hovered over this Kickstarter-funded CRPG. We won’t spoil how the birthing complication turns out, but the latter is met with a resounding yes: Obsidian has delivered exactly what was promised, a game that revives the spirit of Infinity Engine RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. It’s a reverent successor to that bloodline, offering an expansive new realm, Eora, and a new ruleset for realtime combat while still pinning down the essence of those videogame translations of Dungeons & Dragons-style adventuring. What that means here is a captivating trek through a painterly isometric landscape…

Just as her first act did, the second part of Vella’s Broken Age story opens with a knife. But rather than searching for cutlery with which to slice a cake, she instead narrowly avoids being shivved by a talking blade from Shay’s ship. Following Act 1’s cliffhanger, you see, the pair of protagonists have accidentally switched places, and now find themselves forced to make daunting reassessments of what they thought was reality. Shay’s story also echoes the beginning of the game, with his computerised father from the Bassinostra attempting to wake him from unconsciousness. As you might imagine, however, neither scenario is quite what it seems. So begins the bulkier, Double Fine-funded (the development of Act 2 was sustained by Act 1 sales after the Kickstarter pot ran dry) portion…

The assurances of a brochure selling budget package holidays need careful consideration, and the same evidently applies to low-cost interstellar travel. In Affordable Space Adventures you’re promised an unforgettable trip to the beautiful Spectaculon, but you’re instead dumped in a bleak wasteland, controlling a rickety craft whose systems aren’t fully operational yet. Naturally, the environments are more hazardous than travel operator UExplore makes out, though the point of challenge here is less about external threat so much as mastering unconventional controls. The misleadingly named setting is host to a series of dingy, cavernous environments. Your main source of illumination is the ship’s flashlight, the right analogue stick sweeping it across surfaces as you tentatively putter onward. As with all the craft’s systems, the power it expends is displayed on your…

Jordan Thomas has been unwittingly researching his new game for his entire career. In The Magic Circle, players will explore the unfinished world of an abandoned videogame, and by using ‘life’ extracted from cracks in its wireframe models, they can attempt to either restore this land to its once-planned glory or bring it down from within. While development proper began in 2013, the idea began to form during Thomas’s first design role – creating the Shalebridge Cradle level for Thief: Deadly Shadows. “In many ways, working on that game gave birth to my design-demon,” he says. “It tells me constantly how out of place any narrative element is in any simulation, how much of a waste of time traditional storytelling is in an interactive medium. That voice is in constant,…

James Kochalka is an American artist whose work has been published internationally and developed into series for both Nickelodeon and Cartoon Hangover. In 2011, he even became Vermont’s first cartoonist laureate. He also makes music as James Kochalka Superstar and last year added his first published game, Glorkian Warrior: The Trials Of Glork, to his list of achievements. What sparked your interest in games? I went to the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Boy Scouts, and they had a gigantic mainframe computer. We played Tic Tac Toe on it and I was just amazed that you could have control over what happened on a TV screen. After that, I saw Pong, and I was like, “What, are you kidding me? They move?” Did that feed into your interest in creating imagery?…

People who don’t play games much (or at all) often ask the most penetrating questions about them. As I was blundering around the opening stages of Bloodborne one evening, my girlfriend kept posing innocent queries to which there was no good answer. I passed by a carriage still attached to a dead horse – no point, I quickly decided, in flogging it – and she asked: “Can you get in the carriage?” I had to explain that in this kind of videogame you can’t interact with objects that way. The same went for a coffin she fancied opening, and so on. She was also interested in character aesthetics. We’d had an entertaining time choosing an avatar who looked as much like me as possible (Troubled Childhood, natch), and then during…

With Hollywood having made it its collective mission to reboot every property going, it’s little surprise to find that the trend is now permeating the game industry, too. This month’s Hype features two very different prospects deemed fit for a fresh start. The first, DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront, carries with it the weight of years of cancellations and middling returns from the games that did make it onto shelves in boxes bearing that logo. It’s a chance for DICE to ride the wave of its Battlefield success, as well as the excitement generated by Episode VII. All eyes are on DICE to deliver. The hard part will be satisfying a much larger variety of stakeholders than usual. Battlefield fans have already expressed their displeasure at the inclusion of a thirdperson…

Publisher SCE Developer The Chinese Room Format PS4 Origin UK Release 2015 Fictional apocalypses are usually pretty straightforward, but in Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, the end of the world is anything but simple. There are no blasted wastes, shambling infected or 12ft spiders to offer clues as to why humans are now an endangered species – all you know to begin with is that you’re in the village of Yaughton in Shropshire, it’s an impossibly lovely day, and there’s not a soul in sight. You might think The Chinese Room’s next game after Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs sounds explicitly religious. The reality, of course, is far more ambiguous. “It’s not a religious apocalypse,” says creative director Dan Pinchbeck. “[The nature of] the apocalypse is the…

Publisher Nintendo Developer Intelligent Systems Format 3DS Origin Japan Release June 25 (JP), 2016 Love is a complex force, capable of binding opposed minds together, but also tearing lives apart. Evidently, Intelligent Systems realises that ‘It’s complicated’ is more than a trite Facebook status, because its newest Fire Emblem game (subtitled If in Japan) is as much about warring hearts as clashing blades. Where 2012’s Fire Emblem: Awakening focused on bringing your party together, forging bonds between characters on the bloodied fields of turn-based battle that had ramifications far beyond helpful boosts in combat, If’s three strands revolve around the tangled emotions involved in taking a Falchion to family ties. You are the focal point for all this familial angst, torn between the people who raised you in Nohr and…

Squeeze L2 just as an enemy in Bloodborne raises its arm to attack and the Quicksilver Bullet you fire has a chance of staggering them. Follow that up with a light attack while standing close enough and you’ll pull off a devastating Visceral Attack, which also knocks nearby enemies back and renders you invulnerable during the animation. It’s a twist on Dark Souls’ parryand-riposte system that perfectly encapsulates Bloodborne’s more aggressive design, which encourages players to take risks, but it’s not described by any of the game’s tutorial notes. Bloodborne’s backstab manoeuvre is similarly enigmatic: sneak within striking distance of your quarry, charge a strong attack and then, after the enemy has dropped to its knee, follow through with a light attack again to inflict colossal amounts of damage. We’ve…

Format 360, PC, PS3 Publisher Bethesda Softworks Developer Arkane Studios Origin France, US Release 2012 At times, the black mirror of 17–19th century London that is Dunwall can feel like a living dissertation made by a team with an intense love of history. Not when you’re blade deep in an aristocrat’s gullet or possessing a monstrous rat, of course, but in nods to the Age of Enlightenment and the history of science that leap from the game’s text logs and hand-painted textures. The effects of the new whale-oil technology upon which the treacherous Lord Regent builds his regime offer some parallels to the historical discourse on God, magic and science. Science had a different name back in the time of the Great Fire, however, and accordingly each of Dishonored’s mechanical…

Here’s something we never thought we’d print: Mortal Kombat X is nice. It can still be deeply unpleasant when it wants to be – and it wants to be that an awful lot – but there are some heartening moments within the game’s five-hour story mode. Much of it comes from the way developer Netherrealm spent so much of 2011’s Mortal Kombat killing people off, with one series stalwart after another sent to their doom by a scriptwriter’s eager fingers. With Mortal Kombat X being a straight sequel, that’s something of a problem. What chance does a game in this series have without the likes of Sub-Zero, Liu Kang or Kung Lao? Netherrealm’s solution is clever: set the game 25 years in the future and add a host of characters…

No one reads the lore. Oh, don’t look like that. We don’t mean no one reads any of the painstakingly crafted words that RPG writers take the time to squirrel away in fictitious volumes and menu screen tips, but hardly anyone devours every dusty tome that games put in their path. Adventure calls, so you delight in a few of these ancillary texts, skim a lot more, and filter out the rest. You close your inventory and mean to return, but never quite find the time. At least, you suspect that’s how devs see it. It’s the reason that audio logs became a fad after BioShock, because they provide a way to offload backstory while the player plunges on with killing Splicers with murderous bees. It’s why in This Month…

At its worst, The Hunter: Primal lets you win knife fights with Utahraptors. Standing taller than a man, these intelligent pack hunters are unable to turn faster than you can strafe. They rotate on the spot, displaced cries looping as you wound them with a hail of weightless blows, then sprint off in a spasmodic zigzag to confound tracking. But in a twist unexplained by palaeontology, a fleeing raptor might launch you 50ft skywards, allowing gravity to accomplish what hooked claws could not. By offering a melee weapon as your sole starting gear, Primal exposes severe deficiencies in its AI, animation, audio design and aspirations to being a believable dinosaur-hunting sim. Getting up close to the reptiles kills the illusion of tense, skilful stalking and reveals a game as unlikely…

Gunpei Yokoi’s most famous design philosophy suggested that games didn’t require high-end technology to thrive. Indeed, he posited that ideas were often constrained by advanced hardware, since limitations can give rise to creative solutions. After more than five years on the market, 3DS is certainly seasoned technology, and yet HAL has imposed more stringent limitations on itself still, disregarding the portable’s featureset to produce a monochromatic and defiantly 2D platform-puzzler. Had Boxboy been revealed as a lost Game Boy classic from the early ’90s, few would have been surprised. Only Miiverse functionality and Play Coin hints betray the fact that it wasn’t developed during Yokoi’s heyday. That’s no knock. This is a game that doesn’t so much think outside the box as around it, square player character Qbby conjuring blocks…

Have we witnessed the passing of an era? Can it be true that the great days of Easter eggs in games are over? If so, a light has gone out in the gaming world. Actually, it might not have. I just haven’t seen one for a while so, like any rigorous modern journalist, I’m simply assuming something and saying it like it’s utterly true. When we were making Black & White, someone had the excellent idea of getting the game to interrogate the email names stored on the computer and apply them to villagers. Something as small as that made a big difference to the way many people played. Throw a boulder at that little character? No, you mustn’t. It’s your mum! Yes, I know your mum didn’t have an…