Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2015 i Edge

In the old days, people used to huddle together in the corners of the Internet, in forums and on mailing lists, to talk about videogames. We know this because we were there. We even had our own discussion board, before some genius from our parent company’s Men Who Wear Aftershave division decided that there was no value in it and shut it down. This was social media before the term had been invented, but only social in the context of others who were interested in videogames enough to hunt us down and join in. To everyone else, we might as well have been invisible. But then everything changed. User contributions are the beating heart of today’s Internet, from Facebook and Twitter to Kickstarter and Instagram, and everyone is paying attention.…

A lot of people who’ve migrated from Xbox 360 to Xbox One have relegated their old hardware to the loft or sold it. What does that mean for backwards compatibility? This, for me, as a gamer and as somebody who cares so much about the brand, has been the hardest thing about not leaking it. I’ve wanted to tell people, “Hold onto your 360 games!” There were a hundred times where people had to stop me from tweeting that out over the past six months, because as I would see a game that works I wanted to tell people: “Keep it – don’t sell that! Even if you sell your 360, keep your games!” How does it work? The team took the approach of effectively running the whole 360 OS…

Game Star Wars: Battle Pod Manufacturer Bandai Namco Waiting for the console port of a cherished arcade game used to be a big deal. Nowadays, though, the games you play at home are more likely to find their way to arcades instead – Flappy Bird included. So Bandai Namco is attempting to reignite the excitement with a more full-on approach. Star Wars: Battle Pod would feel flat without its air jets, wraparound screen and cradling cockpit, so the company is skipping a console iteration and offering home versions of the actual cabinet. You’ll have to drop a whole lot more than the £45 the Saturn version of Sega Rally set you back, however: the standard version of Battle Pod clocks in at $35,000 (or £24,000 in the UK) – and…

You can’t find me in the club The Internet brought a new era to the videogame industry, not only in terms of connectivity between players, but also in the birth of a new business model that I am not particularly a fan of. I’m not here to tackle the physical-versus-digital debate, but to talk about something that, as a videogame collector, worries me a lot. I am a big fan of arcade games, and today I randomly remembered the existence of a game released by Konami called GTi Club, which I meant to buy a long time ago but had forgotten about. I love arcade racing games, and GTi Club is everything you could want from the genre. I immediately started searching for it on the PlayStation Store but, to…

Illustration marshdavies.com By the time you read this, E3 will be over, but print lead times mean I’m writing these words a few days before I get on the plane. As I mentioned last month, the run-up to E3 is a curious, magical time of half-truths and whispers, and as my departure ticks closer, those rumours are starting to solidify. What I still don’t know, despite it being part-organised by a team sitting across the office, is exactly what’s going down at the PC Gaming Show. I like to think it’ll be much like the one dreamed up a few years ago by Graham Smith, now editor of Rock Paper Shotgun, then editor of PC Gamer and, for as long as I have known him, the bearer of a quite…

Publisher SCE Developer Guerrilla Games Format PS4 Origin Netherlands Release 2016 Guerrilla describes Horizon: Zero Dawn as post-post-apocalyptic. It’s quite a studenty way of putting it, but it fits. It’s been over a thousand years since human civilisation, and much of humanity with it, was wiped from the face of the planet. Nature has reclaimed the landscape, resulting in a lush, vibrant world filled with the swaying dynamic foliage that is rapidly replacing the particle shower as this console generation’s calling card. In the intervening millennium, Horizon’s world has been overrun by strange machines modelled on the animal kingdom. Where they came from, what they’re up to, and quite why they’re such a threat to female protagonist Aloy are among the mysteries to which Guerrilla is happy to refer, but…

Publisher Capcom Developer In-house, Dimps Format PC, PS4 Origin Japan Release Spring The secret to Street Fighter’s enduring appeal is a simple one: it’s still Street Fighter. You might come to SFV having previously played a game in this series 20 years ago, but while things have evolved in the intervening years, whatever experience you have is perfectly valid. You can still jump, still punch and kick, still throw fireballs. Sure, the series’ glossary has expanded vastly since its ’90s heyday, but the first chapter of any entry has been largely unchanged for the best part of a quarter of a century. So, sitting down with SFV for the first time, we do the logical thing: ignore the five other faces on the character-select screen and pick Ryu. We jump,…

When Bob Kane picked up his pencil early in 1939 and began to sketch out an idea for a new hero, his concern was keeping the higher-ups happy; DC Comics had grown fat on Superman’s success and was hungry for more. While Clark Kent’s and Bruce Wayne’s alter egos have jostled for supremacy on printed page and cinema screen since, it is Batman who has proven the better fit for videogames, and it all stems from Kane’s original design. The cover of Detective Comics #27 shows the Caped Crusader swinging over the rooftops, a perp slung under one arm, a rope in the other, and his cape billowing out behind him. Over three-quarters of a century later, in Batman: Arkham Knight, he glides and grapples around a vast videogame Gotham,…

Splatoon feels like Nintendo’s destiny. With outside support at low ebb, Wii U was always going to need new firstparty games, but Iwata’s insistence that these use the GamePad in meaningful fashion suggested that not all of its existing series would be suitable fits. More significantly, it was only a matter of time before the company began to rely on new creators coming up through the ranks, what with Miyamoto, Koizumi and co edging ever closer to retirement. Splatoon is a product of Nintendo’s Garage programme, designed to encourage its employees to freely explore new ideas. The result is, after a fashion, a thirdperson shooter, and it’s the most refreshing thing the publisher has produced internally for some time. Splatoon may not be quite as refined or as generous as…

What are all these gems doing here? These sparkly pickups surely have no place in a world whose every fibre and inhabitant is made of craft materials. Yet here they are, glimmering invitingly, suggesting routes between platforms and tucked away behind knitted false walls. They’re not just aesthetically inappropriate, but mechanically irksome, with one gem in each large group containing one of the 20 Miiverse stamps woven throughout the level, stamps being one of four item types to be fully harvested from each stage if you want a 100 per cent rating. With no way of knowing which gem holds the stamp until you collect it, all you can do is seek out every last crystal. Yoshi’s games have long played at a more leaden pace than Mario’s, and they…

So it turns out that creating a decent army of bots for an FPS is not easy. I was asked to flesh out the characters of a few dozen of these, and what attracted me most to the idea was that the developers in question felt bots need love, too. These bots were to be different and, well, better. Ideally, players should have no idea whether they were facing bots or humans. Yeah, I’ll help with that. The first task was to work out the types of players to create. To do this, I struck upon the happy notion of simply stealing the gameplaying styles of a set of real live humans. And the perfect group was in front of me, hunched over their machines, working with varying degrees of…

The rate of technological change within the field of virtual reality right now is dizzying, a torrent of innovations and competitors rushing in to claim a share of the emerging market. Most recently, HTC and Valve snaffled up attention and column inches with their astonishing Vive prototype, but Oculus has just responded in kind with its retail-ready CV1. The new headset retains a familiar form, but makes the DK1 model and its screen-door display look archaic by comparison. The CV1 unit’s clean lines are appealingly tidy, and the redesigned, partially rubberised strap is far more sophisticated than the harnesses that adorned its predecessors. The difference is instantly obvious when you put the unit on, surprising with its lightness and comfort. The headset has removable headphones, a resolution of 2160x1200 and…

The last time we saw Ernest Cline, he was driving his custom DeLorean DMC-12 across America to attend the excavation of Atari’s New Mexico landfill in Zak Penn documentary Atari: Game Over. Today, the author of Ready Player One is at home and shielded from dust storms, but classic videogames are still very much in his thoughts. Where did the idea for Ready Player One come from? They tell you to write what you know, and to write the story you’ve always wanted to read. I grew up loving adventure stories, especially space adventure stories like Heinlein’s Have Space Suit – Will Travel. Being five years old just when Star Wars and Atari 2600 came out, I had a really low-res 8bit spaceship simulator in my living room. I could…

Illustration marshdavies.com The weird thing about Battlefield Hardline is that you’re not playing cops and robbers; you’re playing a TV show that happens to be about cops and robbers. We now live in an age where the highest aspiration of verisimilitude for a videogame is to simulate not reality, but reality as already mediated by television. Of course, this has long been the case for sports games, which eagerly adopted the mise-en-scène of televised football or tennis as soon as they had the spare processing resources. But it is relatively new in action games. The way each ‘episode’ of Hardline starts with a “Previously on…” narrative catch-up, as well as the way that, if you quit to the main menu, the game shows you a “Next on…” teaser for what…

We may talk about cascading particle effects and lush greenery being the most discernible selling points for this console generation, but it’s also about developers having the opportunity to rebuild gaming’s walls miles farther out. It’s not a question of the impossible made possible, but the fidelity and density of what today’s hardware can conjure up is gradually stripping away the pressure to ever meet a horizon. A world without visible bounds is sure to please a species that evolved to master great tracts of land, and has made a habit of kicking at its limits ever since. But providing acres more space presents a design problem: how best to navigate it? Too much guidance undermines the promise inherent in a vast panorama; too little and wanderlust is soon traded…

Publisher EA Developer DICE Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Sweden Release November 17 (NA), 20 (UK) Despite the familiarity of its constituent parts, little can prepare you for the moment you step out into the howling wind and snow glare of Star Wars: Battlefront’s Hoth battlefield. Snowspeeders, X-Wings and TIE Fighters scream overhead, and the ground shakes under the weight of each plodding step of the AT-ATs we’re charged with defending. Bursts of blaster fire sear the air around us, and their targets’ bodies. But still our Imperial teammates push forward to quash the rebels, forebodingly stylish light-grey winter capes flapping heavily in the blasting gale. It’s an overwhelming slug of nostalgia, and one that successfully delivers the atmosphere of the original films through a combination of perfect recreations…

Publisher Square Enix Developer Avalanche Studios Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Sweden, US Release Dec-15 As Avalanche producer Omar Shakir tells us, a big part of blowing anything up is creating context. It feels apropos, then, that we should clarify that he’s talking about the art of scaling up the fidelity and size of an open world, although he might just as easily be referring to the satisfaction of triggering really, really big explosions. Just Cause 2 certainly wasn’t short of pyrotechnics, but Just Cause 3 ups the stakes to eyebrow-singeing new levels. During our initial minutes with the game, we parachute returning protagonist Rico Rodriguez down into an occupied cliffside village and set about cleansing it of dictator General Di Ravello’s iconography and materiel. A police station riddled…

There’s a temptation to be guarded, of course. Having publicly imploded once already, virtual reality could easily follow the same trajectory as 3D cinema – a comeback far more muted than first predicted. This time around, the hardware is more powerful and more affordable, but are things really any different? We Are Formation co-founder Jon Reidy, Radial-G producer Sam Watts, Psytec Games’ Jon Hibbins, and Roto VR co-founder Elliot Myers join us to unpick some of the tangled issues tied into VR’s second coming. There’s a great deal of hype about the potential of virtual reality, but do you think the tech is ready to live up to that promise? Jon Hibbins Well, there’s been real breakthroughs in tech recently. Vive is phenomenal, and has broken ground on the quality…

Although Dead Island 2, Alien: Isolation, and Dying Light are all horror genre siblings, they share another, far less obvious consanguinity: Axis Animation. Founded in 2000 and based in Glasgow, Axis has grown from a four-person outfit to one that employs over 40, not including its phalanx of freelancers, and has established itself in the upper echelons of videogame CGI creation. For just over a decade, the studio spread itself between games, TV, film and ads, but it wasn’t until it was approached by Deep Silver in 2011 that it would cement a place at the forefront of an industry by producing the much-discussed Dead Island announcement trailer. Games have always been in the studio’s blood, though, with co-founders Richard Scott, Stuart Aitken, Graham McKenna and Dana Dorian first meeting…

For better and worse, power creep is an accepted fact of superhero media. The escapades of costumed crusaders rely largely on spectacle, on the drama of overcoming, and so escalation is inevitable when seeking ways to tax a being who can already put the fear of God into a room full of crooks faster than Lord Sugar. As the closing part of Rocksteady’s Arkham trilogy, and the first in the series to leave behind old hardware, Batman: Arkham Knight is no exception. This is no longer the Batman of Arkham Asylum, caught on the hop and in a tightly bound trap, but a Batman with a bulging utility belt and move list from the off. He exists within a game that flirts with the line between more and excess, but…

E ver since Destiny’s release, Bungie has assured its players that they are being listened to, that the studio’s 500-strong team is working around the clock to shape this ambitious, yet flawed, online shooter into the game its fans want and deserve. It has rarely felt like the truth, the studio’s portentous, in-universe communications dismissing long-standing grievances while it works to its own agenda. Finally, eight months and change on, Bungie is starting to deliver: House Of Wolves is the work of a studio serving its players, rather than catering to the whims of those within its walls. Had you told us a few months ago that one of the solutions to Destiny’s many knotty problems was yet another addition to its convoluted morass of currencies, we’d have laughed you…

What’s going on with development of The Last Guardian? The game is in good shape. What we showed in video format is totally playable and is one section of a larger level. I believe we are showing behind closed doors the actual live code of that level. The reason we’ve shown it at this E3 is we have good confidence in the way development is going. We completely rebuilt the game in terms of the technical side – the PS3 code was very optimised for PS3 and it took lots of effort, but still the game didn’t reach the performance it needed, and features were missing. It was clear the game design had to be compromised to make it work on PS3, and PS4 was coming, so we decided to…

WEBSITE Cat & Fish jonroru.tumblr.com Gods Will Be Watching lead pixel artist Jonathan Romero Ruiz is a prolific animator, one with a penchant for fantasy videogame demakes. One recent GIF is a garish vision of what the high-gloss world of Splatoon might have looked like in SNES form (pretty good, as it happens), and there are plenty of other examples on his Cat&Fish tumblr, such as an adorably tense pixel spin on Alien: Isolation and a clunking Titanfall mech entry animation. Romero Ruiz also whips up 8bit homages to movies and TV shows, with highlights including riffs on True Detective, Looper and The Interview. Dig a little deeper and you’ll also find illustrations and comic-book panels. Colourful and darkly humorous, it’s well worth spending some time trawling through Romero Ruiz’s…

Illustration marshdavies.com Hillary Clinton is holding a Game Boy on Air Force One. Not just holding it, but staring deeply into its screen, transfixed as she grasps it in the proper position for serious Tetris, Klax or (less likely) Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing. She’s not posing, but playing. The Clinton Library recently released this image, taken in-flight by White House official photographer Ralph Alswang in April 1993. It did so via Instagram, of course, where it could find its way onto the world’s billion or so smartphones, on which we all can play Tetris any time, unseen. How much the world has changed in 20 years. What hasn’t changed? Well, that a Clinton or a Bush might fill the White House again (or again-again), but never mind that. Instead,…

Publisher SCE Developer GenDesign, Sony Japan Studio Format PS4 Origin Japan Release 2016 Six years is a long time to wait for a game, even one as apparently immune to the ravages of age as The Last Guardian. First shown at E3 2009 for PS3, development of the follow-up to Team Ico’s Shadow Of The Colossus has been so protracted that it’s long been rumoured the game was cancelled. But if the roar of excitement from the audience at its reappearance during Sony’s E3 conference this year – which opened with a single white feather floating down the main screen – is any indication, years of dashed hopes have done little to quash the enthusiasm of those awaiting Fumito Ueda’s next epic. It’s telling that of all the possible choices…

Publisher Konami Developer In-house (Kojima Productions) Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One Origin Japan Release September 1 (360, PC, PS3, PS4), 15 (PC) While conspiracy theorists scour Hideo Kojima’s Twitter feed for encoded messages about his ties with Konami, our minds turn to a far lesser known but equally vital figure. Somewhere in the bowels of Kojima Productions is the sound technician responsible for simulating the noise a horse makes when yanked into the air at 125 miles per hour. Said horse is the victim of the Fulton surface-to-air recovery system, the air-lifting technique that became a method of nabbing your enemies in PSP’s Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, but only now is being put to use to kidnap a variety of tranquillised beasts. After two days’ play, we’ve…

Publisher Playtonic Games Developer In-house Format PC, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U Origin UK Release Oct-16 Most crowdfunding campaigns launch amid an atmosphere of hope rather than expectation. As a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie in development at a studio staffed almost exclusively by Rare alumni, Yooka-Laylee was as sure a bet as you’ll find on Kickstarter, and so it was little surprise when it quickly passed a modest £175,000 target. No one, however, predicted that it would do so in 40 minutes. The studio had bargained on its stretch goals lasting for the duration of the campaign, the conclusion of which was set to coincide with the back end of E3 – a choice, creative lead Gavin Price tells us, made to capitalise on any hoped-for announcements that didn’t materialise.…

Ultra Street Fighter IV PS4 The definitive version, they said. We’ve fixed the input latency, they said. Maybe Capcom’s vision for the definitive version of Street Fighter IV was laggy menus, unintentional balance changes, graphical glitches and even more latency than the PS3 version, but we doubt it. Patches are slowly bringing it up to speed, but Other Ocean’s port was meant to build hype for SFV. If anything, it’s done the opposite. The Unfinished Swan PS4 Three years on from its release, Giant Sparrow’s debut has lost little of its mystery and none of its charm. Very little has been tinkered with for this port, although a smooth 60fps and 1080p resolution better showcase the minimalist visuals. A later section involving water and vines seems to be more responsive,…

Rocksteady co-founder and Arkham series game director Sefton Hill is about as inside Batman’s head as it is possible to be, having dedicated eight years to making players feel like the world’s greatest detective. Here we ask him about shaping an adventure that peels open Bruce Wayne’s mind for all to see, and introducing focus to the open-world template. Your Gotham is full of character. What do you have to take into account when filling up a city like this? Something that I guess we learned from Arkham City was being able to make sure the player can see, and be drawn into, all these exciting experiences, and also fundamentally making sure that they all feel different. We also wanted to create a city that had a really high density…

Heroes Of The Storm was once, in a previous incarnation, called Blizzard All-Stars. Before that, it was Blizzard DOTA. Both titles make more apparent its debt to DOTA Allstars, the Warcraft III mod that launched a genre, laid the groundwork for a freeto-play revolution, and almost single-handedly elevated the profile of pro gaming. Blizzard changing its game’s name indicates something more than a need to adapt to a world where the Dota trademark has become Valve’s property or ‘MOBA’ is sometimes used as a pejorative. It represents a willingness to break with the past entirely. Heroes Of The Storm is a MOBA in that it places two teams of five RPG-style characters in competition with each other on a map that draws elements from tower defence and RTS games. These…