Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i Edge

It may seem a little odd to open the first page of an issue by talking about its final one, but we hope you’ll forgive us the indulgence just this once. This issue we introduce a new back-page feature, The Long Game, a space for us to check in on titles that have continued to grow and shift long after launch. Games have changed. A release date is often merely a starting line, and we cannot simply draw a line under something after we review it. Modern games are journeys that change with every new DLC pack and balance patch. They have destinations that are nebulous and fuzzy, and depend on a player’s tastes. What does it mean to ‘complete’ a Minecraft, a Call Of Duty, or a League Of…

You’ll struggle to find a more passionate advocate for VR than Andrew Willans. Eve Valkyrie’s lead designer left Ubisoft Reflections after seven years, having worked on the likes of The Crew, The Division and Watch Dogs, as well as leading a small team on the delightful Grow Home. He moved to CCP Newcastle after being dazzled by an early Valkyrie demo, and is still working on the game, some 18 months on from its initial launch. Ahead of his keynote at this year’s Develop: VR conference at Olympia London on November 9, Willans spoke to us about his experiences working on one of VR’s biggest games. “We’re making games in VR because we believe that this is a large part of the future of games” What’s the biggest draw to…

Daniel Avery is a DJ and producer based in London, frequently listed among the top DJs in the underground club scene. He has recorded mixes for Fabric and DJ-Kicks and produced his own dance album, Drone Logic. With new music set to release soon, he takes time out of the studio to talk about his other enduring passion. What was the first game you played? It was definitely Super Mario Bros on the NES round my friend’s house. Being in that room is one of my earliest memories. Seeing my obsession with it all, my parents bought me a SNES with Super Mario World for my birthday. That was back in 1992. I’ve still got it. Did that put you in the Nintendo camp? I dug it all really. My…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar The danger is that educational videogames are teaching exactly the wrong thing Can videogames be educational? The question is as old as videogames themselves, and it depends what you mean. One of my favourite toys as a young child was my Dataman, made by Texas Instruments: it was a futuristic-looking grey handheld console that essentially gamified mental arithmetic, flashing up sums on the blue LED display and asking the player to input the answer via the number keys. As a tiny nerd I became obsessed with getting perfect scores as fast as possible. After months of this I got very good at mental arithmetic, but then that was exactly what the Dataman was training. It was basically an interactive calculator. The question gets more complex when we consider…

How did you break into game development? I originally joined Nintendo as a graphic designer for games. At the time, there wasn’t a department just for debug, and so debugging was done within the department, with new entries to the company being pulled straight in to help. For the first half year after joining I had no graphic design work to do and instead I just worked on debug! Splatoon was the first game to emerge from Nintendo’s Garage initiative. Can you tell us more about the setup of Garage? Garage isn’t so much the name of an initiative of a few staff members as it is a team name. The staff on the Garage team were developers who worked on Wii U launch titles like Nintendo Land and New…

The founders of Press Play needed just a month to open a new studio after Microsoft closed the doors on their first. They had to move fast. If they wanted to keep old colleagues together, they needed to grab them before they dispersed into new jobs elsewhere. But they already had the furniture from Press Play’s old office – and all its IP, too. Copenhagen-based Press Play was the maker of a series of superbly polished and colourful games that embraced physics and player creativity, starting with Max & The Magic Marker, which launched on Nintendo’s WiiWare store in 2010. This platformer asked players to draw objects into the game world with the Wii Remote and it went on to be released on iOS, PlayStation 3, PC and Nintendo DS.…

Developer/publisher  Nintendo (EPD)  Format  Switch Release  October 27 Wait a minute. Mario’s a dinosaur? The payoff to Odyssey’s debut trailer stuck a moustache on a Tyrannosaurus as seemingly the logical extreme of its new capture mechanic. Courtesy of a ghostly hat named Cappy, Mario can indeed inhabit his enemies – well, if you can’t beat them, you might as well become them – so you’d imagine this moment as the culmination of the game’s fanciful conceit, a climactic blowout toward the game’s end. But no. The T Rex arrives within the first half-hour, curled up and slumbering sweetly on the lush grass of the Cascade Kingdom – and yes, you get to control it. It seems a reckless gambit, before you realise it can only mean Nintendo knows it has…

It takes months to make an awesome Adventure, and players will eat it in 20 minutes like a big bag of chips With development of the launch game complete, director Luke Smith has, like us, been playing a lot of Destiny 2. Two weeks after launch, here he discusses the game’s early life, Bungie’s renewed focus on data, and the never-ending struggle to keep pace with an audience with an insatiable hunger for new things to do. No doubt you’ve been keeping tabs on what players are up to in the game. Is their activity running largely as you expected? There have been some pleasant surprises, but there are some that ask you to be introspective about them, too. An extremely high percentage of players have both finished the campaign…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now P erhaps you’re interested in Marvel Vs Capcom: Infinite’s story mode. If that’s the case, allow us to suggest you do something more useful with that money; donate it to a political party whose views you abhor, perhaps, or run it under the tap for ten minutes before throwing it in the bin. It is an embarrassment that wastes not only the bonkers potential of its set-up but also completely fails to fulfil the principal goal of the contemporary fighting-game story mode. What should be a graceful introduction to the game is instead a confusing mess that spends more time undermining its systems than it does exploring them. Any hope that Capcom might have learned a few lessons from…

Developer/publisher Larian Studios Format PC Release Out now Divinity: Original Sin II is the sort of RPG where you can use a teleport spell to pluck a merchant from their stall before dropping them onto a pool of magical fire that you’ve created round the back of a house, all to get away with murder and, once you’ve looted their corpse, theft. Limitations are few and far between in the tumultuous land of Rivellon; if you’ve got some madcap idea, chances are that you’ll at least be able to make a valiant attempt at making it happen. Though not strictly an open-world game, its large maps separated by chapters and loadscreens, this is still very much a sandbox where anything goes, evoking the likes of Ultima 7. Every NPC can…

Private sales of nuclear fallout bunkers have, in recent months, reached their highest levels yet in Japan. Such is the level of national anxiety of being almost-neighbours to a North Korean megalomaniac who routinely plunges test rockets into the Sea Of Japan. Still, the existential dread that accompanies this kind of international sabre-rattling (not to mention the last shoe-soaking downpours of a lingering monsoon) only slightly dampened the atmosphere of this year’s Tokyo Game Show, which still managed to lure a quarter of a million visitors to its cavernous, gloomy venue, the Makuhari Messe convention centre. Here, on the bleak industrial outskirts of the city, a little over 600 companies, including a clutch of international indie developers, showed up. As in recent years, however, many of the big hitters, from…

WEBSITE Destiny Item Manager bit.ly/destinyim Anyone who played the first Destiny will have heard of Destiny Item Manager, a thirdparty browser extension so feature-rich it made Bungie’s own effort look like macaroni art. Thankfully, it’s back in time for Destiny 2. It features a drag-and-drop UI, allowing you to swiftly move items from storage to your inventory at any time. Forgot to bring your trusty exotic fusion rifle to the raid? With a laptop or phone at your side, you can pluck it from your vault at will. DIM can search for duplicates, find fuel for infusions and auto-equip items to push you to your highest Power level. It even marks legendary-mod guns with gold borders to prevent wasteful dismantling. The app is still yet to be updated, but it…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar The best way of keeping a game off the trade-in pile is to build an ecosystem around it to ensure steady engagement Here comes Destiny again, then, and with it goes a chunk of my life. My wife now understands that our evenings together have a fixed finish time so I can link up with the raid group without keeping everyone hanging around; I was 20 minutes late last night, and got the kind of reaction from the gang that you’d expect if you’d just needlessly messed up on the final boss for the 30th time in a row. Everyone has to agree on a time, working their actual lives around their virtual ones. All of us have commitments in the boring real world, and so punctuality in…

Developer/publisher 11bit Studios Format PC Origin Poland Release 2017 O ne of our workers is crippled. Frostbitten from his work hauling fuel from the coal piles far outside our city and hungry because the cookhouse ran out of food, he collapsed and was taken to the medical post. But, instead of curing him, the doctor lamed him and now he’s unable to work, a burden on our society. The people ask if we should build a care home for him, but the notion is ridiculous. We can’t even feed everyone. Frostpunk is a new city-building strategy game from the studio that developed This War Of Mine. It imagines an alternative Victorian Britain which has been stricken by the sudden onset of an ice age, and tasks you with saving your…

Developer/publisher Team Meat Format Android,iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin US Release 2018 B oy, does it feel good to have the skinless wonder back under the thumbs. He patters and smacks through levels, up walls and over band saws with the same satisfying heft as ever. Little wonder: original Super Meat Boy programmer Tommy Refenes is creating this sequel, preserving everything that makes Meat Boy, well, Meat Boy. Weighty physics, tight controls, instant respawns, gory splatter trails – it’s all still here. Quite the feat, considering so much has changed. Super Meat Boy co-creator Edmund McMillen is no longer involved. This started life as an iPhone title. It only uses two buttons. And, technically, it’s a runner. Not an endless runner – often associated with mechanical compromise and…

You began your Nintendo career as an artist. How closely did you work with the design teams, and what did you learn from them about making Mario games? At first I was responsible for character modelling and animation, but I gradually became more involved with the technical design of the characters I was making too. In Super Mario Galaxy, I was involved with the design for the player character and in Super Mario Galaxy 2 I was involved with some level design. I don’t think the work of artists can be separated from the design side. I really learned a lot of things from working on Mario games, including the elements of gameplay, what makes an action game fun, and how to face problems simply. You’ve been at Nintendo since…

You’ve worked at Capcom, as well as Nintendo – even if you were working on Nintendo IP while at Capcom, you’re not quite a ‘lifer’. What makes Nintendo different from other game companies? As far as I’m concerned, it’s that all staff – whether they’re programmers, artists, sound designers or whoever – go beyond the simple boundaries of their area of responsibility and suggest concrete ideas to each other to make a game more interesting. It’s like everyone is a game planner! This was my first surprise when I moved to Nintendo. Which member of senior Nintendo staff have you worked most closely with, and what is the most valuable thing you learned from them? I’ve worked with many staff more senior than me, and what I can say about…

Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox On Developer ConcernedApe Publisher Chucklefish Origin US Release 2016 Eric Barone’s favourite game series was stuck in a rut. By his reckoning, Harvest Moon had lost what had made the earlier games – the SNES original for which he’d first fallen, and his personal favourite, PlayStation entry Back To Nature – so special. He began to look for some kind of replacement, trawling through various fangames to little avail. There was only one thing for it: he’d have to make one of his own. “I guess I just hoped there were other people out there who felt the same as me, who were looking for this sort of thing,” he tells us. It was a natural next step for Barone, who had already considered games…

REVIEWs. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS STILL PLAYING No Man’s Sky PS4 With our base now inexplicably languishing underwater following the significant Atlas Rises update, we start over. A refreshed tutorial teaches us to build signal boosters and to call our ship. It feels like cheating: no more punishment for straying too far from our lifeline in an underpowered space suit. Ancient portals can now be used to meet up with others – but given the initial ‘lone explorer’ vision, it feels a little disingenuous. Overwatch PS4 God forbid the DPS mains are denied their quadruple kill button-press by a sneaky resurrecting medic with a button-press of her own. Mercy’s ‘huge rez’ is no more, in its place a new Ultimate, with the offending power demoted to a single-target use…

Odyssey builds upon Mario 64’s sturdy foundations and adds its own creative curlicues Poor Sunshine. Given one of the hardest acts to follow in the medium’s history, the series’ GameCube outing fluffed its lines a bit, becoming the proverbial black sheep of 3D Marios. It’s all relative, of course: Sunshine remains superior to the vast majority of its peers, and the few games ahead of it all have ‘Mario’ in the title. And, in light of its obvious failings, its considerable achievements were all but overlooked. A straight sequel to Mario 64 would no doubt have been warmly welcomed, but Nintendo, as ever, resisted the easy option. Like Odyssey, Sunshine was a bold attempt to challenge established conventions, a shot at taking the series in a new direction, after establishing…

Developer Sloclap Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release Out now At first, helping hands seem few and far between. A brief tutorial brushes over the basics of fighting: one button for a quick blow, a second for a guard-breaking attack, and other commands producing a block, a feint and an evasive dash. There’s a chance to practise your Prospect’s special class ability – a parry, perhaps, or a multi-directional dodge – a scuffle with a gatekeeper, and then you’re free to roam the ruined kingdom of Adal. Unfortunately, so is everyone else. Jogging about in starter gear is an open invitation to groups of high-level thugs who might like to batter you silly for sweet XP. There is little defence against it. Thankfully, such attacks are infrequent –…

Developer/publisher Image & Form Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Vita Release Out now Beyond the obvious draw of new toys and trinkets, the real joy of a good Metroidvania is found in the moments where you’re journeying blind; where your destination is known but the way there is not. There’s a moment in the back half of Steamworld Dig 2 where you’ve already explored quite some way, and you’re set a familiar objective: to find three similar objects at three very different locations. The map opens up, and a trio of small Xs mark the spots you need to reach – points which reveal, to your growing delight, that you may have come pretty far already, but there’s still much more of this fascinating space you’ve yet to visit, and…

Developer In-house, Argonaut Software Publisher Nintendo Format SNES Release Out now So a delayed game is eventually good, hmm? Well, there aren’t many that have been postponed for as long as Star Fox 2. Cancelled shortly before its planned release in early 1996, what may have been a remarkable accomplishment on seasoned hardware would have looked outdated next to the PlayStation’s early games; with the N64 around the corner, it would have seemed more technically impoverished still. Its belated arrival as a bonus treat on the SNES Classic Mini, unlocked upon completing the first stage of the original game, has been touted as reason alone to invest in Nintendo’s miniature throwback. As a matter of historical record, it’s inherently fascinating; as a game, it’s less likely to hold your attention.…

Community is an important concept for Klang Games. Little wonder: there are just 13 staff working on the studio’s latest and most ambitious title, Seed. Massively multiplayer online games are famously time-consuming development projects, but the team at Klang is looking to have its new simulation MMO finished in just two years. It’s quite the goal, considering its complexity. At first, our demo appears to be Runescape’s more stylish sibling, with a tight-knit colony of tiny citizens breaking rocks and chopping wood in a charmingly low-poly forest. Then we notice the stat breakdown for one of them. ‘Blood filtration’ certainly wasn’t a factor in The Sims. As that implies, Klang is committed to creating a detailed human simulation. “We started thinking about this game probably ten years ago,” CEO Mundi…

“He’s a propagator of despicable garbage that does real damage to the culture around this industry.” Campo Santo’s Sean Vanaman, after issuing a DMCA takedown on YouTube megastar Pewdiepie’s Firewatch videos “When you spend as much time as we do together, in the pressure cooker of creative work and deadlines, you really get to know a person.” Exactly, now former Naughty Dog creative director Bruce Straley. That’s why we got rid of [redacted] “I can be very cocky and very brash on social media. I’m going to continue to iterate on this game… and try to be less of a dick.” Cliff Bleszinski vows to change the habit of a lifetime in a bid to save Lawbreakers “You can’t retroactively say, ‘I’m revoking this licence because you are racist garbage,’…

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 No one gets the prize After picking up a Switch shortly after launch and being very happy with it so far (Zelda on the toilet!) I came to realise there was something missing: trophies. While I certainly don’t consider myself a trophy enthusiast – I only have two platinums out of a library of 40 or so PS4 games – they were very much noticeable by their absence and I was happy to hear the news that Nintendo were looking to introduce something similar in the near future. While trophies (or achievements, for my Xbox brethren) are decisive amongst core gamers,…

Everyone, at some point or another, has been emotionally manipulated by a videogame. Jubilant cheers; growls of anger; terrified, shameful ebullitions; even the hot prickling of tears. The forthcoming titles we’ve delved into this month all appear to have a remarkable gift for prompting big reactions. 11bit Studios’ previous work suggests post-apocalyptic city-building sim Frostpunk (p38) is going to dig its claws into our conscience with every municipal decision we make. May as well book an advance ticket for a round (guilt) trip now, we suppose. On a happier note, The Crew 2 (p34) has earned its fair share of approving noises recently, thanks to its on-the-fly vehicle-switching mechanic. We’re happy to report that an extended demo of Ivory Tower’s silly, surreal magic trick sparks as much delight as its…

Developer Zoink Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin Sweden Release 2018 W hat a mysterious departure from the norm for Zoink Games. The Swedish studio’s previous output has been limited to irreverent 2D games such as Stick It To The Man and Zombie Vikings. But Fe is something else entirely. Fittingly, its titular creature is a spiky outsider in a strange polygonal forest full of animals, where exploration is inextricably linked with communication. Skittering fauna, phosphorescent plants and an ethereal score immediately captivate: a deer calf freezes out of what might be fear, or curiosity. Fe carefully approaches. Then, it opens its mouth. What follows is a gorgeous little gurgle that tails off into a kind of low-pitched growl, a noise designed to soothe. Produced…

Mario Kart has been around for years – many Edge readers have played every entry, over almost a quarter of a century. But what’s the one thing people who only play Mario Kart don’t know about the game – something that you’ll only realise if you’ve worked on it yourself? We remake the game from scratch with each iteration – the program, the graphics and the audio, you name it! Even if we’re creating similar features, since we’re starting from scratch and putting it all together again, they change a little bit each time. I think this steady build-up of small changes is very important for the Mario Kart series. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is the only exception. We used Mario Kart 8 as our base to work from and…

This is the story of the most forward-thinking game developer you’ve never heard of. A company ahead of its time in both game design and narrative. A studio that could easily have revolutionised the medium had its games been released to the masses, but to which fate dealt a cruel hand. A team that should be feted by all modern creators – if it weren’t entirely fictional, that is. Officially, UFO 50’s story begins in 1983. In the real world, however, it started a few years later. In the second grade at school, Derek Yu met Jon Perry, and the two became fast friends, with a shared interest in games. “Some of my earliest memories of hanging out with Derek are basically just sitting down and drawing pages of items…

The absence of a time limit is a key change from Harvest Moon. Why did you remove it? Pretty early on, I just thought, ‘Why should there be a time limit?’ I thought people might want to play for a long time, and I didn't really see a good reason to keep it. Also, I was influenced by open-ended modern PC games where you’re able to keep playing, beyond any sort of storyline, just for the sake of creativity and doing things your own way. What was the biggest challenge you faced during development? Staying focused was challenging at times. I never felt like I was going to quit or not finish it, the question was just when. One difficulty was writing the dialogue. Because of the way Stardew Valley works,…

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a week. Teach a man to turn into a Cheep Cheep, and he’ll find enough entertainment for a lifetime. When it comes to videogames, an exciting set of tools can completely transform an experience – whether it’s the clever framework propping up an otherwise lacklustre package, or the magical concept that immortalises a title in the annals of Edge history. Thank goodness for the minds behind Marvel Vs Capcom: Infinite (p110), who have saved a muddled mish-mash of universes from total scorn with a smart set of systems that can produce fighting-game fireworks, given the chance. It’s the same focus on the fundamentals – and how a player might use them to make something unique – that has elevated content-light brawler…

Developer  Bungie   Publisher   Activision  Format   PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One  Release   Out now (PS4, Xbox One) , October 24 (PC) It takes dozens of hours, and entry deep into the endgame, before things even hint at beginning to fall apart We think a lot about what happened when you reached level 20 in Destiny. A single popup screen told you that, hey, you know that game you’ve been playing? Well, you’re playing another one now. Go and gather Light, it said, to increase your power. And that was pretty much it. That screen is a summary of all that was wrong with Destiny in 2014: it was two games in one, the first a deeply disappointing, miserably plotted campaign, the second an intoxicating, yet bafflingly underexplained…

A bsolver is Parisian studio Sloclap’s debut game – and now Devolver Digital’s most successful launch to date. Here, creative director Pierre Tarno discusses the pressure and promise behind an indie title’s early popularity, and the curious process of discovering your own game during development. Absolver is Devolver Digital’s biggest-ever launch, and you had almost 20,000 concurrent players in the first few days. How has that been for you? We’re really happy we’ve generated this kind of interest. For an independent game, it was nice to see that so many people cared. Thing is, it wasn’t exactly reason to rejoice, because as a lot of players came in, we also saw issues and framerate problems that we hadn’t had in our dev tests or in beta. We couldn’t really relax…

Developer Slightly Mad Studios Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Project Cars 2 is, perhaps more than any other racer, a game about choices. Automatic or stick; rallycross or Le Mans; a beautiful summer’s day or a dull, blisteringly cold one. Perhaps you’d prefer a midnight runaround under cover of darkness. Well then, do you want it at Suzuka, Silverstone, or Spa-Francorchamps? And we don’t mean the modern F1 course; it’s the 14km long, see-the-Belgian-countryside route from the ’60s – a gauntlet that claimed many lives in the more dangerous days of motorsport. Oh, and before we start: would you like two laps, or 200? That’s a lot of questions, but you get the picture. Project Cars 2 is for committed racing-game enthusiasts…

Developer MercurySteam Publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release Out now F or once, ‘Samus it ever was’ just won’t do. In typically contrarian Nintendo fashion, the longawaited return of 2D Metroid is a remake of one of the series’ weaker entries. It makes sense the more you think about it. Revisiting a flawed game, after all, offers greater scope for improvement, and MercurySteam has certainly fulfilled its remit in that regard, expanding upon the Game Boy original in such a way that those four-colour foundations are barely recognisable. Or maybe Nintendo had enough doubts about the developer not to risk handing over the keys to an acknowledged classic like, say, Super Metroid. If so, after playing Samus Returns, you’ll understand its reticence. Broadly speaking, the story remains the same. Samus lands…