Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2016 i Edge

In the recently published Dark Souls II: Design Works, FromSoftware art director Daisuke Satake talks of how players responded to certain aspects of the game’s shimmering Looking Glass Knight boss. “I heard a lot of people say that they loved [the character’s] wings,” he says, “though my personal favourite aspect was the head. You never know exactly what people are going to like.” It’s a good illustration of how the landscape has changed for videogame designers and artists, unbound by the power of modern technology and given the freedom to express themselves in ways that were once unthinkable. Many years ago, we could be more objective: a chunky, super-low-resolution piece of art either looked like what it was supposed to represent – a shield, a postbox, a table lamp –…

For most, the idea of creating a game in 48 hours is daunting enough, but the Finnish Game Jam association is keen to layer on more hardship. An FGJorganised event in 2014 saw teams create their games in the cramped enclosure of a moving bus, and this year the association ramped things up even further for Survival Mode, in which game creators braved plummeting temperatures, dwindling battery power and, erm, nice warm saunas. “We were thinking, what can we do that would be very Finnish?” University Of Tampere game researcher and lecturer (and FGJ president) Annakaisa Kultima explains. “There aren’t that many northern sites for the Global Game Jam – our Rovaniemi site has been northernmost for a couple of years now, and we were thinking that maybe we could…

Game VEC9 Manufacturer 68 Crew Up until now, the most recent example of a vector-graphics arcade cabinet was Exidy’s 1986 game Top Gunner. But thanks to programming group 68 Crew members Andrew Reitano, Michael Dooley and Todd Bailey, a modern machine has now supplanted it. VEC9 sees players take on the role of a Soviet pilot who has been woken from 30 years of stasis in order to avenge an apparently fallen USSR. The machine is built around an Electrohome G05 monitor, the same display found in the original Asteroids cabinet. But while the hardware may be authentic, the additional horsepower under the battleship-grey cabinet has allowed the team to create true 3D visuals which more closely resemble Star Fox than early vector games. Players steer their ship using the…

Lost myself Virtual reality concerns me. Yes, it’s technologically amazing. And of course it’s going to be immersive and create incredible atmosphere in our games. But I’m genuinely worried about the social implications were it to become the standard for games. I worry that with not just an immersive world on a TV but one literally enclosing your head from the outside world, gamers are putting barriers up with others. I enjoy playing through games (even singleplayer titles) with my girlfriend, with both of us helping to solve puzzles and enjoying the story. And I adore local competitive multiplayer – the brilliant intensity that comes from a close match of Street Fighter with a friend over some beer and a good laugh together. Virtual reality will be two folk with…

For all his flaws, popular American song-and-dance man Michael Jackson was on the nose when he said, “All of us are products of our childhood”. Whether consciously or not, we are all in thrall to our pasts. Early hip-hop producers sampled funk tracks; late-’90s house-music knob-twiddlers plundered their parents’ disco collections. So it’s only natural that modernday game-makers should look to their childhood loves for inspiration, be that Broforce’s homage to ’80s action cinema, Gone Home’s love letter to analogue tape, or the way Hidetaka Miyazaki’s youthful adoration of Bram Stoker’s Dracula permeates Bloodborne. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, but it’s still a powerful thing, and a potentially lucrative one; gaming may be a broad church, but we are all of a certain age, sharing pop-cultural touchstones. So…

Developer PlatinumGames Publisher Activision Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One Origin Japan Release 2016 This, if you’re of a certain age, is the game of your childhood dreams: a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game with comicbook-perfect visuals and fourplayer online co-op, made by the best action-game developer on the planet. With Transformers Devastation, PlatinumGames proved that it has a knack for blowing the cobwebs off ageing intellectual property. Now it’s looking to repeat the trick with the pizza-munching, surf-talking reptiles that were kings of the world for a spell in the late ’80s and early ’90s, spanning comics, movies, a cartoon and a highly lucrative toy line. “I’m from a slightly older generation, so I didn’t watch the TMNT cartoon and didn’t realise quite how huge the Turtles were,”…

It’s understandable that games such as Super Mario 64 and The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time would prove enormously influential, because they set the standard for different types of 3D worlds back when 3D worlds were new. It’s understandable that games such as Doom and Wolfenstein would be cited so often as foundational works in the videogame form, because they wrote so many of the early rules of the firstperson shooter. When it comes to Dark Souls’ influence on game design, though, it didn’t invent new rules, or set new technological standards, or change the conception of what a videogame could be. What it did was make people think differently about how a game could be, and what players would appreciate. Dark Souls proved that people actually respond well…

Founder and CEO, Frontier Developments Where does Elite Dangerous: Arena fit into your plans? It gives players a very approachable experience of Elite. Arena got a life of its own because it feels like a different, but very rewarding, experience that gives you a skillset that’s transferable to the [main] game. But essentially it’s something you might want to just play a session of in the evening instead of playing another multiplayer game. What sort of surprises came out of the alpha and beta releases? One of the reasons they were so useful is we got really good statistics and coping mechanisms for [poor connections]. It was better than I thought it was going to be, because we’d done tests internally with people taking machines home. I remember one problem…

A few years ago, readers of the Consumerist website voted EA the worst company in America for two years running. That it beat the likes of Halliburton, Bank Of America and ExxonMobil was, admittedly, more to do with the ability of large Internet communities to mobilise than the company’s wrongdoings. Yes, it had botched Mass Effect’s ending, but it hadn’t committed mortgage fraud or caused the biggest oil spill of all time. But EA took the hint, and promised to do better. And to its credit, it has changed, though change is relative. The company seems to have decided the most effective way to change your image is to do something other people do, but which you don’t. And so we have Unravel (p108), a quirkily charming, sidescrolling, physics-driven puzzle-platformer…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montreal) Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now SETTLE DOWN In the far west corner of the map is the Winja village, which starts out with a population of two – Takkar and female hunter Sayla – but increases as you complete story missions and sidequests. As the population grows and the settlement expands, more abilities and upgrades become available, and you’ll even bring a few vanquished enemies back to pass on rival tribes’ knowledge – to the occasional chagrin of the locals. As a way of conveying the progress of your one-man mission to save the Winja from extinction, it’s fair enough, but despite your growing number it’ll only ever be you and your bestiary doing the dirty work. A few tooled-up villagers would make…

Developer ColdWood Interactive Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release Out now BUTTON UP Each level contains collectable buttons, which are usually concealed in hard-to-reach areas. Getting to them involves some of the game’s most challenging, and enjoyable, navigation puzzles as you divert precious thread to ascend into a tree’s branches, or dangle precariously over the mouth of a cave. The levels themselves are accessed by reaching framed photographs in a homely hub area. While it’s fun to explore at first, having to run and climb your way all the way from the beginning each time you want to start a new level (or retry an old one in order to find missed buttons) begins to feel like a chore the more times you’re forced to do it.…

Developer Techland Publisher Warner Bros Format PC, PS4 (tested), PC Release Out now DEMOLITION MAN The Following’s largest enemies, Demolishers (above), were also the biggest foes in the original game, and they’re as frustrating to fight here, too, soaking up clip after clip of gunfire, and somehow hitting you with arcing punches even when it looks like you’re safely out of range. It’s at times like this that you’ll wonder how you ever made it through Dying Light without the crossbow, which, aimed with appropriate care, can be a more effective option than an automatic rifle. It’s quiet, too, making it the ideal tool for avoiding the attention of packs of baying Virals. Dispatched to a farmhouse during a mission near the beginning of The Following, we arrive to discover…

Developer/publisher SCS Software Format PC Release Out now PATRIOT GAMES When you’ve earned enough money you can buy your own truck, which opens up customisation. As well as mechanical upgrades like your engine and gearbox, you can decorate your dashboard and apply a number of gaudy, patriotic paint jobs, including the stars and stripes. Owning a truck means you have to pay for your own fuel and repairs, so remaining a freelance contractor is the easiest way to play. Developed by Czech studio SCS Software, the Truck Simulator series has been a quiet success on PC. The previous instalment, Euro Truck Simulator 2, stood out among a sea of niche, low-quality sims by being surprisingly polished and well-designed, with production values beyond those of most of its peers. It is,…

While BeefJack Create is a far cry from the company’s editorial website from 2008, the experience in writing about games has been fundamental in forming Create as a platform. It’s particularly the case where getting Create projects noticed by players is concerned. “Marketing is such a huge area of making a game successful, and we know it well through having run BeefJack Magazine ourselves,” Leach explains. “For us, that’s hugely helpful. It means we can help other studios, and engineer and pick out quirky projects that we see have the potential to reach a lot of people. That’s where BeefJack Create and BeefJack Promote can really work in harmony with each other.” BeefJack Promote, a separate offering from the same company, provides marketing expertise and insight for games looking to…

Videogames are often at the forefront of technological shifts, as has been the case with 3D visuals, innovations in interfaces or simply the drive for raw, consumer-accessible processing power. But the most striking thing about the lineup for the UK’s largest virtual reality conference to date, VRUK, taking place at London’s Ravensbourne college, is its wide-reaching diversity. Here cinematographers, educators, advertisers, visual artists, and representatives from charities and ministerial departments all rub shoulders. There are even a few game-makers in among them. It’s indicative of an unprecedented rush of support for a technology that’s yet to prove itself, but which harbours a greater potential for cultural change than any in recent memory. It’s a benevolent gold rush in which prospectors are happy to share ideas and strategies in service of…

Daniel Pemberton is an Ivor Novello-winning and multi-BAFTAnominated composer responsible for scoring TV shows and films including Peep Show, The Man From UNCLE and Steve Jobs, as well as videogame soundtracks such as LittleBigPlanet and The Movies. Most recently he’s worked with Rex Crowle on Knights & Bikes. Way before that, though, a 14-year-old Pemberton found himself doing a work experience placement under a game designer called Peter Molyneux. That work experience must’ve been fun. Yeah, that was weird! It was at Bullfrog, which was about seven or eight people at the time – before it got bought by EA – in a little cramped office in Guildford, designing levels for Populous II. And who would’ve known that little office would’ve spawned the Guildford gaming empire? Did the music of…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar How pleasant to play a game with no lengthy backtracking, no unskippable FMV, no repetitive grinding What is a puzzle? The etymology of the word itself is puzzling. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests possible derivations from earlier European words about being bewildered when trying to choose. And in English, the state of being puzzled is, from the late 16th century, that of being confused or at a loss. This is how videogames often try to make us feel, hopefully in a pleasurable way. And they do this by being filled with puzzles. Yet a puzzle, in modern English, has the sense of something rather trivial. It’s something that’s both difficult and pointless. A puzzle isn’t as serious as a ‘problem’, something a serious intellectual might worthily attack. Ludwig…

A few years ago, during a drink-fuelled graduation ceremony at Leiden University, Chris Goto-Jones, a lecturer in comparative philosophy and political thought, asked a group of outgoing honours students to identify the single most important thing they had learned during their education. “I was somewhat hopeful that their answers might include references to great works of literature, exalted philosophical principles, or perhaps rigorous scientific methodologies,” he says. It wasn’t to be. Some students joked that they could barely remember what had happened during all those indistinguishable semesters, with their hedonistic nights and drowsy, morning-after lectures. One student drolly turned the question around, asking: “Professor, what do you think was the most important thing I learned?” A little despondently, Goto-Jones returned his attention to the tinkling ceremony. Much later, a student,…

The development of Dying Light hit a brick wall in 2013. Several, in fact – the game’s parkour system, which hinged on level designers creating each scalable structure with a marker, was laborious. And it wasn’t until the team had placed its 50,000th marker that a better solution was found: frustrated, programmer Bartosz Kulon came in one weekend and performed some technical wizardry that allowed the climbing of anything in the world, marker-free. After Dead Island’s patchiness – the progresshalting bugs, the AI freezes, the constant whiff of a studio struggling to punch above its weight – the studio suddenly had an unimpeded path to success. It was a much-needed breakthrough; despite Dead Island’s monstrous commercial success – five million copies were sold in its first three years on the…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4 (version tested) Release Out now The singleplayer component doesn’t take the wants and needs of the beginner player into the slightest consideration Yoshinori Ono spent a tremendous amount of our interview for E289’s cover story talking about football. With Street Fighter V, he said, it was as if Capcom was providing us with a ball, kit, two goals and a pitch – all players of any skill level need to get started. At the time, it felt like a fair point. Now, we realise he was missing out on a vital ingredient: a coach. Street Fighter V offers almost nothing to the beginner player. Its tutorial sits somewhere between an insult and a bad joke, walking you through movement, the three strengths of attack, throws,…

Developer Climax Games Publisher Ubisoft Format PC, PS4, Vita, Xbox One (version tested) Release Out now (Vita Apr 5) CONFLICT OF INTEREST One thing Chronicles does well is communicating character through combat. Shao Jun’s techniques are brutally efficient; the similarly athletic Arbaaz Mir adopts a more flamboyant approach; Russia’s Nikolai Orelov has the kind of keen eye that only comes with experience; and Anastasia’s frantic stabbings are a symbol of her fear and anger towards her oppressors. All of which is at odds with the grading system: though you’ll still earn points for silent kills, the moment you engage an enemy face to face you’re all but committing to losing that stage’s most valuable unlockable skill. As such, you’re often best allowing yourself to be shot or skewered, especially as…

Developer Bloober Team Publisher Aspyr Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now MIXED SUCCESS Layers Of Fear is at its best when it doesn’t lean on established horror ideas. The game’s environmental smarts are the principal example of it breaking new ground, but Bloober Team’s artists have also hit on a singular aesthetic. Art and art-making become a recurring theme as paintings melt and distort, and oil paints splatter corridors colourfully. It’s a kind of inventiveness that deserves to be the backdrop for more original horror themes than the game can deliver. There is real tragedy at the core of Bloober Team’s Layers Of Fear, but it has nothing to do with its histrionically delivered tale of an alcoholic artist’s descent into isolation and madness. The game’s central…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com People repeat themselves in real life, but hearing the exact same line in a game makes my teeth itch As someone who plays games I have to admit I’m a sucker for the simple tricks devs play. The Christmas trees and snow that crop up in online games during the festive season. The nods to other games and even to the popular culture of the time. Yep, it can all get a bit meta and date awkwardly, but I find it endears the creators to me. Earlier in the year I was tasked with adding some DLC in this vein for Valentine’s Day. A sultry vixen love interest nonplayer character was required in a game for the players to fall in love with. Yes, I know the many…

The UK’s capital city has long been served by events that celebrate the creative industries, such as London Fashion Week and the London Film Festival. Now games are being given their chance to enjoy the urban spotlight. A new London Games Festival will take place on April 1–10 at various venues across the capital, and its organisers hope it will share its subject matter with a broad demographic sweep, from dedicated players to families and those with little or no experience of interactive entertainment. The event is being put together by a newly formed organisation, Games London, itself a collaboration between videogame trade body UKIE and the longstanding Film London, the capital’s strategic agency for film and media. Backed by a £1.2 million investment from the Mayor of London’s London…

“The idea of me hyping up a game, or talking about a game before it’s available to the public, I just don’t think it’s going to work ever again.” We appreciate the sentiment, Peter Molyneux, but welcome to 2010 “We like phones and tablets because they offer us different experiences to PCs and consoles. The same will happen with VR.” Valve’s Chet Faliszek overlooks the fact no one’s getting a free Vive with a phone contract “It is helpful to know what you know and know what you don’t know, and in this case, I know what I think but I don’t know the answer to your question.” A move into game dev hasn’t changed former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld “The arts and sciences should no longer be a…

WEBSITE Art of Luis www.bit.ly/thewitnessart Luis Antonio, an indie developer and one of the key artists on The Witness, has shared an in-depth look into the process of creating the game’s striking-looking environment and the challenges of working with Jonathan Blow’s exacting vision for the game. The blog is ongoing, and at the time of writing Antonio has covered the posters and trailers for the game (including those ‘long screenshots’); how the panels, lasers and cables came together; the game’s detailed texture work; and several of the earlier areas. All of this is accompanied by a huge number of images that include screenshots of early test builds and the finished areas, and reference shots from field trips. Be warned, though: there’s much to be spoiled here if you haven’t yet…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar I’m struck by the way the USA has managed to turn something really quite tedious into a year-long game My deadline for this column means that, by the time you read this, the apparently centuries-long process through which the United States selects its candidates for the presidency will be several weeks closer to finishing. A would-be POTUS spends almost as long running for the Oval Office as they will sitting in it, and, watched from afar, it’s a tortuous process. You’re invested in the result because it will doubtless impact your life in some way, but not so invested you don’t spend the best part of 18 months rolling your eyes in front of the news, wondering when it will all be over. As I write this the…

Developer/publisher Epic Games Format PC, PS4 Origin US Release 2016 Epic is keen to stress that Paragon is a MOBA. This is a contested, storied term, one that describes some of the world’s biggest games and a few of its bigger failures, too. MOBAs were the new MMOGs, and the demise of projects such as EA’s Dawngate and Warner’s Infinite Crisis reflect the difficulty that a succession of large studios have faced in trying to climb onto the bandwagon. Epic emphasises that Paragon is a MOBA not to associate it with that rough spot in the industry’s recent history but to differentiate it from a modern trend towards characterbased first- and thirdperson team shooters – a charge led by Blizzard’s Overwatch and reinforced by Gearbox’s Battleborn and Hi-Rez Studios’ Paladins.…

Developer/publisher Prospect Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin UK Release 2016 Move over, Amazon drones. Unbox’s Global Postal Service would like to present the real next-gen of shipping solutions: the self-delivering box. You’re the latest prototype of this revolutionary endeavour, a cardboard cube capable of self-propelled motion. You bobble along awkwardly, but at a surprising lick, and are blessed with surprising agility for an object that’s all straight edges and sharp corners. You can jump with a tap of the right trigger, and with a squeeze of the left one you’ll perform the titular ‘unbox’, shedding an outer skin for a burst of mid-air momentum in what is surely the most oddly conceived double-jump in videogame history. Or hextuple jump, if you’re so minded. It’s rather more appealing than…

Puzzles & Dragons iOS Two years of daily logins later and we’re finally approaching P&D’s endgame, but what is it, exactly? Such is the pace of change in P&D’s native Japan, where a host of competitors have left development studio GungHo struggling to keep on top, that the meta is constantly shifting. Building an endgame team will take us months – by which point it may well be outdated. But of course we’ll do it anyway. Destiny PS4 Were we too effusive in our praise for The Taken King? Because it’s been downhill ever since. The new nadir is Crimson Doubles, a week-long 2v2 gametype that’s so uninspired, and its drop rate so stingy, that teams are throwing themselves off the nearest ledge to hurry things along to the next…

The AI’s refusal to teach you that you’ve made one of the most glaring mistakes in the game is puzzling in the extreme Round 23 of Street Fighter V’s survival mode, and our opponent, Chun-Li, is crouching at the far end of the screen. Experience tells us she’s holding down-back on the stick, charging up two moves at once – a common tactic for charge characters. From here, she can press forward and punch for a fireball to control space, or up and two kick buttons for an EX Spinning Bird Kick, her best get-off-me move if we get too close. Since we’re at full screen, the fireball seems more likely, so we throw out one of our own. Chun-Li has a few options here: she can throw a projectile…

Developer/publisher The Molasses Flood Format PC, Xbox One (version tested) Release Out now STREAMING DISCONTENT The Flame In The Flood began as an endless survival game with permadeath, though feedback convinced The Molasses Flood to develop a campaign mode with two difficulty settings. Survivalist gives you fewer resources and drains your stats quicker, while Traveler is marginally more generous with supplies and features checkpoints – albeit ones spread some distance apart. There is, too, a story of sorts. You’ll sporadically encounter other survivors along the way, from a pair of feral kids to a curious old woman at a gas station. Given the lack of human contact elsewhere, such encounters are exciting at first, though their gnomic pronouncements in the exchanges that follow hardly feel like sufficient reward for having…

Developer/publisher LKA.it Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now (PC), 2016 (Xbox One) LIGHT SPLITTER Regardless of the choices you make, Renée’s story ends up in the same place, though you can make quite a difference to how certain events play out. An early choice whether or not to read an official document sees the narrative path diverge for the first time: a troubled Renée can opt not to read the ‘forbidden’ text for fear of causing trouble, but should she steel herself to uncover the truth, her relationship with a fellow patient will change. In the final act, your response to a letter represents another turning point, and this time the differences are starker. Though there’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ending per se, Renée’s subsequent actions carry a…

Developer Silicon Studio, Square Enix Publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release Out now UNDO INFLUENCE Bravely Second’s light-hearted tone is disrupted by the arrival of Geist, a gore-soaked, goggleeyed, cackling force of evil, who even unsettles his superiors. Despite limited screen time, he leaves an indelible imprint, not least because defeating him gives you access to the Exorcist job asterisk. The ‘undo’ command allows you to take back expended brave and magic points and even bring dead team members back to full health. Sorry, White Mages – you had a good run. We’ve just fought three giant tigers and now another four have shown up. Oh, don’t worry – we’ve got this. After all, Yew’s just putting the finishing touches to a selection of poisonous gateaux to throw in their faces.…

Dean Edwards had long dreamed of making his own game. He had ideas aplenty, and the will to work hard, but his lack of experience across game development’s numerous disciplines meant that many of the conventional routes to market were closed to him. Then he discovered BeefJack Create, and partnered with the team to take Iron Fish from drawing board to reality. “The hardest part for me was getting the project started,” he explains. “With Iron Fish, I wanted to create a game that would appeal to the established and growing fanbase of horror games. As this is my first game, I was very nervous about getting it right. BeefJack has been incredibly supportive and really believed in the project right from the start, which inspired a confidence in me…