Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i Edge

To be clear: the phrase “More powerful than God” to describe the original PlayStation console was never a legit piece of editorial in Edge, but that didn’t stop Sony’s marketing team printing it with heatproof ink onto many thousands of sheets of perforated card and distributing them at 1995’s Glastonbury Festival, where they could be torn up and used as roaches. We’ve included this notorious episode in our 30 Years Of PlayStation calendar because the story of Sony’s platform has always been about more than the hardware and games. The standout quality of early releases such as Ridge Racer, along with widespread support from an industry fed up with producing games on cartridges, was critical, but the decision to address an older audience in innovative (and sometimes controversial) ways helped…

So I played a game today with an interesting plot and good characters – and also puzzles. You can see where this is going: I hit a puzzle I couldn’t solve. The plot evaporated. The characters ran out of things to say. It became like a theme park after closing time. It was sad, and by the time I found the way forwards, my suspension of disbelief had taken a critical hit. I have a Post-it note about this stuck to the side of the cabinet behind my desk. It reads “STORY = CHANGE OVER TIME” and, ironically, it’s been there for more than a decade. It was scribbled on a train before my studio, Inkle, was founded, when co-founder Joseph Humfrey and I were on our way to a…

Developer Firaxis Games Publisher 2K Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch Origin US Release February 11 As creative director of the Civilization series, Ed Beach is one of the more precise and economical thinkers in videogame design. As we talk to him about the forthcoming seventh mainline entry, though, he’s clearly in an expansive mood. “I have always thought that the ultimate opponent in a Civilization game should be Machiavelli,” he tells us, spreading his arms wide at the thought. “If you can out-duel Machiavelli in a Civilization game, then you can put that up on your shelf, give yourself a little trophy.” It’s a lovely idea, but there’s been a problem with Machiavelli for the entirety of Civilization’s history. The author of The Prince has never fit neatly within the…

Developer/publisher Dreamlit Inc Format PC, PS5 Origin US Release TBA Match Towers Of Aghasba in action and it feels vast. Given your activities range from deepwater dives to climbing up cliffs or lumbering beasts, and from nurturing plants or building settlements to pinging arrows at the undead, it’s hard to get a bead on the game’s limits. Perhaps that’s because the concept was fermenting for years before it was made. Game director Khang Le had it in mind even before his first game, 2012’s Hawken, imagining something like Minecraft in a world drawn by Studio Ghibli. “It was way too ambitious at the time,” Le says, “but the idea kept brewing.” Later, Zelda and Animal Crossing would influence its evolution, the latter softening the edges of the survival experience. “I…

The UK has become a hot spot for co-development, something Roberts says is a result of the country’s “chaotic but creative” history of game-making. “There were a lot of big companies in the tail end of the ’90s and early ’00s that sort of fell apart, and then seeded the earth.” Those talented people went off to found their own companies, and many ended up working in co-development, just as Roberts did. Today, one name dominates the UK’s co-dev scene, though it is headquartered just outside it: Keywords Studios. The Dublin-based company began in 1998 by providing localisation, and has since expanded into supplying other videogame-related services, acquiring audio production studios, art studios, trailer producers, and more. In the past few years it has set its sights on co-development, buying…

After the release of Sundered in 2017, Montreal-based developer Thunder Lotus conducted a post-mortem of its side-scrolling Roguelike. “One of the things that came out was that I couldn’t be creative director on a project any more,” studio founder William Dubé says. Despite the success of Sundered and Jotun before it, with the demands of the studio growing, Dubé had, as he puts it, “become a bottleneck for the team.” The studio had grown from four full-time staff members in 2014 to eight, along with numerous additional contractors, and during Sundered’s development Thunder Lotus also released Wii U, PS4 and Xbox One ports for Jotun. The team, especially Dubé, was getting pulled in different directions. Before getting too deep into development on the studio’s next title, Spiritfarer, Dubé stepped back,…

Developer BioWare Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now With Dragon Age: The Veilguard, BioWare has made a deeply self-conscious game, visibly inspired by some of the best-loved ideas from Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Fans will notice, too, the moments when the studio strives to improve on things it’s been criticised for in the past, whether in terms of under-representation, neglected dwarven lore, or ill-liked fetch quests. The work is clearly evident – although, after ten years of troubled development, it also shows in the fractured seams of reboots and rewrites. New players are quickly brought up to speed on the story. Ten years ago, Solas betrayed the Inquisition and revealed not only his identity as an ancient trickster god but his plans to…

What, exactly, does £220’s worth of visual upgrade look like? That is the question on the mind of anyone considering the upgrade to PS5 Pro from a base model that nowadays retails for £480, after a 2022 price bump (although, given the Pro model’s lack of disc drive, perhaps the £390 digital-only PS5 model would be a more accurate comparison). The specs don’t lie – this is a clearly superior piece of hardware than its predecessor, particularly in terms of extra GPU headroom. Having tested a good chunk of the ‘PS5 Pro Enhanced’ titles on offer at launch, though, we have to squint more than we expected to see evidence of that extra power on screen. This is, generally speaking, a compliment to the original versions. Storming that opening village…

The big five-oh Since E397’s UFO 50 feature, I’ve been counting the days until its release. I loved the concept of an obscure, forgotten studio, the fact that the team had worked on it for eight years, the retro-cool graphics in the screenshots. And I loved the fact that the promise was to play 50 real games, not minigames. I was so naive. When I got my hands on it a few days after its release, I decided to explore each game a little to get an idea of the whole thing. What a mistake! Apart from a very small number of games, I was completely lost. I didn’t understand the controls or objectives easily (in some games, they weren’t even explained). Oh, what’s this flying thing – a bonus?…

Last month I laid out a theory – that videogames’ rise took an appetite for play that’s been part of our species since the very first knucklebone dice were rolled, then cracked it open, teaching us to look for it everywhere. I also promised that this time we’d turn our attention to what might be the greatest beneficiary of that effect. An entire medium that has effectively sprung from videogames’ side and multiplied with such leporine intensity that it’s become something of a dirty word: ‘Immersive’. Most of the companies working in this space wince at that term nowadays, in much the same way we might have at its overuse in videogames a decade ago. The problem here, specifically, is the scattershot way it’s been applied, to everything from dinner…

Developer Okomotive Publisher Panic Inc  Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series  Origin Switzerland Release 2025 The noise of traffic is a welcome intrusion at the start of Okomotive’s latest adventure. In its Far games, Lone Sails and Changing Tides, we were sole survivors, so it’s reassuring to hear some proof of life beyond our own. And you wouldn’t necessarily know the city was inhabited otherwise – Herdling’s young protagonist begins the game in isolation, sleeping rough beneath an overpass in a part of town so desolate you could believe it had witnessed an apocalypse of its own. Another sound draws us from our makeshift bed – a crash, then a car alarm close by. Shrouded in an oversized parka, we go to investigate and come across a creature, rather like a long-haired bison, steering into abandoned…

Developer The Game Kitchen Publisher Tripwire Interactive Format PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series Origin Spain Release January 28 After Blasphemous and its sequel, we didn’t expect The Game Kitchen’s next title to remind us of Commandos. For many Spanish developers, though, the Madrid-made stealth tactics series was a formative experience. “We grew up with those games,” Maikel Ortega, director of The Stone of Madness, tells us. “Almost everyone [in Spain] who had a PC at that time played Commandos. So it’s been on our minds since we were kids.” It was, however, a more recent entry in the genre, Shadow Tactics, that inspired the direction of Ortega’s game. Its sniper character, Takuma, has a wooden leg which makes noise when he moves. That got the team thinking, creative director José…

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What’s it like trying to balance the needs of players who have been here for 20 years and people asking, ‘Should I give it a go?’ It’s a challenge. I think that any long-running game faces that challenge of a core of players who are experts at the game, who want more, who want deeper, who want more complexity, more options – and trying to make sure that at the same time the whole experience is staying approachable for someone who’s picking it up for the first time. Is one audience easier to satisfy than the other? I think serving our existing audience is natural to us. That is our default. We are listening to our players. We’re listening to the players who maybe played and left recently and trying…

NEAR MISSES Miniatures PC As the name suggests, small is king in this collection of interactive short stories exploring the applications of point-and-click control. The Last Sand Castle is most pleasing to toy with – a single-screen overview of the titular structure reveals it to be teeming with tiny (and talented) life as you nose around. Paludarium, meanwhile, is an impactful piece of visual storytelling, The House Of The Moon plays with a picture-book format, and Familiar unveils the sinister side of flatpacked furniture. It’s all over in less than an hour, but plants acorns of ideas that warrant reflection. Great God Grove PC, Switch, Xbox Series Here’s a more familiar form of point-and-click adventure, albeit with its own bright idea. Armed with a vacuum-cleaner/megaphone hybrid, you can suck the…

There is no matter more unresolved among Dragon Age admirers than ‘which game is the best?’ Every entry in the series is distinctly different from the one that came before it, since not only does each iteration feature a new protagonist and explore new elements of the setting, it also exhibits a dramatic change in style and tone. Yet beneath this question lies an even more divisive one: what is central to Dragon Age’s identity, such that one game might be more quintessentially Dragon Age than the next? To grasp how slippery the essence of the series is, it’s worth considering the most distinguished facets of each. Dragon Age: Origins takes its name from its unique playable backgrounds, giving your assigned origin its own prologue that adds depth to the…

“As the artist who designed Young Liz, I love to see an article promising a bold new future where she could just look like someone’s half-assed cosplay instead.”BioShock Infinite artist Claire Hummel may still need a bit of persuading with all this use-AI-to-direct-game-visuals malarkey “Do you think a vice president has ever gamed? I don’t think Dan Quayle was gaming.”Yes, he fell short, but Tim Walz will always have videogames “I’m not a master of anything. I just want to play videogames and watch basketball.”As credos go, John Carpenter’s is a reasonable starting point “The ‘day-zero patch’ mentality today just encourages poor development and management practices, and it’s a worse customer experience too.”The real skill, suggests Denki co-founder and GTA veteran Colin Anderson, is doing it without the aid of…

For many years, in simpler times, the alarm tone on my phone was the Great Fairy Fountain music, specifically the arrangement from Ocarina Of Time. That magical theme, somehow comforting and heartbreaking simultaneously, has from its first appearance in A Link To The Past grown to exist in many forms and elaborate orchestrations. It was written by the great in-house Nintendo composer Koji Kondo, the maestro who scored the entirety of Ocarina and also created the Super Mario Bros theme. Kondo is one of the greatest popular composers of the past few decades, and this autumn was inducted into the Hall Of Fame of the Academy Of Interactive Arts And Sciences. And yet you wouldn’t know about him at all if you played any of his music in the new…

Our exploration of Civilization VII and conversation with its creative director, Ed Beach, has us thinking about the alliances that might arise. With the new game placing greater emphasis on leaders, encompassing a wider definition of the term and demanding they switch civilisations mid-game, we look forward to some intriguing contrasts. Benjamin Franklin in charge of the Mayans? Or Confucius palling up with Machiavelli? Improvised alliances are a theme across this month’s Hype, each example offering a potentially fascinating dynamic. In Herdling and Towers Of Aghasba, working with nature is a matter of mutual benefit. Guiding Herdling’s group of magical cattle back to their mountain home should help you find renewed purpose as much as restore theirs. Towers Of Aghasba reframes the message of the survival game, turning the environment…

Developer By Sam Eng Publisher Devolver Digital  Format PC  Origin US  Release TBA The first time we met Sam Eng, at June’s Summer Game Fest, he arrived clutching the skateboard he rode across LA to get there. There’s no question, then, that the Skate Story developer is the real deal. He enountered the hobby in his youth via Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, then gave up after realising “I wasn’t going to be jumping over taxis”. He picked it back up around the time he turned 20, however: “I still skate around every day. I use it as my main mode of transportation. Now it’s become a lifelong pursuit.” Note the way he talks about the skateboard: not so much as a vehicle for tricks as simply a vehicle. “I have so much fun just…

Developer/publisher Studio Imugi Format PC Origin Canada Release TBA No sooner have we stepped into the boots of royal guard Bonaparte than we’re faced with a life-altering decision. An army of workers advances on the Bastille: do we repel them or defect and join their cause? Vive la révolution, we decide, and switch sides. It’s a choice that reflects real events in 1789, according to Jongwoo Kim, creative director of Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution. “It felt like a pivotal and symbolic moment for the game to begin and directly confront players with the choices around the revolution,” he says. “Who do you side with? Why do you do it? And how far will you go?” Counterfactual history makes for fascinating thought experiments and, for Kim, revolutions are especially fertile soil.…

Who made Hogwarts Legacy? Glance at the game’s box, or its listing on any digital storefront, and you’ll see that it was developed by Warner Bros Games – or more specifically its Avalanche Software subsidiary in Utah. But that’s only half the story. Huge chunks of the game were in fact made across an assortment of UK studios, including Red Kite Games in Leeds, D3T in Runcorn, and Studio Gobo in Hove. These are just some of the UK companies working in what has become known as co-development, with triple-A games now depending on it. Both D3T and Studio Gobo worked on Sony releases in 2024, the former on the illfated Concord, the latter on this month’s Lego Horizon Adventures. Meanwhile, Red Kite contributed to EA’s Knockout City – as…

At what point did you decide to create a card game for Rebirth? The card games in Final Fantasy VIII and IX left a strong impression on me. They are what I think of most when it comes to minigames in the series, so I wanted to do something similar in our game. The aim for Queen’s Blood was to offer something that the player could customise and play repeatedly throughout the game. Did you create a physical version of the game in order to try out the initial ideas? At the prototyping stage we made some physical mockups with paper, but calculating the scores was tricky, so we created a simple prototype version as a Windows application and were then able to test to see how fun the game…

Playing a trans or non-binary character in Dragon Age: The Veilguard is more than a matter of choosing a body type. Your character’s identity comes up in conversation with other party members, and deciding how to respond deepens the roleplaying experience. It’s for this reason, however, that Veilguard has come under fire for its ‘politics’, a word used selectively by certain parts of the videogame community. Sure, some of the dialogue in Veilguard feels didactic, but it’s not clumsy writing that is being criticised here. Instead, in-game manifestations of DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) are being blamed for some kind of malaise in gaming. Such complaints shouldn’t be conflated with racism, misogyny and homophobia, apparently – the issue is one of shoehorning people from marginalised groups into games rather than their…

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