Innehållsförteckning för April 2015 från Edge

As Peter Molyneux knows only too well, sometimes things don’t go to plan. (The more thought you put into your plan, the more opportunity it has of succeeding, naturally, but that’s a discussion for another time.) In the case of the issue in front of you, we were all set to review Bloodborne in the time-honoured Edge style, but then reality rudely intruded. As we twitchily prepared to make our journey into the macabre recesses of Yharnam, we discovered that the game’s Chalice Dungeons were not yet ready to be explored, and would in fact be added into the game courtesy of a launchday patch. Then we found out that online functionality wouldn’t be available, either, meaning that we’d be unable to test the game’s co-op or PVP features. So…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a SteelSeries Wireless H Headset Draco malfeasance I see that BioWare have released figures for dragons killed in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Since I played offline, my count won’t be included, but I’m ashamed to admit it’s three, including the compulsory one. That’s two more than I wish it was. Maybe I can excuse one, since I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I consider needing two bites at the cherry to discover it was sour to be a lapse of judgement on my part. These dragons are complete one-offs, look magnificent, don’t attack you unprovoked, and to beat them you have to break their legs one by one till they’re…

My wife is an excellent packer. Educated at boarding school from the age of eight, she is a master of the art of fitting a lot of stuff into a small space, the consequence of having to load up a trunk at the start and end of every school term for a decade. There’s a lovely ritual to the way she packs a case. Nothing goes in until everything is ready, her clothes rolled up, small things stuffed into bigger things. Then she stands back, takes in the situation, and embarks on what is best described as a Tetris speedrun. As an onlooker, you understand what’s going on, but could never do it yourself, that mix of speed and precision, anticipation and reaction, with everything slotting perfectly into place. I…

Publisher Ronimo Games Developer In-house Format Wii U Origin The Netherlands Release Spring Perhaps there’s been a memo. Nintendo spent the second half of last year making its shifting priorities perfectly clear, telling the world that, now Wii’s massmarket appeal has given way to Wii U’s distinctly niche proposition, it was rethinking the way it makes its games. Just as one day last summer we struggled with Shigeru Miyamoto’s trio of GamePad prototypes, our time with a 90-per-cent-complete build of Ronimo’s eShop-bound sequel sees us presented with the ‘mission failed’ screen a few more times than we’d like. Swords & Soldiers II is hard. Much of that, admittedly, comes from its incomplete state. Ninety per cent might sound like a lot – indeed, the game is visually and mechanically done,…

Publisher/developer Tale Of Tales Format PC Origin Belgium Release Spring So this is how the other half lives. No, not the rich – although exploring the opulent penthouse apartment of fictional revolutionary Gabriel Ortega affords an intoxicating glimpse of the kind of wealth that few will ever experience. Rather, Tale Of Tales’ latest allows us to experience conflict from a rarely examined perspective. We’re accustomed to being the boots on the ground, or occasionally the eye in the sky; if we’re not responsible for the conflict, then we’re usually caught up in the middle of it. Sunset, by contrast, examines what it’s like to be on the periphery. As cleaner Angela Burnes, we hear the rat-a-tat of distant gunfire, get startled by a muffled explosion, and look through mirrored glass…

Format 360, PS3, Wii Publisher MTV Games Developer Harmonix Origin US Debut 2009 Yes, he’d just taken the phone call he’d been waiting for, but now Josh Randall was worried. Since his earliest days at Harmonix, working first on Karaoke Revolution and then Guitar Hero, he’d pushed the idea of a game based on a single, wellknown band. Now it was happening, and the band in question was about as big as they get. “We’d been doing experiments with games based around specific groups for a number of years, even before Guitar Hero,” Randall tells us. “And I was involved in a series of those prototypes. Me and the other guys would joke, like, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome to do a Beatles game? Ha ha. Yeah, as if.’ “But then,…

Publisher SCE Developer Ready At Dawn, Santa Monica Studio Format PS4 Release Out now The Order: 1886 might be named after the group of steampunky knights that stand at the centre of its tale, but its title could just as easily refer to how meticulously controlled your journey through their world is. The critical path here is so concertedly funnelled as to be suffocating, only occasionally ballooning out into spaces larger than the barely disguised corridors that link each cutscene and QTE – and in The Order, it feels like you rarely manage 30 paces before triggering one or the other. It’s a frustratingly rigid template that’s all the more egregious when you realise it isn’t the price of The Order’s incredible visuals, but rather the cost of Ready At…

Publisher Sega Developer The Creative Assembly Format PC Release Out now There’s a pattern to the way Total War traces the rise and fall of empires. The first game of an epoch introduces sweeping design and tech changes, then standalone expansions fix the bugs and refine the formula as the era wears on. Attila arrives during the twilight phase of Total War: Rome II with the unenviable job of cleaning up one of the series’ creakiest entries. It does an admirable job, even if it can’t quite overcome Rome II’s cracked foundations. The setting is fascinating: it’s 395AD and the Roman Empire is divided into Eastern and Western factions, barbarians are rampaging, and a freezing climate shift is ruining crops and killing standing armies throughout Europe. Apocalyptic portents such as…

The stratospheric rise of the peripheralled music game between 2005 and 2008 was one of the more extraordinary trends in videogame history, perhaps equalled only by how quickly the genre disappeared. For millions, dropping to your knees with a plastic guitar held aloft is one of the defining memories of the 360/PS3 era, but annual iteration and a flood of new games with ever-moreredundant plastic instruments wore the market out so quickly that it could not survive the recession. In 2009, Activision released 25 different music game SKUs. By 2011, there were none at all. But Harmonix – one of the originators of western rhythm-action games and the developer of Amplitude, Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the game that kickstarted the music game’s rise to prominence – is still here.…

How are drinking straws made? An innocent enquiry from Sam Barlow’s children was answered swiftly: within seconds of a Google search, he had found a video of a factory in China which demonstrated the entire process. It was a reminder of how much more informed we now feel with a wealth of information at our fingertips. “When I get an email from someone I don’t know, I can go online, look at Wikipedia, their posts on Twitter, find out more about them,” Barlow says. “Being a detective in a very loose sense is embedded in everything we do now. That [process] is intrinsically interesting, so having that as the main mechanic for how you interact with a fictional story is interesting, too.” If you know how to use Google, you…

Tom Watson’s career has been a colourful one. Currently MP for West Bromwich East, he has been Labour’s campaign organiser, was instrumental in securing pardons for WWI soldiers shot for cowardice, and campaigned to ban the sale of Gary Glitter albums. But his enduring passion is gaming, and Watson’s become a vocal advocate for the industry during his time in parliament. You’re a big supporter of the UK game industry. Why is it important to you? I feel terrifically privileged to have lived through the period where gaming became ubiquitous and moved into the home. From the point I first saw the Space Invaders coin-op to when I could program in Sinclair BASIC on a ZX80 to the day my brother and I received our Atari console – these are…

What will videogame technology do for property porn? That is the pressing question as one watches Benoît Dereau’s recent tech demo for the Unreal 4 engine, which takes the form of a placid, uneventful stroll around a heartstoppingly beautiful Parisian apartment. I used to live in Paris, and while neither I nor anyone I knew lived in an apartment like this, because we weren’t billionaires, the Unreal Paris demo still somehow captures an essential ambience of life in the City of Light. The solution to our housing crisis is clear: instead of providing decent living space at reasonable cost to all, just do a mass mailout of Oculus Rifts so the less fortunate can spend all their time indoors with a headset strapped to their faces and inhabit the domestic…

In terms of the time you’ll spend in their company, all but the slightest games dwarf the taut span of an average movie, which makes rhythm of play one of the most important, and difficult, aspects to get right. It’s all very well having a sprawling open world to gad about in, but if the pacing of your activities (whether that’s in terms of narrative beats, variety of interactions or geographical variation) is oppressive or flat, the game’s lustre is tarnished. Even developers that struck upon a successful gameplay rhythm in their initial offering might struggle when it comes to a sequel. It’s a problem that Crystal Dynamics has had to wrestle with when approaching Lara Croft’s latest adventure, Rise Of The Tomb Raider (p38). Not only is the studio…

Publisher Nintendo Developer GungHo Online Entertainment Format 3DS Origin Japan Release Out now (Japan), May Sometimes you get the feeling that Nintendo makes business decisions solely to irritate its critics. Barely a financial quarter goes by without another raft of calls for Nintendo to take its portfolio to smartphones, where cheaply produced games rake in millions via in-app purchases every day. Instead, Nintendo has done exactly the opposite, bringing Puzzle & Dragons, Japan’s most popular smartphone game, to 3DS. And we really do mean popular. PAD, as it is often abbreviated, has been downloaded 32 million times in Japan, a country of around 127 million people. In the first half of 2014, it made GungHo Online Entertainment some ¥85 billion (£463 million) in revenue. Most importantly, unlike so many other…

Publisher SCE Developer FromSoftware, SCE Japan Studio Format PS4 Release March 24 (US), 25 (EU), 26 (JP), 27 (UK) “YARNHAM’S CITIZENS AREN’T SOULS-STYLE HOLLOWS, WAITING PATIENTLY IN THEIR FIXED SPOTS” BLESSING OF LIGHT Yharnam spends the game in the grip of a perpetual night, an endless hunt that can only be brought to an end by the player finding and finishing off the source of the scourge of beasts. As such, it’s a dark world even above ground, and even worse beneath the earth or indoors. A merchant sells a clip-on lantern for a nominal fee that helps light the way while keeping both hands free, but its range is short and certain interiors are almost impossible to navigate without using a torch. These can also be used as weapons…

Wearable technology is still very much in its infancy, but when Apple unveiled its smartwatch (pictured) in September 2014, it made it seem like its wrist-bound second screen for your iPhone could do almost anything. With one, you might peer into a tiny universe of photographs, track the calories you burn during a run, find your car, and, in a feature that wavers between intimate and creepy, send a recording of your heartbeat to someone on your Contacts list. Practically absent from the stage – and noticeably so, given how they served to propel iPhones to ubiquity – were the games. Other smart-device makers are available, of course, and so developers have already had the opportunity to think about the possibilities these new form factors offer for play. Just don’t…

When Erez Goren and Todd Harris founded Smite creator Hi-Rez in 2005, their 50 staff occupied office space in the same building as one of Goren’s other firms, an enterprise software firm providing solutions for the retail industry. The new venture was the realisation of its founders’ long-harboured desire to make games their business, particularly MMOGs – these, after all, were the years right after World Of Warcraft’s launch, when the genre was at its liveliest. Goren had developed and even sold games before, as a teenager, but his success, when it arrived, was in business-oriented software. Those companies provided not only the initial financial backing for Hi-Rez, but also the majority of its senior staff, including Harris, Stewart Chisam and Mike Dudgeon. “[Erez] was kind of done with that…

Ru Weerasuriya began his videogame career at Blizzard, illustrating manuals and taking on cinematic-focused roles before he co-founded Ready At Dawn. Alongside his artistic responsibilities at Blizzard, Weerasuriya also handled script editing for several games, and has now combined disciplines as Ready At Dawn’s creative director. Here we ask him about the design choices behind The Order: 1886. The Order looks incredible. Was it very difficult to achieve that level of fidelity? Yeah, it definitely was. We didn’t have any legacy work, so there was a lot to learn. But the good thing about that was that we took a lot of risks that paid off. We told ourselves that it was pretty much blue sky when we started, and it paid off. The facial animation works particularly well. What…

Publisher/ developer Capcom Format 360, PC, PS3, PS4, Vita, Xbox One Release Episodes 1–3 out now, final episode March 18 Franz Kafka and Resident Evil seems like a strange combination. One, after all, is a noted surrealist who wrote meticulously observed works of high literature, and whose deeply metaphorical writings have influenced numerous authors. The other is a bloated series that’s birthed as many meretriciously banal works as it has given us shlock-horror classics, and whose campy scripts inspired a slew of in-jokes. They’re not quite on a level. But what links the Austro-Hungarian writer and this sequel to 2012’s 3DS spinoff Revelations, besides a liberal sprinkling of Kafka quotes and nods, is that they are both shockingly self-aware. Or to put it another way, the four episodes that describe…

Before everyone outside the gaming community started asking everyone inside the gaming community if games promote violence in the youth of today (they don’t), people asked if games can be art. Art is often defined as anything intended to provoke a reaction in those experiencing it. I’m not sure whether this is useful, since by that token a flu jab can be art. But what if we said that anything being created as art only earns the right to call itself that if it’s been specifically designed to create a reaction? Well, what about games? Yes, they’re designed to be fun, beautiful, challenging and often moving. So they don’t rule themselves out on any level. As an example – and there are hundreds – I’d say Braid is art. I…

He may have made his name with the lo-fiPapers, Please, but back in 2006 Lucas Pope was exactly what Naughty Dog was looking for: a prodigiously talented programmer who could effectively build internal toolsets. He joined the Santa Monica studio when it was ramping up preproduction on the first Uncharted. “I was underqualified,” Pope tells us, “but they gave me a chance because I was willing to do stuff that no one else wanted to do.” Pope built the tools that would be used by Naughty Dog’s designers and artists. Uncharted’s level editor was his work, as was a program that organised the dialogue for faster localisation. It was enjoyable – “I friggin’ love tools,” he says – but after Uncharted 2, it was time to move on. “That was…

Designer and musician Judson Cowan, AKA Tettix, has spent most of the past ten years in various US design agencies, but he also composes for games and television, contributing half of Rogue Legacy’s soundtrack and providing the music for Ben 10: Alien Force ads, for example. In between his numerous commitments, he’s managed to squeeze in the task of illustrating Dark Souls’ Lordran from top to bottom. What on Earth possessed him to embark on the project? “I’m as rabid a Souls fan as they come,” Cowan tells us. “I picked up Demon’s Souls on launch day – much to the confusion of the GameStop employee – and nothing else soothes the burn any more. But honestly? Dark Souls II’s incredibly disappointing linear world just cast into relief how well…

IAN BOGOST With games today, the form of a work is found less in the game – in its mechanics and conventions – than outside and all around it. Why not embrace it? I present to you the true genres of videogames, circa 2015. First, Sequels. They used to be marred by the unseemliness of enumeration. Super Mario Bros 3. Half-Life 2. It’s cheap, slapping a number at the end of a title, even if the title itself offers substantial improvement or novelty compared to the original. Numbers make for a continuous stream of constant sameness with a slight twist of variation. A new Batman, a new Kirby or a new Mario for a new system or, more likely, a new Nintendo earnings period. A new Assassin’s Creed for a…

Publisher Microsoft Developer Crystal Dynamics, Nixxes (360) Format 360, Xbox One Origin US Release Winter 2015 According to Noah Hughes, creative director on Rise Of The Tomb Raider, “the secrets of our world are hidden in the darkest places”. It’s an attempt to explain how Lara Croft can find herself raiding her old stomping grounds without sacrificing the brutal survival-action edge that was nurtured in 2013’s reboot. After ten bone-breaking, deer-murdering hours on Tomb Raider’s Yamatai, the prospect of a dusty catacomb, trap-laden or not, seems polite in comparison. Hughes’ solution is to embed those traditional tombs – infrequent in the earlier game – in the most hostile parts of the world. By all means marvel at the looming architecture, but don’t forget the bear gnawing at Croft’s feet. Siberia…

Publisher/developer Ben Esposito Format iOS, PC Origin US Release 2015 You won’t realise it immediately, but Donut County plays a clever trick before you’ve even reached its title screen. You’re thrust into a tutorial without warning; in the absence of prompts, you’ll move the mouse around and notice you’re guiding a small hole. The letters of game creator Ben Esposito’s name fall inside it, and the hole expands with each object it swallows. The camera pulls back, presenting a wider view of a grass verge, around which a raccoon rides a motorised scooter. We gobble up white fence posts, then it’s time to overturn the scooter, which drops its cargo – a box of doughnuts – invitingly. The hole widens further, and the raccoon and its ride are gone. What…

Publisher/developer Team Outer Wilds Format PC Origin US Release TBA Well, this is new. We’ve played a lot of incomplete code, but never have we failed to get past the title screen before. Except this is not a bug, and it’s no fault of Alex Beachum and Sarah Scialli’s, the duo heading up the development of Outer Wilds. We’re to blame. For 20 minutes now, we’ve been staring at a wisp of smoke rising from a campfire through a copse of trees on a hunk of rock that’s spinning through space. A softly plucked banjo phrase builds and builds, then drops away and starts up again. And again. And again. It’s perfect. Happily, what we find when we finally muster the strength to move on is pretty special too. We…

Hidetaka Miyazaki is as mysterious as his games. The developer interviews in the marvellous Dark Souls Design Works book portray a man who speaks in riddles, giving his designers keywords and concepts and then letting them flesh them out. It’s an uncommon approach, but it’s clearly effective: Miyazaki joined FromSoftware in 2004, and last year was appointed company president, juggling boardroom concerns with the business of directing Bloodborne. When FromSoftware creates new IP, how important is it that it recalls the style of previous games? And how do you ensure that it achieves that? We don’t normally have any [of the] style of previous games in our mind, really, when we create new IP. What makes FromSoftware unique is the attitude we have – as players, we are eager to…

If you do not like it, give truth to the lie. Write your own fate on the battlefield. Dame Ravness, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Driver! Faster, if you please. I would be loath to expend any of the violence of my present mood on my companions. Balthier, FFXII In my dreams, I see an evil tyrant’s hands, which would choke the world. And he is the only one blind to his folly. Sydney Losstarot, Vagrant Story Alexander O Smith has to duck to fit through the doorway of one of his favourite pizza places in Kamakura, Japan, the sleepy city he lives in, an idyll located an hour south of Tokyo. At over two meters tall, he’d stand out anywhere that wasn’t an NBA basketball court, but in…

Innovation and videogames are inextricably linked. Since their inception, games have been bound to cutting-edge technology and experimental design – even a comfortingly predictable big-budget series such as Call Of Duty represents an astonishingly fluid template when compared with more rigidly defined media. But innovative thinking is always harder to execute. In Evolve (p110), Turtle Rock has attempted to shake up the multiplayer shooter with asymmetric design, pitting a team of hunters against a towering monster. But while the result is loaded with potential, the game is hampered by generic, interchangeable arenas and commercial concerns, while getting the best from it is absolutely reliant on your fellow players’ dedication to the template. There Came An Echo (p120), meanwhile, draws players into its RTS combat by establishing an uncommonly close relationship…

Publisher 2K Games Developer Turtle Rock Studios Format PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One Release Out now Evolve begins with a plummet from a great height. Oh, there’s a base jump from a dropship at the start of every match for the hunters, but the bumpiest landing awaits your expectations. What you pictured was a thrilling showdown between man and monster. What you land in is a wide game in a disorienting jungle, left to clatter around while being pestered by murderous NPC megafauna, all while you dance intangibly around the opposing side. There is hope. The enthralling moment when your team works together to track a wounded beast under UAV oversight, arrests it with a one-two of tranquilliser dart and harpoon gun as a dome of blue energy mesh…