Innehållsförteckning för May 2017 från Edge

A quick peek behind the scenes for you: Edge moved to new offices this month. It wasn’t your typical move, either. This was a real clearout, a proper life laundry – which, when you’ve been going for almost a quarter of a century, means getting rid of stuff. And we had an awful lot. Everyone comes to a point in their lives when they have to let go of things that are important to them – but game makers don’t have the luxury of waiting 25 years between clearouts. The early part of a project’s life is a time of nonstop creativity; no concept is bad until it is proven to be so, and so there is a procession of great ideas. Then there comes a tipping point, when creativity…

“People think diversity was the goal of the Overwatch team. We cared about creating a game and a world where everyone felt welcome.” Well, everyone except for the puritans who simply couldn’t accept Tracer was gay, right, Jeff Kaplan? “Passion is essential for all of us at Electronic Arts. If you’ve ever met Peter Moore, you know that he quite literally wears his passion for Liverpool FC on his sleeve.” No, EA’s Andrew Wilson, you’re thinking of Halo 2. Or Grand Theft Auto IV “Please do not be scared to be different from the existing conventional games. I encourage you to swim against the stream. Do not try to predict the future, but just make it.” Yoot Saito shares the philosophy that gave the bonkers Seaman to the world “I’m…

WEBSITE Switch Teardown bit.ly/switchteardown We’re still treating our Switches with kid gloves: slowly easing the device into its dock so as not to scratch the screen, tentatively disconnecting the Joy-Cons from it as if the whole thing was made of glass, and constantly worrying about that insubstantial kickstand. Distributed manufacturing platform Fictiv has been less circumspect, however, and posted a detailed blog on its teardown of Nintendo’s newest hardware. Among various revelations is the fact that the unit’s internal speakers aren’t located anywhere near the speaker grilles at the back, and that flimsy-feeling kickstand is actually made of glass-filled nylon – a particularly hardy plastic used for injection moulding. It is a shame, however, that they don’t fully investigate the Rumble units. VIDEO Nintendo 64 report bit.ly/n64launch With Switch now…

The child barrels over, as the child does, and after I bark a warning he stops just in time, like he sometimes does. “Daddy’s working,” I say, and it does the trick. The greatest advantage this profession has given me, apart from the enormous salary and the beautiful women, is the unique ability to stop my kid from messing with all my lovely toys. All I need is just four magic words. ‘This is Daddy’s work’. Beautiful. A couple of weeks back, however, the technique failed me. The kid hurtled over while I was playing something for review; I uttered the magic words but, rather than wander off, this time he stuck around to watch. “Daddyyyyy,” he half-whined, in the way he does. “What are those people saying?” They were…

Developer Monolith Publisher Warner Bros Interactive Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin USA Release August 25 O ne of 2014’s surprise successes, Middle-Earth: Shadow Of Mordor rendered open-world fantasy violence with unusual skill. More than just a good action game, its simulation of orc society demonstrated an ambitious commitment to systems-driven design. Procedurally generated warlords presided over networks of lieutenants who you were free to assassinate, sabotage, or convert to your side. Each climactic kill was the result of hours of strategic play, and the characters that you bested – or who managed to kill you – would remember your encounters and return with new traits, strengths and weaknesses as a result. The Nemesis system was the highlight of the game, and for the sequel Monolith is rolling it out…

Brjann Sigurgeirsson has learned his lesson. The Image & Form CEO, slightly bleary-eyed upon his return from GDC, is playing his cards close to his chest after giving away a little too much a little too soon for his studio’s previous release, Steamworld Heist. Though the finished game – a refined, inventive side-scrolling strategy title with realtime aiming – was really rather good, Sigurgeirsson had discussed concepts during its early development that hadn’t come to fruition. One critic was moved to chastise the developer at the beginning of his (otherwise positive) review, Sigurgeirsson recalls. “But he was right: it is a problem when developers talk too much about their games,” he tells us. “You market it so hard that there’s nothing exciting at the end. It’s like watching close-up porn…

For Honor (p112) might just be the most honestly titled videogame ever. While presumably intended to invoke the spirit of good, old-fashioned, bloodthirsty sword combat, the game’s name is also a perfect descriptor for how its multiplayer matches play out. Ubisoft Montreal has surely primarily designed this PVP brawler to let players duke it out honourably. Yet it’s also been crafted with a mischievous eye, understanding that sometimes the notion of doing the right thing can get stuffed. You’ll throw foes off high walkways to their doom. You will bait out a mistake, then kick them into a river of lava. Griefing used to be an unfortunate by-product of the MMO. Now, in a host of genres, it’s increasingly part of the design document. It’s even spread to the singleplayer…

Armed with silenced weapons and a take-it-orleave- it approach to international law, four US special forces operatives are deposited in Bolivia with the goal of destabilising the Mexican drug cartel that has inexplicably taken over the country. Designed for co-op, Wildlands attempts to marry Just Cause’s freeform open world to Clancy-style tactical action, and GTA’s anarchic irreverence to Clancy-style militarism. It’s not a particularly happy partnership. Despite the Clancy name, Wildlands merrily adopts the trappings of a Ubisoft lifestyle game; your operative can be decked out with an array of fashionable hats, beards, ghillie suits and gun paint-jobs, and its story of CIA incursion is given the Instagram treatment, an ochre glow infusing a spectacularly lethal gap-year adventure. In traditional Ubisoft style, each map icon represents a templated, infinitely recurring…

For Honor doesn’t feel like a Ubisoft game. It doesn’t try to do everything; it doesn’t pack an open world with collectibles; it isn’t trying to be for everybody. Ubisoft’s free-roaming medieval combat simulator has the depth of a fighting game, building a complex system of feints, parries, stance switches and grabs out of a few simple building blocks. In one-on-one duels, the purest expression of For Honor, play follows a set pattern. First, you assess your opponent, since each of the game’s 12 characters approaches combat differently. The naginata-wielding samurai Nobushi uses kicks and backsteps to keep her distance while needling you from long range. The axebearing viking Berserker thrives in close, where her fast, multidirectional attacks are hardest to reliably guard against. The lumbering knight Lawbringer, meanwhile, wields…

With Breath Of The Wild comfortably fulfilling its straightforward remit to be an unmissably brilliant Nintendo game, 1-2-Switch has been assigned the less glamorous – but no less important – job of selling its host console’s feature set. In that role, of demonstrating the possibilities of the hardware, it’s an undoubted success. But it feels like an ideal pack-in game that’s been somewhat overvalued by its publisher, and it’s not hard to imagine what might have happened had the similarly slight Wii Sports also been sold solus at an inflated price tag. Its suite of 28 two-player minigames may seem generous, but perhaps half of those will be quickly left out of the rotation when friends and family members next come over. Among the highlights are Safe Cracker, a fascinating…

Y ou have to admit, it’s a tempting pitch. A longforgotten hero making an opportune return; an all-time multiplayer classic revived and reimagined for an irresistibly social new console at launch. With the remaining Switch lineup looking a shade on the slender side – Link’s magnificent new adventure aside – Super Bomberman R would at first glance appear to be the ideal second game. Don’t be fooled. This overpriced confection isn’t Act Zero bad, but it sits worryingly close to that end of the quality scale, peering vainly at the sublime SNES and Saturn versions far off in the distance. The kernel of the game remains: four (or eight) diminutive heroes must battle across a maze, placing bombs to destroy blocks and eventually one another, the winner being the last…

Remember the days when as a developer, we would actually finish making the game? I’m talking about the (usually dreadful) good old days, when we could literally do no more. Something vital inside had reached the number 255 and nothing else was possible. Off to the duplicators it went. Of course, things are hugely better now, but we are faced with the conundrum of deciding when we’re done. It’s why we have milestones, deadlines, alphas and golds and all that. We now stop developing when we have run out of time, or, if we’re lucky, when we have ticked every item on the list in the design document. Or if we’re unlucky, when the money starts to run out. But whatever the reason, calling a halt to the creative process…

The Sega Master System’s equivalent of Zelda and Super Metroid was 1989’s Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap. Deep, complex and full of mystery, this RPG-inflected platformer was on every owner’s radar – including that of Parisbased Omar Cornut, who went on to work as a programmer at UK studio Media Molecule on Tearaway and Dreams, at Q-Games on the PixelJunk series, and co-created the rather special Soul Bubbles on DS. In his spare time he’s cultivated a growing obsession for the Master System into running SMS Power, one of its principal fan websites, and has now established a new studio, Lizardcube, to remake its killer app with a beautiful new graphical style – albeit one that can be restored to its1989 state at the touch of a single button.…

Game Bombergirl Manufacturer Konami While Super Bomberman R has the Switch launch covered, Konami is also bringing the explosive hero back to arcades for the first time in two decades. Well, sort of. The company is following in Namco’s now ancient footsteps to create Bombergirl. The game twists the series into a 4v4 team battler and each of the entirely female cast has a specialism. As well as bomb placement, there are also snipers, high-speed attackers, and blockers. Every character also has special abilities that can be levelled up – examples shown so far include a beam weapon and a flaming sword. Each team must attempt to destroy the opposition’s base within the time limit. It’s quite a jump: the series’ last arcade appearance, Bomberman Neo on MVS, only allowed…

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 Wild bunch Videogames are in abundance these days, every detail marketed in order to sell more. Knowing what to expect before playing has become the norm, taking away the magic of what it was like when all you had were a few screenshots or a magazine article to pore over. After watching the initial trailer for Breath Of The Wild, I decided to avoid any new information surrounding the game until reading E304’s review and the brilliant story behind the game’s creation. After reading through both pieces – enamoured by the subscriber cover art, which seemed to take reference from Monet’s…

It’s one thing to have confidence in your work, but it’s another entirely to think that others should be following your lead. Yet during our latest look at Prey (p36), we hear how Arkane Studios is so enamoured with the immersive sim – the label for a loose collection of games that lets the player put a complex web of systems to work in the manner of their choosing, seamlessly combining a host of genres and gameplay styles into a coherent whole – that it doesn’t understand why every game isn’t built to the same set of principles. Prey, on latest inspection, certainly seems to back that up. We had a similar feeling after playing Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor, the 2014 adventure that subtly redefined our expectations of the open…

Developer/ publisher CCP (Atlanta) Format PSVR, Rift, Vive Origin US Release 2017 From Speedball to Discs Of Tron, game designers have long experimented with sports that lie beyond the bounds of current technology. Sparc, the Icelandic publisher CCP’s first non-spaceship-based virtual reality project, is the latest in the lineage, weaving DNA from a variety of physical and digital sources. The high-walled court of squash combines with baseball’s three-strikes rule; the back and forth of tennis is couched in the futuristic styling of 2001’s Cosmic Smash, one of the few titles released by Sega Rosso, that short-lived arcade division headed by Sega Rally’s Kenji Sasaki. These familiar ingredients combine to create something familiar, yet otherworldly. It’s a twoplayer game, which CCP Atlanta wincingly describes as the first ‘vsport’, since the studio…

Firepower Developer/publisher Williams Format Pinball Release 1980 defender Developer/publisher Williams Electronics Format Arcade Release 1981 Stargate Developer Vid Kidz Publisher Williams Electronics Format Arcade Release 1981 Robotron: 2084 Developer Vid Kidz Publisher Williams Electronics Format Arcade Release 1982 blaster Developer Vid Kidz Publisher Williams Electronics Format Arcade Release 1983 narc Developer/ publisher Williams Electronics Format Arcade Release 1988 smash TV Developer/ publisher Williams Electronics Format Arcade Release 1990 Cruis’n USA Developer Midway Games Publisher Midway Games, Nintendo Format Arcade, N64 Release 1994 The Fast and the furious Developer Raw Thrills Publisher Raw Thrills, Taito Format Arcade Release 2004 Cruis’n Blast Developer Raw Thrills Publisher Raw Thrills, Nintendo Format Arcade Release 2016 nex Machina Developer/publisher Housemarque Format PS4 Release 2017 Eugene Jarvis is one of the earliest pioneers of the modern…

Martin Edmondson Lead designer Where did you first get the idea to make a game about destruction derby? We’d seen Ridge Racer, which was already out in Japan, but we hadn’t taken anything from it. The game was a result of a personal passion for stock-car racing. In the ’80s I’d go and watch it live, or on Grandstand or World Of Sport. The courses were little more than these muddy bowls, but the sport, back then, was quite well known. As first-time PlayStation developers, what tools, if any, were available to you? The first PlayStation development kits were about the size of a photocopier, but you couldn’t use them to build an intricate 3D mesh or a car model because the only way you could interact with them was…

Less than an hour in, all our concerns are addressed. Until then, Automata has borne all the attributes of a typical PlatinumGames joint: dynamic action, a protagonist who moves and fights with balletic grace, and a dodge to die for. Then suddenly, a combination of overconfidence and an unhelpful camera angle (a rarity, happily) leads to a premature arrival of the dreaded grey screen of death. A caption laments our failure, before an accelerated credit crawl reveals that we’ve hit an ending: one, it turns out, of 26 possible conclusions. Another arrives five hours later when we inadvertently take the scenic route to a mission objective and are admonished for having abandoned our post – though at least this time we’re not deposited back at the start. In other words,…

Oh boy, the Spartans. If one unit sums up Halo Wars 2’s approach to realtime strategy, it’s the series’ revered supersoldiers. They leave enemy grunts cowering in their wake, reduce vehicles to piles of twisted metal, and are capable of withstanding barrages of missiles that would drop a tank, with little but a depleted shield to show for it. Their special, meanwhile, sees them leaping high before slamming down, devastating any units in the vicinity – unless you land on, say, a Wraith, in which case it’ll be yours to command in a matter of moments. Sure, this mightn’t involve much more strategic nous than a kid grabbing a Transformers toy and stomping it across a chessboard. All the same, it’s a delight to witness. Spartans apart, Creative Assembly –…

Hey, the cog might be wonky, but it’s ours. One of the many joys of Snipperclips is the strange sense of attachment – and pride, for that matter – you’ll feel towards the messy shapes you make when you bring its two protagonists together and use one to shear pieces from the other. That’s the hook for this unassuming co-op puzzle game (previously known as Friendshapes) from British developer SFB Games. There are no further embellishments to this central idea, but Snipperclips doesn’t need them: its diverse objectives are testament to its considerable flexibility. It gives you as much room to blunder your way to success as to carefully orchestrate an efficient solution. If these geometric heroes end up looking as if a toddler has been hacking away at them…

Tina Guo is a cellist, composer and published poet. Alongside her own creations, Guo has made a name for herself performing on a wide variety of TV, movie and videogame soundtracks, including Diablo III, the Call Of Duty: Black Ops games, and Journey. More recently she has released Game On, an album of videogame covers. What led you to create Game On? Videogaming has always been a part of my life. My first experience happened when I moved from China to America. I was five years old, and my little brother – who was already in America – had an Atari system and we played this Tarzan game. Actually, I remember the day I first played that, I also tried cheese for the first time! After that my brother had…

Look, I’m in a tank! Well, I’m not really in a tank, but Battlezone on PSVR makes the illusion extraordinarily compelling. At least at the beginning, before you have to start driving the damn thing. We seem to experience something akin to rapid hedonic adaptation in these new VR worlds — the initial immersion, a kind of magical teleportation to a new world, is a repeatable thrill, but then we just disappear into the virtual universe. In the current line-up of PSVR games (a lot of which, it must be said, are little more than tech demos), one can already spot a couple of future generic directions for the medium. This is obviously the perfect next step, for example, for the walking simulator, and I for one also welcome the…

Fireproof Games’ commercial director and co-founder Barry Meade is warm and welcoming when we arrive – he immediately asks how we like our tea – but he’s feeling slightly downhearted. The studio behind The Room series is set to move to larger offices shortly, and Meade is disappointed that our visit has occurred too soon for him to show off the new digs. He takes heart in the fact that the cosy current premises are still scattered with years of awards, artwork and desk trinkets instead. Fireproof is, after all, a charismatic studio, and we would much rather see it spread out in its natural state than packed away into moving boxes. Fireproof’s founders bonded at Criterion Studios while working as artists on the Burnout series. By the time Burnout…

Yoko Taro might have plenty of game-design experience, but if there’s one field in which he’s gained true mastery, it’s in trolling his players. This is, after all, the man who chose to finish the original Drakengard with an exacting rhythm game that demanded you reflect incoming attacks with perfect timing – culminating in an extended flurry, followed by a single final blow just at the moment you’re about to sit back and reflect upon your triumph. And your reward? A sucker punch of an ending in which the two protagonists die. Yoko subsequently repeated the trick in 2014’s Drakengard 3, only this time the sequence lasted eight minutes rather than two-and-a-half, with a final note playing over a black screen during a dialogue exchange. In both cases, a single…

And we thought western games were made to templates. Persona 5 marches to the beat of a practically identical drum as Persona 4, which in turn was structurally indistinguishable from Persona 3. This, in fairness, is a natural consequence of setting a game across the span of the academic year; each new instalment cannot help but hit the same beats – the fear of being the new kid, the dread of being called on in class, the panic of exams, the ecstatic release of holidays and festivals – as the game that came before it. If it’s intended as commentary on the stoic rhythm society imposes on the young, then fair enough, but it also removes much of the game’s ability to surprise you. Still, within that framework are plenty…

Stealing has never been quite so nerve-wracking. From pickpocketing as Corvo Attano or Ezio Auditore to smashing villagers’ urns and scooping up their hidden rupees as Link, we’ve become masters of casual theft over the years. Yet as Mae Borowski stretches out a paw to grab a chunky belt buckle while a shop assistant shifts her gaze in the other direction, we find ourselves reflexively tensing. This is low-stakes stuff as far as crimes go, but Night In The Woods has convinced us that it matters. As we hurriedly exit the shop with our ill-gotten gains and breathe, along with Mae, a sigh of relief, we realise why. It’s because we care. That’s quite the feat, since Mae isn’t always the easiest protagonist to like. At the tender age of…