Innehållsförteckning för August 2017 från Edge

If you’re a bit sick of politics at the moment, we understand. By the time you read this, the UK will have been to the polls for the third time in as many years (is everything OK? We hope it’s OK). Much of the world is still adjusting to life under the most divisive US president of our lifetimes. Politics is simply everywhere, landing on our doomats, blaring from our TV screens, buzzing from our phones as news alerts and Twitter notifications flood in from morning to night, rarely bringing good tidings. It’s in our games, too – if not by design, then certainly by association. This month’s cover game, Far Cry 5, was immediately set upon after its announcement by both sides of the yawning chasm that is the…

“The physical shape of the Gale Crater and the textures we were using were all sourced from NASA spaceships” Multi-tasking Both Cunningham’s team at Blackbird and Dr Norris’s team at NASA JPL had to work on Project Eagle in between their other responsibilities. Since Blackbird worked on the project entirely for free, it was squeezed into evenings and weekends, around the studio’s more conventional development tasks. NASA, naturally, was similarly embroiled in its core mission throughout the process. “When they’re not talking to us, they’re giving instructions to the Mars Curiosity rover – these were the actual engineers working on stuff, and it was really fun,” Cunningham says. “We’d be bragging about how we just had another Skype call with NASA, while at NASA, they had a machine with a…

“Someone told me, ‘You’re not indie.’ Fuck off! I make games on my kitchen table with my bare fucking hands. How much more indie do you need to be?” Maybe a bowl-cut hairdo and an album of obscure Elliott Smith covers would help, Brenda Romero “I don’t think free-toplay is going to be as dominant [in VR] as it is on mobile. I think there will be more of a balanced mix.” Thank heavens for that, ex-Rovio GM Oskar Burman “Go back to Words With Friends. Devs were like, “Oh, it’s just Scrabble on a phone. Yeah, exactly. The best things are just X meets Y.” Quite right, Cliff ‘Miyamoto meets Blink-182’ Bleszinski “This incredibly talented team got it done, despite the fact that a lot of them, including me,…

WEBSITE Australian Pokémon bit.ly/AUpoke Paul Robertson, the animator and pixel artist who worked with Tribute Games on Mercenary Kings and who has contributed to all manner of high-profile projects including Scott Pilgrim, The Simpsons, and Gravity Falls, has now turned his attention to Pokémon. Rather than simply pixelate Game Freak’s existing creatures, however, Robertson has instead created an entire Australia-themed Pokédex from scratch – he’s even included evolutions. Highlights include Sidnee, whose armoured back resembles the Sydney Opera House; Caramell, Fredo and Berty, who are all half-unwrapped chocolate bars; Bogg, Shitta and Dunnee, who take on various lavatorial forms; and the frankly nightmarish Dedorse, a zombie steed emerging from a bubbling pool of blood. An utterly charming bunch. VIDEO Kazutoshi Iida bit.ly/tocoiida Doshin The Giant creator Kazutoshi Iida is the…

NATHAN BROWN Illustration kaeru.com.ar It’s always easier to blame the bigger boy, especially when he just put the makers of your favourite games out of work Like the rest of you, I expect, I was shocked by the news that Square Enix was looking to offload IO Interactive. After all, the Danish studio has spent the past few years making, releasing and then continuing to make perhaps the best Hitman game of them all. It got an Edge cover in 2015 and an Edge 9 in 2016, but in 2017 the studio that makes it is being cast aside while Square Enix focuses in on what it calls “key franchises and studios” – a phrase that roughly translates as “things connected to Final Fantasy” and will have subsidiary and partner…

Developer /publisher Epic Games Format PC Origin US Release 2018 According to its creative director Darren Sugg, the long-in-development Fortnite has become “a mirror for the evolution of Epic as a whole”. The game began life as an Xbox Live Arcade project during the heyday of so-called Epic 3.0, that middleware behemoth in thrall to a couple of premium action series. Seven years later, it will launch as a flagship title for Epic 4.0: a digital publisher with its own desktop app, a focus on indirect monetisation and five projects underway simultaneously, propped up by the enduring Unreal Engine business and a $330 million investment from Chinese juggernaut Tencent. It’s perhaps in keeping with the theme, then, that Fortnite feels undecided, caught between eras and traditions – both a cooperative…

Developer Iron Galaxy Publisher Maximum Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release TBA We spend a while wrestling with the idea of Iron Galaxy’s latest project. It sounds like the studio itself has, too. Some things are easily grasped: it’s definitely a thirdperson action-adventure game. It’s also a monster-battler influenced by the likes of Team Ico’s Shadow Of The Colossus and popular anime series Attack On Titan. Beyond that, things get more complicated. “I’ve worked on a bunch of games,” game director Kraig Kujawa tells us, “and this has been one of the most ambitious things that I have worked on.” That’s quite the statement from a man with credits on series such as Killer Instinct, Dead Rising and Resident Evil, yet Extinction contains more moving parts than…

STILL PLAYING Ultra Street Fighter II Switch Yes, it’s too expensive. And judging by the combo videos we’ve seen Capcom didn’t spend long balancing new additions Evil Ryu and Violent Ken. Yet there can be no disputing the rock-solid foundation on which this undercooked, overpriced update has been built. The offline AI is the same input?reading mess as ever, and the delaybased netcode’s not great either. Yet we can’t put it down. Our 85 per cent rankedmatch win record may, in fairness, have something to do with it. What Remains Of Edith Finch PS4 The beautifully conceived cannery section – in which you play through a daydream with the left stick while carrying out repetitive manual labour with the right – may be the standout, but Giant Sparrow’s game is…

Developer/publisher Codemasters Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Despite a multitude of improvements and a larger offering than its predecessor, Dirt 4 feels less spirited PASS PLUS Joyride mode appropriates the DirtFish Rally School in Washington for a huge series of courses on which to attempt lap-time and smash challenges. The former dots each circuit with red and green tokens – each of the latter you pick up reduces your lap time by a second, while hitting the former, which are often placed in difficult-to-avoid locations, does the opposite. Smash challenges, meanwhile, give you a set number of blocks to find and destroy with your car, tracing routes that allow you to go full Ken Block as you slide the car around piles of tyres and under excavator…

Developer SMAC Games Publisher Mode 7 Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now (PS4 TBA) Once you’re given a little room to explore, you’ll find a quietly absorbing simulation of a future city HITMAN: EXPOSITION Tokyo 42’s story unfolds through text-based conversations with a steadily expanding range of contacts. As your reputation increases with each successful hit, you’ll attract the attention of an underground mobster; shortly afterwards, you’ll team up with another assassin after being challenged to take out a target before him. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, establishing its tone with an opening sequence where you vomit over the side of your handler’s speeding skycar. If its line in corporate conspiracy isn’t particularly intriguing or new, it’s a robust framework for a diverse series of…

Developer/publisher Llamasoft Format PS4, PSVR (both tested) Release Out now MINTER CONDITION All three game types can be played in VR, and there’s 3D support, too. On Classic and Pure modes you’ll gain an extra three shields after every completed stage, up to a maximum of nine; the former lets you start from the last level you reached, while the latter sends you back to the start when you die. Finally, there’s YOLO mode, which furnishes you with nine shields at the start but won’t give you a top-up between stages. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but Llamasoft’s latest is a low-poly, high-speed marvel. It’s a ride for which you’ll feel the urge to strap in even before calmly voiced instructions from an airline safety announcement play…

Developer Mojo Bones Publisher Bandai Namco Format PC Release Out now SNOW WONDER They’re too few and far between, but the odd triumph and the occasional startling discovery (an abandoned playground; the half-buried fuselage of a crashed plane) might just encourage you to stick at it. Since the game moves at a pace that makes Tarkovsky look like Michael Bay, finding the ingredients required to craft a skidoo for speedier scavenging was a particular joy – at least until we realised it meant carting around fuel cans of inventory-hogging bulk. Survival games are all about eking out little victories: as Shinji Mikami noted, “Beyond the hardship lies accomplishment.” Yet the returns rarely correspond to the effort. It’s the carrot of another goal that keeps you hooked, making you forget you’re…

Illustration Box Kite Curve I find myself lapsing into a sort of Victorian argot, which has never worked in a game ever, and never will We, on these tiny, cold islands, make some of the best games in the world, but they always get categorised, especially in the United States, as British. Apart from, I suspect, the GTA series, which satirised the US so effectively that they think it’s American over there. Sweet irony. Which, like satire, I think could be lost on them. But being British about games isn’t a design thing. There isn’t a British look to our games, and nor do we use Britten and Vaughan Williams exclusively for soundtracks. It stems from two sources. Firstly, the time when it’s set. Anything vaguely fantasy and sword-filled ticks…

Technology free Despite inventing technologies that are now foundational to computer science and gaming, and all the countless billions of dollars that they must have helped generate, he didn’t patent shaders or Perlin noise. “No, and it’s a good thing I didn’t,” he says. “I totally gave it away. I copyrighted it so people wouldn’t make wrong versions of it, but I didn’t charge for it.” It’s not that he’s against patenting, and part of the reason was the technology’s legal relationship with his then-employer, MAGI. “I don’t think in terms of making money, I think in terms of how my children thrive, and it’s a different rule for each thing.” If it was hardware technology, then patenting would’ve helped to secure the capital needed to realise it, but as…

Game Hado Shoot Manufacturer Meleap Japanese startup Meleap has been around for a while – it launched Hado, an augmented-reality game of six-player PVP fireball-flinging, back in 2015. Powering its tech is a combination of AR headset and wrist-mounted motion sensor, enabling players to act out the Ryu power fantasy in (almost) real life. It’s a popular installation piece with its own tournament scene – but with Japan’s arcade industry increasingly embracing virtual reality and its related technologies, the firm is stepping up a gear. The latest fruit of that endeavour is Hado Shoot, a fourplayer game played on a huge display projected onto a wall by the AR headset. Waves of cutesy mushroom people – a sort of non-threatening chibi take on the enemies that mill about in Dark…

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 “Competitive games aren’t only a test of skill, but of being able to out-read your opponent” My desire It’s exciting to hear that even for Nintendo, their new hybrid console is exceeding expectations, so much so that they’ve even revised sales forecast targets. The biggest indicator to me of this unforeseen success is undoubtedly the drip-feed of software, as opposed to the full-on wave of experiences to try out. I concede, the games are coming and E306 piqued my excitement a lot for Arms. But c’mon, a few more would be nice. To compensate, there has recently been a lot of…

MOST WANTED Everybody’s Golf PS4 We wondered quite what was going on with a game we first played 18 months ago. Turf War, a realtime scrap over a nine-hole course you can move around freely, may not quite justify the lengthy wait, but it’s got us more excited than ever for the latest instalment of the breeziest, most likeable golf game around. Super Mario Odyssey Switch Since we’re sending this issue to press three days before boarding the flight to E3, we’re giddy with anticipation at our first sit down with Mario’s weirdly realistic open-world adventure. By the time you read this, you’ll know all about it, so tell us: is it any good? Pyre PS4 No-one mixes genres quite like Supergiant. After Transistor’s sublime blend of RTS and RPG…

Developer Gunfire Games Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2018 Well, it’s been a while. Not, admittedly, as long as the century that War’s soul has spent screaming in the abyss: the punishment handed down to Darksiders’ original protagonist for – as you do – prematurely starting the Apocalypse. But five years is a long time for a series to be similarly stuck in limbo. Darksiders was one of the many victims of the fall of THQ, but the brand’s acquisition by Nordic Games (since renamed THQ Nordic) raised hopes of a revival. No one quite knew what to make of a hastily assembled remaster of the second game two years ago: was this a final death rattle, or a prelude to a proper follow-up?…

You need to hit things, sure – but you’ll often want to miss on purpose, sending out a limb to block off an escape route As you’d expect from the name, being able to throw a proper punch is the most important thing in Arms. Use the recommended control scheme – the Thumbs-Up Grip, with a Joy-Con upright in each hand – and chances are you’ll quickly realise you naturally curve your real-world punches; that won’t do in Arms, where simply getting an enemy into a punchable position frequently feels like the hardest thing. When you’ve finally pinned them down, the last thing you want is for your execution to let you down. But saying that, punch control is the most important thing in Arms. You need to hit things,…

Developer/publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release Out now You’re always uncomfortably aware of feeding hours of your actual life to the void for a shot at a kooky hat REALITY CHECK It seems only fitting to mention Tekken 7’s PSVR-exclusive offerings here as an afterthought – because that’s exactly how they come across in-game. Headset owners can choose between VR Battle or VR Viewer. The former has you beat up an AI meatsack in a single stage, in regular thirdperson view: it’s an endless, HUD-less, pointless affair that you’ll play once and then forget forever. (Bafflingly, regular training dummy settings aren’t even an option here.) VR Viewer is a briefly interesting but basic character model viewer, designed to showcase the designers’ detailed work and let you get…

Developer Red Storm Entertainment Publisher Ubisoft Format PSVR (tested), Rift, Vive Release Out now CAPTAIN SOLO The singleplayer option can’t really compete with the collaborative experience, though it’s an amusingly frantic exercise in micromanagement. Rather than using your voice to lead, you’ll need to select options from a range of menus. Bridgewide commands let you quickly engage or analyse targets, say, though at times only more specific instructions will do. And if you’re not happy with the AI’s decision-making, you can blink into their chair to briefly assume their role. A starship captain, we suppose, should be unflappable and decisive, but at this rate, we’re headed for a court martial. In our defence, the ‘answer hail’ and ‘red alert’ buttons are in troublingly close proximity. Later, as the flames lick…

“Clearly I try to turn myself into a kind of gelatinous blob and let people thrash me around for a bit” Five years later, the emails, Facebook messages and Instagram posts are still arriving on a daily basis; Austin Wintory happily acknowledges that his work on Thatgamecompany’s Journey was a career turning point. “I feel extraordinarily grateful,” he tells us. “I’ve had composer friends and colleagues who’ve had very successful careers but have never had an experience like that, where something became so personal to people that it’s something they’re excited about years later, that they’ve built into the fabric of their lives.” Wintory was 24 when he signed up to score Journey, and 27 when it came out. After the fact, it dawned on him that he’d spent more…

Career mode After winning the GTR British championship online, Hamilton made his real-life racing debut in the 2011 Renault Clio Cup United Kingdom. His first season became the subject of a documentary, titled Racing With The Hamiltons: Nic In The Driving Seat, commissioned by the BBC. Hamilton moved up to the European Touring Car Cup in 2013, before starting to drive in the British Touring Car Championship in 2015. But while his racing career is flourishing, Hamilton hasn’t forgotten his roots, and has worked closely with Slightly Mad Studios on both Project Cars and its forthcoming sequel. “I always wanted to be a part of developing a game because games were what I lived for” Nicolas Hamilton is a racing-car driver who currently competes in the British Touring Car Championship.…

STEVEN POOLE Illustration kaeru.com.ar Potassium is known to be good for the brain, so why not give banana-eating the credit instead? Videogames are good for you, right? Everyone seems to agree. The Theme Park co-designer and DeepMind AI entrepreneur Demis Hassabis was recently on Desert Island Discs, and explained how he uses games to improve his cognition. “I think you can learn a lot from them. In business or in life there are not many times you can practise, in a safe way, ideas or strategies, or develop your own mind. So I find games are a little bit like a gym for the mind. So I’ve used games, boardgames and computer games, to train my own mind.” Such talk is perfectly tuned to elicit curiosity and a lowering of…

Developer Monolith Productions Publisher Warner Bros Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release October 10 Monolith’s latest assault on the Tolkien universe sees each Orc leader’s traits and foibles writ large in the fortresses that loom over every region of the world. Assign a member of the Feral tribe to run a captured keep, for example, and he might decorate the walls with butchered firedrakes, attracting beasts to the vicinity – a peculiarity you, as immortal ranger and latterday general Talion, might exploit to acquire a new mount. To date, press for the game has focused on the act of conquering (and defending) these structures, whereby you’ll pick your lieutenants, choose between such troop types as troll demolishers, venomous spiders and agile Caragor cavalry, then drive your foes back…

Developer Inti Creates Publisher 505 Games Format PC, PS4, Switch, Vita, Xbox One Origin Japan Release 2018 S et for release a full decade after the last true 2D Castlevania – series fans understandably discount loot-obsessed co-op adventure Harmony Of Despair and Lords Of Shadow spin-off Mirror Of Fate – producer Koji Igarashi’s spiritual successor to his lauded platformer-adventure series represents a somewhat more delayed resurrection than his traditional vampiric villain is used to. Not that Dracula himself is the undead inconvenience this time out. Writing a brand new scenario in order to step comfortably away from Konami’s currently mothballed official series, Bloodstained transposes the action from Transylvania to merry old 18th century England, and forges a new fanged threat with not a Belmont in sight. There is, of course,…

“YAGER DOES PROJECTS THAT ARE QUITE SPECIAL. THE Y’RESORT OF MAINSTREAM ,BUT NOT MAINSTREAM Founded 1999 Employees 110 Key staff Timo Ullmann (managing director), Philipp Schellbach (director of development), Jonathan Lindsay (executive producer Dreadnought), Peter Holzapfel (game director Dreadnought) URL www.yager.de Selected softography Yager, Spec Ops: The Line Current projects Dreadnought Yager Development has come full circle during the 17 years it’s existed. Founded by five friends in 1999, the studio slowly grew to around 20 people by the time it released its first title, futuristic flight-combat game Yager, in 2003. Excursions into anti-war surrealism and ill-fated zombie apocalypses followed – via, respectively, the critically lauded thirdperson shooter Spec Ops: The Line, and a short-lived collaboration with Deep Silver on the still yet-to-be-released Dead Island sequel – but the studio has now…

The Galaxy hate mob may – OK, probably will – see a simplified fighting game that’s played with motion controls We can probably blame Super Mario Galaxy. Wii’s star attraction was the game that truly invoked the ire of the more traditional segment of the gaming population; for all that the console’s ground-breaking motion controls had broadened that audience, it had done so with games like Wii Sports and Carnival Games – titles built specifically for those controls, and those people. Wii launch title The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess was easily forgiven, a Gamecube port with Wiimote controls tacked on to give early adopters something more meaty to chew over than the rest of the launch line-up offered. But Galaxy? A true mainline Mario game that insisted players give…

Developer Netherrealm Studios Publisher Warner Bros Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now The Multiverse is Injustice 2’s beating heart, its true singleplayer mode, its theoretically infinite endgame BURN CLINIC Super meter builds terrifically quickly in Injustice 2, since the bar fills as you both land and take hits. Cinematic super moves are the flashiest way to spend it, and given the ease of input (you simply squeeze both triggers simultaneously) they’re a reliable route to big damage. Yet chunks of super meter can be used to perform a succession of vital moves: interrupting blockstrings, escaping juggle situations, or using an invincible roll to get out of the corner. On the attack, a Meter Burn is equivalent to Street Fighter’s EX system, amping up special moves – but…

Developer Amplitude Studios Publisher Sega Format Windows Release Out now This is, by a considerable distance, the best-looking and sounding grand-strategy game around audience PASS INTO LEGEND Endless Space, Endless Legend, Dungeon Of The Endless and Endless Space 2 – all of Amplitude’s games to date – share a setting. Auriga, the planet on which Endless Legend takes place, is presented in Endless Space 2 as a unique world in the grip of an ice age that yields scientific rewards for the faction that controls it. Similarly, the factions of the first Endless Space game make cameo appearances during events and quests. This compounds the sense of an ancient, storied universe that Amplitude is so good at evoking, as well as the blend of science-fiction and fantasy that is specific…

Developer Impulse Gear Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment Format PSVR Release Out now GOOD AIM PlayStation Aim’s matte-white stylings might look a little undercooked, but in use the device feels substantial and of high build quality. All of the DualShock 4’s buttons, bar the touchpad, are included, albeit not always in the most intuitive position. The Options button, for example, is a bit of a stretch. It’s also weighted to ensure that it’s comfortable to hold with one hand, which – if support is forthcoming – will offer a little more flexibility for developers. The fact that our front room looks directly out onto the street is unfortunate. Anyone who had the misfortune to witness us flailing around while wearing a PSVR headset and aiming at thin air with the glowing…