Innehållsförteckning för July 2018 från Edge

In the videogame industry, longevity is as often a blessing as a curse. You don’t get to stick around unless you achieve success, but as the acclaim and awards roll in, the pressure ratchets up. When Cliff Bleszinski quit Epic Games after 20 years to set up on his own, he was not the head of a promising young start-up; he was the cocky Gears Of War guy. He still is, but now also carries the burden of the failure of his studio’s debut game, Lawbreakers. This issue we run the rule over Boss Key’s new game, Radical Heights, the next chapter in Bleszinski’s future legacy. The man who will inevitably still be known as CliffyB when they wheel him into the nursing home may, in his more humble moments,…

The Walking Dead: Our World is just one of a slew of augmented-reality games styled after popular film and TV properties due for release in 2018. Jurassic World Alive will also use Google Maps to geolocate gameplay, superimposing dinosaurs onto real-world locations, while Pokémon Go developer Niantic is finishing work on its next major AR game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Perhaps the popular fiction best-suited to AR game treatment, however, is Ghostbusters, for the grimly practical reason that spectres don’t look strange when they glitch through walls or the floor. Ghostbusters World will be a forthcoming collaboration between Sony Pictures Entertainment Consumer Products, Ghost Corps and publisher FourThirtyThree.…

Alessandro Cortini is an Italian musician best known as a member of American industrial band Nine Inch Nails, but has also produced music in other collaborations and solo projects under different names such as Sonoio and Blindoldfreak. Besides music, videogames have been a lifelong obsession, beginning back in his childhood in Italy. What are your earliest memories of videogames? They go back to summertimes when my parents, my aunts and uncles would get together after dinner at these outdoor bars – a lot of these places would have one or two arcade cabinets. The ones that I remember most are Donkey Kong, a platformer called SonSon, and Moon Patrol. My first gaming system was a Commodore 16, which wasn’t nice. I lasted a year on that – then I was…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar There are evenings when one wants just to lie back on the sofa, covered in crisps, and be entertained Sometimes playing a videogame just feels like too much work. There’s a reason, after all, why some of the academic crowd follow Espen Aarseth in calling games “ergodic literature”: it’s from the Greek ergon, work. There are evenings when one wants just to lie back on the sofa, covered in crisps, and be entertained. Hence, perhaps, the extraordinary popularity now of watching other people play games for us. Streaming on Twitch, of course, is currently the big story. The Fortnite streamer Ninja is making half a million dollars a month. But there is now a whole ecosystem of more curated, edited gaming videos, which in a way map onto…

“It’s an interesting time,” Chris Hecker once told Edge, when we put it to him that indie gaming was entering a golden age. “What Jon [Blow] and I talk about a lot, though, is, now we’re working on big projects, will it be a golden age by the time we’re done?” At the time, Hecker was working on SpyParty (p42), an ambitious, asymmetrical multiplayer game about a sniper and a spy. Seven years and 97 issues of Edge after he wondered what kind of market his finished game would eventually release into, it is finally here, but anything but finished. It’s in Early Access. Hecker’s game pushes to the absolute limit the question of when, in the modern age, a game is deemed ready for release. And while perhaps his…

Ivory Tower hopes that The Crew 2’s comprehensive built-in video editor will encourage players to orchestrate and share some of their flashiest – and funniest – in-game moments. Hitting left on the D-pad opens up a Live Replay mode, in which you can compose beautifully lit screenshots (even changing the weather, if you so choose) or wind back through the last ten autorecorded minutes of gameplay for editing and posting on socialmedia platforms. “The main point of Fast Fav is to enjoy it with your friends,” Beley says – we think back to a brief demo moment in which we had attempted to perform a loop-de-loop-into-water landing, turning from plane to boat alongside our co-op partner.…

Creating dense cities with visual variety requires a lot of time and resources. But being a relatively small studio, Frogwares has created a city generator that allows Unreal Engine 4 to do most of the work. After designing hundreds of assets with its own unique architectural styles, a city grid allows the designers to set algorithms for how each district is populated, from rich houses to industrial districts. With the press of a button, a whole city is procedurally generated in hours instead of months, while designers can go in and apply modifications and give areas a more personal touch afterwards. It’s been an invaluable tool for the studio, and may, in future, be for others too: Frogwares plans to publicly release it once The Sinking City is on shelves.…

Developer Grasshopper Manufacture Publisher Marvelous Entertainment Format Switch Origin Japan Release 2018 Travis Touchdown has lost touch with reality. So what else is new? Suda51’s beam-saber-wielding antihero has always seen life as a game, slicing his way up the ranks of the United Assassins Association in No More Heroes to become the number one assassin. In Grasshopper’s follow-up, he walked away from the crown: now, in spin-off title Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, he’s sucked into another competition. That’s not just fancy phrasing – he really is sucked into it. Seven years after the events of No More Heroes 2, Touchdown has entered middle-aged ennui, bored of the UAA, and has moved out to the sticks to play videogames in peace. That is, until Badman shows up with a…

Format PC Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Reflections) Origin France, UK Release 2017 There’s a harmonious magic in Ode’s landscapes. Its alien worlds, peculiar yet welcoming, double as giant, organic musical instruments, with flowers, strange growths and springy fungi becoming valves, frets and keys in a spontaneous, experimental performance. As a fallen star, you barrel around, drawn to tiny spheres that trail behind you once collected, ready to be cast out and gathered back up in an instant. Almost imperceptibly, the soundtrack builds with your own momentum until it reaches a rousing crescendo, a euphoric conclusion to your orchestral manoeuvres. Like each of its stages, Ode gradually developed from modest beginnings. It’s a surprise, in fact, to discover that it all started with a simple piece of technology, created by one of Ubisoft…

Is there a limit to complexity in videogames? If this month’s Play selection is any guide then if there is a ceiling on how far developers are prepared to push us, it’s nestled somewhere out of sight above the clouds. Games have always been as much about testing our ability to keep plates spinning as our reflexes, admittedly, but sometimes you can’t help but wonder if things are beginning to get out of hand. Take, for example, Pillars Of Eternity II: Deadfire (p110) – a game which was crowdfunded to the tune of $4.4 million on the promise of taking players back to the nails-hard complexity of old-school CRPGs such as Baldur’s Gate. So, yes, it was always going to tax the grey matter. The audience for this sort of…

“It was the role of our art department to show you the people that your decisions will affect” Kuba Stokalski is the lead designer of Frostpunk. Here, he discusses the challenge of building a city management game with meaning, storytelling through systems, and balancing the game’s sombre tone. Was it a challenge to build a message into a city management game? We knew we wanted to do that, but nonetheless it turned out to be the biggest challenge of the development process. A lot of management games already have some kind of statement written into them because of the verbs and the nouns they use in their design, but I get the feeling that it’s not something very thought through in the sense of one particular vision being behind it…

Whether or not you prefer his work on the original Nier, Keiichi Okabe’s soundtrack for Nier: Automata increasingly feels like a modern classic. Naturally, it blends the human with the mechanical: Birth Of A Wish II and III combine robotic chants with clanking percussion, while Fortress Of Lies provides the android headquarters with the steady pulse of a human heart. There’s a mournful undertone to even its most strident battle themes, but the score reaches its emotional peak with the soaring Weight Of The World. In the Japanese-language version, singer Marina Kawano’s voice cracks with emotion as the music builds, before she audibly breaks into tears. It’s a moment that fits the game’s central theme like a glove, highlighting the beauty of human fallibility.…

As service games become increasingly prevalent, developers across the industry are obsessed with finding ways to not just attract players, but retain their attention; to not just build a fanbase, but to foster a community. Cambridge-based Jagex seems to have mastered the art: on average, players of its evergreen MMO RuneScape stay with it for seven years. Then again, it’s had plenty of practice – RuneScape has, after all, been around since 2001. “We like to use the slightly euphemistic phrase ‘It’s been 17 years in the making’,” CEO Phil Mansell laughs. Naturally, the game has evolved significantly during that time, but so too has the way Jagex has communicated with its players. During the game’s infancy, creators Andrew and Paul Gower were able to talk directly to a small…

WEB Adobe Flash’s Gaming Legacy bit.ly/flashlegacy Ben Latimore is on a mission to save thousands of Flash games from certain obscurity. In this article, he explains why Flash support is due to disappear in just two years’ time, as well as how likely we are to lose several culturally important titles when Adobe pulls the plug. Thanks to sitelocking, not every game can be downloaded and saved to a hard drive: DRM and online multiplayer functionality prevent some from being played without the intended servers. And it’s already started happening. But Latimore introduces Flashpoint, a Flashgame preservation project that functions as a kind of playable museum by using the Apache web server, hacks and a whole lot of Google Drive space. The legality of it is questionable, but Latimore is…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Labo’s components fit together with an elegance you’d never have thought cardboard was capable of So, it has happened: the Edge brood has further swelled. Labour began when I was about halfway through last issue’s cover feature; while it certainly led to a marked uptick in writing speed, it is neither something I would recommend nor intend to repeat. But still, Child Two is here, and as I expected, having a second kid is very much the New Game Plus of parenthood: you’ve seen this all before, and it’s technically harder, yet feels easier because you’re stronger and have seen it all before. It’s the sort of thing that I could probably spin out to full wordcount, if I was prepared to really stretch the analogy to breaking…

Red Dead Redemption 2 PS4, Xbox One Lawks, it’s really happening. The latest trailer may have given too little away about Rockstar’s western opus, but a brief encounter with the preview circuit yielded more promising details about what is sure to be the biggest-selling game of the year. Lumines Remastered PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One This rebuild of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s mesmerising music puzzler may be in development for four platforms but come on, we know that only one of them really matters. A late June release cruelly means we won’t have it on Switch for the flight to E3. Miz, if you’re reading, help us out. Super Smash Bros Switch Masahiro Sakurai’s latest party brawler is unlikely to mess with a winning formula in the way Odyssey and Breath Of…

Developer In-house Publisher Chris Hecker Format PC Origin US Release TBA After eight years of constant development, SpyParty has finally appeared on Steam’s Early Access, and it’s still far from complete. “We launched in a pretty rough state,” says its sole designer and programmer, Chris Hecker, who was previously lead engineer on Spore. “It’s a mix of emotions,” he continues, surprisingly brightly, given that he’s spent the entire night responding to support requests and had only an hour’s sleep when we speak. “I’m still reeling from the whole thing of working on something this long. A launch is huge for anybody and after eight years it’s huger. I’m relieved, but I’m most proud of myself for pushing the button when the game was in a state I didn’t think it…

Going public with a build so early in development is an unorthodox strategy that risks alienating gamers used to smoother edges. But Lowery tells us it’s actually a way of taking some of the guesswork out of the process. “Typical game development is 18 months to five or six years. You sit there and wonder, ‘How will it be received?’ And you hope, and you keep spending time on it. We were able to create a core loop pretty early. We were playtesting it within a couple of weeks of beginning development, and we knew we had something that we could start getting in people’s hands pretty quickly. We really wanted to get the idea out there and make sure there was an audience for it.”…

Developer Plausible Concept Publisher Raw Fury Format Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin Sweden, UK Release Summer Fittingly, Plausible Concept has started small, both in terms of its team and its game. There are just three people making Bad North, a refreshingly minimalist realtime strategy game that puts you in charge of a series of small, randomly generated islands. By directing your tiny troops, you must stave off invading Vikings – but the real battles are fought in your head, as you constantly assess your surroundings and make swift decisions based on visual clues.. Bad North’s miniature, pastel-hued locales invite prodding, and poking, and gawping. We quickly abandon physical buttons to use the more intuitive touch controls, spinning our first island like a perfectly iced cake on a…

Suda is collaborating with several devs to include homages to indie games in Travis Strikes Again (Touchdown is sporting a Hyper Light Drifter shirt in our demo). He’s previously drawn comparisons with Grasshopper Manufacture and indie devs. So what does “indie” mean to him in 2018? “It’s people just creating whatever they want, without any interference,” he tells us. “I think Grasshopper’s adapted a similar style over the years. Several of the publishers we’ve worked with over the years have been rather lenient with their control, so we’ve been able to do what we want. The game industry has matured, but game culture has only just started to grow. We’ve gone from an era in which only pros could create games, to an era in which basically anyone can. I…

There are an astounding number of ways in which Lara Croft is brutally punished in our demo, from nearly drowning, to being speared by spike traps, to being impaled through the throat by a pipe, still alive and gasping for air as she claws at her neck. Chayer-Bisson explains that they were a design choice for Shadow. “The checkpoints are not far away from when you die, so having these gruesome deaths make you feel bad to fail, and do everything to stay alive,” he says. It sounds like the pipe incident, however, was a bit of a sore point. “I said, ‘To not break the immersion, I would like to not see Lara dead on screen, just falling or dying’. So when the spike came here,” – he gestures…

What a year it’s been for Brendan Greene, aka Playerunknown, the man and modder behind Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds. An Early Access release last March saw the battle royale title – originally a mod for survival shooter DayZ, itself a popular mod of Arma 2 – become an instant smash hit, selling over 26 million copies and smashing Steam’s record with an astonishing 3.14 million concurrent users. A full release in December pushed its sales to over 40 million, and PUBG seemed nigh-on untouchable. But Greene’s big idea had set a chain reaction in motion. Suddenly, everyone was out to grab a slice of the PUBG pie – not least flagging survival title Fortnite, which turned around a battle-royale mode in record time and has somewhat gazumped PUBG of late. The genre…

The bigger Ubisoft games have lots of features, collectibles and so on, but it feels like Reflections takes the opposite approach. With these small teams in particular, it’s a necessity! You can’t help but burn things right down to the pure essence of an idea. What we’re surprised by in this process every time we do it is how much you can boil it down and how much you can take away in order to reveal the purity of the idea at the centre. Did the team’s experience with Grow Home help in that regard? Yeah, with Grow Home, we kept on reducing and reducing the scope out of necessity for both the size of the team and the experimental nature of the game – it was a very tiny…

Destiny 2 PS4 Yes, you read that right. After a few months in which we came perilously close to deleting it to save hard drive space, we’re back in Bungie’s muddled shared-universe shooter again. It’s early days for Warmind, which launches as we send to press – and we’re not expecting much from the story. But a sweeping sandbox update has done wonders for the power fantasy, and it seems there’s now an endgame grind to savour. Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze Switch Its pricing may be scandalous – it takes remarkable cheek to sell a barely improved remaster at a higher price than the original – but Tropical Freeze is exceptional when it really hits its stride. If this turns out to be the foreword for the glorious E3…

Seven years on and, arguably, no videogame has surpassed LA Noire in recreating the subtlety of an actor’s facial performances. Developed by Depthanalysis, a now-defunct sister company to the game’s now-defunct developer Team Bondi, the 3D scanning technology used in the game, MotionScan, was unwieldy (actors reported being unable to move their bodies while being recorded) and almost prohibitively expensive. Its technological approach of creating, in effect, 3D sprite sheets for every frame of animation also produced, in LA Noire, a game of notorious heft; the recent re-release is too substantial to fit on Switch’s standard memory. But while players still needed to leap the uncanny valley, when it comes to seeing is believing, the chasm has rarely been narrower than in Rockstar’s gumshoe drama, even after all these years.…

Now in its 13th year, Develop: Brighton is hoping to build upon the success of last year’s record-breaking event with a number of key changes. Traditional curtain-raiser Evolve, which centres on cutting-edge developments across the industry, is now a full track within the main conference programme, which has expanded to run for the full three days. Elsewhere, a brand new track, Discoverability, is designed to help advise developers on gaining player attention. The Develop Game Jam and Indie Showcase competition, meanwhile, will both return. For further information or to book tickets, visit developconference.com.…

E319 brought news of the Exa Conversion Kit, a new multi-game arcade board whose maker is putting indie developers at the frontline of its planned assault on the coin-op scene. It’s a fine idea, not least for how it gives manufacturer Exa-Arcadia a way to amass a sizeable catalogue in relatively short order by signing up games which have already been developed. Okay, almost developed. Exa’s latest signing, The Kung Fu Vs Karate Champ, is the work of oneman developer Jae Lee and has been available through Steam Early Access for over two years, under the (snappier, if you ask us) name Shaolin Vs Wu Tang. Like Lee’s debut, Kings Of Kung Fu, this is a love letter to real-world martial arts; the action is balletic and athletic, but more…

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 Back to basics It was great to read Nathan Brown’s column in Edge 318, in which he relays the excitement of his son “getting into Mario”. You can’t beat playing a videogame with your children, as I’ve recently discovered. My five-year-old twins have played the occasional videogame on a tablet or smartphone, but their first experience of Super Mario Odyssey (following the purchase of a Switch “for the family” at Christmas) has secured in them a love of all-things Nintendo. The great thing about the newest generation of small humans is that there is no prejudice on a game based purely…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar We’re stuck with showing the real, unadulterated state of the game, a mildly terrifying but essentially healthy situation During most planning meetings, developers talk of conception, of preproduction and post-production. Then towards the end of the meeting there’ll be a pause, and someone will ask, ‘What about the E3 demo? Or the pitch demo? Or the exec demo?’ And everyone will groan. There’s always the fantasy that we could just make the game, and that demos are an unwanted distraction. Handled correctly, however, they can be a useful checkpoint for your project and a chance to get feedback. Better still, it doesn’t matter what point you’re at during game development, or whether your audience is a publisher or a player, the goal of the demo should be the…

Twitch was a glimmer in the eye of Justin.tv when Hecker started making SpyParty, but he found himself making a game that’s ideal for it. “The kind of game people talk about building right now is competitive multiplayer, esportcapable, lots of spectating. That’s exactly what SpyParty is,” he says. Twitch isn’t built into the game, but it features an absurdly overengineered native spectator-and-replay system instead to scratch the same itch. Live games are viewable by other players; every one is saved on the game’s server and you can scrub back and forth through their replays, viewing them from six different cameras. There’s also a casting mode with splitscreen. You can even play sniper against a replay, allowing you to face off against yourself and learn where you went wrong and…

The toughest levels that Bad North’s algorithms can throw up aren’t necessarily always the ones with oodles of winding caverns. “If we have levels that are completely flat, they’re some of the hardest, most complicated levels,” Meredith says. “When we first put in flat levels, it took me quite a while, even knowing the game well, to cope with them.” Enemy units can reach yours faster, there’s less cover, and choke points are nonexistent. “From a development point, there’s a lot less work involved than adding whole new units – but it is genuinely more interesting, and intuitive,” he explains. “If we add new units, you have to learn how they work. If we change up how the islands are, there’s nothing for us to teach you: you know how…

As an exploration of Lara Croft’s inner turmoil, Shadow must be a deeply personal thing to work on. Indeed, both Murray and Chayer-Bisson see parallels between Croft’s dangerous monomania and their own work. “A lot of us relate to her stubbornness, her obsessiveness, her relentlessness,” Murray laughs. “We’re all game developers: we work a lot and love what we do. There’s an obvious connection there.” Chayer-Bisson agrees: “It was always about obsession. We are obsessed about what we’re doing: we can lose focus and perspective, and especially when it happens with your life and your family. This is a story about how sometimes your passion can destroy you, and how it’s better to stop and get perspective before doing the thing you think is right.”…

Greene made videogame mods as a hobby while working as a photographer, DJ, graphic designer and web designer. He’d seen The Survivor GameZ, an online contest created by Brian Hicks and Jordan Tayer: “I wanted to play the Survivor games, I couldn’t because I wasn’t a streamer.” So he decided to make his own version, thinking of augmentations to the mode such as ‘last man standing’ rules instead of Survivor GameZ’s teamplay. In 2013, he created the DayZ: Battle Royale mode by playing around in a custom server. When DayZ released as a title independent from Arma 2, Greene moved his mod into Arma 3. After a spell as a consultant on H1Z1, Greene geared up to follow in DayZ’s footsteps and release PUBG as a standalone title – which…

Larian Studios works a 16-hour day. Not, you should understand, because it’s in a state of constant and debilitating crunch. Larian’s lights are on for two-thirds of the day because it’s spread across time zones, beginning in Saint Petersburg in Russia, continuing as Ghent in Belgium wakes up and then Dublin. Finally, as its eastern wing begins to wind down, the Quebec City studio opens. Aside from its smaller Dublin office, which focuses on writing and business, each of Larian’s four studios sports a similar headcount and the same balance of programmers, designers and artists. They all contribute equally, a setup which allowed Larian’s 150 staff to make an RPG as deep and intricate as Divinity: Original Sin II in just two years. Larian cuts a distinctive figure in the…

Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios Format PC Release Out now Building a civilisation that lasts is hard, but building one that retains its respect for freedoms is harder Management games, particularly city builders, are frequently guilty of depicting the breadth of human experience without the depth. SimCity and its successors – both evolutions of the form, such as The Sims, and modernisations such as Cities: Skylines – present some of the challenges of life, but rarely ask you to consider the consequences of either those problems or the solutions brought to bear to fix them. It wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for them to do so: they are toys and toolkits, sandboxes that task you with engineering solutions to complex problems in a safely abstracted environment. If SimCity took it upon itself…