Innehållsförteckning för August 2018 från Edge

Yes, that’s a toys-to-life game on the cover of Edge. A genre you thought was gone for good following the demise of Disney Infinity and the disappearance of Skylanders. Yet Starlink: Battle For Atlas is an entirely different beast. Where Warner and Activision aimed their wares at the very young, Ubisoft’s game skews a little older. And that’s not just a matter of presentation: this is a tricky game set in a dynamic world that responds to your input, and your lack of it, the bad guys overrunning the entire solar system if you don’t keep them in check. The toys themselves aren’t just plastic playthings to be dropped, one by one, onto an NFC scanner; they’re modular, their components snapped off and on, the change reflected instantly in game,…

Hangar 13 thinks of itself as one team spread across four locations – though the need for individual studios to have ownership and autonomy means that the global operation isn’t entirely holistic. “Each studio has to have a set of mandates,” Wilson says, “so you don’t have the Death Star over in California and then a bunch of co-devs. We take individual areas and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to build a team that’s going to be the owner of, and experts in, one particular area’.” Yet efforts are being made to ensure handfuls of staff work directly with overseas colleagues. “That’s helpful, because it drives collaboration.”…

We didn’t see this coming, and neither did those who tuned in to Microsoft’s recent Inside Xbox stream for some promised Halo news. The result was not a new console game, but Halo: Fireteam Raven, a ludicrously high-spec arcade cabinet developed by Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix, in close consultation with current Halo steward 343 Industries. The game itself is, predictably, an on-rails shooter, casting up to four players as an ODST squad supporting Master Chief during the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. Familiar Covenant enemies, classic weapons such as the Needler, and vehicles including the Warthog help elevate the action to an extent, but fundamentally this is the same kind of game we were playing in arcades decades ago. Instead, it’s the production values that make it stand out.…

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 Growing pains Simon Brindle’s experience with Firewatch (Dispatches, E320) reminded me of a similar incident I had in the late 1980s, with a 4X MSDOS game called Reach For The Stars. The game was entirely text-based although they had cleverly remapped some character graphics to planets so they could draw a map. I’d bought this game and played it obsessively with three friends, taking dozens of turns that could last up to half an hour each. Eventually, we hit a bug, when someone formed an armada of more than 32,767 ships (any software engineers reading this will recognise that magic number).…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar You know, I never thought that motion controls were going to take over the living room, or that 3D TVs were somehow going to become ubiquitous, or even that smartphone games would somehow destroy the desire for larger, more immersive and time-consuming titles. And sorry, I still don’t believe in virtual reality, no matter how many otherwise-smart people burned their billions on it (keep an eye on AR, though). Similarly, I don’t like most of the current fads on the business side of game development. Not microtransactions, nor sudden difficulty spikes paired cunningly with an offer to skip a challenge for a dollar; no loot boxes or blind card packs, and definitely not pay-to-win. It’s not that I’m unaware that these strategies sometimes make lots of money. It’s…

The component ideas of Black Ops IIII’s battle royale mode, Blackout, had been floating around the studio throughout 2017, before Treyarch decided to go ahead and fully develop the concept at the beginning of this year. Like Fortnite and PUBG, it will be playable either solo or in squads. The map will feature elements from Black Ops series history (you’ll play amongst parts of Nuketown, Raid and even old Zombies maps) and will be “1,500 times bigger than Nuketown” – a marketing line that elicited chuckles from a roomful of COD fans with an intimate knowledge of the iconic, detestably frantic Black Ops map. The area will be significantly smaller than Blackout’s competitors, then, although it may make for tighter skirmishes and a lot less running. Whether we’ll see a…

Director Tetsuya Nomura hopes Kingdom Hearts III will attract new players to the series – which seems a safe bet given the sumptuous visuals, and the fact that many thousands of new Disney fans have been born while he’s been working on the game. Yet the game’s convoluted story may prove something of a stumbling block. The title is somewhat misleading, after all: the story picks up immediately after the events of Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, the seventh game in a series with more spinoffs than mainline entries. Disney fan service is all well and good, but when it’s diluted with talk of Master Xehanort and the seven Guardians Of Light, its impact is rather less. Luckily, you’re only ever seconds away from beating up a mob of…

The toys’ custom connectors took a lot of work. “Everyone in the manufacturing world told us that we were crazy to make custom connectors, because making reliable connectors is a huge challenge,” producer Matthew Rose says. It had to be something pre-manufactured, the team were told, if they hoped to pass the electrical tests and maintain their sanity: RFID tags read by a standalone receiver pad, perhaps. But none of the off-the-shelf connectors had quite the right feel, the tactile sense that a piece had slotted into place satisfactorily as well as the sense that it wasn’t about to accidentally disconnect. The team tested various combinations of USB and magnet fastenings until they settled on their custom edge connectors, the chips enclosed in tall walls and deep-set receptor sockets.…

Jade Raymond’s first job after leaving university was as a programmer for Sony Online Entertainment. She then moved to EA to work on The Sims Online, but her big break came when she went to Ubisoft Montreal in 2004, and was a founding member of the team that created Assassin’s Creed, on which she was a producer and, along with game director Patrice Désilets, was the public face of the game. After the game launched, she was a target for hate groups, and withdrew from the press circuit, rising up the ranks to become Ubisoft’s head of new IP, steering the likes of Watch Dogs and The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot from concept to release. In 2009, she helped found Ubisoft Toronto, and in 2015 joined EA and began…

11-11 draws heavily on the research of two historians, Peter Doyle and Robin Schaefer. Their research has turned up some startling revelations. “If we’d wanted to, but we didn’t, we could have used the acronym ‘OMG’, because that was actually in used back in WWI,” writer Iain Sharkey says. “But then you start thinking: would an audience look at that and just think we’re using modern language, and that’d be really weird? So you have to discount bits as well because you’re thinking about it from a modern angle. It’s such an odd balancing act.” His co-scribe Stephen Long was initially keen to work the term into the script. “But I think it just makes you a wanker, then, like you’re waiting for somebody to call you out, so you…

James Schmalz has an infinitely better job than the one he had six years ago. Sure, his title hasn’t changed – he was CEO of Digital Extremes back then, too – but he was head of a very different company. Digital Extremes had been a work-for-hire studio for many years, working from contract to contract, its fortunes determined by market realities and the whims of its clients. And that meant that Schmalz, who began his career as a programmer and designer, spent a lot of his time on the road pitching, and he hated it. Today, Digital Extremes is the developer of sci-fi shooter Warframe, one of the most popular console and PC games around. In March, it celebrated having amassed 38 million registered users, with an average of 50,000…

Developer Quantic Dream Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now The writer wields allegory with a similar grace and lightness of touch to which Leatherface uses power tools A common complaint about any game with a branching narrative is that the decisions you take as a player invariably mean little in the grand scheme of things; that all choices eventually converge at the same point. To which most storytellers would respond by insisting that it’s about the journey, not the destination. Detroit: Become Human, however, offers a pointed rejoinder to accusations of smoke and mirrors whenever you pause the game. Here, you’ll find an extensive flowchart, highlighting a remarkably divergent array of possible routes, spidering out from the point of narrative entry. Some of these do, admittedly, end up in…

Nintendo seemed to underestimate players’ creative zeal: the sheer volume of uploaded courses meant that some found their earlier works being deleted. As such, when Super Mario Maker got its inevitable 3DS port, Nintendo restricted stage sharing to StreetPass. Some critics wrote off the portable version as pointless, but it had its advantages. In enforcing the notion that creation was its own reward, it may well have encouraged players to take more care over their work. A tutorial that explained the art of good level craft was welcome; likewise, a campaign of sorts boasting 100 levels, with bonus medal challenges providing extra design inspiration. In fact, its best courses surpass the two New Super Mario games on 3DS.…

Paul Rose is an electronic-music producer, DJ and label boss. Under the name Scuba, Rose has released four studio albums on his label Hotflush Recordings. With his latest project, Caibu, made under his more techno-influenced alias SCB, now on shelves, we caught up with him to reflect on a life, and career, defined by technology. What’s your earliest gaming memory? I must have been seven or eight, and my dad came back with a rubber-key Spectrum 32k one evening. He plugged it into the telly – it was one of those ones you had to hook up to a cassette deck. And for the next seven or eight years, I was just totally hooked. What games did you play most? The one that really sticks out was a budget game…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Back in 2009, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett published what was to be a hugely influential book called The Spirit Level, which showed forensically how greater economic inequality in a society results in worse outcomes for nearly everybody across the board, in mortality, mental health, education, and so on. Their new book, The Inner Level, concentrates on the psychic effects of inequality on individuals. The authors write that when people are worn down by the stress of a hierarchical society, when they feel “worthless”, and “incompetent”, they turn more to “addictive crutches” such as alcohol, problem gambling – and videogames. “Drugs, alcohol, immersion in the fantasy worlds of video games and TV, comfort food, retail therapy or the possibility of a big win become more alluring and…

Remember when the big boys led the charge? It feels like forever ago now, but with Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Activision defined the console shooter for a generation. Innovations such as perks, levelling and customisable loadouts quickly became genre standards, and have remained so, for better or worse, to this day. Similarly, the Battlefield series wrote the book on large-scale multiplayer, its 64-player, PC-only warfare the envy of console players everywhere. Things are very different now. The defining games of the past ten years have not, by and large, been made by big publishers. And so we frequently find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of watching as these former kings scrabble around under the table for scraps. Rather than introduce new ideas that others can’t resist copying, they…

The tactile ‘feel’ that has become a hallmark of the Metro series is a result of the 4A design team’s roots in the practical sciences. “We have a lot of guys on our team that have those kinds of backgrounds,” Bloch says. “We have mechanical engineers, rocket scientists – pretty smart people. “It’s very important to make sure that everything is grounded, has a reason. We spent a lot of time and energy with things like the weapons to make sure that they are realistic. In previous games we made sure they seemed as realistic as possible, but this time around the weapon designers actually went and made sure that the weapons are mechanically sound – at least on paper.”…

Uncommonly for a game of this kind, a free demo of Octopath Traveler was available on the Switch eShop within months of its announcement – at the time the game was still known by its codename, Project Octopath Traveler. This was no mere hype-building exercise: Square Enix sought feedback on the demo, and has responded to a broad range of concerns, increasing movement speed in the field, rebalancing combat and even tweaking the UI. It’s commendable stuff that has not only improved the game, but engendered plenty of goodwill in the process. Our email about US spellings in game titles, however, was regrettably overlooked.…

Developer/publisher Nyamakop Format PC, Switch Origin South Africa Release 2018 When it comes to platformers, we’re used to jumping through a series of rigidly designed hoops. As we play Semblance, however, Ben Myres watches our movements with a different kind of interest. Here, platforming is taken to a literal extreme: the gelatinous blob we’re controlling can bend and shape the world at will. If we need extra height to pull off a jump, we nudge the centre of a platform into a peak. A deadly laser can be neutralised by turning up the corner of a nearby surface. Myres is as curious as we are about what our next solution will be. “We actually worked on lowering the skill floor instead of raising the skill ceiling” It’s hardly surprising, then,…

Game Starlink: Battle For Atlas Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Toronto) Format PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release 2018 antasy is all very well when it comes to toy spaceships and virtual worlds, but business is another matter. As such, there’s something irresistibly audacious about Starlink: Battle For Atlas. Ubisoft Toronto’s open-world space adventure is powered by a set of model starships, which can be disassembled and reassembled into various combinations that are then replicated, and used, in-game. It is, to all intents and purposes, a toys-to-life game. And toys-to-life, you may remember, is currently on a bit of a downward spiral, to put it mildly. Following the success of Activision’s Skylanders, the nascent genre inflated rapidly, with plenty of would-be imitators throwing their RFID-tagged statuettes into the ring. The market, it seemed, was…

For art director Daniel Ebanks, working on a toys-to-life title has thrown up plenty of design challenges. “I’ve spent my career making stuff that doesn’t actually have to exist,” he says. “[Starlink] was a big eye-opener.” Suddenly, little things like a piece of a ship being too thin to function were a problem. Manufacturing costs and practicalities, user comfort and safety issues were just as much of a priority as aesthetics: early on, Ubisoft Toronto hired an industrial toy designer from local toy company Spin Master, who helped guide them into the factory process. For Ebanks, one particular design compromise still stings: a multitonal red paint job that proved far too pricey to be realistic: “At my desk, I keep a wing that’s just like, what might’ve been!”…

Game 11-11: Memories Retold Publisher Bandai Namco Developer DigixArt, Aardman Animations Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2018 The popular image of the Great War is one of simultaneous intimacy and distance, of opposing soldiers hunkering down for months in trenches as little as 50 yards apart, yet unable to see or speak to one another. This is an image 11-11: Memories Retold both draws upon and labours to subvert, as it hunts for the smaller, quieter stories too often swallowed up by the war’s thunderous mystique. A collaboration between legendary UK film studio Aardman Animations and Montpellier-based developer DigixArt, the game weaves its setting’s cultural and geographical schisms into the art direction, narrative and mechanics in order to slowly erode them. Timed to coincide with the centenary of the end…

Format PC, Xbox One Developer/publisher Unknown Worlds Entertainment Origin US Release 2018 Every work of fantasy is defined as much by what it escapes from as what it escapes to. Subnautica transports you to an extra-terrestrial ocean, a lush 3D survival sandbox extending four kilometres across by two kilometres straight down. Marooned by a starship crash, the player must hunt for food, gather resources, fashion equipment and comb the seafloor for answers while awaiting rescue. This is a perilous environment, its kelp forests and cave systems haunted by snaggle-toothed pack-hunters and speeding leviathans. But it is also a serene, meditative place, characterised by a scarcity of combat elements, as developer Unknown Worlds Entertainment sought to disentangle itself from virtual violence in the wake of a real-life atrocity. In December 2012,…

Problems with a videogame’s launch always make for good copy – but servers get fixed and kinks ironed out, meaning most are swiftly forgotten. Yet the story of the early days of The Division will linger long in the memory. Player characters in Ubisoft’s online shooter-RPG had solid bodies, and some wag figured out that you could stand in an early doorway and prevent anyone else from starting the game. We celebrate games for the way they let us escape the mundanity of real life – yet even in the wildest videogame fantasies, there will always be doors, and they will often be a problem. This month’s Play crop yields fine proof of that. Destiny 2: Warmind is the latest incarnation of a game which is infamous for how often…

The entire sequence is charged with a tension you don’t often find in games Having done the rounds at preview events, Detroit’s Stormy Night sequence has already attracted plenty of critical attention. Its depiction of domestic violence is hardly the first we’ve seen in a videogame, but the disquieting notion that there could be a ‘right’ way to escape abuse understandably came under close scrutiny. Though the judgement perhaps seemed a little premature given that we didn’t have the context of the full story, the finished game hardly ameliorates the issue: indeed, the unspoken suggestion that each scenario is essentially a puzzle of sorts with several potential ‘solutions’ is made more explicit by those narrative flowcharts. In fact, the entire sequence summarises the strengths and weaknesses of Quantic Dream’s most…

In recent years, Edge’s annual Get Into Games feature has, in addition to profiles of the universities and institutions that can prepare you for a career in games, looked at what else you can do to bolster your chances. We’ve covered game jams, emerging technologies, free engines and modding, among others. All can, no doubt, get you experience and a good portfolio. But it was last year’s panel of industry voices (see E309) that made us realise we needed to change tack. Yes, you can still brute force, or luck, your way into the game industry. And a great portfolio will still help you stand out. But we saw a pattern last year. Those of a certain vintage got into games in all sorts of ways. One had a marine-biology…

Breda University of Applied Sciences, to give it its full title, places students in a simulated development environment for its Creative Media and Game Technology course, which is taught entirely in English. It’s designed to help undergraduates develop a strong foundation in visual art, programming, design or production, before allowing them to further specialise as their game projects expand in scope. A string of successes demonstrate the benefits of its vocational approach, as head of programming Robbie Grigg explains. What are Breda’s key strengths? Our industry lecturers are focused on giving students professional aptitude and experience of triple-A development. Our high standards and production values lead to students creating great portfolios, helping them achieve that dream internship or job within the game industry. We also host the Global Game Jam…

Hangar 13’s new Brighton studio began, like so many of the good things in life, over a pint. Andy Wilson and Nick Baynes worked together, years ago, at Black Rock, the developer of Split/Second that was shut down by parent company Disney in 2011. They’ve taken very different paths since. Wilson went off to build a studio for Codemasters in Guildford, then helped Ubisoft do likewise in Toronto, before joining Hangar 13 in 2014. Baynes stayed local, working in small, agile indie teams after years on the console-game treadmill. Yet he and his core team had been feeling the itch a bit. They yearned for a big project. “We’d still meet at E3s and GDCs for a quick catch-up and a beer,” Baynes tells us, going on to recall the…

MOD Neon Advance bit.ly/neonadvance On a fragility scale from ‘solid as a rock’ to ‘the US president’s ego when confronted about his tiny hands’, the DS Lite clamshell hinge rates pretty highly. Fortunately, the self-styled Joe Bleeps is on hand to turn broken handhelds into beautiful custom collectibles. Using the standard firmware, Bleeps programs the settings to directly boot up Game Boy Advance carts to the lower screen; a speaker fits neatly into the cavity where the DS Lite stylus would typically sit inside. Each Neon Advance mod takes about five hours from start to finish, and the full package comes complete with display stand, protective pouch and USB charger. Neon Advance is currently a oneman art project rather than a product for regular sale – although we rather hope…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar One day during the production of this issue, I briefly wondered what year it was. This is, in fairness, not an uncommon occurrence. I am, after all, knocking on a bit, and am also pretty sleep-deprived following the arrival of Child II: The Childening. But one day, as I wandered back into the office after a smoke break, I was asked if I knew anything about a cake. I did not. I soon would. And almost immediately afterwards, I would wish that I did not. I’d seen it being delivered. On my way out of the building an entirely normal-looking young woman was asking the chap on the front desk to call up to a couple of the editors of Future’s other game mags. She’d parked outside in…

Jurassic World Evolution PC, PS4, Xbox One With review code arriving a tad too close to the wire for inclusion this issue – and too close to the trip to E3 to be played before we get back – we’ll have to wait a little longer before we can run the rule over Frontier’s Goldblum-starring riff on Planet Coaster. Review next month. Dark Souls Remastered Switch Yes, we’re back on board, as you’ll hear later this issue. But as nice as it is to run through Hidetaka Miyazaki’s masterpiece all over again, it’s tinged with a note of disappointment. The Switch version was going to keep us company on the long flight to Los Angeles. The wait is agony. Yakuza 4 PS4 Sega recently announced a trio of PS4 remasters…

If you’re surprised that EA’s letting its biggest shooter of the year give new maps away for free, it’s because Battlefield V will supplement its price of admission with cosmetic microtransactions. This is tied to a new system: The Company. Here you’ll be able to customise the look and loadout of soldiers, guns and vehicles, personalising them so they stand out on the battlefield. You’ll be able to create multiple soldiers of each class and army, both male and female, and tailor their loadout based on the guns and skills you unlock through progression in play, and the clothes you earn through either in-game currency or real money. Guns and vehicles, too, can be tweaked with new decals and effects, including the timeless classic: covering your sniper rifle with leaves.…

Developer/publisher Square Enix Format PS4, Xbox One Origin Japan Release 2018 The notion of a JRPG set in the Disney universe has always been a bit mad, and boy does Kingdom Hearts III lean into it. We’re minutes into our demo and, after whaling away on a boss’ feet for a while to stun it, a button prompt appears in the bottom-left corner of the screen. Big Magic Mountain, it says, and we scan our internal Disney database, one built up over a lifetime, for a matching reference. What use could Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, a steam-train ride from Disney’s Florida themepark, possibly be against a stone Titan in a level based on the Hercules film? Everything, it turns out. A neon train appears from the ether, a thirdperson action…

Initially developed for Myres and Kimani’s final-year university project, Semblance initially had players changing the character’s form between three different shapes to solve puzzles. “The idea was it was set inside an abstract painting, like a Rothko or something,” Myres says. “It was cool, but it was really hard to get enough gameplay out of it.” Once they stumbled across the idea of deforming platforms instead, Myres began to use his love of art as a more philosophical inspiration. “I’m very into something called generative design, where programming systems generate artworks,” he says. “You’re designing a system to output something beautiful, but it has this singular end product. You have to think of games like that. You’re just creating the boundaries, so you have to be really aware of what’s…

One of our favourite details about Starlink is, well, the concept of Starlink itself. The title refers to the starships’ modular technology – both in the real world, and in the fantasy one. “That breakthrough was already there technically when I arrived, so we knew we would need to integrate that,” lead narrative designer Joshua Mohan says. In fiction, the ship parts are stored onboard the mothership, the Equinox, and beamed into battle via a kind of quantum superpositioning (which allows vehicles to exist both inside and outside of the Equinox – Schrodinger’s’ spaceship, if you will). “Because you can play as anyone, it’s about the crew, not the individual,” Mohan says. “We couldn’t just pin it on any one person. We could have said ‘It’s just because Judge is…

Aardman and Bandai are mindful of current arguments around gender diversity in games – EA DICE’s Battlefield series, which took players back to World War I last year, has recently come under fire for including female soldiers in the WWII-set Battlefield V. Daniel Efergan brings up the topic without prompting, defending the choice of male protagonists. “We really believe in role models, in constructing role models [for everyone]. But when you go back to that period of time, you have a sexist, homogenised environment which you’re trying to replicate.” Bandai Namco producer Lionel Lovisa is a little more combative. “We didn’t even have that in mind. We know we’ll always find somebody who’s not happy about that – ‘oh, there’s no girl’. We did our best to be as respectful…

How did you approach bringing on new staff throughout development? It was always a strain, because I believe that you want to hire when it hurts. You don’t want to just hire when you think you need someone, but when you know you have to because if you don’t, it’s going to be super painful. So you have to have a resistance to hiring, because it slows everything down, and increases expenditure, which is a long-term risk. That said, we don’t crunch. If people want to work more they can, but it’s not our culture. I firmly believe that working long hours is basically insane and counterproductive. Did you ever worry that Subnautica was too hard to navigate? Some people did ask for a map, and maybe in retrospect we should have…

Dark Souls Remastered PS4 Okay, it might not be the best remaster you’ll ever play, but it’s one of the best games of all time running on current console hardware at a near-unbroken 60fps, and that will do us nicely. Blighttown may have been given a much needed refresh, but our reflexes have gone the other way. After picking up our first ever curse from the basilisks in the Depths, we head off for a cure – then head back down and immediately get cursed again. Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection Switch This Capcom compendium is an awkward thing, lavish in places and phoned-in in others – the 12 games on offer are mere ROM dumps. But this is, despite the cut corners, an essential collection charting the history of…

Developer Undead Labs Publisher Microsoft Game Studios Format Xbox One Release Out now Surely to goodness, it should not be this difficult to close a door behind us Rarely has a game’s title so accurately described the condition in which it launches. From a technical standpoint, State Of Decay 2 is a shambling mess of a survival game that constantly trips over its own feet. Much like its predecessor, these shortcomings undercut its strongest ideas, the upgrade to fresh hardware having had little discernible effect. It remains as ugly to behold as it is clumsy to play, and even the arrival of a hefty patch halfway through the review process does little to dispel our thoughts that this might be the most rickety, rough-edged game published by a major format…

The University of Suffolk has a keen focus on teamwork, using its industry experience to give students the practical know-how to make and ship a game, while welcoming undergraduates from other subjects with game-related ideas and skills. MSc Games Development course leader Dan Mayers lays out the benefits of its synergistic approach. What makes the University of Suffolk attractive for those looking to study game development? We teach the theory of game design and programming, but we place a big emphasis on the practice of making games as part of a team. Our students are continually developing projects in game jams, spinning up rapid prototypes and tackling increasingly complex concepts. Every project is run inside professional project-management methodologies based on our industry experience, so as well as building practical skills,…