Innehållsförteckning för May 2019 från Edge

Smartphones are one of the defining technologies of our lifetimes: an innovation that didn’t disrupt the status quo so much as redefine it. Their influence on the game industry has been seismic, too. Not just through sheer ubiquity, though that is clearly a factor. Rather, it is in the way they have democratised game development and publishing. In the old days – you know, 20 years ago – you couldn’t make a game for commercial sale without a development licence from a platform holder. And good luck getting it out there without a publisher. The App Store, and later Google Play, changed all that, and the industry had little choice but to follow suit. In just a decade, smartphones have redefined the game industry, yet they have also given it…

For kids, building (and breaking) stuff will never go out of style. First it was Minecraft; then came Fortnite. But the foundation upon which those games were constructed was one of Danish plastic. Lego, of course, is bulletproof – well, conceptually at least – but that doesn’t mean that its designers aren’t exploring new means of developing its iconic toy for a modern audience. The roles have been reversed: Lego is looking to games as inspiration for a new way to play. Its latest project, more than two years in the making and launching this summer, is Lego Hidden Side. It’s a series of Lego sets designed to work in conjunction with augmented reality. Scan the finished build with your smartphone camera via the free app, and Apple’s ARKit 2.0…

Videogames have been an influence on Denis ‘Remute’ Karimani’s career since his debut EP Hypnoconsole in 2002. Two years ago his album Limited was released on 3.5-inch floppy disk – and his latest project, Technoptimistic, comes on a Mega Drive cartridge. Here, he discusses his love of Sega’s 16bit system, and why niche formats make for more rewarding listening. What are your very earliest memories of playing videogames? I got a Commodore 64 when I was five years old – that was my first entry into the gaming world. Right after that I got a Nintendo Entertainment System, and when I was eight I got a Mega Drive. That was the most powerful gaming experience of my childhood because of the graphics, and of course the music. I actually had…

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 The world is yours Steven Poole’s piece on “interactive cinema” (E329) confirmed many of my thoughts around games which appear to offer you a choice while in essence boxing you in at every opportunity, but it made me think back to the exception to the rule, last year’s Detroit: Become Human – a woefully underappreciated game because of its numerous defects. Yes the morals were clunky, the analogies to the civil rights movement were laid on so thick it should have come with a free trowel and there weren’t very many shades of grey, but your choices genuinely affected the outcome…

You’ll know the Miyamoto quote by now: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” It’s a pithy line, and more true than not, but it hides the complexity behind not only game creation but also the impacts of delays on people, cashflow and market position. Delays give you time to polish, edit and refine your game, but they also cost money, affect team morale, throw a wrench in marketing plans if mistimed and impact your release window. All this became more relevant at Typhoon when we decided to add a few months to the development of Savage Planet. This is not really a delay – we hadn’t announced a release date – but it affects our internal schedule in the same way. It was…

Developer/publisher SIE (Bend Studio) Format PS4 Origin US Release April 26 When was the last time Sony released a mediocre game? It’s taken great pains to maintain its status as the golden goose of this console generation, and has so far succeeded with a clutch of handsome PS4 exclusives. And Days Gone started out looking – if not mind-blowingly original – promising, at least. An E3 2016 gameplay demo featured sophisticated crowd tech, a horde of thousands of zombie-like Freakers flowing over bridges and falling over themselves to attack the player. This was to be a survival game of sheer numbers, the oppressive momentum of the oncoming horde versus an ever-dwindling supply of machine-gun ammo creating a different kind of anxiety. But as we trek across Days Gone’s open world, it’s not…

This kind of game is a departure from the norm for Double Fine, purveyor of linear puzzle-adventures. “The world itself is put together randomly, and the mutations are random, and that was new for us,” Petty says. “But it really helps you keep fresh eyes on the product.” Rethinking the way that he tells a story has been exciting, too. “In the past, we communicated them with more cutscenes and longer dialogue sequences, but now we’re communicating via the moment-to-moment experiences that are happening to the player. We have endings – we never bring them to a point where you can’t keep playing this game forever. But successful runs mean story drops, and over time they start to build into bigger world-changing arcs.”…

Audica’s origins lie in Chroma, Harmonix’s cancelled team-based, firstperson rhythm shooter. “We found that in order for a team-based FPS to be successful, it had this long list of requirements that often found themselves at odds with the core rhythm shooting mechanics that were so compelling,” Rigopulos says. As VR took off, Harmonix returned to a more focused version of the idea – hence, Audica. But the team isn’t ready to give up on the idea of PvP entirely. “We have many ideas about various multiplayer manifestations of Audica, and we very much hope to return to those at some point in the future. We just wanted to focus on nailing the core interaction first. Once we’ve established that as a foundation in the first release of the product, then…

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This month’s Play crop is a bit of a contradiction. Games are all about progress: we expect something new for our money, for more powerful hardware to take us to places we haven’t seen before. Yet this month brings an object lesson in the follies of simply racing off toward the horizon without a crystal-clear plan for what to do when you get there. We had high hopes for Anthem (p102), and indeed it has its moments – sporadic little flashes of the brilliance we had hoped for from BioWare’s answer to Destiny. Yet by and large, the game we’d dreamt of is left to dwell in our heads. It has been rushed out the door, certainly, a technical mess of a game that clearly needed more development time. Yet…

There is a widely held suspicion that Anthem was not the game BioWare wanted to make. That it was toiling away on another of its signature singleplayer RPGs when EA, green-eyed at the engagement numbers Activision was touting for Destiny, enforced a genre switch on the studio. Certainly this is a game of contradictions, that often gives the impression it either used to be, or would prefer to be, a more traditional BioWare game. Yet that alone does not explain away all the game’s problems. Nor does the Frostbite engine EA has spent this console generation pushing its internal studios to use, though it offers a plausible explanation for some of Anthem’s issues. It is easy to see why a game engine designed for Battlefield’s sprawling deathmatches would struggle to…

Developer White Paper doesn’t seem too interested in ’80s nostalgia, but it is fascinated with the music of the era. The game’s soundtrack is split between three in-game radio stations: classical, chilled acoustic, and pop hits. The last one is the highlight – original music with touches of glam rock, post-punk and new wave that evokes the period, especially in its production, without resorting to easy tropes. The game’s optional collectibles come in the form of vinyl records. And, unlike most records in 2019, they’re intended to actually be listened to – you place it on the turntable, lift the arm, and even set the RPM, giving you the opportunity to take these lovingly-crafted tunes and give them the chipmunk treatment.…

On offer for just £73.99 is the game’s first – yes, first – season pass. Paying more than the price of the game itself nets you over 60 new costumes, and just two characters, one of whom you’ll have faced in the base game’s singleplayer mode, which like the game’s aesthetic is an idea we thought we’d all moved on from by this point. Another pass will follow in a few months, and we doubt it’ll stop there: after all, buying every costume in Dead Or Alive 5: Last Round would run you over a grand.…

This is not the first toy-powered Lego game, of course: Lego Dimensions was a charming idea that sadly went the way of most other games in the toys-to-life genre. You’d think Lego would be wary of developing something similar, but Andrews explains that the team doesn’t see Hidden Side as part of the same space. “It conjures up a specific type of gameplay, I think, to which Hidden Side is very different. You’re right that the data is showing that that sort of play – Starlink for instance, which is a great experience in some respects – arguably isn’t doing as well as it could. But that’s not to say that connected play and physical/digital play, having one hand in each world, is not something that kids want. And we believe that they want…

Remute’s work on 2017’s Limited helped him adapt his style to realise his dream of programming music for the Mega Drive – a 3.5-inch floppy disk, after all, has even less storage space than a 4MB cartridge. “It really forced me to concentrate on the essential parts of a song,” he says. “When you’re restricted to certain limitations, you have to focus on the parts that are most important and delete everything that isn’t. It changed my musical direction a lot but I’m really happy with the result.”…

Back in 1998 the US Navy cruiser USS Yorktown suffered a complete engine failure off the coast of Virginia. It was “dead in the water” for two hours and 45 minutes. Eventually it had to be towed back to harbour. Embarrassing, but not – as it would have been in a combat zone – multiply fatal. The Yorktown had been a testbed for the Navy’s Smart Ship project, which aimed to use networked computers aboard vessels to reduce the number of people needed to crew them. This ‘smart’ ship was so smart because it was running, er, Windows NT. One sailor accidentally entered a zero into an input field and the system attempted to divide by zero, causing a buffer overrun and somehow corrupting the entire database. Bye bye, propulsion.…

Discussing the post-apocalyptic setting for his new game Rad (p38), Lee Petty refers to calls in the US press for there to be more media about the fall of humankind. What was once about escapist entertainment, the thinking goes, is now a matter of preparedness. The Doomsday clock is at two minutes to midnight: we are the closest we’ve been to the apocalypse since the height of the Cold War, so it’s time to rewatch The Walking Dead with notebook in hand. Well, whoever had that bright idea clearly hasn’t played many games. The last thing we need is more of the blessed things. Yet here we are, staring down the barrel of another round of games that seek to ask how we might survive when society finally goes up…

Stealth is, apparently, a key weapon in your arsenal against Freakers, even though we don’t ever seem to find ourselves at risk of a swarm of them during our demo. Shots will attract larger numbers to an already-ensuing struggle, but silencers can be fitted to your guns to help minimise the chance of a situation escalating. Upgrading your bike (via camp mechanic Manny) can also help reduce the noise of the engine, while you’ll need to dismount entirely and push it through places where you really don’t want to attract attention. From what we’ve seen, however, driving into Freakers at speed is a fairly efficient way to ensure they stop hearing anything.…

Having each spent several years working at big studios, Hazmer and Dziauddin are well-armed with industry savvy. “I told Tabata-san [director of Final Fantasy XV] five years ago that after I was done with XV, I wanted to bring all this know-how to Malaysia,” Hazmer says. With a team of just 20, the two have to lead responsibly. The original plan was for No Straight Roads to feature a four-person band, but it would have put strain on the team. “Our logo is a metronome, because not only do we care about the role of music in games, but also the pace of work in our company – so no overtime, for one. But the other thing is we want to come up with a game every year or so.”…

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 Do you see Sky as a spiritual successor to Journey? I wanted to combine all the games that we’ve made, and the lessons we’ve learned, going back to Cloud, which I made in school on a PC – [like Sky] that game is about flying in the clouds. So I wanted to make a new game that had all the good parts of the others. Originally, Sky was actually supposed to be Cloud’s sequel. But then as we made it, we realised there were so many things from Flower, Flow and Journey that we wanted to influence it. And so as a result, it’s more like a spiritual sequel of Flower, Journey and Cloud.  Did you learn a lot from Journey in terms of encouraging players to collaborate with one…

Frozen Synapse 2 was originally slated for a 2016 release, but didn’t end up coming out for another two years. What was it that made you decide to push back the game’s release date? It’s difficult, but if you’re a small company, you can actually afford the luxury of bumping a game until it’s ready. And that’s something we had to do in order to get Frozen Synapse 2 into the state we wanted. Literally every game I’ve ever worked on, or any successful game I’ve ever heard about, has come out way later than originally intended, and the reason for that is iteration. You can’t make all the game design decisions in abstract; you put things in, you try them, they don’t work, you iterate, and every time you…

Developer BioWare Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4 (both tested), Xbox One Release Out now D irge, more like. At its worst, Anthem is an unmitigated disaster, a game so beset with problems that it is unfathomable it was deemed ready for release in this state. After battling through the final level, we clip through the floor as the boss begins what we now know was its last stand. We miss the final cutscene, the game instead showing us a loading screen and the legend ‘please wait, cinematic in progress’. We load into the results screen, and the game crashes. We have, notionally, finished Anthem, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. You suspect BioWare knows the feeling all too well. The misleadingly titled day one patch (it arrives six…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now Ah, merry old London – the red phone boxes, the plastic garden furniture, the road signs and erm, the demonic tree-thing whose gigantic spiked branches have torn all those grand old buildings to shreds. Red Grave City isn’t quite London as we know it, but the inspiration is obvious, and we spend a little too much of Devil May Cry 5’s opening hours playing this fast-paced action game completely wrong, not sprinting but strolling, gawking at familiar roadside furniture and Tube-station ad posters. Capcom researched England in surprising depth, as we explained in E326’s cover story, though perhaps it missed a few of the finer details. Nice as it is to see a dinged-up Transit van in a rotten…

If you fancy a break from all that shooting, there are rooftop checkpoint races to compete in. though you’ll comfortably smash those gold medal times by the time you’ve got two midair dashes and a portable launch pad. TerraNova’s propaganda towers, meanwhile, host platforming challenges that see you scaling vertiginous heights – and they’re a little more involved than Assassin’s Creed’s vertical traversal. But while some are smartly assembled, others require too many blind jumps, the camera doing you few favours. The distance you can cover while jumping and dashing is such that vehicles are almost irrelevant – the same was true of Saints Row IV, though that did the superhero fantasy thing with more wit and wanton chaos. There are driving events here, too, but given Sumo’s genre experience,…

New Dawn’s theme of rubbish parenting suits a game about dealing with another game’s toxic legacy. Mickey and Lou, the villains of the piece, are trying to live up to their renegade father’s example; Joseph Seed, meanwhile, must reckon with a son who has lost patience with his Messianic tendencies. The player, too, has an inheritance to face up to – one of the escort characters you can recruit is in fact the previous game’s protagonist, now a mute, masked Judge. These threads don’t really lead anywhere, however – Far Cry 4’s crackpot examination of identity and family seems positively Oscar-worthy by comparison. In practice, Mickey and Lou are just another pair of mouthy trolls in a series that specialises in baiting its player.…

Shortly after its release in late February, Devotion was abruptly removed from Steam. As Red Candle tells it, some placeholder text was left on an in-game poster; unfortunately, said text was a Chinese Internet meme comparing president Xi Jinping to Winnie The Pooh. A review-bombing campaign left the game with a miserable rating, prompting the developer to take it down. We hope to see it back on Steam before long, and are publishing this review in the hope – and belief – it’ll return.…

To maintain the long post-credits grind, Dragon Quest IX provides an intricate levelling system, with each member of your group able to access and switch between a dozen different trades. As you level up in your current profession you spend skill points on weapon- or class-related abilities and bonuses, which can carry across when you decide to start a new vocation. You’ll also be able to ‘revocate’ once you max out your level in any class to restart from the beginning and earn even more points. It’s a highly flexible system which allows each character to gradually build towards a full set of skills, and lets you tailor the setup of the squad to effectively combine abilities in tactically diverse ways.…

Unsurprisingly given the strength of the pitch, few developers have told GameClub no, though Hodapp admits some are caught off guard. “You get emails every now and again from people who want to play your game, but you can’t really justify the cost of the updates. Then I come out of the blue and I’m like, ‘Hey, let me solve all your problems for you!’” The only studios to say no have had imminent plans to revive their old games themselves. “It usually ends with, ‘Thanks, but no thanks – but this is super cool, and I wish I’d known about you guys six months ago, because holy cow’.”…

At E3 2012, three Nintendo executives posed for a photo that became a classic. Standing by a 4x4 outside the LA Convention Centre, Reggie Fils-Aimé is shaking Shigeru Miyamoto’s hand, and Satoru Iwata has rested his own right palm over the top. All three are smiling. Internet wags christened it the Triforce, which is probably about as flattered as Fils-Aimé has ever been. The outgoing president of Nintendo Of America – he leaves on April 15, to be replaced by the immaculately named Doug Bowser – is no game developer. The cult of personality around him (‘My body is ready’ and the rest of it) started out as ironic and became affectionate, which is some achievement for a man who spoke in bullet points, parroting marketing lines that had come…

The sun came out last week and Drake’s Nice For What came up on Spotify, prompting a sensation I don’t normally feel in February: cor, I can’t wait for E3. Every year, as soon as it’s warm enough for me to roll down the car window and crank the volume, thoughts inevitably turn to Los Angeles in June. E3’s been changing steadily over the past couple of years. This year it seems likely to change even more. The way some people are talking about it, it could even be the last one. EA started doing its own thing with the Play event in 2016, and Microsoft also part-quit the conference last year. But both companies understood they couldn’t really abandon E3. The first EA Play was crammed into a former…

Dragons’ Dogma: Dark Arisen Switch With Hideaki Itsuno recapturing hearts and minds with Devil May Cry 5 (see p106), now is a fine time to revisit his cruelly overlooked action-RPG, which has some fine ideas and features some of the best combat in the genre. A fine palate cleanser, too, for the Netflix tie-in anime. Rage 2 PC, PS4, Xbox One It’s been a rather muted promo campaign for Bethesda’s latest sequel, but while it might not have wowed on the preview circuit, we remain optimistic. Id’s shotguns and Avalanche’s explosions remain a combination that’s hard to resist. Super Mario Maker 2 Switch A surprise announcement in a late February Nintendo Direct broadcast, this fills the summer Switch slot taken up in previous years by Arms and Mario Tennis Aces.…

Developer Double Fine Productions Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin US Release Summer As we watch Rad’s many protagonists sprout gigantic cobra heads, throw around their own disembodied limbs and parp out a series of spider-legged mini-clones, we feel we’re starting to see a pattern to Lee Petty’s work. “I do have perhaps an unhealthy association with body horror – it appeals to us all as we get older!” he laughs. The creator of the rocket-powered-head platformer Headlander is a Cronenberg fan, and the influence can also be felt in his latest game. “For me, it’s maybe the intersection with identity. There’s this strange artifice when you’re playing videogames: you’ve got this character in front of you, and you’re sort of projecting your consciousness onto it. And when…

A warning that the build we play “does not represent the final quality of the game” makes us a little less concerned about one or two minor technical issues, such as our crime scene investigation being soundtracked by a constant mewling from the feline witnesses nearby. The script, however, potentially represents a bigger issue. The many typos – a consequence, no doubt, of a developer not working in its first language – will be fixed. But while the occasionally eccentric turn of phrase is strangely fitting for the feline exchanges, Mist’s lines are both clumsy and perfunctory. Still, the visual storytelling compensates somewhat; there are dozens of sharp little details in the pixel-art environments that breathe life and character into Tales Of The Neon Sea’s debauched world.…

Vehicles were in the game from an early stage, we’re told, not because of the huge amount of ground players would have to cover but simply because the team thought they’d be entertaining. Your main transport is the explorer, a quick and light four-wheeler designed for short field trips (and sick drifts). Tractors and trucks are a better choice when you need to haul resources across large distances, but trains outstrip them all in terms of capacity and speed. And when you’ve found new outposts and set up remote mining stations, a well-put-together railway is essential to the expansion and automation of your planet-stripping industrial empire.…

Videogames can be peculiarly hidebound creatures, dominated by conventions that are opaque to outsiders, in thrall to a small collection of pop-culture precedents, from Tolkien to Aliens. One of the less-sung benefits of latter-day virtual and augmented reality technology has been to let in a bit of fresh air – multiplying the points of contact with other artists and industries, all lured by the idea of entertainment platforms that set less store in questions of skill or dexterity. Few developers have embraced this opportunity like Dream Reality Interactive, the White City, London-based independent founded by ex-Sony London studio director David Ranyard in 2016. During its short life, Dream Reality has covered plenty of ground, much of it familiar territory. It has developed a beautiful and usefully platform-agnostic VR maze game,…

While the loading times and crashes make for a painful time for players who want to sprint to the level cap, a novel XP system means there’s surprising scope for optimising the time you do get to actually spend playing the game. Experience isn’t just earned by completing activities, but by earning medals that reward you for playing in certain ways. There are multiple tiers for each one, too, ensuring that the melee-focused Interceptor, for instance, isn’t unduly punished for sticking to what they do best. Further incentive for playing the field comes through challenges, which task you with racking up kills or completing missions with individual gear pieces, and unlock progressively more powerful crafting recipes as you go. In places, beneath all the problems, lies the seed of a…

Special mention must go to the many Machiavellian methods of executing its riders that Trials Fusion realises. Players have been sending their avatars into flame pits and brick walls for years – decades – now. That’s old hat. The ignominious ends in Rising are something special, though, each one a perfect punchline to the track-long slapstick comedy routine. It has to be said that riding full-speed into an open refrigerator, which for reasons best known to itself promptly explodes, takes some beating. There’s a perverse thrill in watching your rider succumb to obstacles you helped them avoid just moments before, too: flipping over an exploding car and then riding headlong into another, or jumping across one bottomless chasm in order to reach the depths of another.…

In several cases, there are more violations to discover than you need to close the file, and you can spend time seeking them out – perhaps also flagging up any users responsible for multiple infractions – to trouser a small bonus. The Hypnocoins you earn can be spent personalising your desktop: you can download a range of screensavers and wallpapers, some of that delightfully awful music and even a virtual pet – true to form, these perish quickly when starved of attention.…