Innehållsförteckning för May 2020 från Edge

We’ve been feeling a little nostalgic of late – the natural consequence, we suppose, of an era coming to an end. Flicking through old issues of Edge, we stumble across E244’s Manifesto, in which representatives from the Nordic territories’ development community discussed the pressing issues of the day. Valve’s staff handbook had recently leaked, detailing the Half-Life maker’s unique structure: it had no traditional hierarchy or even job titles, with desks on wheels so staff could move between projects as they liked. We asked the room for their thoughts. David Polfeldt, head of Ubisoft Massive, offered this: “I believe creativity needs boundaries. The Valve thing is a very expensive way to make people creative – by having a lot of people doing more or less what they want. Eventually you’ll…

No one does band names quite like Japan. The tracklist for Tetoke X Connect, a new arcade music game from Taito, contains some classics. Animal Biscuits? Sign us up. Confinement Satellite? Let’s go. Gyari Cocoa Cigarette P? We are instant fans. There’s plenty more to like, too: this is a generational step forward for the dancing game, set as it is across a human-sized screen that puts you directly opposite a virtual dancing partner – the predictable waifu harem, a gorilla and, at launch, a collaboration with ubiquitous Sega vocaloid Hatsune Miku. Gameplay is deceptively simple, but works well to give a real sense that you’re dancing with a partner: circles appear on the screen to denote your hand’s starting position, and then the Ouendan-style path you must trace in…

There is a long and, let us charitably say, mixed history of videogames based on films and TV series. Notoriously, hundreds of thousands of unsold cartridges of Atari’s 1983 ET game were buried in the New Mexico desert, but people who grew up playing games in that decade will also recall some surprising successes. The 1986 home-computer game of James Cameron’s film Aliens, for example, cleverly foregrounded the horror of watching the remote biosensors of team members flatline as they were killed off-screen, and pioneered many of the rhythms of the modern survival-horror genre. These days, of course, there is Netflix and the rest, and a popular multi-season streaming TV drama is arguably a stronger IP than almost any single film. So what if you’ve binge-watched the latest season of…

Ustwo Games’ offices look exactly as we imagined. On our way into the building, we’re led through a peaceful courtyard that feels completely out of place in the city. Picnic benches surround a large tree at the centre; strings of garden lights are stretched overhead. It’s straight out of Monument Valley. Inside, the theme continues. Wooden floors sweep through an open-plan office, the white walls dotted with pastel-coloured concept art and neon Post-Its. People stretch out on an orange sofa; it’s lunchtime, which usually means some experimental PS2 game is on the go (the flavour of the month is Japanese kissing adventure Chulip). On the other side of the building – into which the studio has recently expanded – the colour palette leans cooler, the turquoise furnishings and stylish lamps…

Developer/publisher Valve Format Index (tested), Rift, Vive, Windows Mixed Reality Release Out now Every Half-Life game has had its defining tool. In the original, it was Gordon Freeman’s iconic crowbar, as useful for smashing open crates and breaking down obstacles as it was dispatching enemies. Half-Life 2 had the Gravity Gun, the perfect way to toy with the game’s unprecedentedly sophisticated realtime physics. Portal – to stretch the definition of a Half-Life game a little, though Alyx underlines that the two share a universe – introduced the Handheld Portal Device, a space-warping concept so compelling an entire game’s worth of puzzles could be built around it. Half-Life: Alyx has the Gravity Gloves. At first contact, they lack that instant sense of revolution. In fact, the Gloves feel a little underpowered.…

One year on from its early access release, Dreams’ depth of possibility means it hasn’t even begun to approach its ceiling of potential. Here, technical director and Media Molecule co-founder Alex Evans discusses evolving LittleBigPlanet’s creative philosophy, busting the ‘lazy game dev’ myth, and what you make after the game that can make almost anything. Dreams has been out for a while already – it was Media Molecule’s first-ever go at early access. Does it feel like a proper launch? Yeah. I think Art’s Dream is awesome, and the community has already responded to it. There’s a couple of sides to Art’s Dream: the play side, where hopefully lots of people will discover Dreams and maybe they were intimidated by the create-centric angle, and now they can enjoy a game.…

The launch of Stadia at the tail end of last year may have been – and let’s not mince words here – an unmitigated disaster. With only one exclusive title to tempt players who hadn’t already been turned off by reports of the technology’s myriad performance issues, there was scepticism about whether Google’s game-streaming service really did represent the future of play. But perhaps we haven’t been thinking broadly enough about the possibilities. With the muscle of Google’s world-leading infrastructure behind it, Stadia is capable of much more: of not just making playing games more accessible, but developing them. Google has invested resources in setting up a specialised research and development team within its Stadia arm, composed of ex-game industry employees interested in figuring out how some of Google’s most…

When people shout at me in the street, they usually start with, ‘Hey, interactive movie guy!’ In the moments that follow, shaking my head and fleeing, I attempt to worm my way out of this uncomfortable descriptor by thinking about what makes games and movies different, and the instances where the former borrows from the latter. As an industry we often reach for the comparison to our older, more beautiful sibling in Hollywood. But outside those pleas to economics and respectability, what does it mean for games to aspire to be like movies? The title page of the screenplay for Telling Lies describes it as an “anti-movie.” I wanted to be up front with our cast and crew that we were not just ignoring some of the intrinsic elements of…

Developer/publisher Larian Studios Format PC, Stadia Origin Belgium Release TBA The marriage of Larian Studios and Baldur’s Gate might seem one made in Celestia – aka, final resting place of the Lawful Good. Larian, after all, has already crafted perhaps the finest successor to BioWare’s sorely neglected party roleplaying series in the shape of Divinity: Original Sin II. Still, we must confess to a wriggling worm of doubt. Larian’s Divinity games are celebrated as much for breaking the classic CRPG template as cleaving to it – consider the pandemonium of Divinity’s magic and element systems, whereby you’d cast fireballs to evaporate spilled blood, then poison the resulting steam so that undead characters regained health while walking through it. The game’s taste for knock-on effects is true to the tabletop roleplaying…

STILL PLAYING Yakuza 5 PS4 The Remastered Collection is complete. Time, then, to revisit perhaps not the best but certainly the most Yakuza game of all. We’re struck by the melancholic opening chapter and the tragedy of Kazuma Kiryu’s inability to escape his past, even with his kindly new boss prepared to overlook it. Still, no Yakuza stays downbeat for long – and, as we bomb down the expressway at ludicrous speed, we eagerly anticipate the bear fights and dance-offs to come. Archero iOS Habby’s mobile ARPG has a delightful central mechanic – your chosen hero fires automatically, but only when standing still, which is tough in dungeons filled with near-bullet-hell levels of ordnance – and its RPG stylings get their hooks in quickly. But like too many mobile games,…

The odd thing about reviewing Half-Life: Alyx is that it isn’t just a game. It isn’t even a system-seller, in the traditional sense of that term. It has been specifically designed to make the argument for an entire medium, to do for capital-V-virtual capital-R-reality what Super Mario 64 did for 3D. So asking if it’s the best VR experience we’ve ever had isn’t quite enough. (For the record, though: allowing for the fact that Tetris Effect is almost as good on a TV as it is inside a headset, while Alyx is completely VR-native, yes, it is.) The question instead becomes: is that enough? When Alyx was first revealed, it was accompanied by a sense that even the fans who’ve spent the last decade clamouring loudly for another Half-Life game…

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The new console generation is almost here, mobile gaming has never been bigger and cloud gaming services look set to redefine our hobby. But wireless connections are already struggling to keep up with the demands of a user-base that prizes stability and speed above all else. Fortunately, 5G gaming is also on the horizon. It is a significant step-up from 4G, with median speeds around four times faster, and potentially capable of reaching 20Gbps. From low-latency gaming – with alleged response times of a single millisecond in near-perfect scenarios – to improved download speeds, greater accessibility to those in rural areas and even the form-factor of virtual-reality headsets, 5G could reshape the industry over the next few years. Ralph Heersink is chief product officer and co-founder of Gameye, a company…

getty images / Patrick McMullan “I’m not a big believer in remote work. But I think I may be surprised. I think you are going to see a significant change, maybe a long-lasting change, in business travel.”Strauss Zelnick hints at seismic post-coronavirus change for Take-Two: the NBA 2K devs can devise gross monetisation tactics at home in their pants “The new studio will focus on delivering exclusive games, using new gameplay mechanics, creative ways to play and unique interaction models.”Stadia’s Jade Raymond continues to put in place the stuff Google should have set up five years ago “It feels like ‘outside looking in’ is where a lot of the negative analysis comes from, and sometimes rightfully so. But I’d like us to be at the forefront of that as well.”Phil…

Issue 343 Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an SN30 Pro+ controller, compatible with PC and Switch, courtesy of 8BitDo Give it a day Had I written this letter earlier, we would have been in the longest drought between Nintendo Directs since they first began. As it stands, I write this with the longest drought being in recent memory. The Nintendo Direct format has very much taken on a life of its own, to the extent that it has become a format for their signature E3 performances. Every Direct has been slickly produced with a number of game announcements, often with one being the standout or surprise. As of the writing of this letter (February 27) Nintendo have…

We write often in this part of the magazine about the enduring peril of videogame sequels. Yet this month’s Hype crop puts a very different spin on the conundrum. This is not just about making the next one, of following up on some successful thing from a couple of years ago with enough new bells and whistles to justify another £50 price tag. This issue, three very different developers are seeking to rekindle some much older flames. Final Fantasy VII Remake (p30) offers up a fitting swan song for a generation in which developers and publishers grew so fond of repackaging beloved classics, but its title is a little misleading. This is a root-and-branch reconstruction of the PS1 RPG, to the point that it is, really, a completely different game,…

Developer/publisher Amazon Game Studios Format PC Origin US Release May 26 Amazon wants to arrive in the game industry proper with a bang. Founded A as a developer seven years ago, so far Jeff Bezos’ experimental games arm has largely produced small titles – a forgettable (and bizarre) racing game based on The Grand Tour licence, and a series of Amazon Appstore exclusives. When it’s not been cancelling them, of course. But our trip to the San Diego studio reveals a project that’s clearly been a while in the making, an expansive massively multiplayer online game set on an uncharted island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This island, sustained by a supernatural mineral called Azoth that enriches the veins of the land, promises many things to would-be explorers:…

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Writer/director/composer, Eliza How did you approach composing the music? It was actually a little difficult, because I could do whatever I wanted. Most of the music for a typical Zachtronics game plays on its own while you’re solving a puzzle, while in Eliza it’s to underscore someone talking. So it was tough at first to adjust. I remember a friend jokingly saying it was basically cheating: ‘You get to write this dialogue, and you get to write this piece of music so you can really punch it up exactly the way you want.’ Were Eliza’s live feeds based on the wellbeing tech you encountered during your research? It is partly based on the demo that I saw. I was really struck by that imagery, because it’s such an interesting juxtaposition…

As the clock continues to wind down on the current generation – though if Covid-19 continues to affect Chinese manufacturing, those hands may need to turn a little longer than planned – our thoughts naturally turn to its legacy. One of the less positive trends to emerge over the PS4 and Xbox One era is the fixer-upper: a game that launches in a right old mess and is slowly knocked into shape amid the outcry. There are plenty of cautionary tales, and stories of redemption, across the industry, from Destiny to No Man’s Sky, from Final Fantasy XIV to Rainbow Six Siege. This month we run the rule over Street Fighter V: Champion Edition (p112), the apparently final version of a game that botched the launch but, many years of…

Developer Media Molecule Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now From limitation comes creativity. Much of the joy of LittleBigPlanet came from seeing what trickery other, smarter players invented to implement unintended features in their creations. Dreams, however, has very few limitations. Media Molecule’s latest, seven years in the making, is a simple-to-use, head-spinningly powerful creation tool: with DualShock 4 in hand, you can do everything from sculpt and animate things from scratch to compose cinematic soundtracks, control puppets and code AI, before using your creations in open-world adventures or co-op brawlers, short films, digital art museums or interactive jokes. In Dreams you can make almost anything. Naturally, people are making what they already know. Head to the community showcase ‘Dream Surfing’ area, and you’ll immediately see Mario, Sonic and…