Innehållsförteckning för May 2021 från Edge

Sakaguchi certainly doesn’t seem overly concerned about the challenge faced by premium games on mobile platforms, in light of the abundance of free-to-play games. In fact, he suggests players familiar with modern monetisation practices – particularly in Japan, where gacha games rule the roost – are beginning to tire of them. “My belief,” he says, “is that if you can craft a really good experience – something that’s unique, whether it be on the story side or the game mechanics side – then players will want to flock to it and experience that for themselves.”…

An accepted truth in our industry is that no one knows how a game is going to work until they make it. This is why games are always late and sometimes don’t work out, despite best intentions. But is this really the case? As I grow older and more contrarian, I find myself questioning this. I think we can imagine how a game is going to play before we make it. And we’d make more interesting games if we did. I once met a successful film financier who had never lost money for his investors. It was straightforward, he claimed. Start with a good screenplay. Hire the best cast and crew you can. Shoot coverage. The key is that screenplay – this document, relatively cheap to produce, is a predictor…

Developer/publisher Sloclap Format PC, PS4, PS5 Origin France Release 2021 Your master is dead, and you’re on a mission to take down the five assassins responsible for his demise. Each is protected by an army of goons that you need to defeat single-handedly using flurries of beautifully executed kung fu strikes and the occasional thrown table leg. Sifu is a singleplayer brawler from Paris-based Sloclap, creator of gorgeous PvP battler Absolver. Though the clean art style and expertly choreographed attacks are heavily reminiscent of the studio’s previous title, Sifu has a meaner edge. In one set-piece, your character battles a dozen enemies in a narrow corridor, slamming them against walls, hurling dropped machetes and kicking them through barriers. Sloclap wants to capture a gritty form of kung fu that draws…

Developer/publisher Might And Delight Format PC Origin Sweden Release Summer Might And Delight is out to defy convention with this hand-painted social RPG. It almost feels like a Shakespearean sonnet written in code – a love letter to a genre that’s become diluted with vapid quests, superficial choices, and ostentatious combat. The Swedish studio promises its upcoming TMORPG – that’s ‘tiny multiplayer online roleplaying game’, for the uninitiated – will hark back to classics such as Baldur’s Gate by demanding players engage with the world around them, trusting them to take the lead and chart their own path. “The first thing to accept is that this is not a common RPG,” creative director Jakob Tuchten explains. “So if you’re expecting a storyline that will hold you by the hand, this…

It’s worth mentioning that dying doesn’t send you straight back to the start of the day. At least, not the first time around. One of the early powers Colt acquires is Reprise, a passive ability that lets you cheat the loop a little – think Hades’ Death Defiance mechanic meets BioShock’s Vita-Chambers. You’ll get a couple of extra chances per day, with Reprise dropping you earlier in the level without resetting any progress. Surviving enemies go back to their routines, satisfied that Colt is dead, giving another opportunity for you to get the jump on them. And best of all, Reprise is one ability that Julianna cannot access herself, ensuing you’ve always got a slight edge on the human competition.…

Discussing Roguelikes is always a little awkward due to the vague terminology. Is Roguelike a genre, a structure? When does a Roguelike become a Rogue-lite? With so many leading lights on hand, this seems like the ideal opportunity to clear things up. Or not. “Honestly I think the terms get a little silly and I am too busy making the game to care too much,” Sigman says. “In our marketing we tend to refer to [Darkest Dungeon] as a Roguelike because it gets the basic point across and nobody wants to read a hype paragraph that has asterisks and disclaimers about terminology.” Yu seems content to go with the flow. “I’ve been calling Spelunky a ‘platform Roguelike’ or an ‘action-Roguelike’ because I wanted to help the turn-based, dungeon-crawling Roguelikes keep…

How did the process of setting up a virtual concert with Travis Scott start? Phil Rampulla Travis had been a fan of Fortnite for a long time, and that stream with Ninja and Drake and Juju and Travis was the beginning of it all. And when we know we have a fan in place, somebody who’s just really passionate about our brand, and we’re passionate about their brand, it just kind of grew as a narrative. It all comes to life by really understanding the authentic background of the brand and story of the other side. Can you think back to the beginnings of the partnerships, and what happened when you first showed Travis the vision you had for Astronomical? PR I do remember the first time we showed Travis…

Yoshiro Kimura’s move into indie games nine years ago felt inevitable. Look through his back catalogue and it reads like that of an indie developer who’s been covertly operating within the publisher system for decades. Since his work on Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 for Square, Kimura’s work has been thrillingly esoteric. Having left the publisher to join Kenichi Nishi’s Love-de-Lic, the Kimura-designed Moon: Remix RPG Adventure thumbed its nose at JRPG conventions, while 2000’s strange, ambitious life sim LOL: Lack Of Love is considered one of the cult classics of the Dreamcast era. Despite a mixed reaction from critics, the likes of Chulip and the controversial PS2 horror Rule Of Rose (which caused such an outcry among the British tabloid press that its UK release was cancelled) only enhanced…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format Switch Release March 26 Any Rise normally comes after a fall. But while we’ve no doubt a few purists would disagree, Monster Hunter: World was not just the biggest commercial hit of this storied series, but the best it’s ever been. Just as a new player gradually acclimatises to the rhythms of a hunt, learning to be watchful and working out when to back off, forging and upgrading weapons and gear to stay in the fight longer against incrementally tougher opponents, so too has Capcom grown attuned to the needs of its players. Leaner yet smarter than previous entries, World successfully shed some of the series’ legacy baggage without ever losing the essence of Monster Hunter. It’s no surprise, then, that Rise should feel so light on…

Though there hasn’t been a Splinter Cell since 2013, Sam Fisher has made cameos in other Ubisoft worlds, most often in Ghost Recon. The Ghosts aren’t known for their touching character moments, but Fisher’s scenes are made charming by the beloved mumble of Michael Ironside. The voice actor was replaced for Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and Ubisoft initially blamed the change on the demands of performance capture – Ironside no longer had the physique required to play Fisher. The explanation caused uproar among fans, but turned out not to be the whole truth. Ironside later revealed he’d been given a cancer prognosis that led him to walk away from the series. But he survived, and Fisher only gains greater gravity with age.…

People have been making games in Iraq for thousands of years. A popular pastime in ancient Mesopotamia – a region that enclosed much of modern-day Iraq and Kuwait together with parts of Syria and Turkey – was a strategy game in which players raced to move their pieces off a 20-square board. Rediscovered as ‘the game of Ur’ by British archaeologists, it predates chess and is a possible ancestor of backgammon. Videogame development in Iraq, meanwhile, dates back to at least 1993, when a small team of Baghdad University students led by Rabah Shihab developed a roleplaying platformer, Babylonian Twins, for Commodore’s Amiga. Created against a backdrop of high unemployment and devastated infrastructure following the Gulf War, it is an attractive side-scrolling recreation of an age of relative prosperity and…

You know the tune by now: a game appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and grabs hold of the zeitgeist for a minute, pushing ahead of far more established titles and maybe breaking a record or two along the way. Among Us. Fall Guys. Phasmophobia. And, latest to join the chorus, Valheim – a Viking survival game that, this February, joined the exclusive club of games to hit 500,000 concurrent players on Steam. It’s an achievement only ever matched by four other titles: PUBG, CS:GO, Dota 2 and Cyberpunk 2077. And in stark contrast to its new peers, Valheim is a debut release from a Swedish studio with a headcount of five. At the outset of development, the team consisted of one person: Richard Svensson. Svensson quit his job as lead…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a 12-month Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership Act of contrition Reading E356’s article about the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, I couldn’t help but find in it a darkly ironic meta-narrative of corporate exploitation. That CDPR dropped a whopper of a ball on this goes without saying, and perhaps such a talked-about game was always doomed not to live up to expectations. But then something struck me, harking back to Edge Annual Vol 3 and an article about the unionisation of the game industry, where a comment was made that these problems (discussions around unions and crunch culture, among others) shouldn’t appear on the radar of gamers, and shouldn’t stop them enjoying…

When you think about it, every game is an RPG, after a fashion. Whenever we step into a protagonist’s shoes, we’re inhabiting a role. Yet, as Book Of Travels’ creative director Jakob Tuchten notes, some games don’t always think about what it means to truly embody the character you’ve become. Should bards and priests really be picking up swords? In downsizing the traditional MMO, Might And Delight’s new game is hoping that players learn to organically live their part. There’s a bit of Method in their madness, you might say. Indeed, there’s a remarkably broad selection of roles to take on within this month’s Hype crop. In Santa Ragione’s deeply unsettling Saturnalia you switch between several characters. As a visiting geologist or photojournalist, the game’s disorienting tricks make you truly…

Developer Santa Ragione Publisher The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild Format PC Origin Italy Release 2021 Night has fallen on the remote Sardinian village of Gravoi, and the streets have emptied. Everyone’s at home, safely behind locked doors upon which eye-shaped sigils have been scrawled. Our last match is burning down to our fingers, providing just enough light to confirm that, yes, there’s someone out there in the creeping fog. Someone with headlamps for eyes and – are those horns protruding from the top of their head? We’re not especially keen to find out. Perhaps familiarity will dull our terror at Saturnalia’s street-stalking presence in time, but for now the sight of it gives us enough of a jolt to make us forget what we’re doing and flee desperately for the nearest…

To build Deathloop’s world, Arkane had to get inside the heads of people who know their world will reset at the end of every day. “It’s way more alien than we expected going into the project, to be thinking with that philosophy,” Bakaba says. No one can be painting a masterpiece, writing a book, or creating anything that will take longer than 24 hours to finish. There are no consequences for destruction, violence or death. This worldbuilding affects game design, too – because everything washes away in the morning, like fairy gold, one RPG mainstay was closed off entirely. “How do we deal with currency? Because in most games you have currencies,” Bakaba says. “Money doesn’t make sense in this world.” Blackreef’s so-called Visionaries have got one thing right, at…

We can’t yet know what lasting effect Hades will have on the Roguelike scene, but the scale of its success must make some impact inevitable. What does Kasavin think about it? “I think Roguelikes would have continued to grow and evolve in exciting new directions, regardless of whether Hades existed or not,” he says. Supergiant’s aims, he explains, come from a love of game design traditions, and a desire to push at their boundaries. “Our goal [with Hades] was to make a Roguelike game that had a reason to exist – its own unique signature in a genre filled with outstanding, inspiring games,” he adds. “We learned a lot from our predecessors, and I would be glad if what we learned in turn helped inform games in this – or…

Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer/publisher Echodog Games Origin US Release 2020 As it takes friction to polish a gemstone, so even the most seemingly perfectly formed games only come to be so through months and years of iteration. Their constituent parts abrade one another until eventually those coarse edges are worn down to fit smoothly together. Echodog Games’ debut is so holistic in its design, its mechanics and story so tightly intertwined, that it’s almost hard to imagine in its nascent form. But like every game, it started with a rough idea that only began to resemble its final shape after some time. Designer Dyala Kattan-Wright founded the LA-based developer in 2018, before recruiting art director Holly Rothrock and technical lead Zach Vinless – with whom she’d worked…

Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit Switch Setup remains a faff, but once the cardboard is unpacked, unfolded and weighed down – a job for which, it turns out, wine bottles are practically purposebuilt – it’s still well worth the effort. The sense of speed on screen is remarkable, given how the physical kart ambles along, and experiencing familiar spaces from a Lilliputian perspective retains its magic. Plus, we’ve discovered, it’s a great way of tracking down lost slippers. Spelunky 2 PC, PS4 The addition of online multiplayer on PC breathes fresh life into our adventures, presenting us with an opportunity to drag uninitiated friends beneath the Moon’s surface and coach them in the ways of Spelunky. Even if every piece of advice seems to arrive over voice comms a moment…

With more kronor in its pocket than expected, has success affected Iron Gate’s plans for the future of Valheim? Not much. “We’ve actually had a quite clear development roadmap from the beginning,” Törnqvist says. “This really hasn’t changed our plans.” It’s sticking to the milestones it laid out ahead of launch, and has no intent of rushing to deliver them. The biggest difference Valheim’s sales numbers will make is to the size of the team – which, as it stands, is equivalent to one member of staff per million copies sold. “We’re going to hire some more people sooner rather than later,” Törnqvist says.…

Welcome, voyager, to Antescher. Please watch your step, and read this important travel guide. “To explore the eerie ruins,” it reads, “without at least a motion scanner to warn of the sudden appearance of the gigantic ants, is still considered suicidal.” You may wish to check out the city’s Great Pyramid and the obscure Monument before you are consumed by huge mutant insects. Enjoy your stay! Videogames have long been thought of as, among other things, a form of virtual tourism to imaginary places, but what if we treated those places as real objects of study? That is the conceit of Konstantinos Dimopoulos’ new book Virtual Cities, a guide for the prospective traveller to 45 game conurbations. It starts with Antescher, from Sandy White’s 1983 classic Ant Attack, taking in…

Weird West PC After seeing what the Dishonored team did next, we’re more eager to compare notes with this, from the series’ former creative director, Raphaël Colantonio. It’s shaping up to be the perfect counterpoint to Deathloop’s triple-A ambitions, returning to the immersive sim’s roots for an Ultima-style top-down RPG. Pokémon Legends: Arceus Switch Set in pre-industrial Sinnoh, where the Bidoof roam free, Arceus offers a trip to Pokémon’s past. But with its debut teaser suggesting that Game Freak is committing to the open-world promise of Sword and Shield, could it also be a glimpse of the evergreen series’ future? Project Triangle Strategy Switch Yes, it’s yet another Square Enix game with a terrible title. But the generous demo for this tactical RPG is promising indeed: already, it’s prettier and…

Developer/ publisher Unknown Worlds Entertainment Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release May 14 Like its 2018 predecessor, Below Zero is a game of vivid atmospheric shifts woven around a simple bodily necessity: oxygen. The need to keep tracking back and forthbetween the ocean’s surface and the deep makes for a world that is always changing, taking on different moods from second to second. As you dive, sunlight gives way to bioluminescence. Day-and-night shifts pattern the water above while schools of glowing fish trace the contours below. Each aquatic biome, from cave system to kelp forest, has its own atmosphere and soundtrack of animal calls, which blur together in your wake as you hurry to make the most of your dwindling air. New weather systems…

Developer Nerial Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, Switch Origin Russia, UK Release 2021 As kids we are told that cheats never prosper – a proverb that life seems to be doing its best to disprove. So why not get in on the grift? Nerial’s latest is another card game, but it isn’t your average deck-builder, though in a sense it shares something in common with this now-ubiquitous genre. You’ll need to master a variety of techniques to cheat your way up to the upper echelons of 18th-century French society, even putting your life on the line in the highest-stakes games. But on a fundamental level, it’s all about ensuring you’ve got the strongest hand. The idea behind Card Shark began to form when artist and former filmmaker Nicolai Troshinsky developed…

With no ability to save, and limited chances each day, the sense of danger is cranked up in Deathloop. “If the player gets into too much trouble, then they’re done. They die, and they loop back to the beginning of the day,” designer Dana Nightingale says. “So, entering each space, they need to think: what risks am I willing to take on this run? Because if I mess up and I die, I’m starting over.” This, we suggest, sounds an awful lot like a Roguelike – a format Arkane’s Austin team experimented with in Prey’s Mooncrash expansion – but Nightingale, at least, never thought of this game that way. “It’s more a case of convergent evolution. So maybe Roguelikes are birds, and we’re bats,” she says. “We both learned to…

Holly Rothrock Art director, Echodog Games Signs has a hand-drawn aesthetic. Can you tell us about your approach to the art? Coming from a fine arts background, I didn’t want to make something I’d seen before. Because I think that’s something they really push in fine art. So we actually did a lot of style explorations. I said I would have rather had an ugly and unique game than a pretty, derivative game. Because, you know, for a lot of indies, this is your passion project. And this is going to say something about you, which is very different to working on a big project where you want to make sure that it’s visually appealing all the time. And how did it develop from there? Dyala and I took a…

Thanks to our cover game, we’ve got loops on the brain this month. Designers talk a lot about a game’s core loop: that circular flow of action and reward that repeats for its duration. Loop Hero takes that concept literally, putting your diminutive hero on an unending circuit, the ride only stopping when you get off or a monster brings it screeching to a premature halt. It’s caused a few fierce arguments here: is this absorbing game design or just a cleverly disguised Skinner box, designed to tap into our worst compulsions? Or simply a bit of both? Yet, combined with its permanent progression system, even Four Quarters Roguelike feels less a loop, more a tight spiral. There are plenty of those elsewhere in Play this month, with no more…