Innehållsförteckning för July 2016 från Edge

As Seneca the Younger once pronounced with a waft of his toga, it is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness. The man who once dispensed advice to emperor Nero of Rome knew very well that making awesome videogames – or books, or films, or animation – is really bloody hard indeed. Hence the prevalence of painful crunch periods at studios the world over, the tolls taken on those who make games, and of course the cascades of bugs that need patching up with day-one updates. For a lot of developers, it’s not just a rough road but a long one, too. Just ask Fumito Ueda, whose most recently published game reached shelves a few weeks prior to the arrival of Xbox 360 way back in late…

World Of Warcraft is a living place. With each expansion it sails onwards, leaving old players behind as new ideas, faces and philosophies keep the 11-year-old MMO current. However, some players would prefer to step back in time and wander the world they knew, like revisiting the street you grew up on. Until April 10, Nostalrius existed to do just that. It was the largest private server running WOW patch 1.12 – the final build of the base game, free from expansions and adulteration. Nostalgia was so strong that 800,000 people registered Nostalrius accounts, and 150,000 were active players. This took place without the approval of Activision Blizzard. The Battle.net EULA, which governs every Blizzard game, forbids the creation of private servers, despite WOW’s past surviving in no other form.…

”You gotta love their passion. We love that our fans treat this franchise like their own and have such strong points of view.” Activision’s Eric Hirshberg addresses Call Of Duty: Infinite’s debut trailer receiving (at the time of writing) 1.7m YouTube downvotes “I would like to say again how sincerely sorry we are… The release date we are announcing is set in stone and there will be no further delays.” Keiji Inafune is no-going-back certain, for sure, really, about Mighty No 9’s release now ”Massive has nerfed the crafting system, and allows packs of superhero rogues to gank you in the Dark Zone. Thanks a lot, jerks.” Pundit Andy Levy heads way off-script into The Division territory in a rare instance of Fox News getting it bang on “If you…

www.facebook.com/edgeonline Discuss gaming topics with fellow Edge readers Indie labels I am an indie game developer. Not a particularly successful one, but one whose career has so far lasted over 12 years and 50 or so games. I am glad that indie games now command so much attention and coverage from the mainstream games media. However, I have two issues with this coverage. My criticism is not directed specifically at Edge, rather the media in general, although I feel your magazine is just as guilty for not providing an alternate voice. Firstly, I do not consider that some developers who are considered to fall under the banner of ‘indie’ are really that at all. Let’s consider two examples: Mike Bithell and Lucas Pope. Both of these personalities undoubtedly created interesting…

Rules, as this month’s Hype crop makes clear from the off, are there to be broken. LawBreakers’ (p38) title is a reference to a world in anarchic disrepair, but it’s also a fine way of conveying the extent to which Cliff Bleszinski’s return from retirement flouts the laws of physics. One character flings mines that strengthen the gravitational field around them, slowing enemies down. Another has a ground-pound with the opposite effect, flinging players into the air. Some maps have low-G sectors. None of this is surprising given Bleszinski’s past – rocket jumping is in LawBreakers too – but it’s indicative of a widespread desire among creators to fiddle with the natural order of things. As its name implies, Gravity Rush 2 (p52) takes the concept to its logical extreme,…

Developer Arkane Studios Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin France Release Nov 11 Karnaca isn’t Dunwall. Dishonored 2’s new city is part Barcelona, part Havana, and – thanks to Arkane’s still-extraordinary art direction – part itself. The first game’s rain-slicked docklands and sheer imperial palaces have been traded for tall, sun-baked terraces and colonial mansions nestled in thick trees. Karnaca sits in a bay in the shadow of a mountain, and your first view of it comes from the sea, from the dock of an old ironclad ship, the Dreadful Wale, which forms your headquarters between each mission. As an outpost of Dunwall, however, Karnaca features a few of the same faces. You’ll encounter familiarly thick-set guards, this time in service to the Grand Duke of Serkonos.…

Developer/publisher Neat Corporation Format Vive Origin Sweden Release 2016 The holy grail of VR is presence: the absolute sensation that you are in another place, the real world on the other side of the headset simply melting away. Too many of the games that launched alongside Rift and Vive offer only the holy grail as Monty Python saw it, their little foibles and contrivances reminding you that you are sitting in your living room wearing a £700 blindfold – that those are two halves of a coconut, not horse’s hooves. Well, no more. Halfway through the all-too-brief level that comprises the first playable demo of Budget Cuts, we try to nudge our crossbow through a hole in the floor, and are stunned to find that we hit real-world carpet instead.…

Game Yooka-Laylee Developer Playtonic Games Publisher Team17 Format PC, PS4, Wii U, Xbox One Release Late 2016 Likening any modern videogame to a title from the N64 era is rarely complimentary. It’s the kind of comment that crops up semi-frequently around the Internet, usually as a derogatory way of exaggerating a game’s visual failings. One look at Yooka-Laylee is enough to see that this particular criticism doesn’t stand up here. But anyone listening in from the other side of Playtonic’s large, open‑plan office could be forgiven for thinking that their colleagues had dipped into creative director Gavin Price’s extensive retro collection. From Grant Kirkhope’s bouncy, upbeat theme to the gibberish babbling of its cast, Yooka-Laylee consciously evokes the games its creators were making 20 years ago. To say it’s like…

Did you experiment with other visual styles before settling on the final look? There were a lot of iterations, and a lot of work done, before we settled on the final style. We wanted to be as realistic as possible, but we also wanted to leave some room for players’ imaginations. We didn’t want it to be pixel-perfect rendering with lots of special effects. We could have done that, but we chose not to. When you have to imagine some things, it’s much more immersive. You believe it more. We didn’t want to show you extremely detailed characters; we wanted the player to translate it their way. Where did the idea to make the game black-and-white come from? Take On Me! The video for that was one of the references.…

Developer Naughty Dog Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now You still have a destination to reach, but have much greater say over how you get there, and what you do on the way The realisation hit us quickly, at the close of an early flashback sequence in which Nathan Drake, his brother Sam and their fellow treasure hunter Rafe Adler make their escape from a Panamanian prison. You hop the final fence and land in the thick of a forest. The screen is packed with countless branches, leaves and fronds, all swaying as one in the wind, everything our heroes brush past responding properly to their touch. There have been glimpses of it before – Nathan’s handcuffed stroll through a gorgeously lit prison corridor, then the first of many…

Developer Stoic Publisher Versus Evil Format PC Release Out now Accepting the inevitability of bad things happening helps prevent this from descending into suffocating bleakness FOUR LEGS GOOD The introduction of the Horseborn, a third playable race alongside Humans and Varl, is an intriguing choice that pays off twofold. In battle, they’re very useful, capable of moving, attacking and then beating a tactical retreat – or to cajole enemy units away from your best fighters. With the ability to throw javelins, their overall range is as good as an archer. From a story standpoint, their presence adds to the tension: with most Horseborn struggling to understand the Human language, you’ll have to be careful how you communicate. Those you recruit will be viewed with suspicion from factions within your camp.…

Developer DoubleDutch Games Publisher TinyBuild Games Format PC, Xbox One Release Out now (PC), TBA (Xbox One) ENDLESS RUNNER The simple, boxy map layouts make SpeedRunners an ideal candidate for a level editor, and while DoubleDutch’s solution isn’t exactly Super Mario Maker levels of playfulness, it’s a simple, intuitive editor. Steam Workshop support means creations can be freely shared, but while a potentially infinite supply of courses is to be cheered in theory, in reality it’s a less than ideal fit for a game that’s at its best when its players have committed a layout to memory after hundreds of runs. That title, it turns out, is a little misleading. Yes, this is a game about running fast, but you’re not racing against the clock. Instead you must win a…

CONVERGENT MATRIX For developers, a new console means another wearying set of TCRs to follow, though most of Neo’s certification requirements are designed to ensure parity between it and the launch-model PS4. Online play, Trophies, DLC and, ideally, save systems must be the same across both consoles, though Sony is leaving the latter up to developers. Sony goes on to specifically prohibit a game falling back to the base PS4 code if a bug occurs in the Neo mode, presumably to ensure the game still runs if the launch model is formally abandoned in the future. While feature parity is encouraged, Neo can offer expanded versions of what’s available on the base PS4 – one example given is a twoplayer splitscreen mode that supports four people when played on Neo.…

BROWN NOTES Brown started writing about games as a journalist during the PS2 era, but found the focus tarnished his interest in playing them for fun (“I had a PS3, but didn’t play it very much – there was one time where I tried to turn it on and it wouldn’t work, and those vents on the side were so full of dust that I had to hoover them out. I felt like if my 14-year-old self could have seen me, he’d be like, ‘Mate, you really lost your way…’”). Along with his other projects, Brown has contributed to Veep and Babylon, and is currently working on original pieces with Aardman Animations and Warp. BAFTA-winning writer Jon Brown’s CV includes Peep Show, Veep and the 2014 film Cuban Fury. He…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Broforce demonstrates that the silliest shooters can smuggle in serious messages worthy of a chin-stroking art game Identity politics being the high-profile issue it is, the makers of survival sim Rust might have seen controversy coming when they decided in April that the game would randomise player avatars. Half were assigned women characters; many were black. By doing this, lead developer Garry Newman explained: “We get an even spread of races and genders that make players more identifiable – while at the same time making the social aspects of the game much more interesting.” But many players were enraged. “I just want to play the game and have a connection to the character like most other games I play,” said one. “Not have some political movement shoved down…

Developer/publisher Red Barrels Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release 2016 The first Outlast was something of a breath of fresh air for the horror genre. Sure, its asylum setting was hackneyed and, by cinematic standards at least, its nightvision video camera shtick a bit old hat, but tight pacing allied to a dollop of parkour, the ability to look over your shoulder while running away, and a wicked, self-aware sense of fun made Red Barrels’ effort stand out. The studio’s clever use of the camera and ability to capitalise on players’ expectations to compound scares brushed away the genre’s cobwebs and it didn’t pull any punches when it came to disturbing imagery or nightmarish scenarios. Which is why we’re as unsurprised as we are appalled when we stumble…

John Curley From his formative years installing servers in populous American cities to enable people to play peer-to-peer Doom deathmatch, through to his latest venture, equity-based crowd-funding platform Gambitious Games, Mike Wilson has always served at the bleeding edge of the videogame industry. But for a man who has helped launched numerous billion-dollar-revenue videogame series, his modus operandi is peculiarly artist-centric, seeking to nurture talent and reward it with a far fairer deal than many of his nickel-and-diming contemporaries. It’s an outlook that has made Wilson’s Devolver Digital perhaps the most desirable publisher for independent games today, with a string of hit releases on its books, including Hotline Miami, OlliOlli and recent success story, Enter The Gungeon. Devolver has fostered an image that is closer to a music label than…

Founded 2014 Employees 37 Key staff James Brooksby (CEO), Jim Mummery (CCO), Chris Mehers (COO) URL www.edgecasegames.net Selected softography Strike Suit Zero (as Born Ready Games) Current projects Fractured Space Convention dictates that the walls of today’s game studios should be festooned with common reference points of contemporary geek culture. After all, what are visitors to think of your nerd credentials if your team isn’t surrounded by carefully selected boardgames, a spread of immaculate vintage consoles, and at least a handful of Lego Star Wars sets? Visit Edge Case Games in Guildford and everything on the developer interior-design hit list is in place. Or at least, it was all in place, before somebody moved it. Something is different on the shelves at the working home of the team behind Fractured Space, a…

In a time of customisable characters, Nathan Drake is a rare breed. He simply is Uncharted There really ought to be a word for it, this feeling of happiness and sadness at the same time – like when you finish a good book and are happy with the conclusion but sad it had to end. The closest is the Malay word ‘sayang’, which depending on the intonation can be used to express love or loss, happiness or sorrow. But it’s most commonly used in the romantic sense, and while Nathan Drake, unlike the HD era’s Hollywood stars, only gets better looking as the years pass and technology improves, ours is not a physical relationship. But, as the credits roll on a Nathan Drake adventure for what is surely the final…

Developer Paradox Development Studio Publisher Paradox Interactive Format Mac, PC Release Out now Stellaris simply communicates its tangle of resources, currencies and modifiers with improbable elegance PIC’N’BLITZ Stellaris’ ship builder offers delightful choice for those in a mood to conquer. Starting with large modules specific to your race, you can tweak the number of weapon or utility slots available to each class of ship. Fission missiles give way to H-bombs, antimatter warheads and quantum WMDs. Conventional munitions are merely the start, however. In another display of emergent excellence, your scientists can research the remains of just about anything you blow up. A scuffle with a shoal of powerful void squid led to research into the construction of organic strike craft. Our battleships and defensive stations could unleash an amoebic air…

Developer/publisher Housemarque Format PS4 Release Out now Alienation sort of stops when it should really be getting going, routes closing off as they should be opening up Whoever would’ve thought that an alien invasion of Earth would be so nice? The place is a wreck – the streets empty but for things upturned, broken and abandoned, the pavements strewn with the proximity-sensing eggs of the invaders – but the marauding quartet of super-soldiers that constitute humankind’s last hope see nothing but niceness at every turn. You have access to three emotes in Alienation, each mapped to a D-pad direction (the fourth expands the minimap to overlay the entire screen). ‘Wait’ serves a singular, functional purpose; likewise ‘Over here’. The third, ‘Nice’, is left for everything else. Buddy just revived you?…

Developer/publisher DrinkBox Studios Format Vita Release Out now CUT AND TAKE Successful slashes build a meter that, when filled, allows you to slice off appendages once foes’ health is depleted. These parts are your currency, used to invest in an RPG-style skill tree which gives you buffs rather than abilities, boosting damage output, decreasing the impact of enemy hits, and giving you more time to sever limbs, for example. But rather than adding depth or variety, this merely increases breadth, allowing DrinkBox to pad out the runtime with repetitive battles. Severed establishes its setup with devastating economy. A thin plume of smoke draws you down a wind-buffeted, twilit path towards its source, a small fire amid the ruins of a collapsed home. Heading inside, you catch your reflection in the…

VIDEO Battlefield – Life On The Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour www.bit.ly/magicprotour As a primer for what must be one of the world’s most popular card games after poker and solitaire, Enter The Battlefield – Life On The Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour is undeniably thorough. Written, produced and directed by Shawn Kornhauser and Nathan Holt, and narrated by Wil Wheaton, the film follows a group of elite players in their bids to become 2014 world champions. Flanking this central thrust, it also covers the basics of the game and its history, has interviews with the spouses, siblings and friends supporting the efforts of some of Magic’s best players, and briefly touches on the familiar issue of female representation among players and designers. Cringe-inducing rap and awkward high-fives aside, it’s…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar I’ll refrain from going over old ground. Let me just say that I hate Achievements and wish they had never happened So long, Xbox 360. Microsoft’s decision to cease production, just shy of tenand-a-half years since the console’s launch, may mean it is now officially dead, but to most it died a long time ago, consigned to the attic or back bedroom to be replaced by new hardware. Indeed, it died an awful lot while it was still alive, thanks to the red ring of death and other assorted potential points of hardware failure. Even those that survived gave the impression they were going to keel over any second. I once brought my 2006-era Premium console into the openplan floor Edge shares with Future’s other gaming titles; someone…

Has going back to a small team recaptured the feeling of the early days for you? It’s risky, but it’s also a little exciting. Epic’s grown because they want to do multiple things for multiple people. They’re at 400 people; I’d like to stay at 60-ish for as long as humanly possible, because right now one of my folks who works at the studio told me this feels like the Gears 1 vibe all over again. We’re a small-to-medium-sized studio, we feel like a family, and we’re making a whole new IP on this new platform together. That’s a pretty cool feeling to have. You’ve dropped the free-to-play model now – what are your plans for the game? We’re big fans of Counter-Strike: GO – you pay a small fee…

Developer SCE Japan Studio Publisher SIE Format PS4 Origin Japan Release 2016 Defying gravity may be fashionable in games at the moment, but none treat attractive forces with so little regard as Gravity Rush, in which protagonist Kat can change the way she falls at will. And its follow‑up looks set to build on the Vita game’s appealing combination of charismatic steampunk setting and focused plummeting with a brand-new engine and the full force of PS4’s architecture. A direct sequel, Gravity Rush 2 nonetheless abandons what its creators describe as a “subdued, dark, European atmosphere” for something altogether brighter. Inspired by Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées comics, the game uses an expanded palette that replaces its forebear’s sepia tones with deep, Sega-blue skies and vibrant bunting. It looks stunning, and we can’t…

Developer/publisher The Game Bakers Format PC, PS4 Origin France Release 2016 We do love a good parry. Furi’s is right up there with the best, returning projectiles to their sender, fending off attacks and, if timed perfectly, setting up a damaging, automated cinematic combo. That doesn’t happen too often, admittedly – frame-perfect timing will come only through mastery, and that will take time. Yet the greatest component of Furi’s parry doesn’t require perfection, just that you perform it successfully. Repel an incoming blow and there’s a flash of green, before your health bar replenishes a little. The parry is one of the purest expressions of risk and reward games have to offer, but rarely is the balance tipped so firmly towards the latter as it is here, where a successful…

The Last Guardian has now been in production for more than eight years, starting life as the third project of in-house Sony studio Team Ico. Announced during 2009’s E3 as Project Trico, the game has had a troubled gestation, suffering numerous delays and a shift from PS3 to PS4. That period also saw Fumito Ueda’s departure from Sony, along with several members of Team Ico, who set up Gen Design to continue working on the project – though a dedicated team remains at Sony to provide support for the small startup. Despite rumours that the game may be about to slip again, director Fumito Ueda assures us that 2016 will be the year The Last Guardian finally emerges. Here, we ask him about the difficulty of staying focused on a…

Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios Format Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Poland Release 2014 As mood boards go, Dire Straits, A-ha, Banksy and the siege of Sarajevo might seem like unlikely bedfellows. But all played their part in influencing the development of 11 Bit Studios’ tale of a group of civilians caught in a war zone, This War Of Mine. The striking black-and-white survival game is drawn in smudged, thick pencil strokes and uses a muted palette to reflect its equally downbeat tone as you attempt to protect a group of survivors from starvation, freezing temperatures, marauding bandits and festering, untreated wounds. But this startling project began life as something more traditional. “We had some mechanics and ideas for something designed for gamers,” art director Przemysław Marszał, who previously…

Nathan Drake leaps across a chasm, his arms at full stretch, his fingers finding a handhold. His grip is sound, but rock crumbles away, and the game cues in an audio file from the day Nolan North spent in a sound booth yelling ‘Holy crap!’ over and over. Drake falls away, arms scrabbling against thin air. He catches a ledge a few yards below, and we’re back on our way. Uncharted 4 (p104) has a Trophy called Ludonarrative Dissonance. It’s a send-up of the well-worn complaint about the happy-go-lucky, cheeky-chappy adventurer who turns into a psychopath when bad guys show up. But there’s another disconnect at the Uncharted series’ core. These games make you feel like there’s so much at stake, when in fact there’s nothing at all. Mess up…

Developer Gearbox Publisher 2K Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now The possibilities of traditional MOBAs are eroded in the absence of multiple lanes and an aerial view GEAR BOX While Battleborn’s headline feature is its in-match levelling, the system is supported by more traditional progression mechanics as well. Your command rank rises the more you play, and every character has an individual rank to push into double digits, too. In addition, chests dotted about levels contain various temporary perks (such as faster movement speed), while more permanent gear that gives you a shield boost or causes your character to drop a grenade on death can be acquired from Loot Packs and fallen bosses. Gear comes in common, uncommon, rare and epic varieties, and up to three pieces…

Developer Intelligent Systems Publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release Out now Their absence alongside you is as keenly felt as the guilt you’ll experience in denying them a legacy in the credits sequence So, relationships based on intense experiences never work? We have powerful evidence to the contrary. Having foolishly left our avatar open to attack from the Hoshidan army’s most powerful units, we watch with awestruck delight as our butler-cumhusband Jakob steps in to bravely block no fewer than four successive attacks, saving us from yet another soft reset. Ours was a bond forged in the fiery heat of battle – and over our apparent inability to make a half-decent cuppa – thus proving that love can indeed flourish in the unlikeliest of situations. Suffice it to say that Fates…

Developer/publisher Increpare Games Format PC Release Out now THE ABSOLUTE WURST The atmosphere here is strange. It’s on one hand breezily absurdist, with a main menu presented as if printed on shrink-wrapped sausages. It’s overlaid by a soulful piano theme tune, and yet the words “de-lic-ious sau-sa-ges” light up in time to it. The game’s abstract generative music can sound nightmarish, and its environments represent nature with cold pixels, but the pause menu text is almost Comic Sans. It’s an intriguing mixture that feels personal to its creator. It’s almost as if Stephen’s Sausage Roll doesn’t quite believe anyone will take to it. Its Steam page delivers the barest of descriptions: “A simple 3D puzzle game.” And, chances are, you won’t take to it, not at first. It doesn’t tell…

Developer Level-5 Publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release Out now WRIST/REWARD Though primarily singleplayer, you can engage in local battles with other Yo-Kai handlers. Combat, however, lacks the depth of Pokémon, and there are no options other than a straight fight. The focus of the post-game is on upgrading your watch to S-rank and locating additional Yo-Kai to fill the gaps in your collection. Several bosses reappear under different names, their palettes swapped and their health bars extended, before a climactic encounter against a robust new opponent. You may not be able to guarantee global success, but you can certainly maximise your chances of creating a phenomenon. Level-5 president Akihiro Hino would be the first to admit that Yo-Kai Watch is a calculated tilt at a huge audience, designed from the…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com It’d establish a baddie with more solidity if he threw a hen into a furnace. Now we know what he’s really like, the swine Right now I’m at the stage of a game project where the main baddie has to be created, and, as I have the luxury of a little time, I’ve taken the bold decision to actually think about bad guys in games. First, there’s the idea of the boss. If you’re battling an organisation, somebody has to be the architect of all the unfolding evil. Imagine a game where legions of warriors rampage across the plains, burning and wrecking, while the Arch-Warrior head of the army stands by the side and begs ineffectually for them to stop, in the manner of a supply teacher at…