Innehållsförteckning för October 2016 från Edge

You’re forgiven if you completely missed the most important moment of this year’s E3. It came at the end of Ubisoft’s press conference, when company CEO Yves Guillemot issued a thinly veiled hands-off message to bosses at Vivendi, who were rumoured to be plotting a hostile takeover of the French publisher. “The real magic,” Guillemot said, “happens when teams are free to create. When you are free, there is no failure – there is only forward.” Flanked by the developers who had taken the stage during the preceding conference, Guillemot told Vivendi that he did not want its money, and neither did his teams. That they had his back, and he theirs. Even that kind of crazy-looking bearded guy who made Red Steel. Yet Guillemot wasn’t just telling a 22…

Gathered for the Edge panel entitled Next-Generation Visuals: Creating Art For VR, leading developers joined us at Develop in July to discuss the challenges facing artists working with virtual reality. In this edited transcript, SIE London Studio executive producer of VR Brynley Gibson, Rebellion head of digital Matt Jeffery, and Guerrilla Games Cambridge principal artist Shawn Spetch consider the potential and pitfalls. What challenges face developers creating art assets for VR games? Shawn Spetch We now have to think about things in terms of performance. So instead of just building a game like Killzone Shadow Fall, where we populate levels with a lot of detail, we have to scale that and we test performance while going into production. We optimise while we’re working, instead of putting a bunch of stuff…

FRINGE BENEFITS Alongside his TV work, DeRosa has also appeared in a number of short films and was a writer on comedy documentary Women Aren’t Funny. DeRosa hosts the We’ll See You In Hell podcast on Fangoria Network, and recently launched a horror column called Some Severe Situations on fangoria.com. He’s been performing as a standup comic for more than a decade, and will make his Edinburgh debut this month with new show Zero Forward Progress (bit.ly/joederosa). Standup comedian Joe DeRosa is also an actor who’s appeared in TV shows including Better Call Saul, Inside Amy Schumer, Louie and Bored To Death. Grand Theft Auto V players will also recognise him from his voice work in Rockstar’s game, as sleazy Hollywood agent Rufus Bellows. How did the GTA role come…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Once you have tracked down and identified your migrant, you ‘collect’ them by throwing a brick to knock them out In the new sovereign utopia that is post-EU Britain, adults and children alike are going nuts for the latest craze, Pokémon Go Home. We took back control of our borders; now Pokémon Go Home lets everyone help in the democratic task of sending migrants back where they came from. Using robust profiling algorithms and your smartphone’s camera, the game has you search for migrants in streets, parks and cafés. With its deep-learning tech, Pokémon Go Home simplifies the task of the vigilante, who may not be able to tell at first glance who is a migrant and who isn’t. After all, a Pole might well speak better English…

Developer/publisher SIE (Santa Monica Studio) Format PS4 Origin US Release TBA God Of War has changed. Kratos has grown a beard, and sprung a child; he has travelled, soul searching, and ended up in Scandinavia at a time when, awkwardly for a man who just wants to be left alone, the Norse pantheon of gods looks down from on high. Yet it’s the new perspective that represents the most transformative change. Previously positioned high above the action to accommodate Kratos’ swirling combo strings tearing into enemies, the camera now sits tightly over the god-killer’s shoulder. While born in part from Sony Santa Monica’s desire to make this a more personal, reflective tale than games past, it’s also a decision taken from a gameplay perspective, recognising that after over a decade’s…

Such is the level of paranoia surrounding the venture that, seven months after the founding of Kojima Productions, the independent studio won’t confirm, even off the record, how many staff it currently employs. The team is worried. It’s clearly been a bad breakup as far as Konami, Hideo Kojima’s employer of more than two decades, is concerned. There are concerns about litigation. Some team members refuse to be photographed; they don’t want people knowing where they work. Kojima, meanwhile, has never looked better. Even while labouring under 12-hour jetlag he looks bright and far more youthful than his 52 years. The elbowy title of his new game, Death Stranding, has been announced and, while the director is unwilling to discuss precise details, it’s clear he’s assembled the team he wants…

Ah, the summer drought, when all thoughts of videogames fade to the backs of our minds as we get out in the famous British sunshine. The flow of new releases slows to a drip, then cuts out entirely, save for the odd movie tie-in or sports licence. And magazine section editors the world over spend restless nights fretting about all those empty pages. Yet here we are, in an uncommonly clement UK summer, wondering how we’re going to fit all these games in – not just to the Play section, but our daily lives, lured as we are to the beer garden, the park, the Pokéstop. This must surely be a contender for the busiest August in videogame history. The southern hemisphere, locked as it is in what passes for…

Developer Giant Squid Studios Publisher 505 Games Format PC, PS4 (tested) Release Out now WATER TEMPLE The nautilus shells that you collect appear in ghostly form within the vaulted ceiling of a spectral temple you’ll visit regularly throughout the game. Each chapter is bookended by the discovery of a lifeless underwater cave in which resides an ancient tower, long since lost to the salty waters. Swimming into the portal that sits on top of these pieces of forgotten architecture transports you to the alternative reality of the temple where, after completing an action that we won’t reveal here in order to avoid spoiling things, you’ll restore life to once-murky caves. The comparisons to Journey are unavoidable. This is, after all, a game helmed by Flower and Journey art director Matt…

Developer/publisher Blendo Games Format PC Release Out now Setting up a good workspace is crucial in Quadrilateral Cowboy. In front of you, you’ll place your deck. This jerry-built laptop – constructed by you, since you find and install its memory, CPU and other components – features a keyboard and screen to display a command-line interface, and it’s your most prized piece of equipment, used for hacking into external networks and to control various amazing tools. To the side you’ll place your CCTV unit. Its twoscreen display feeds video from some of those tools, so you’ll angle it so it’s visible as you type commands on your deck. One feed might be from Nell, your Weevil, a four-legged remote bot that’s small enough to get under pipes and through vents. After…

Developer Insomniac Games Publisher GameTrust Games Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now PURSUIT FARCE Song Of The Deep reaches its nadir with a dreadful trialand-error chase sequence, during which you must escape from deadly squid that can destroy your craft in an instant. Rather than the same group hunting you for the duration, invisible trigger points will spawn more squid closer to you. They don’t have to make contact to suck you in, and so you can be killed for not having the clairvoyance to know their exact spawn positions. This gear-gated bedtime story is the latest of a recent slew of in-house passion projects from heavyweight studios. A ten-hour undersea fable about an inquisitive and resourceful fisherman’s daughter who builds a rickety submarine to rescue her…

After years of being understood as a niche phenomenon within the game industry, professional gaming is now better understood as a new form of business entirely. Despite recent highprofile investments by major publishers – notably Activision and EA – a substantial amount of esports’ growth has occurred outside the auspices of the companies that develop the games involved. This part of gaming culture was born with the player community, and the international showrunners that now dominate it – companies such as ESL, DreamHack, Faceit and MLG – all originated outside of the traditional game development apparatus. If anything, Activision’s recent acquisition of MLG demonstrates that gaming’s traditional stakeholders have been pushed into a reactive posture by the rise of esports. “There’s no centre to the industry. It’s a series of…

Impossible Bottles is a collaboration between Berlin-based multimedia production company Honig Studios and artist and illustrator Rafael Varona, who lives in Amsterdam. The latter’s Impossible Bottles illustration project inspired the studio to approach him, and now the group is pulling together a striking-looking iOS puzzle game. “Impossible Bottles is a combination of themes, topics and techniques we’re excited about,” Honig co-founder and technical designer Jiannis Sotiropoulos tells us. “Mad scientists working in solitude; enormous golems existing in eternal movement; perfect loops and humorous animations and situations the player discovers if they look carefully.” Players will control a tiny scientist who must bring equilibrium to the workings of a series of incredible machines that have gone off-kilter. “The game starts with a malfunctioning robot which the player needs to repair to…

WEBSITE Aric’s World www.bit.ly/aricsworld Veteran LucasArts creative Aric Wilmunder (known as SCUMM Lord to his colleagues at the time because of his key role in the engine’s evolution) has a stack of design documents from the studio’s golden era and has started to release a few each month on his site. The collection of expansive outlines for all manner of classic (and not so classic) games is a treasure trove for anyone who grew up playing adventure games in the ’90s. It reaches back farther, however, to 1985’s The Eidolon and the following year’s Labyrinth: The Computer Game. There’s also an ever-so-slightly different version of the Maniac Mansion document co-creator Ron Gilbert recently published, an uncredited Star Trek SCUMM game, and a circuitous link to the design document of the…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar When you sign up for World Of Warcraft, you forget about your gym membership – both literally and figuratively Even if you didn’t spend your university years playing Mario Kart 64 in smoky halls-of-residence dorms, the human memory is an unreliable thing. Our shortterm memories can, by default, only retain between five and nine pieces of information at once. Transferring them to our long-term memories only works with conscious effort – revising for university exams, say, if you aren’t too busy perfecting the mushroomless Koopa Troopa Beach waterfall shortcut. This is especially dangerous in an era of monthly subscriptions and paperless bank statements. As one conference speaker put it a few years back, when you sign up for World Of Warcraft, you forget about your gym membership –…

Developer/publisher Spaces Of Play Format PC, PS4 Origin Germany Release 2017 A lion in a cave is quoting Byron at us. Then again, it’s not long since we used some blue flowers to change the rest of its pride into rabbits. Or, for that matter, since we managed to get a sheep to teleport us to a new area. Though we’re still not really sure what the birds do. Our notes after playing Future Unfolding’s preview build might read like a particularly feverish hallucination, but then this intoxicatingly strange game feels a lot like a vividly remembered dream. The top-down view probably has something to do with it, but it has a similar woozy, heady quality to Hotline Miami – if, perhaps, Dennaton’s troubled antihero had swapped guns for a…

Where else can we start, but Gjallarhorn? Throughout Destiny’s first year this mythical rocket launcher was, for those not blessed by capricious RNG, the game’s whitest whale. To those that had it, it was their best friend, since it was by a distance the game’s greatest weapon. But to Bungie it was Destiny’s biggest problem. It melted enemy health bars, so Bungie made enemies tougher, and more numerous, in order to give players a decent challenge. The Gjallarhornless were left behind, frustrated, locked out of pickup raid groups by players who deemed it so essential that they refused to play with anyone who didn’t have it. Rumours swirled of Destiny’s troubled development: of a late, desperate rewrite of its story, of problems with Bungie’s toolset, of the studio’s struggles in…

Developer Spark Unlimited Publisher Activision Format Gamecube, PS2, Xbox Origin US Release 2004 Scott Langteau couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He knew DreamWorks Interactive had changed – since Electronic Arts acquired the studio two years prior, the working weeks had grown longer, the upper management a lot more hands-on. As Langteau perceived it, the DreamWorks family, which he oversaw as a producer, had been split up and destroyed. To a point, it had been tolerable. Long hours, especially as a release date drew near, were a reality of game development. And Medal Of Honor: Frontline, the title DreamWorks was developing, was expected to be a major hit. Of course EA would drop in occasionally and check on its investment. But this was too much: standing in his office, looking…

Publisher Square Enix Developer Eidos Montreal Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Where Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s transhumanism theme felt broadly timely in 2011, Mankind Divided’s deeper exploration of a world beset by terrorism, tearing itself apart over differing beliefs, mistrust, violent law enforcement and dehumanising language, is a sobering reflection of our times. Its uncomfortable proximity to current events has caused controversy, too, with language such as ‘mechanical apartheid’ and, more recently, ‘Aug lives matter’ having sparked criticism of its developer’s judgement. But while there has been understandable controversy around the real-world parallels in Mankind Divided’s themes, that they have caused such a reaction is testament to the game’s powerful depiction of the social divides at the centre of its fiction. Set in 2029, two years…

As art director on Flower and Journey, Matt Nava helped define the distinctive aesthetic language of Thatgamecompany’s output. Now, as creative director of his own studio, he’s further exploring the potential of his striking art style, while also pushing his game design skills to the fore. (Spoilers follow.) Does the game have an ecological message? I think a lot of people are afraid to talk about the morals or messages in their work, but it’s pretty clear that there’s an environmental lesson to be learned from Abzû. What we tried to do was put that in there – this message of giving back to the world and being aware of your impact on it – without beating you over the head. How did you manage the tension between searching for…

Developer Double Fine Productions Publisher Adult Swim Games Format PC (tested), PS4 Release Out now HEAD AND TALE The incidental dialogue is typically humorous, yet the story is played as straight as a tale starring a floating human head is ever likely to get. The pitch is that humans have opted to upload their consciousness to the cloud, liberating themselves from their flimsy meatsack bodies and upgrading to sturdier robot torsos. However, Methuselah, a malevolent AI, now has the robots – and by extension the entire human race – under its control, and no one knows where the bodies are kept. As seemingly the only option to save humanity, your head is brought out of cryosleep, with the help of an army of female robot freedom fighters and a mysterious…

Developer Ghost Town Games Publisher Team 17 Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now TEMPERATURE CONTROL Despite needing four players to truly shine, there’s no online co-op in Overcooked. There’s support, at least, for two or three players, scaling action durations as appropriate, and it’s even playable in singleplayer, though switching between two chefs with a shoulder button is no substitute for the real thing. Those short on controllers, meanwhile, will be cheered that Ghost Town offers a split-controller feature, which lets two players play on one gamepad at the same time. Oh, bugger, the chips. One of our number has just come a cropper and fallen off the block of ice we call a kitchen, taking a vital order of fries with him. Our companion will be…

Three years since its inception, Square Enix’s Collective initiative has hit the $1m milestone in money raised through Kickstarter. This year, it has already published moody point-and-click adventure Goetia, with two more games to come before December. Each month, it attracts more pitches from independent developers than it can accommodate. Its success so far is a validation of the efforts of one man: the Collective’s creator and project lead Phil Elliott. The first seeds were planted when Yosuke Matsuda took over from Yoichi Wada as president of Square Enix. “He had a series of things he was interested in looking into more,” Elliott tells us. “One of them was: how do we empower our community more in publishing decisions? Others included a general interest in crowdfunding and supporting new talent,…

AP/Press Association “I wasn’t so enthused… It’s taken me years and years to catch up with them, and it’s because I didn’t like these goofy games.” Spielberg and Lucas always loved tech, while Martin Scorsese couldn’t see the point, which he reckons left him in their wake “We think having a new machine coming is going to help the industry to continue to grow and to take a lot more casual players back to the industry.” Yves “The GamePad can be as revolutionary as the Wiimote” Guillemot bigs up NX. We hope he’s right “You have three choices: you can spend your own money, you can lie, or you can do what you’re told. And, generally, we’ve always chosen that we’ll just do what we’re told…” Feargus Urquhart paints a…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a New Nintendo 3DS XL, supplied by the Nintendo UK store The outdoor type Games condition you to look at the world differently. You boot up Call Of Duty, see a man running, and shoot him. You run around the streets of an Assassin’s Creed game and instinctively look for window frames to use as footholds. In, well, every Naughty Dog game made in the past decade, you see a yellow ledge and know for sure it’s the way forward. It’s simple psychology that doesn’t transfer over to the real world. I don’t walk the streets looking for buildings to clamber up. But while immersed in these digital spaces I use the…

Developer DICE Publisher EA Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Sweden Release October 21 Battlefield 1 may have leapt back in time with regard to its setting and necessarily contemporary kit, but DICE has every intention of creating its most technically advanced series instalment yet. “The way we look at it internally is that Battlefield 1 is a sequel to Battlefield 4, so turning the clock back on time isn’t the same thing as turning the clock back on development, or how we look at shooters in general,” senior producer Aleksander Grøndal tells us. The game is certainly the best-looking Battlefield yet, volumetric fog rolling across its ravaged fronts, and there’s a solidity to the game’s controls and movement that feels a cut above its predecessors. “I would say that…

Publisher Bethesda Developer Bethesda, Dire Wolf Format Android, iPad, PC Origin US Release 2016 RPGs and card games go together well, and it would be easy to dismiss Legends as an attempt to jump onto the bandwagon. Certainly many of its details are rather more cloned than inspired – the cost, for instance, of an arena run, or eschewing trading in favour of making whatever cards you want with sufficient play. Legends is an overtly tactical game, splitting the battlefield into two different lanes. Minions summoned from your collection of cards – a deck starting at 50, rather than Hearthstone’s 30 – can only directly attack enemies in their current lane, with the added complexity that one lane is typically a ‘shadow’ zone where they’re safe from direct attacks for…

Bobby Earl and Kevin Oxland, alongside senior programmer Robbie Tinman, have been working together at Spiral House for 18 years. It’s no surprise, then, to find that they have a habit of finishing one another’s sentences. On this occasion, there may be another reason for such keenness. Both are buzzing with nervous excitement as they demonstrate the studio’s forthcoming game, the ambitious thirdperson action-adventure Troll And I. This is the long-delayed realisation of a dream. “When we first started,” Earl says, “our remit was a five-year plan to do our own IP, to make our own games.” But since 1999 RPG Silver, the studio has mostly taken on conversions and workfor-hire jobs. Only now, 17 years on, is Spiral House able to make good on that promise. In some respects,…

And they say writers come on board too late in a game’s development. Mary DeMarle, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’s narrative director, was on the project from its inception, and her work on the game has long since completed: when we speak, she’s been on holiday for a month. Here, we discuss the challenges in weaving story around a vast, complex world that puts player choice at its centre – and the perils of dealing with real-world themes in a game whose planning began over four years before its completion. Why did you choose Prague for the primary setting? Deus Ex is all about travelling the world, but in Human Revolution we never got to Europe, so we really wanted to for this game. The more we looked at Prague, the…

Developer Tokyo RPG Factory Publisher Square Enix Format PC (tested), PS4 Release Out now T rading in nostalgia is a risky business. The problem with making a game designed to pay homage to genre landmarks is that it’s all too easy to lapse into hollow pastiche. Classics are considered classics partly because at the time they felt fresh, exciting and different. Trying to capture the spirit of beloved games through simple mimicry is a fool’s errand, unless you also attempt to evoke that feeling of the new. I Am Setsuna’s mandate to follow closely in the footsteps of golden-age JRPGs, with special attention given to studying Chrono Trigger’s Active Time Battle mechanic, suggested Tokyo RPG Factory was aiming for wide-eyed tribute and nothing more. Yet if it isn’t as memorable…

Developer Plastic Studios, SIE Santa Monica Studio Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now KEEPING TIME Finish the game and a speedrun mode unlocks, with PBs tracked in a global leaderboard. There are shortcuts within levels, opportunities for sequence breaking, and tricks within the dancer’s moveset – a roll into jump, for instance – that speed her up. Completionists can seek out the collectible memory shards, and those who prefer to take things slower can nudge the touchpad to activate photo mode. Story-led games are, by their nature, rarely replayable, but Bound bucks the trend. Well, we hadn’t quite expected this. We thought Bound was a game about a balletic alien girl in a low-poly, voxel-heavy dreamscape. Yet Plastic Studio’s third full game opens with us in control of a…

Developer/publisher nDreams Format PC Release Out now REQUIRES SOME ASSEMBLY Bizarrely, The Assembly – which nDreams describes as being “designed from the ground up for VR” – is available without virtual reality functionality for £14.99, or as a full-fat version for £20. If, for some inexplicable reason, you plump for the former and subsequently regret it, worry not: you can simply cough up the extra £5 on Steam to unlock your game’s full potential. It’s a perplexing offer and one that serves to further underscore the game’s superficial relationship with VR. You’ll spend a great deal of time reading emails on flatscreen monitors in The Assembly. It’s a hoary mechanic that ironically serves to highlight the unfulfilled potential of this made-for-VR sci-fiadventure. The story, told from the alternating perspectives of…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com Nearly every developer I’ve ever met has also been a great lover of playing videogames. It’s obvious, really. Love of videogames plus chunk of talent equals job in the videogame industry. But gaming is a very different experience for those who know how they’re made. First off, we love looking for imperfections. It’s not enough that we make games and people like buying them; others make games and we must find their mistakes and errors. I’m not talking about crashes and show-stopping bugs. Finding those in games is just heartbreaking. No, I mean the little things. The bad animations, the glitches, and, for me in particular, the misread or badly delivered lines of dialogue. Not only do dev types analyse every game, but they play them differently. I…