Wireframe Magazine #54

Playing Destiny 2 during this summer’s Season of the Splicer, the game’s latest seasonal content drop, I was pleasantly surprised by the portrayal of the player’s character as the ultimate weapon of a dominant, if waning, empire. The latest storyline features beloved main characters on the side of the player, decrying xenophobia against refugees and apologising for their genocidal attacks against the Fallen, an alien race on the verge of extinction. It’s a good example of a game understanding the characters’ place in the universe, and their relationships with others who find themselves in a position of material desolation. Examining Destiny as a critique of imperialist and colonial practices, however, I found that very few games share this nuanced understanding of the power a certain few wield against those they…

Chatting to the developers of FAR: Changing Tides got me thinking about smaller, self-contained games that deal in evocative atmosphere rather than explosive bombast. Relatively speaking, quieter, even meditative games are a new thing when compared to the medium’s age: it’s only in recent years that we’ve seen such poetic titles as thatgamecompany’s Flower and Journey, or the gently exploratory Gone Home. (The minimalist point-and-click adventure Myst, from 1993, could, I guess, be considered a distant ancestor to these games.) Maybe it’s taken time for the industry to mature to the point where some developers are brave enough to branch out and experiment with different tones or forms of storytelling in their games. As Changing Tides programmer and sound designer Fabio Baumgartner told me this month, “Innovation is always expensive.…

In a harsh, post-apocalyptic world, your only true friend is a ramshackle craft that clunks and heaves across the desolate landscape. In FAR: Lone Sails, that craft took the form of the Okomotive: a wheeled vehicle that had to be fuelled, guided, and repaired as it carried you towards your uncertain destination. In its sequel, FAR: Changing Tides, you take to the seas in a bulbous vessel once again powered by wind and fuel; you can hoist a sail to catch the breeze, or start up a furnace and use the craft’s engine to barrel your way through the waves. As you variously jump on bellows to fan flames, adjust the angle of your sails to match the direction of the wind, or occasionally dive out of a hatch to…

For both FAR: Lone Sails and Changing Tides, Okomotive have used FMOD to help create the dynamic soundtrack – a piece of middleware that allows a relatively tiny indie studio to create music that responds to the player’s movements. “It’s super-approachable for anyone who’s worked with audio tools before because the user interface is basically built the same way,” Fabio Baumgartner explains. “But the tool allows you to establish logical structures, which can then be parameterised. And those parameters can be accessed from the game engine side. So FMOD is a really powerful tool which allows us to do these things quite easily. For example, switching between two parts of the track precisely on the beat is something that wouldn’t otherwise be possible so easily, without an audio engineer or…

Like Shadow of the Colossus and Journey, FAR: Changing Tides’ interface is pleasingly minimal: with little in the way of visual prompts to clutter up the screen, you’re instead left to gradually figure out how the ship functions by yourself. “It comes from the idea that you have to learn the mechanics [of your ship], and it’s not just the game telling you things,” creative lead Don Schmocker tells us. “So you see that the engine’s overheating and you have to react to that. In a lot of situations, the player has to use their real-life knowledge, I would say – how things work instead of relying on game logic. It helps to make the mechanics more intuitive and makes it possible for the player to figure out how things…

You’ll find a careful balance of busyness and calm in Changing Tides, whether you’re operating the sail, stoking the engine, carrying out repairs, or simply watching the waves swell and the landscape drift by. On occasions, the hazy sky will darken, clouds will gather, and you’ll find yourself in the midst of a roiling storm. It’s all wonderfully poetic. For the occasions where wind-power won’t cut it, we headed below decks to fire up the ship’s engine. Again, there’s a mix of intricacy and simplicity: hopping on one switch gets the engine running, while hitting another feeds fuel into the furnace. Fuel takes the form of flotsam you’ll find outside the ship, and needs to be stowed on hooks in the belly of your craft. You’ll have to nip down…