edge - june 2016.pdf

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/edge-june-2016pdf 1/130

#293 JUNE 2016

REVIEWEDQUANTUM BREAK

STAR FOX ZERO

HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER

ADRIFT

EVE: VALKYRIE

RATCHET & CLANK

SALT & SANCTUARYCHRONOS

U N C H A R T E D 4 A S T R O N E E R G E A R S O F WA R 4

M I R R O R ’ S

E D G E

C A T A L Y S T

DICE REDEFINES

THE FIRSTPERSON

ACTION GAME

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Bothering Jeff Minter’s sheepfollowing a trip to Mute City We’ve heard it so many times. Some of us may have even uttered the wordsourselves: “This is great, but… imagine it in VR.” Now that we’ve spent timeimmersed in VR with all sorts of games and other applications, and forextended periods rather than simply dabbling, the inappropriateness of the

remark comes into grim focus. In compiling this issue’s Play section, for the firsttime in history a game caused one of our review staff to actually vomit.

Videogames have long held the potential to mess with our bodies’ delicatesystems. This parish’s own James Leach recalls a trip to see game designer

Jeff Minter 25 years ago: “We went to his cottage in deepest Wales. Wesaw a variety of llama-related titles he was developing, and then he showedoff his brand-new Super Famicom on a big TV. He had F-Zero, with its mightyMode 7 3D effects, and after a few minutes of both watching and playing it,my face went extremely cold and I had to go into the garden, where therewere three sheep. A pint of tea, mixed with a motorway breakfast and a Fry’sTurkish Delight, was ejected over the fence. I recall not wanting his sheep tograze on the fresh vomit, which was thoughtful of me. On the way back wehad to stop at the Severn Crossing services so that more spew could emerge.I did my best to avoid Mode 7 games after that. And lamb, for a while, too.” In a way, it all brings us back to what we were talking about in the intro ofE291 – that we should be increasingly disinclined to expect that what worksfor one person will chime with another. Plenty of you will be able to make it

through all of this issue’s VR games without turning green, after all.This month’s cover game, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst , is precisely the sort ofthing that would have once been naively held up as a made-to-ordercandidate for VR treatment. But, sensibly, it is being delivered in a contextmuch less likely to turn the stomach, as a PC, PS4 and Xbox One actionadventure played on an old-fashioned screen, with familiar controllers.Crucially, though, the team at DICE is putting in the effort to build upon thelustrous original in a series of innovative ways. Our report begins on p60.

Exclusive subscriber edition

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Explore the iPadedition of Edge foradditional content

Follow these linksthroughout the magazinefor more content online

4

42

gamesHype

36 Uncharted 4: A Thief’s EndPS4

42 Gears Of War 4 Xbox One

46 Super Hyper CubePSVR

50 Astroneer PC

52 ParagonPC, PS4

54 Return Of TheObra Dinn

PC

56 Hype Roundup

Play

100 Quantum Break Xbox One

104 Adrift PC, Rift

108 Star Fox Zero Wii U

110 EVE: Valkyrie PSVR, Rift

112 Chronos

Rift 114 Ratchet & Clank PS4

116 Hyper Light Drifter Ouya, PC, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

118 Dead Secret GearVR, PS3, PS4, Rift

119 Lucky’s Tale Rift

120 Trackmania Turbo PC, PS4, Xbox One

122 Salt & Sanctuary PS4, Vita

108

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


5

94

6

J UNE 2016

60

80

sections293

K now l ed g e8 The magic Touch? What does Oculus Touchmean for virtual reality’s future?

12 Survival of the quickestDo the prospects of UK studios liein their ability to change course?

16 Funny gamesMeet the comedians bringing videogames back to national TV

18 Make it sewThe academics teaming up withDisney to find the game in quilting

20 SoundbytesGame commentary in snack-sizedmouthfuls, featuring Danny DeVito

22 My Favourite GameMusician Jim Guthrie talks PS1demo discs and Resident Evil 4 24 This Month On EdgeThe things that caught our eyeduring the production of E293

Dispatches26 DialogueEdge readers share their opinions;one wins a New Nintendo 3DS XL 28 Trigger HappySteven Poole on Trump, politics,and treating kids like idiots

30 Big Picture ModeNathan Brown ponders the lotof the humble videogame PR rep

129 Postcards FromThe Clipping Plane

James Leach reveals his weeklysurveillance missions in Wiltshire

Fea tures 60 On Reflection With Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, DICEtakes stock of the original’s failingsand sets about redefining a genre

74 Collected WorksTetsuya Mizuguchi recalls a careerof painstaking research, field trips,and giving higher-ups headaches

80 Play N ice After 30 kids’ apps in five years,Toca Boca is growing up – andtaking its audience with it

88 The Making OfHow Thomas Happ’s Axiom

Verge went from hobbyist projectto critical and commercial darling

94 Studio Profile We visit Dontnod Entertainment,the young Parisian studio for which life really is strange

124 Time Extend A look back at Fable II, andhow Albion’s sophomore formrepresented Lionhead’s finest hour

74

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


6

Specialist Magazine Of The Year

EDITORIAL Tony Mott editor in chief Na than Brown deputy editor

Ben Maxwell writer Andrew Hind art editor

CONTRIBUTORSElizabeth Elliott, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, Will Freeman, Matthew Gilman, Ben Griffin,

James Leach, Emmanuel Pajó n, Simon Parkin, Steven Poole, Chris Schilling, Alvin Weetman

ADVERTISING Steven Pyatt account manager (+44 (0)1225 687713 steven.pyatt@ futurenet.com)

Michael Pyatt advertising manager Andrew Church advertising directorClare Dove commercial sa les director

CONTACT US

+44 (0)1225 442244 edge@ futurenet.com

SUBSCRIPTIONSUK reader order line and enquiries 0844 8482852

Overseas reader order line and enquiries +44 1604 250145O nline enquiries www.myfavouritemagazines.com

Email edge@ myfavouritemagazines.co.uk

MARKETING Laura Driffield group marketing manager Kristianne Stanton marketing manager

CIRCULATION

Juliette Winyard trade marketing manager (+44 (0)7551 150984)

LICENSINGRegina Erak senior licensing and syndication manager (regina.erak@ futurenet.com)

Tel: +44 (0)1225 442244 Fax (yes, really, fax): +44 (0)1225 732275

PRODUCTION & DISTRIBUTIONMark Constance production manager Nola Cokely production controller Jo Gay ad production controller

MANAGEMENT

Matthew Pierce editorial director, games, photography, creative & design Rodney Dive group senior art editor Joe McEvoy managing director, magazine division Nia l Ferguson content and marketing director

Printed in the UK by William Gibbons & Sons on behalf of Future. Distributed in the UK by Seymour Distribution Ltd,2 East Poultry Avenue, London, EC1A 9PT (+44 (0)207 42940 00). Overseas distribution by Seymour International.

All submissions to Edge are made on the basis of a licence to publish the submission in Edge magazine and its licensed editions worldwide. Any material

submitted is sent at the owner’s risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future Publishing Limited nor its agents shall be liable for loss or damage. While we make every effort possible to ensure that everything we print is factually correct, we cannot be held responsible if factual errors occur. Please check any quoted

prices and specs with your supplier before purchase. One day we’ll tell you about former Edge publisher James Binns and his Quake II-summoned hurl at ECTS.

All contents copy right © 2016 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rig hts reserved. No part of thismagazine may be reproduced, stored, transmitted or used in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept

any responsibility for errors or inaccuracies in such information. You are advised to contact manufacturers and retailers directly with regard to the price and otherdetails of products or services referred to in this publication. Apps and websites mentioned in this publication are not under our control. We are not responsiblefor their contents or any changes or updates to them. If you submit unsolicited material to us, you automatically grant Future a licence to publish your submission

in whole or in part in all editions of the magazine, including licensed editions worldwide and in any physical or digital format throughout the world. Any material you submit is sent at your risk and, although every care is taken, neither Future nor its employees, agents or subcontractors shall be liable for loss or damage.

Want to work for Future? Visit www.futurenet.com/jobs

Future, Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA United KingdomTelephone: +44 (0)1225 442244

Fax: +44 (0)1225 732275

Future is an award-winning international mediagroup and leading digital business . We reach morethan 49 million international consumers a monthand create world-class content and advertisingsolutions for passionate consumers online, on tablet& smartphone and in print.

Future plc is a publiccompany quotedon the LondonStock Exchangesymbol: FUTR).

www.futureplc.com

Chief executive Zillah Byng-MaddickNon-executive chairman Peter AllenChief nancialof cerRichard Haley

Tel +44 0)207 0424000 Lond on)Tel +44 0)1225 442244 Bath)

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Northway Gamesco-founders Colinand Sarah Northway

KNOWLEDGEOCULUS TOUCH

There’s an established ritual to beingdemoed a Rift game, demanding

passivity and obedience. Slip on theheadset, then place the hands forwardand pause – polite and isolated indarkness – ready for a gamepad tobe placed in your grasp. This familiar

procedure is already changing, though.The tweak is subtle, but open hands areno longer befitting to the ritual. OculusTouch may not yet be available publicly,but developers have clearly embraced it.Those waiting hands must now be heldflat, fingers tightly bunched, ready forthe wrist strap of Palmer Luckey’s handcontroller to be slid into place. At GDCthis year, it wasn’t the case that Touchcontrollers represented a rising trend;rather, they were close to the norm.

The reasons behind the shift aremanifold, and the impact on the Riftexperience is beguiling, whether being wowed by the intensity Touch controllersbring to Epic’s Bullet Train FPS demo, orexperiencing the tangibility they engenderin Northway Games’ construction-kit

puzzler Fantastic C ontraption. Virtual reality always needed a

hand-tracking solution, of course,because without it users try to reach outand grab anyway, especially duringformative VR experiences. That desireto grasp is an important one to VR’spotential to immerse, and it plays onsomething defining in the humanexperience: the opposable thumb.

“After you start working with VR, itbecomes really obvious why players

want to reach out,” explains NorthwayGames co-founder Colin Northway .“Our hands are the way we interact withthe world. There’s a giant part of thebrain dedicated to moving our handsaround, controlling things with our hands,using tools and picking things up. Our

hands are a big part of what being ahuman being is. So when you add handsinto the mix in VR, even without fingerdexterity, it makes you interact with thespace in a more normal way, and withless of a divorce from how you interactin the normal world.”

If VR’s trump card over traditionalscreen-based gaming is presence – thatextremely powerful feeling that makesthe virtual world feel like a reality –

Th e m agic Tou ch ?Oculus’s VR vision has become a reality, but what doesthe forthcoming Touch controller mean for its future?

8

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE Three Oculus Touch projects t hatillu st rate t he hardware’s use in a variet y of scenarios: SchellGames’ I Expect You To Die ; Harmonix ’s Rock Band VR ; Epic’sBullet Train demo, which put s a new spin on Time Crisis

Nort hway Games’ FantasticContraption may haveoriginally emerged back in2008, but it feels fresh asa Vive/Touch t it le i n 2016

THE TOYOF THEBEHOLDERUp close w ith Touch

Due for release later this year, the Touch hardwareessentially merges thefunction and form ofmotion controllers and atraditional pad, breakingthe latter in two so thateach half can be usedindependently. Itsconstellation trackingreads hand movements with striking precision,using the same sensor that

tracks the Rift user’s headposition. Traditional fasciabuttons, thumbsticks andtriggers, meanwhile, letplayers grab, press andselect. “I don’t think thequestion is about if thereare going to be a lotmore hand controllergames and tools for VR,”says Colin Northway.“It’s about if there’sgoing to be anynon-hand-controlledgames and tools.”

9

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


FROM TOP Jason Jerald,Nick Donaldson andGreg LoP iccolo

10

K N O W L E D G EO C U LU S T O U C H

then motion controllers such as Touch will be fundamental in establishing themedium. It’s a concept that has been atalking point within the academiccommunity for some time.

“As humans we have a visceraldesire to reach out and interact with the

world,” says VR researcher Jason Jerald,echoing Northway’s observations. “Arelatively large portion of the sensory andmotor cortexis devoted to the hands.

Without our hands, we’re confined to alargely passive experience of both thereal world and virtual worlds, and acting

with our hands enables us to feel like

we’re more part of the world.”The Touch controller’s ability to make

the VR experience feel more real is apowerful one, but what does it actuallymean for gameplay? The simple answeris tangibility and immediacy. Played withTouch controllers, ullet Train evokes thefeel of Time Crisis and its lightgun ilkbutplunges the forminto a completely 3D

world, where grabbing bullets fromtheair or crossing arms to fire two guns inopposite directions is equal partsinstinctive and exciting. In Rock and VR,meanwhile, a Touch controller clamped to

a traditional Rock and guitar controllerallows you to take your plastic axe with

you as you move fromthe physicalrealmto a virtual one, in the processrendering those air-guitar fantasies moreconvincing than ever before.

“In our case, the guitar is the channelthrough which the player impacts the

world, so for us, having a virtual guitar asa bridge between the physical and virtualis incredibly powerful,” says Harmonix creative lead Greg LoPiccolo. “It lets usfulfil players’ fantasies about what it mightbe like to actually play onstage, but

connected directly to their hands andmotion in a way that’s very intuitive andpowerful. For instance, we can visuallyrender the freestyle guitar solos with craz y

visual pyrotechnics, but since the visualsare flying out of the controller the playeris holding, it grounds the experienceand makes it very real and evocative.”

Implementing Oculus Touch in these ways has naturally come with its ownset of challenges, and the experimentalideas being explored by developers

are indicative of the uncharted spacethey’re moving into.

“We had to be careful to keep thingssimple in ullet Train,” says project leaddesigner Nick Donaldson. “To start with,

we had slow-motion and teleport on twodifferent Touch buttons, but people wouldfind themselves touching different buttons.That wasn’t quite right, so we made allthe buttons teleport. We had to find abalance of complexity around Touch, andthat was a very organic, natural process.”

Thus far, the development communityseems happy with the technical processof bringing Touch into

games – LoPiccolo’sassertion that it is “prettystraightforward” is entirelytypical – but there’s littlesense that the traditionalgamepad is in any dangerof being replaced.

“The part of our brainthat our hands use is reallygood at helping us usetools,” says NorthwayGames co-founderSarah Northway .“And something like an XboxOnecontroller is a really good tool for doing

certain complexjobs.”But one area where Touch outstrips

gamepads is in its potential forcommunication and expression. HTC’s

Vive controllers, and the Move controllersthat are compatible with PlayStation VR,also extend the player’s reach into agame environment, but the Touch solutionoffers a more instinctive interface. Whilethe option to naturally extend your thumbor forefinger in a game may seemlittlemore than a frivolous gimmickon paper,

it’s a remarkably powerful – and efficient– way to express yourself to other

players. Why trawl through an emotemenu when you can give two thumbs upto your fellow avatars? It’s no surprisethat Facebookfounder MarkZuckerbergpicks social VR as the most valuableavenue for Oculus Rift’s future.) And theadditional nuance of control this aspectencourages means developers cancreate puz z les and challenges that candistinguish between a fist and a proddingdigit – one behind-closed-doors demo wetried at GDC had us working through theprocesses of turning door knobs, flicking

light switches and

punching through glass. As for the future Touch

and its contemporaries areheralding, there’s an awfullot to lookforward to.Sam Watts of TammekaGames has experimented

with Touch control for thestudio’s futuristic racer,Radial-G, and while thesystemmay never be the

default for the game, he remainsconvinced that it has powerful potential.

“Oculus Touch and motion controls

add a level of immersion that’s notpossible with a gamepad,” he notes.“And Touch especially, for interactionsthat are hand-based – rather than, say,holding a weapon or tool – feels muchmore natural to use, allowing users toreally feel connected to the virtual world.That’s at a base level, but combined

with tracking a standing or movinguser in VR, then whole new genresemerge that haven’t necessarily beenprototyped or even designed yet.” n

Full hand tracking is the ul timate goal in VR interaction, but f or the t ime being Touch represents the mostcomprehensively featured controller. The tech won’t be available to Rift owners until later in 2016, however

10

It’s no surprise thatMark Zuckerbergpicks social VR asthe most valuableavenue for OculusRift’s future

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


FROM TOP Bossa’sHenrique Olifiers,Rebellion’s JasonKingsl ey, andBossa’s Imre Jel e

KNOWLEDGEUK STUDIOS

The closures of two of the UK’s most

highly regarded studios has raised

new questions about the region’s ability to

flourish in the ever-evolving videogame

industry. If the Microsoft-owned Lionhead

and Sony-owned Evolution can’t find

success on these shores in 2016, what

does it mean for British companies that

don’t have the backing of multinational,

platform-owning corporations?

In Bossa Studios, creator of SurgeonSimulator and the forthcoming Worlds

Adrift, we find an optimistic, albeit

realistic, perspective. “It’s a great time

here [in the UK], and then there are

challenges,” says Henrique Olifiers, thecompany’s co-founder and ‘gamer-in-

chief’. “If you look at things like the tax

breaks the UK industry received, there’s

some advantages we have now that we

asked for over many years, and we

finally got some help there. At the other

end of the spectrum, there’s less need to

use middlemen and publishers, and that’s

great. But then the market out there today

is very noisy, with a lot of competition.

So it’s hard, but it’s also a time when

it’s easier to do whatever you want.”

Steam’s explosion continues,

alongside an unrelenting tide of mobilereleases, while console gaming grows

increasingly accessible for developers.

Meanwhile VR and AR stand as rising

opportunities for devs, while games

continue to have commercial roles outside

of entertainment. But so broad are the

opportunities, and so numerous are those

embracing them, that the real challenge is

knowing where to place bets when the

leading platforms and markets are so

overcrowded. Placing all of your chips

on a modest range of IPs, genres or

technologies is a risky strategy, as

illustrated by the closure of Lionhead and

Evolution, two studios with extremely

narrow areas of interest.

“I think it’s a tough time for anyone in

a large studio that’s 100 per cent reliant

upon one IP to survive,” says DebbieBestwick , C EO of Team17 , the UK

company that was founded in 1990 and

has evolved its publishing ambitions in

recent years, supporting a roster of

up-and-coming indie teams, including

Playtonic, whose Yooka-Laylee it will

publish this year.

“It’s high-risk, hencewhy we’re seeing the

closures that we are,”

Bestwick says. “W hen you

hear crazy stories of game

X or Y needing to sell five

or ten million copies to

break even, that’s an

insane situation to be in.”

Bestwick notes that

studio overheads – often

adding up to 50 per cent beyond

the base cost of a game’s actual

development budget – borne by some

firstparty studios and large publisher-owned operations make it tough to

embrace the experimental spirit that has

resulted in so much success within games

in recent years. O lifiers recognises the

increasing need for flexibility. “We’re in

an industry of transition,” he says. “It

always is in the games industry. Every

couple of years you might need to reboot

your whole thing as a studio. Maybe

that’s a problem for some. Perhaps some

have been set in their ways for too long.”

The ability to adapt has defined

Bossa’s success. Since its formation,

the studio has worked on small mobile

games, technologically ambitious VR

projects, and jam-made curios that have

defined the Let’s Play movement, along

with countless concepts that never made

it beyond the drawing board. Bossa’s

approach – begin with a diverse range

of creatively interesting ideas, then look

at if they can be successful, and if the

prospects look uncertain, let go – has

given it the flexibility to flourish while

other companies, manacled to single

concepts and defined by

them, have struggled.“It’s Darwinian,” O lifiers

says. “You have to be

prepared to evolve to

survive. There’s a place

for specialised studios, of

course, but specialising too

much today can prove

extremely difficult. There’s

limited space for those

who can’t change.”

But then that’s easier said than done

– a fact Bossa knows well. “Things just

go badly sometimes,” says Imre Jele, thestudio’s co-founder and creator-in-chief.

“And sometimes it can be hard to pivot

the direction of the studio, either because

it’s not in the nature of the people that run

a studio to make that choice, or because

the company is locked into a contract,

limited by its owner or something. The

game industry is in constant change,

so we have to be ready to change, too.

Some companies in certain situations –

whether it’s their fault or somebody

Su rv iv a l o fthe qu ick es t As high-profile closures hit hard, do the prospects

of UK studios lie with their ability to change course?

12

“I think it’s a toughtime for anyone ina large studio thatis 100 per centreliant upon oneIP to survive”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


13

Bossa’s diverse approach means it ’s as happy on touchscreen devices as it i s PCs, wit h aroster including I Am Bread , Surgeon Simulat or and the fort hcoming Worlds Adrif t (above)

Wit h t it les such as SniperElite 4 ( above), Rebellionspreads it s act ivit ies acrossPC and console. Battlezone is another of its mult iformatgames, set t o debut on PSVR

Team17, which got it s st artduring t he Amiga era, count sthe high-profile Yooka-Laylee ,from t he creators of Banjo- Kazooie , among its l ineup

A SMALLSOLUTIONHow one indie isfacing the challengeof diversi cation

Keeping a studio small insize can make it mucheasier to be flexible, andit’s given people such asAj G rand-Scrutton (above)the opportunity to take a view of the challengesfacing today’s developers. As CEO of Dlala, he ’salready worked in a variety o f environments,on contrasting projects, while the company thrivesas it approaches its fourthbirthday. Dlala partnered with Team17 to releaseparty game Overruled;before then, it had gone italone, and experimentedfor a time operating within Microsoft’s LiftLondon. Subsequentlythe team has worked ongovernment-training gameprojects, and it continuesto work on its own titles.“I think the single biggestmistake anyone runninga studio makes is basingthe company’s future on

projections,” Grand-Scrutton says. In three tofive years, he points out,the game developmentlandscape can changeconsiderably. “My rule isI don’t base our studio oninvisible money. I makesure we have the deals we need to keep thestudio running and thecontracts are sorted soif it gets killed randomly,it doesn’t give us onlythree months to survive.”

1313

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


14

KNOWLEDGEUK STUDIOS

else’s – can’t adapt to changes, andthat can be the end of them.”

Looking at Sony’s official statementconcerning Evolution’s closure, it’s clearthat platform holders themselves have tobe equally agile, which comes with acost. When huge global videogamecompanies adapt in order to survive, itcan result in entire studios falling, puttingimmense pressure on individuallivelihoods. “Regular reviews take placethroughout SCE Worldwide Studios,ensuring that the resources that we havein such a competitive landscape cancreate and produce high-quality,innovative and commercially viableprojects,” the statement reads. “As partof this process we have reviewed andassessed all current projects and plansfor the short and medium term and havedecided to make some changes to theEuropean studios structure.”

If Sony is demonstrating theincreasingly important ability to changecourse, then Evolution’s staff are victimsof a global machination rather than aUK-specific downturn. Writing on theofficial Xbox blog, Hanno Lemke, GMof Microsoft Studios Europe, revealed

a similar story concerning Lionhead’sclosure: “These changes are taking effectas Microsoft Studios continues to focusits investment and development on thegames and franchises that fans find mostexciting and want to play.” The logicbehind the closures isn’t tied to the UK,then, but rather the entire state of the videogame market.

In the midst of significant upheaval within the British game developmentscene, we can still find well-establishedstudios that continue to succeed without

shifting their ethos in order to followtrends. Oxford’s Rebellion is one of themost famous. Founded in 1992, thecompany deploys over 180 staff acrosstwo UK teams, maintaining its output ofconsole and PC titles, usually within therealms of sci-fi, military and fantasygenres, sometimes calling on the jewelin its IP crown, the 2000AD library, which it has owned for 16 years.

Yet despite all of those constants –and the company’s size – Rebellion

points to agility, diversity andexperimentalism as reasons behind itssuccess nearly a quarter of a century on.“I don’t think it’s that much of a secret,really,” says CEO and creative directorJason Kingsley of his studio’s lastingsuccess. “Chris [Kingsley, studioco-founder] and I just love making stuff we’re interested in, whether that’s buying2000AD because we read the comic askids, or creating the Sniper Elite gamesbecause we love our history.

“I suppose if I was looking at it fromthe outside, you can see we’ve been atour best when we’ve been forced to thinkon our feet. I definitely see parallelsbetween our early years, fighting todeliver Alien Vs Predator

and doing things we’dnever done before, andnow, when we’re self-publishing multiple gamesand learning to thrive withall these new challenges.”

Kingsley says thattalented, experienced staff,a diverse IP catalogue,and a suite of internaldevelopment technologyalso help, allowing Rebellion to reactquickly to opportunities. As for what theLionhead and Evolution closures mean for

the UK dev scene, he’s not of the beliefthat it paints a picture of a region indecline, and agrees that it’s part of abroader trend.

“I’m probably not alone in sayingthat all of these closures and layoffs werean unwelcome surprise, but I don’tbelieve they represent the health of UKgame development,” he says. “Theseevents all reflect business decisionsmade by multinational companies ratherthan the abilities of the UK developers

caught in the middle. It’s a blow, for sure,but as for the wider development sceneI think it’s very healthy.”

For Bestwick, there’s confidence aboutthe future of UK studios and a predictionthat the situation is set to improve ratherthan worsen. “I’m incredibly positive,” shesays. “Team17 is having the best time in25 years, as are a number of other [UK]businesses, such as Rebellion, Frontierand Sumo. Then we have success storiesincluding Facepunch, Ndemic andChucklefish – all these guys have soldmultimillion-unit games, and they’re allbased here in the UK.”

“With the support of organisations likeBAFTA Games, UKIE, The London GamesFund, even the Wellcome Trust, there issuch a strong network around UKstudios,” adds an equally optimistic Jele.“And now university courses here arereally strong. It’s getting really exciting,and as long as you’re always looking atthe next areas that could be big, I thinkstarting a games company in the UKtoday is a very clever idea.”

With the Fable Legends project nowofficially shut down, Lionhead’s talented

staff will disperse in all sorts

of directions, some possiblyeven setting up studios oftheir own. For Evolution,however, the story hastaken a positive turn withthe announcement thatanother UK industrystalwart, Codemasters,is stepping in to employthe core DriveClub team.“We want to benefit

from everything that they’ve learned asa team toge ther,” Codemasters CEOFrank Sagnier told GamesIndustry. “The

whole point is to keep their DNA andbuild a new game.” On Sony’s decisionto close Evolution, Sagnier forecasts onlya positive outcome: “In terms of whythese big businesses make thesedecisions, there are many differentreasons for that. It’s often an opportunityfor new startups. But this is a great thingfor the UK industry, that we’re able tobuild this racing powerhouse – a UKstudio that’s hopefully going to bethe world number one in racing.” n

BY THE NUMBERS As the organisationsthat monitor thehealth of UK gamedevelopment havechanged over t he pastten years, so has theshape of t he data theyproduce. It makesconsistent comparisonof the UK scene overtime testing for eventhe most devotedanalysts, but there’senough to go on toget a sense of thedirection in which theregion is moving.

In 2005, now-defunct trade bodyELSPA reported t hat

22,190 people workedin games within t heUK, some 6,000 ofthose at st udios.

At the time thatrepresented a year-on-

year climb overall, buta fall in numbersactually makinggames. Some ten yearslater, the trade bodyhad become UKIE,

which, working withinnovation charityNESTA, found 1,902game companies inthe UK in 2014 anincrease of 22 percent over two years,and a figure that,

considering studiosizes, suggests aparallel increasein headcount.

UK industry bodyTIGA, meanwhile,found in its ownresearch that across2013/14 closure ratesfell by 30 per cent,

while throughout 2014industry headcountclimbed some ten percent across the UK. For2016’s numbers t o bepooled and published,the wait will go agood way into 2017,but t his year followsconsistent growth in

terms of t he numbersof people andcompanies makinggames in the UK,against an uncertaineconomic backdrop.

14

“These events allreflect businessdecisions ratherthan the abilities ofthe UK devs caughtin the middle”

DriveClub will live on as a PSVR tit le, but its coredev team is now focused on a new racing project

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


KNOWLEDGEGO 8- BIT

V ideogame-triggered outbursts onmainstream TV arguably peaked

back in the ’90s with Dave Perry’sinfamous GamesMaster hissy fit. Butcomedy duo Steve McNeil and SamPamphilon are determined to top hisstroppy effort with Go 8-Bit, a TV version(commissioned by UK channel Dave)of their Edinburgh live show in whichinebriated comedians play gamesagainst each other. The live show wasoriginally developed in 2013 while thepair were working on a sitcom together.

“We had this other idea for a show where we got comedians drunk and gotthem to be rude to each other while theyplayed Mario Kart,” McNeil tells us.“We figured we could probably chargedrunken Scottish people

£ 10 to watch that, so we just did it for fun. Andthen it became far moresuccessful than any of thejokes we’d been writingfor the past five years,so we kept doing it ”

Though the pair callits early iteration an“unbroadcastable, base,drunken mess”, the TVshow, which has been two-and-a-half years in the making, retains the spirit ofthe Fringe experience. McNeil and

Pamphilon retain their team captain roles, with fellow comedian Dara Ó Briainjoining the lineup as host, and it still pitsguest comedians against each other ona variety of games. But the live show’sforfeits, which saw losing teams drinkhorrendous savoury cocktails or playSnake with a real 14-foot python drapedover them, have gone in favour of agreater focus on the games themselves.

Each hour-long episode is split intofive rounds across four parts. “The first

part is a classic game that your mum’sheard of, like Pac-Man or Space

Invaders,” McNeil explains. “In parttwo we let all the guest comedians picktheir favourite game and do two mini

challenges on that. In part three we do amodern title, so maybe something on theRift or an indie title like G ang Beasts.Then in part four we’re creating aphysicalisation of a classic videogamethat in some way enhances and grows it.That might be new ways to use controls where the entire audience play eachother at Pong or Track & Field, but we’realso talking about physical versions ofgames that we can somehow controlusing videogame tech. [Dave is] lettingus get away with it, so it seems silly not

to waste all their money

on some shenanigans.”Broadcasters have had

a difficult time with games,struggling to represent themin a way that works withinestablished TV formats without alienating broaderaudiences, or turningplayers off by beingpatronising. It’s a difficultbalance to strike.

“We’ve been talking about this a lot,”McNail says. “It was surprising to see theamount of coverage [the show’s] got and

the amount of conversation that’s beengoing on about it. And it’s taken us yearsto get any sort of videogame thing on alarge channel. Telly is funny: we camefrom comedy, and maybe five years agothe received wisdom was that sitcoms were single-camera things shot without anaudience – things like The Office – andthat studio sitcoms were rubbish 1970sthings. And then Miranda was incredibleand all of a sudden it became thereceived wisdom that studio sitcoms

were funny and actually single-camerastuff wasn’t the way to do it any more.

“I think what we hope is that if we getthis right, rather than the received wisdombeing that you can’t put games on telly

because it’s not fun to watch other peopledo a thing, all of sudden everybody will want to make their own videogamingshow – and obviously that will be a wonderful thing because with Twitch, Youtube etc and all of the people puttingtheir stuff online and drawing in massiveaudiences and making far more moneythan anyone on telly, we know thatpeople want to see this.“

“Telly does want that audience,”Pamphilon says, “and it does recognisethe scale of the gaming community. But

if you’re a commissioning editor just tryingto pay for your house in Kent, you’ve gotto be pretty brave to put your neck on theline if nobody else has had the balls.So we’d best not screw it up.”

Despite the territory being delicate,McNeil and Pamphilon thankfully haveno intention of playing it safe with Go8-Bit . “In this show we’re not going tobe afraid to talk about games, and we’re not going to apologise for it,”Pamphilon says. “The show will becompetitive, it will have comedians in it –ones that we really like and know are

going to be really funny – and so thetopic almost doesn’t matter. Except it doesmatter because it’s a topic we feel verystrongly about, so we don’t need to worry about how niche it can get. Imean, we’re probably not going getinto a 30-minute conversation aboutShenmue because that would probablyalienate… well, nearly everybody. Buttopics are interesting if they’re discussedby interesting people, so I don’t thinkit’s going to be a problem.” n

Fu n n y gam esHow a new videogame panel show is tryingto kickstart an enlightened age of TV gaming

6

“We gotcomedians drunkand got them to berude to each other while they playedMario Kart”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Go 8-Bit’s stage version pictured) will return in the f uture, but t he TV show is the focus for t he time being, with Dave scheduling it to air in the autumn

McNeil left ) and Pamphilonhave been working togetherfor seven years. Visitmcneilandpamphilon.comto see clips of them in action

17

MASSIVELYMULTIPLAYERThere’s innovativetechnology to go

with the laughs

McNeil and Pamphilonalso host a spinoff stageshow called Wi-Fi Warsin which entire audiencescompete against eachother, and the tech behindit will feature in Go 8-Bit.Pamphilon explains:“Everything took a bit of aturn when someone weknew for a while – a guy

called Rob Sedgebeer, whose other half wasactually one of the fewfans of our double act…”“The fan, you might say,”McNeil interjects. “Hello,Carol!” Pamphilon: “Robcame to us with this ideafor some technology thatcould beam the gamesinto your phone, so that you can play them onthe big screen with us.That lifted the showto a different level.”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


MAKE IT SEWThe academics teaming up with Disney’sR& D aim to nd the game in quilting

The sewing-machine version of quilting game Threadsteading is, to an extent, the title’s ‘handheld’ port. After all, the original version was created for a rather less portable contraption –a 13ft-wide quilting machine, housed in the textiles lab atDisney Research in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Threadsteading itself bears loose comparison with area-control tabletop games, but here the ‘board’ is a piece of fabric,upon which two players – using a control panel hacked into theguts of a sewing machine via an Arduino – sew their gameplayprogress into place. The w inner doesn’t just walk away victorious – they also get to keep the quilt they c reated, whichmust be replaced with a fresh fabric panel for the next game.

The project came about after Gillian Sm ith, an assistantprofessor in Game Design and Computer Science atNortheastern University, met Lea Albaugh, research associateat Disney Research, at 2015’s Different Games Conference.They started by assembling a team of academics and

researchers around them with a shared interest in craft andgame design. Come the summer of that same year, the pairpulled their collaborators together for a week of game jammingto see how they could best harness their 13ft giant as anentertainment platform.“We wanted to create an interactiveexperience that would show how we can use these machinesin new and interesting ways,” Smith explains. “I’m fascinatedby how using different kinds of controllers and materials canprompt us to create new kinds of games.”

While Threadsteading’s platform is striking, its mostinteresting feature is the way in which its gameplay mechanicsare inspired by the rules and practicalities of quilt making.Playing well engenders – to a degree – producing anaesthetically consistent, authentic quilt; a spin on consumeras creator possibly unique to games today. n

8

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


KNOWLEDGETHREADSTEADING

19

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


20

KNOWLEDGETALK/ARCADE

Soundby te sGame commentary in snack-sized mouthfuls

“I think it’s safe to say that

we unde res t ima tedth e popu lar it y of some of thesingleplayer features.”

ARCADE WATCHKeeping an eye on thecoin-op gaming scene

Game The War Of Currents:

Tesla Vs Edison

Manufacturer Real Art Whil e certain poorly maint ainedold cabinets in t he dark cornersof seaside arcades might give you pause be fore you lay handson t hem, some machines aredeliberately out to electrocute you. T he latest example is a 2Dbeat ’em up f rom Ohio-basedcreative outfit Real Art. Unveiledat S SW, the one -off machinesees digitised representation s ofNikola Tesla and Thomas Edisongo at it o ver electrical standards.

The War f Currents off ers ascant f our stages and the t itu larpair of characters with which t odo battle. Land enough hits and you’ll build up a charge of energy

that can be released as a specialmove which zaps your onscreenopponent and causes massivedamage, while also sending asmall electrical charge to thehand of whoever’s grasping themachine’s oth er me tal joystick.Naturally, as an incentive to avoidlosing, it proves a litt le moreeffective than simple pride.

The striking yellow-and-blackupright cabinet caters for thegame’s simple mechanics withdual two-button and stickcontrols, and rejects the fashionfor eno rmous screensfor something a littlemore int imate. Whil e t he cabinetis a bespoke build,it’s now t aken uppermanent residenceat Real Art ’s partnerproject, ProtoBuildbar, acombination ofmaker spaceand café wherepeople can buildand print theircreations, whichhappens to beright next doorto Real Art.

“ I ’m no t a b i gf a n o f ‘ X bo x O ne -

and - a - ha l f ’ . If we’regoing to move forward,I want to move forwardin big numbers.”

You can have this one forfree, Phil Spencer: Xbox360 has a nice ring to it

“Wha tt h e f u ck is Poké mon?”

Actor Danny DeVito provesthat ignorance truly is bliss

We’ve got a great joke about this, Yoshinori Ono. We’llbe releasing a word of it per week over the next six months

“ The r e w as not ax pay er m oneyinvo l ved , and I take

full responsibility. I’mgoing to pay everythingback… with interest.”California Republican Duncan Hunter, who ‘accidentally’ spent$ 1,300 of campaign funding on Steam. Look, we’ve all done it A

P / P r e s s A s s o c i a t i o n I m a g e s

A P / P r e s s A s s o c i a t i o n I m a g e s

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


A ward-winning Canadian musician J im Guthr ie is a prolific solo artist

and has recorded as a member ofIslands, Human Highway and Royal City.He has also created or contributed to thesoundtracks of Superbrothers: SwordSworcery EP, Planet Coaster and IndieGame: The Movie, and is scoring XboxOne title Below . His game career, though,had its beginnings on PlayStation kit…

Before Sword & Sworcery’s darkelectronica, you were a rock/folkart ist. How did you make that leap? A friend gave me a PS1, but I was so

broke I used to play a lot of demos fromOfficial PlayStation Magazine coverdiscs. One of them had MTV MusicGenerator on it. I still have a PSOne witha folding screen that I use to composemusic on from time to time. Craig Adamsgot in touch because he was a fan of mymusic. I ended up sending him a CD ofmusic I’d made on the PlayStation, andhe really dug it. We stayed friends andthen maybe six years later he asked meto work on Swords Sworcery. He lovedthose recordings so much we ended upusing them. I’d had the opportunity to do

ad work, scoring a film and a few otherthings, but games gave me my firstopportunity to stretch myself as aninstrumental composer.

That visual and aural aesthetic hasbecome quit e fashionable now. Yeah. I remember when I did SwordSworcery I was shocked that there weren’t more people from indie rock andother places making music for games.The more we can mash that up, the better.

Composing for videogames wasn’t

always in your sights, then?I think if I knew I could compose musicfor games when I was 16, I would havegone in that direction. But when you’re16, that stuff just seems out of reach.

How has the process of composingfor Below felt different?It’s a slightly different group of people –it’s still with Capy, but Craig’s not there.Kris Piotrowski is the creative director – helikes what I do, and I love the way hethinks, so it’s basically him trying toplease me trying to please him. The

soundtrack is very differentto Sword Sworcery – it’smuch more droney andatmospheric, and there’snot really beats as much,and not as many melodies you can hold on to. We’retrying to set moods thataren’t spoonfed at everymoment – it’s more like we’re laying out these blankets and youjust lay on them and roll around a bit.

Planet Coaster feels like a surprising

addition to your CV.[Frontier’s] Janesta Boudreau got in touchand knew my indie and folk stuff from way back when, and was like, “I don’tknow what you’re up to, but I know you’ve done games in the past and I’m working on this thing – I think you mightbe a really good fit”. As a self-employedguy, I’m always up to hear about a newjob. Basically, when they said they lovedmy stuff, they had me right there. And I’dbeen making so much dark, scary music

for Below that it was really fun to just

strum on an acoustic again. The way theypitched it to me was that they were goingto have this kind of game music thathappens on the rides, but then I wouldcreate other stuff which is almost, as theyput it, ‘anti-game music’. It’s a really easysell if you say, “You know that thing you’ve been doing for the past 20 yearsand not making that much money doing? Just do that some more, but here, we’lltotally pay you to do it.” It’s like, “Are youkidding me, you just want me to be me?”That’s a huge compliment, and hopefullyit’s a huge compliment to them for me to

recognise that I think thatit’s a little risky or weird, ina way, to put that in there.

So which game is yourpersonal favourite? Well, I’ve spent just asmuch time playing MTVMusic Generator as anyother game, so it’s either

that or Resident Evil 4. I’d played RE1,but then didn’t play any of the other ones. And RE4 really stuck out in the catalogueof what was available on the Wii. I

played a whole lot and I thought aboutit all the time – I loved the combat, the weapons and the music. And the totallyridiculous dialogue. I’ve probablyfinished it 20 times – there was a lot ofreplayability. And it wouldn’t make youfeel like a jerk if you weren’t good at it –it was monitoring how accurate yourshots were, and how well you weredoing, and if you weren’t very good atit, when you got to the harder levels it wouldn’t throw more people at you. n

SUPER BROTHER

Guthrie released hisfirst solo album, AThousand Songs, in2001 on Three GutRecords. He put outtwo more before

working with DarkFlute Records torelease his Sword &Sworcery LP and IndieGame: The Moviesoundtracks, along

with a collect ion ofhis MTV Generatorcompositions calledChildren Of The Clone.

Along with his solo work and bands,Guthrie hascollaborated on a

variety of otherprojects with othermusicians and alsosupplied a song forthe recent remakeof Amplitude . Visitjimguthrie.org formore info and tolisten to his music.

“I still have a

PSOne with a

folding screen that

I use to compose

music on from

time to time”

My Favourite Game Jim Guthrie

The Sword & Sworcery composer and indie musician discussescomposing on PS1, ‘anti-game music’, and Resident Evil 4

KNOWLEDGEFAVOURITES

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


2323

Guthr ie first made his markon that most hi-t ech ofform ats, the audio cassett e.The analogue delights oft he humble pinball tablefeel l ike a good fit , t hen

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


KNOWLEDGETHI S MONTH

WEBSITEDiablo proposal

www.bit .ly/diabloproposalDiablo creator David Brevik

has uploaded the now coffee-stained seven-page proposalhe used to pitch the gameback in ’94. The document wasput together while Brevik wasst ill working at Condor, thestudio he founded (read morein E286’s Collected Works).Brevik envisioned the game asa turn-based Roguelike wit hrandomly generated dungeons.

While the game wouldeventually transform into t heauthored, realt ime action RPGthat revolutionised the genre,the proposal’s introductionreveals t hat the spirit of whatDiablo became was t here fromthe start. “As games todaysubstitut e gameplay with

multimedia extravaganzas,”it reads, “and strive t owardneedless scale and complexity,

we seek to reinvigorate thehack-and-slash, feel-goodgaming audience.”

VIDEOThe Faking Of…Nint endo NX

www.bit .ly/nxf ake With Nintendo’s NX due this year but still unseen, Internet wags and Photoshop fanshave much to keep themoccupied. None will go to t helengths Frank Sandqvist did

with his NX controller fake, which used a Photoshopmockup of a controller withbuilt-in screen that mostonlookers saw through –or hoped they did. Here,Sandqvist shows a st ep-by-step breakdown of how he

used a 3D printer, laser-cutt ingtool and spraypaint t o mockup a device one Nintendofansite called ‘terrifying’. Afascinating look behind thescenes of a very modern hoax.

WEB GAMEScience Kombat

www.bit .ly/scik ombat Brazilian science-and-culturemagazine Superinteressante

covers its subject matter in alight, accessible fashion. It’san ethos that carries over wellfrom the styleguide to t hischarmingly bonkers fightinggame that pits scientificlegends against one another ina fight to the flashing-neon KOscreen. Alan Turing summons aflying robot Steven Hawkinghas a teleport and on thisevidence Pythagoras hadmastered the Kamehamehalong before Dragon Ball Z arrived on the scene. It’s notexactly an educational tool,unless you want to send youroffspring to school believingIsaac Newton’s pioneeringrole in physics also involved

shooting rainbow lasers outof a cane. Those who find t hesciences a turnoff might preferSuperinteressante’s previousgame in this mould, thelogically titled Philosofighters .

TWEETSI was a participant in a conversation tonight

which involved Tetsuya Nomura sending usapproximately 140 pictures of his cats.

James Mie lke @ jamesmielkeCreative director, Bitsummit

Steam alone has like 9 different notificationboxes, I don’t see a way to tell it to just STFU.

Jonat han Blow @ Jonathan_BlowCreator, The Witness

Fun Firewatch fact: I am the hand behind allof Brian’s writing because I have the scrawlof a 13-year-old child.Olly Moss @ ollymossGraphic designer

Just looked at some old buses in VR. Jef f Mint er @ llamasoft_ ox Founder, Llamasoft

Dy ing p r ideFable Legends is gonefor good. The Edge cover curse strikes again

Miinono A small tip for nexttime, Nintendo: fewerpush notifications

Mar ke t - s t a l l m e r ch… butDSIII deservesbetter than its subparofficial clothing line

S um m o n e l seIf we’re going to help you, you really haveto stay alive for a bit

Da rw i n w i n s aga inCodemasters stepsinto the breach by

snapping up Evolution

Mi it om oOffers literally hoursof fun. OK, an hour.

All right, 20 minutes

Dragon ’s Dogm aNamco’s Dark Souls/ Affleck mashup was

an instant classic…

S um m o n g r e at After a month of offline

Souls, all these co-oppartners are a delight

W hen we weren’t doing everything else we were thinking about stuff like this

THIS MONTH ON EDGEcon t inueBOOK

Indie Games: The Complet e Int roduct ion To Indie Gaming www.bit .ly/indiedive r

Vice videogames editor Mike Diver moved into game journalismfrom a career championing new music for Drowned In Sound. He

continues to back the underdog in his first book, which looks at thetumultuous indie development scene. This isn’t an industry text, but

rather a finely presented compendium of games aimed at people who might not have heard of them. Diver tackles the evolution ofthe industry, digital marketplaces and mobile, as well as examining

broader topics such as horror, emotional empathy and spacethrough an indie-centric lens, along the way speaking to indie

luminaries including Sean Murray, Tim Schafer and David Braben.

qu i t

24

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Organised byIn partnership with

Media Partner Media PartnerMedia Partner Media Partner Media Partner Media Partner

Media Partner Media Partner Media PartnerMedia Partner Partner

B o o k b y 2 7 A p r il fo r

b e s t r a te s – p a s s e s

fr o m ju s t £ 9 0 !

D e v e l o p i s a v e r y i m p o r t a n t p l a c e - i t ’ s o n e o f t h e f e w d e v e l o p e r

f o c u s s e d c o n f e r e n c e s w e h a v e i n E u r o p e a n d t h a t m a k e s i t v e r y v a l u a b l e .

R a m i I s m a i l , l a m b e e r

W H A T ’ S N E W F O R 2 0 1 6 ?

N e w f o r t h e C o n f e r e n c e

G a m e s F u n d in F o r u m

L o o k in g a t s o lu tio n s fo r fi n a n c in g y o u r g a m e

G a m e s F u n d in W o r k sh o p

P r a c t ic a l w o rk s h o p to h e lp in d ie s p r e p a r e fo r fu n d r a is in g

V R T ra c k

W ill e x p lo r e e v e r y a s p e c t o f V R a c r o s s a ll d is c ip lin e s

N e w f o r t h e E x p o

N e w f o r N e t w o r k i n g

V R G a lle r y

T h e la te s t g a m e s a n d h a r d w a re o n d is p la y

fo r y o u to e x p e r ie n c e

M e e t in Z o n e

o r e sp a c e fo r b u s in e s s m e e tin g s

M e e t@ D e v e lo p

O n lin e e e t in g P la n n e r - d o n ’t le a v e

y o u r b u s in e s s m e e tin g s to c h a n c e ,

p r e - b o o k th e m a n d g e t m o r e o u t o f

y o u r v is it .

****************************************************

T r a c k s

e v o l v e f u n d i n g b u s i n e s s v r m a r k e t i n g d e s i g n a r t c o d i n g a u d i o i n d i e

D E E L O P : B R I G H T O N I S B A C K !

C o m e a n d jo in o v e r 18 0 0 d e v e lo p e r s fo r E u r o p e ’s le a d in g g a m e d e v c o n fe r e n c e

C o n v e r t in a n Et a b lis h e d G e n r e in to V R :P itfa lls a n d

O p p o r tu n it ie s

a r tin d e R o n d e , V a n g u a r d

F r o m 2 T o 1 3 . G r o w in F r o m N o t h in a n d W o r k in W ith

T h e “ B i B o y s ”

A j G r a n d - S c r u t to n , D la la S t u d io s

Le ts T a lk N a r ra t iv e w ith R h ia n n a P r a tc h e t t

R h ia n n a P ra tc h e t t, A w a rd - w in n in g W rite r

D o n ’t F o r e t th e Ee b a lls :D e v e lo p in C o m p e llin

G a m e s fo r e S p o r t s A u d ie n c e s

Ia n S h a r p e , A zb u

C o m m u n it y - d r iv e n G a m e D e v e lo p m e n t T h r o u h

In n o v a t iv e M a r k e tin A n a ly t ic s

A m m a r J a w a d , R a d ia n t W o r ld s

H a rn e s s in th e P o w e r o f th e C r o w d to G e t Y o u r G a m e

N o t ic e d

K a t e R u s s e ll, J o u r n a lis t, R e p o r te r a n d A u th o r

W h a t N o t to D o a s a S ta r tu p

E lla R o m a n o s , S trik e G a m e la b s

D e v e lo p :B r i h t o n 2 0 1 6 O p e n in K e y n o t e :

Le e n d s o n t h e F u t u r e : H id e o K o jim a in C o n v e rs a tio n w ith a rk C e r n y

S E S S I O N S I N C L U D E :

********************************************

R

F u n d i n g

F u n d i n g

D e s i g n

E v o l v e

M a r k e t i n g

B u s i n e s s

I n d i e

w w w . d e v e l o p c o n f e r e n c e . c o m

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


26

DISPATCHES

JUNE mean we’d get a match in m ult iplayergames. We tried a Vive FPS onl ine t he ot herday. Seven people were playing it worldw ide.

Ul t im a te evo l u t i onNormal development s wit hin t he gaming world don’ t necess arily int eres t me t hatmuch. I’m probably a closet cynic, quietlycrit icising everythin g from a distance.However, wit h t he long-await ed public releaseof t he Oculus R ift , and its potent ial t o bring v ir t ual reali ty (a feature t hat I never t ru lybelieved would reach t he average consum erso soon) to t he living room, the fut ure ofgami ng appears bright. No longer rest rict edto t he game developers and very wealt hy t hat

we admi re onli ne, I ’m actuallyhopeful t hat I w ill one day gett o t ry and maybe, just maybe,own a VR set m yself.

For the first t ime in a long whil e I ’m exci t ed about t he

fut ure of gaming. After all t hedisappoint ment of the ‘next-gen’ consoles (which are under-powered, to say t he least ), v ir t ual reali ty promis es aunique way of playing ourbeloved videogames all over

again. Over the years games have attemptedto offer us players more and more ways t oimmerse ourselves; to leave realit y andescape complet ely int o virt ual bliss .T echnological breakt hroughs t hat I readabout and observ e always appear decadesaway f rom reaching someone like m e, who

occasionally invests h is st udent l oan innew gaming t ech.

However, things have now changed. Vir t ual reali ty is real ; it’s on t he market .I know t his is t rue because Valve keepsreminding me on St eam t hat ‘VR IS H ERE’.T hese bold words remind me t hat I’m n ot insom e lucid dream sequence. No, t hose fancyheadset s you’ve jealous ly seen ot hers use cannow be yours f or m any, many pound coin s.I was hugely worried about t he whole ideabeing anot her gimmick, like 3D. I t hink I

Coin du ng eon Whenever I t hink about v ir t ual reali ty I get adeep feeling about i ts scale t hat overwhelmsme. We used t o see VR just as a new fancyand curious gadget, but it has m uch m ore tooffer besides funny m oment s. It ’s offering usa whole new world of possibilities to explore.It ’s not a just a different videogameexperience, but a whole new medium whichis going to m ake an im pact on entert ainment ,science, t ourism, cinema, T V…

Vir t ual reali ty developers now have t heability to im merse t he player completely;t hey can alm ost l it erally t ransport u s t oother worlds, because t he limit at ions of t hescreen don’t exist any more. It reminds mea lit t le of t he leap from 2D t o3D graphics: everyone knewit was going to be somet hingbig, but I’m sure none of uscould have imagined t hepoint we’ve reached today.

Forget about physicalborders. We won’t have t opretend we are som ewhere everagain; we will sim ply be t here.T hat ’s going to cause a lot oft rouble. Avoiding real- worldobstacles (be t hat t he screen,t he controller, or your mum taking youout of t he experience) has a price; not onlya monetary one, but also a philos ophicalone. Constantly exchanging realities isn’tt he best way t o st ay sane. T he disconnectionfrom realit y wil l att ain levels t hat we havenever s een before.

Also, new t echnol ogies are never cheap.Costs w ill be reduced wit h t ime, but whathappens in t he meanti me? We can answert his wit h anot her question: what happenedt he last t ime a gaming t echnology was tooexpensive for our lit t le pockets? T he retu rnof retro gamerooms may not be far away.Sergio Abreu Garc a

Un t il V R is m ore widely adopted, t hat ’s afine idea. It would’ve spared th e room we’vehad t o sacrifice for V ive, and would at l east

Dia logueSend your views, using‘Dialogue’ as the subjectline, to edge@ futurenet.com.Our letter of the month wins a New Nintendo3DS XL, supplied bythe Nintendo UK store

Issue 292 “In its currentstate, VR is tooexpensive, and

simply lackingthe library ofgames it needs”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


27

DISPATCHESDIALOGUE

order t o gain hu manity, pat iently fed t he lastof t hese hard-earned currency t o a Daught erof Chaos. Kale, preparing for yet anot her t rekthrough L ost Izalit h, didn’t know it t hen, butt his brief rest at t he Chaos Witch’s sist er’sbonfire would be his last . T hat light, whichhad burned so bright ly and had burned solong, finally went out – ironically, indicat edto me by t hree blink ing red light s. My PS3’ssoul petered out long before Kale’s ever did. Now, my copy of Dark Souls is foreverencased ins ide it s glossy, black tom b. Icouldn’t have dreamt of a more poet ic and wonderf ul way t o burn ou t , though: a warri or,mid- adventure, on t he eve of Dark Souls III .PS3, I hope, that in t ime, lik e every Souls player before you, you event ually come t o seedeat h for what it really is: a second chance. A second chance t o get back what you havelost : a shot at NG++. I pray t hat you nevergo hollow, PS3, and may you burn as grosslyincandescent as L ordran’s sun . And as for

you , Andre of Ast ora, we have someunfini shed business t o att end to.Kyle Charrette

We’d t el l you abou t t he s crew you can t ur nt o manually remove a jamm ed PS3 disc, but you ’ve gone t o all t hi s poet ic t rouble and i tjust wouldn’t be fair. Have a New 3DS X L .

Pow er -up fu s ion Vi deogames are in ext ri cably l inked t o newtechnology. T hat ’s not going to change.However, our obsession with the new,clubbed t ogether wit h our u nderstanding

t hat ret roact ive approaches t o design andtechnological l imit at ions s hould be reservedfor a £ 10 download-exclus ive t it le, may leadto lim ited scope in t he triple-A market. Just look at E292’s previ ew of Ratchet &

Clank’s PS4 debut for a prime example. AnEdge staffer is besotted by a game’s 2016technological advancement s but less welcom ing of some desi gn aspect s t hatharken back t o 2002. I s a 2002 design approach inheren t ly bad?Does it som ehow require a less er degree of

commit ment or effort from t he developers?T he assum ption is t hat if t he audience pays£ 40 t hey demand a cut t ing-edge experience,both in t erms of t echnological sophist icat ionand the conventions of modern game design. But what is modern game design? It ’s notjudged by t echnological ‘progress’ but rat herby t rends. T he Souls games have seenpunishing difficulty become vogue, andUbisoft ’s success is sl owly result ing in abacklash agains t object ive- abundant open worl ds. If last year’s Yooka- Laylee funding isanything to go by, late-’90s collectathons wi ll soon become fash ionable again t oo. It seems a litt le myopic of Edge to thinkless of Ratchet & Clank’s 2002 designapproach si mply because it ’s not in v ogue.Give it five years and I’m s ure t he public’scravings for PS2- era design wil l be lookedat t hrough rose- t int ed glasses and Ratchet

& C lank’s PS4 debut wil l be heralded as ahidden gem. Who knows, maybe Sony has

already engineered a revival of 2002 designphilosophies wit h it s PS2-on-PS4 s cheme?Fergus Pearson

It ’s not t hat bygone design principl es arepast it , but t heir presentation against a2016 v isu al sheen can be jarring. And pl easest op being mean about our eyesight.

Aw ak en in gHi t here I’m Arl o, I’m 12 years old I reallyloved your magazine and it has got me reallyhyped up for Dark Souls III Before t his, Ididn’t k now a thing about Dark Souls at all,

but now, t hanks t o you, I am really l ookingforward to it I t hink t he quality of t hecontent in this Edge m agazine is incredibleT his is t he first t ime I have had an issue ofEdge and I loved it s o much I asked my dadto get m e a subscript ion, and he did I t hinkEdge is my f avouri t e magazine of all t im e Arlo Heskett

Ar lo T one down t he excl ams and m aybenext t im e you can have t he 3DS you askedfor in all those bits we had to edit out. n

may be wrong. VR could be t he advancemen tin gaming tech t hat we really need.

Al t hough v ir t ual reali ty i s act ually a real,buyable object now, there’s still the issue offilli ng out your dedicat ed gaming shelf wit h VR t it les . Oculu s l aunched w it h 30 games;t hat ’s not a bad st art , but what about t hefuture? Yeah, there’ll be plenty of indieexperiment s and experiences t o be found onSteam and online, but how many tri ple-Agames w ill foll ow suit ? Not many, I f ear.

It ’s been a sim ilar sit uat ion wit h Blu- rayfor film s. I remember seeing t he first discs inmy l ocal s upermarket , realis ing how absent anum ber of iconic t it les were, and balk ing att he extraordinary price t ag that came wit h it .It ’s taken a while for high- definit ion films t obe widely accepted as com monplace, and alsoto drop in price. I th ink t hat virt ual realit y wi ll foll ow a sim ilar t rail of accept ance. Init s current st at e, VR is t oo expensive, andsimply lacking the strong library of games

t hat it so desperately n eeds. Unlik e thegimmicky, disappoint ing st ereoscopic 3D,I actu ally believe that VR does have a placein t he gaming world. T here are possibiliti esfor it t o become the norm, which ismassively promising for t he t echnologicaldevelopment of gami ng as a whole. Alexander Jones

Neit her Rift nor Vive are truly m assm arketproposit ions right now, and won’t be unt ilt heir prices become m ore affordable. By t het ime PSVR arrives, software and pricing willneed to be somewhat less of an issue if

Oculus and HT C are to compete.

Mons te r box As I closed in on NG++, nearing t he cen turymark in hours invest ed, my PS3 finally died.But it died doing what it loved: reading theDark Souls disc, meticulous ly saving t hegame’s data, ensuring that I never lost soulsor progress t hat weren’t of my own undoing.T his is what it would have want ed.

Kale, a level-118 fighter, exhausted fromhaving t o repeat edly tap t he square butt on in

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


28

I l l u s t r a t i o n

k a e r u . c o m . a r

between th e U S and M exico, one with a “big,

beautiful door” in it. Likewise, when speaking

of the threat of international terrorism, it isconsidered incorrect by the fine minds of the

iC ivics game to say “We shou ld blow up as

much as possible to send a message that we

aren’t playin g around.” An d yet in N ovember

2015, when asked what he would do about

Isis , Donald T rum p literally said: “I would

bomb the shit out of ’em. I would just bomb

those suckers. T hat’s right. I’d blow up the

pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up

every s ingle inch. T here would be nothing

left.” People loved it.

T ragically, then , Win T he White House

simply fails as a model of how American

politics is actually working this election

cycle, and I have enough faith in American

children to think they’ll see through it too.

But the problem goes deeper. T his game is

actually anti- democracy. It teaches players to

pander to voter prejudices rather than try to

explain things. T ake, for example, business

regulation. A Republican candidate in this

game is marked wrong for saying “C ompanies

need lots of rules and regulations if they

want to succeed,” even though that is

uncont roversially true. (T he most ardent

champions of free markets still want trade

and contract rules to be strictly enforced.)

Instead the poor child is guided towards

choosing the correct tawdry metaphor by

arguing: “Companies should be allowed to

grow and blossom, and the government

shouldn ’t stop t hem.” Grow and blossom, like

little pixel flowers in a walking simulator.Now, there is nothing wrong with trying

to teach children politics, and games might

even be one way to do it. W ith a brilliant

teacher overseeing things and leading

discussions, Win The White House might be

only s lightly worse than having the class read

T he On ion. But you ng people are likely to

learn harsher and more realistic lessons

about the world – and even better skills of

“critical thinking,” as Sandra Day O’Connor

hopes – from games that aren’t explicitly

designed for schoolroom use at all. Like the

MGS fan from South America who posted to

a messageboard about how he was electrifiedby the fact that Peace Walker “was all about

helpin g to liberate banana republ ics”. Or li ke

anyone who plays Papers, Please. Even TheDivision dramatises the fragility of

civilisation in some thoughtful ways. It’s not

merely a matter of sweetening the bitter pill

of philosophy with some faceshooting; it’s a

matter of not treating the young like idiots.

One day, after all, they will be voters too.

A nyone can become a game developer

these days. T ake former S upreme

Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

As you’ll recall, she made up the notorious

5-4 majority who stopped the Florida

recount and so gave the presidency to George

W Bush in 2000 . So who better to teach the

children of America how their electoral

system really works? In 2009 O’Connor

founded a nonprofit education company

called iC ivics, which has produced an

educational game called Win The WhiteHouse, newly updated for the 2016 campaign

season. So how accurate a guide is it to the

facts of American democracy?

Alas, reality has already overtaken the

cartoonishly sober simulation. You may not

be surprised to learn that I immediately

named my candidate ‘Don ald T rum p’ and

chose as the slogan for my touring bus

‘V ictory is certain!’ – the best, I felt, out of

the available alternatives, with its faint hintof National Socialism . But the game wouldn’t

actually let me be T rum p. T hings began to go

wrong from the very start, when I was

designing my policy platform in the

primaries. I chose ‘Fiscal Responsibility’ as

one of my key issues, and was given three

skeleton speeches to support it. One can

easily im agine Don ald T rum p saying “We can

grow our military strength by adding way

more robots. Robots are the future,” but this

is the obvious wrong answer because it is

completely irrelevant to the topic. Fair

enough. But you also get marked wrong for

saying: “Bailing out a sinkin g business i s a lotof work. So many buckets!” T his is a

perfectly T rum pish thin g to say, with its

irreverent imagery, and its wondering use of

‘so’ to make everything sound magnificently

bad, or (in the case of his own promises)

magnificently good. (“You’re going to be so

happy,” he constantly tells his supporters.)

W hen I am trying to explain my support

for ‘Secure Borders’, meanwhile, I am n ot

even offered an option as creative as T rum p’s

celebrated plan to build an enormous wall

Young people are likely tolearn more realistic lessonsfrom games not designedfor schoolroom use at all

DISP TCHESPERSPECTIVE

Trigger Happy

STEVEN POOLE

Shoot rst, ask questions later

Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is nowavailable from Ama on. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Readyto play Discover the new look Offic ial box Magazine

F

6 8 - p a g e

s u p p l e m e n

A V A IL A B L E N O O R O R D E R D IR E C T F R O M Y F A V O U R IT E M A G A Z IN E S .C O .U K G A M IN G

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


30

I l l u s t r a t i o n

k a e r u . c o m . a r

W e’ve seen a few remin ders of that

recently – in quick su ccession, and from

some of the biggest players in the game. OnMarch 5, I received an email from Microsoft

about the Fable Legends beta – sent not to

press, but to registered players – detailing a

couple of features that had recently been

implemented into Lionhead’s weird F2P

experiment. T he subject line read ‘FableLegends – a new reason to play every day’.

T wo reasons later, on M arch 7, Microsoft

announced it had cancelled the game and was

proposing to close Lion head’s doors. T here’s

no way that whoever sent the first email

knew what was coming: it was a decision

made at the very highest level of Mi crosoft.

But when I saw the news, I immediately

thought back to that email, and cringed on

behalf of the poor flack who, just days earlier,

had clicked send, blissfully ignorant of the

axe hovering above them and their game.

Sony, meanwhile, has played the PR game

masterfully so far this generation. It seemed

like it had done it again when a kind- hearted

and undoubtedly well- meaning tweet from

the PlayStation Jobs account a few days after

the Lionhead announcement invited all

affected staff to a recruitment fair the

following week. One small problem:

unbeknownst to whoever hit send on that, a

dozen or so paygrades u p the ch ain the bean-

counters were planning a closure of their

own. Less than a fortnight later, Sony

announced its plans to drop the shutters on

Evolution Studios. Armchair pundits called

conspiracy, decrying the com pany for m akingeyes at M icrosoft’s Lionh ead staff while

plotting a mass breakup of its own, as if the

two were somehow connected.

I recently completed a start- to- finish

re-watch of T he W est W ing. I do it every few

years and felt the need to do it again, its cosy

lefty embrace a welcome sanctuary from a

world lurching towards a right-wing

catastrophe. President Bartlet’s team obsess

over how every little detail of a policy,

announcement or reaction to the day’s

political hot potato might go over with the

press and the voters. Noth ing goes out to the

media until it’s been discussed from allangles by the sm artest people in the room, to

ensure that the W hite House isn’t left

looking stupid. W ould the game industry

look a bit better if things ran a little more

like that? Perhaps, but to the casual observer

it’d certainly be a little less entertaining. A nd

it would block off a lucrative career path to

some of my peers. I get enough dirty looks in

the office as it is .

The path from videogame sarcastic-

airquotes- journalism to videogame

sarcastic- airquotes- PR is a well-trodden

one. It is, in m y experience at least, the most

common next step on the career path for

writers, and for good reason: the money’s

better, you’ve got the contacts and the

relationshi ps, and you kn ow how that part of

the industry works inside out. I always

appreciate – OK , sometimes appreciate –

when a writer who jumped the fence

approaches us, because they understand h ow

we work, the sort of timescales we operate

within, and what we need to get the job done.

T he focus is so overwhelmin gly on online

and video these days that plenty of PRs thin k

two watermarked screenshots, a logo and an

embargo set four days after an event is

somehow going to result in four pages of a

magazine. W orking with som eone who

understands how we operate – because

they’ve worked alongside us, or they’ve beenaround long enough to remember how th ings

went when print was the default – can be

refreshin g. (M ostly, anyway: every so often

you get someone who thinks that just

because you got drunk together at E3 once,

you’re going to be interested in writin g about

their A ndroid farting game.) T he best of the

best know wh at we’re interested in and tailor

their approach accordingly.

C learly working in PR has its benefits, but

I don’t th ink I ’d be cut out for it. T he biggest

single thing stopping me, apart from

worrying about how I’d get to sleep at night

knowing I’d sold my soul (joke, PR friends!),is that, unless you’re lucky enough to work

in- house at a single development studio,

you’re just a sm all cog in a very big machine.

W orse than that, you’re a small cog whose

job is to ensure the machine as a whole

doesn’t look silly; but the machin e is so large

that you have no way of knowing what the

rest of the cogs are up to. For all you know,

someone somewhere is putting on their

clown costume and prepping the stealth

release of a deeply racist fart ing game.

For all you know, someone isputting on a clown costumeand prepping the release ofa deeply racist farting game

DISP TCHESPERSPECTIVE

Big Picture Mode

N TH N BROW N

Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

Nathan Brown is not interested in looking at your pixel-art world-builder from a team of former MMO developers

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


L IF E ’S B E T T E R W IT H T 3w w w .m y f a v o u r it e m a g a z in e s . o .u k / t3

G E T F IT F A S T IN 2 0 16

W IT H T H E V E R Y B E S T T E C H

F OR R U N N IN G ,

C Y C L IN G A N D M OR E …

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


32

P R I N T D I G I TA L

Every issue delivered to yourdoor, with exclusive covers

only available to subscribers

ONLY £ 54 per year

Instant digital access on youriOS and Android device, with

exclusive animated covers on iPad

ONLY £ 27 per year

CHOOSE YOUR PACKAGE

S U B S C R I B E T O

Get the best possible value with our

complete print and digital bundle

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


33

GET THE COMPL ETE PACK AGE

P R I N T + D I GI TA L

V ISIT myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/edgesubs

TERMS AND CONDIT IONS Prices and savings quoted are compared to buying full-priced UK print and digital issues. You will receive 13 issue s in a year. If you are dissatisfied in any way you can wri te to us at Futur e Publis hing Ltd, 3 Queensbridge, The Lakes, Northampton, NN4 7BF, UK or call us on 0844 848 2852 to cancel your subscript ion at any time and we wil l refu nd

you for al l un-ma iled is sues. Pr ices cor rect at po int of pr int and subject to change. For full t erms and condit ions, p lease vi sit myfavouri temagazines.co.uk/te rms. Of fer ends 26/05/2016

Every new issue inprint and on iOS

and Android

Never miss an issue,with delivery to your

door and your device

Exclusive animatedcovers on iPad and

subscriber-only coversfor print issues

Huge savings, the bestvalue for money, and a

money-back guarantee

Instant digital accesswhen you begin asubscription today

ONLY 68 per year

SUBSCR IBE TO EDGE TODAY

B ES T V A L U E

OUTS IDE

THE UK?SEE PAGE

58

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


36 Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

PS4

42 Gears Of War 4 Xbox One

46 Super Hypercube PSVR

50 Astroneer PC

52 ParagonPC, PS4

54 Return Of TheObra Dinn

PC

56 Tokyo 42 PC

56 The LegendOf Bum-bo

PC

56 Zero Time Dilemma 3DS, Vita

56 Star Ocean: Integrity And Faithlessness

PS4

56 Gonner PC Explore the iPad

edition of Edge forextra Hype content

THE G AMES IN O UR SIG HTS THIS MO N TH

#293

34

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Fuss in the music world, as Deep Purple are inducted into the Rock And RollHall Of Fame without legendary lead guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. DeepPurple were formed in 1968 and are still touring – as you read this, they’rein Japan. But only one of the original lineup is with the group. You mightthink it odd to draw parallels between sexagenarian rock aristocracy andthe cutting edge of interactive entertainment, but here we all are.

Just weeks ahead of release, we finally have our first play of thesingleplayer component of Uncharted 4 (p36). It is, its name implies, thefourth game in Naughty Dog’s Nathan Drake series. But what does thatmean, when series creators Amy Hennig and Richard Lemarchand haveskipped off to EA and academia respectively, and creative control has beenpassed to the pair who helmed The Last Of Us? The result is a game thatseeks to address the most frequent criticisms aimed at Nathan Drake – andthe answers, to some of them at least, come from Joel and Ellie.

This month’s Hype crop yields another first hands-on with a forthcoming

platform exclusive, but the relative lack of excitement around Gears Of War4 (p42) speaks to its rather muddled lineage. Gears haspassed from North Carolina to Warsaw, from EpicGames to Microsoft, and is now being made by a

Vancouver studio that has been closed down once andchanged its name twice. Will this still be a Gears game?

Absolutely, resolutely yes – though that’s not necessarilya good thing in 2016.

Epic Games seems to understand that. Paragon (p52)is a new IP from the Gears Of War creator, though aMOBA is far from a new concept, and its maker is muchchanged from the days when C liff Bleszinski held up agun with a chainsaw on it and was treated like a rockstar. Just like Deep Purple, those who remain at EpicGames carry on without their talisman. We doubt,however, that they’ll ever make it big in Japan.

Overw a t ch PC, PS4, Xbox One After Paragon and its ilk have made anunconvincing case for the straight-upMOBA on console, all eyes are onBlizzard’s reworking of a careful selectionof the genre’s systems. Fast-paced andsilky smooth, it’s a fine fit for consoles.

Doom PC, PS4, Xbox OneThe recent multiplayer beta proved onething loud and clear: one-hit shotgunkills are never going t o get old. Id’s gotthe feel of the thing just right, and it’sjust as well, since its attention is neededelsewhere: the beta had so much screentearing it was like playing a shonky VHS.

Let I t Die PS4Suda, you’ve been gone too long.Intrigued as we are by the premise –an asynchronous multiplayer brawler

with CPU aggressors sporting AI basedon real player data – it ’s the prospectof suplexing a baddie into a showerof gore while wearing only Speedosthat really has us paying attention.

MOST WANTED

In name only

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


36

H Y

P E

Developer

Publisher Format Origin

Release

Naught y DogSIEPS4USMay 12

U N C H A R T E D 4 :

A T H I E F ’ S E N DEveryone loves drivingthrough muddy puddles

Nathan Drake, hisbrother Sam and cigar-chomping comrade Sullygaze out on the plainsof Madagascar, thesetting for a long-overdue first hands-on withUncharted 4

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


373737

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


3838

W ell, t hat ’s one way t o do it ,apparen t ly. Few ser ies are sofrequently crit icised for t heir

lin eari ty as Uncharted, and when we vi sit edNaught y Dog for E276’s cover st ory we gott he dist inct i mpression t hat t he studio wasaware of, and work ing to count er, t hatpercepti on. Fif t een mont hs later and justweeks away f rom launch, we fi nally h ave ourfirst hands- on experience with Uncharted 4’ssi ngleplayer m ode, and a chance t o see towhat ext ent Naughty Dog has broken wit h

its own t radition. And it doesn’t t ake long –seconds, reall y. As our demo, t aken f romt he fi nal game’s f our t h chapt er, begins,Nat han Drake sit s behind t he wheel of a4x4 on t he mud- sl icked plain s of Madagascar.He’s at a fork in t he road. Do we go left , orri ght ? Heavens above, t he possibil it ies areli t erally plur al. OK , so t hose two roadssim ply bend around a sm all rock for mat ion

and converge once more fi ve seconds l at er,but look, kids! Choice.

I t ’s easy t o be cynical, of cours e, butwhat is m ost disappoint ing about t hisarbitr ary bit of pat h- split t ing is t hat i t ’sent ir ely u nnecessary. We’ve seen Dr ake inhi s jeep before, at last year ’s E3, where hesm ashed t hr ough a Madagascan mark et placein what , a few left - orri ght choices aside,was at heart t he sort of follow- your- nosespect acle we’ve come to expect fr omUncharted. Yet h ere, we have fu ll cont rol of

t he 4x4 in a vast , 360- degree space. T here’san u lt im at e goal – a volcano on t he horizont hat Drake, brother Sam and longtim e cohortSully hope is t he next step on t heir quest t ofi nd a my t hical pirate ut opia set up by HenryEvery, t he most successf ul m an ever t o swasha buckle. But t hat can wait . In t he meant im e,we’re fr ee t o head off and explore – and so,for novelty’s s ake if not hin g else, we takeNat han Drake off t he beat en t rack.

I n Uncharteds past , Naught y Dog has us edt he glim mer of t reasur e to ent ice a player int o

a dark ened corner of f t he crit ical pat h.Here, it ’s t he decayed upper f loor of som er ui ns , peeping out over a rock f ace a fewhu ndred yards away, th at draws t he eye. Wepark up, hop out of t he jeep, and clamber u p.On a crum bling wall s it s a shiny t ri nket anda but t on prom pt . We pick up a tobacco t in .We inspect i t . Not hin g happens . I s t his asuf fi cient retu rn on our endeavour? Gamest hat offer t his sort of explorat ive freedomt end t o reward t he inquisit ive advent urerwit h doll ops of X P; perh aps a new weapon

or sk ill . Somet hin g, at least . “Anyt hin g?”Sul ly asks, as D rake clambers back in t o th ef ront seat . “Eh hh,” Drake responds, whichjust about sum s it up. “Not hing wort hwhile.Come on , let ’s keep going.”

A f ine idea. T he jeep, it quickly t ranspires,is about mu ch more th an sim ply coverin gt his vast expanse at speed. It ’s your onlyweapon again st t he mud, and t here’s an awfullot of it . T ry t o walk up a wet clay sl ope andDr ake will get half way before losin g hi sfoot ing, falling face fi rst in t he muck andsl iding back down t o solid ground. T he 4x4

can make it , but it s accelerat or i sn’t exactlyan autom at ic win but t on. T he back end slidest his way and t hat as t yres bat t le for t ractionin t he mi re, and you’ll need t o chart a coursebetween clum ps of rock pok ing above t hesu rf ace t o give you enough pur chase t o makeit up st eeper s lopes. A winch is dism issed asan un necessary r ent al expense by Sul ly earl yon, but quickly proves essent ial inenvironm ental puzzles – fir st t o pull t he jeepup a sheer wall so t hat Dr ake and co cancont inu e t heir m ud- sli cked journ ey, and lat ert o pull down t he support s fr om a brokenbridge to m ake t hem i nt o a ramp.

And t his i s t he point . Naughty D oghasn’t jus t made a bigger space for t he sakeof it : this is a level, and your progress t hroughit is a puzzle. T he tr ink ets and tobacco t inst hat dot t he periphery of t he plains ofMadagascar are not t he sol e rewards f orexplorat ion – t here’s sat isf acti on to begained fr om s im ply havi ng reached t hem .

St ill , is t his r eally what we want fr omUncharted? Many see it s l in eari t y as an asset ;as t he underst andable cost of doing bus in essin a game t hat off ers such r ollicki ng

Asset

m a n a g e m e n tFrom a technicalstandpoint, NaughtyDog is the ewel inPlayStation’s crown.Mark Cerny’s Advanced TechnologyGroup is based in a walled-off corner ofthe studio floor, andthe Uncharted maker was one of the firststops on HideoKo ima’s fact-findingtech tour after hesigned up with Sony. What’s the secret?

“We do a lot of brute-force managementof assets,” leadgame designer RickyCambier says. “Thesecond we’re done with an animation, we unload it. Thatgives us room to focuson the environment.Take the marketplacedemo. Drake hasall these animationsfor walking andexploring, but they’renot loaded, because we need that space

for more, more, more.I’d be curious to knowhow many otherstudios do it.” Notmany, we suspect.

He’s at a fork in the road.

Do we go left or right? The

possibilities are literally plural

UNCHARTED 4: A THIEF’S END

H Y

P E

Nadine Ross and Rafe Adlerare the game’s principalantagonists, helming aprivate military company

that’s racing Drake andco to find the mythicalpirate utopia supposedlyestablished by 17th-centurypirate Henry Every

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


39

ABOVE While Drake certainlyplays the role of point man

in combat, both Sull y andSam stay close by, andaren’t afraid to get st uck inthemselves. At one point,

wit h the screen drained ofcolour and Drake on thebrink of deat h, Sully came inswinging to save the day.LEFT Neither Cambier norhis PR travelling companionresort to t he cliché of callingthe jeep a character in itself,but it ’s a vital tool in thissection of the game, andcertainly has personality asit struggles to gain purchaseon t he muddy plains

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


4040

ABOVEMelee combat is thesame old one-button st uff,but t here’s a t remendous

crunch to connectingblows, and Naughty Dog’sanimat ion blending hascome on l eaps and boundssince the PlayStation 3 era.TOP RIGHT Enemies areaggressive and powerful,lending dynamism to thet hirdperson gunplay,especially for anyone who’sbeen playing The Division.If you don’t keep moving,

you’ll be quickly pinneddown and flanked.MAINPresented with a large,circular arena wit h a singlesniper atop a cent ral tower,

you’d t hink a quiet climb tothe summit to dispatch thegreatest threat would be the

logical course of action –until Drake flings a bodydown below and alertsthe entire enemy faction.BELOWLEFT Since we spendmost of our t ime lookingover Drake’s shoulder,there’s little opportunity toassess how much of NaughtyDog’s remarkable cutscenefacial animat ion is renderedin-game. A long-overduehands-on means it ’s a

wort hwhile t radeoff.FAR R IGHT We wou ld’veliked to have given Drake’snew t raversal moveset amore relaxed workout, butit’s t remendously importantin combat too, both as

you clamber around t o lineup stealth kills, and legit t o break line of sight

when it all goes t o pot

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


41

spect acle at so cracking a lick . Does wideningt hings out l ike this not risk diluting whatmakes t he ser ies s pecial? Naturally, leaddesigner Ricky Cambier doesn’t t hink so.“If we give th e player choices t hat contin ue toengage t hem, I don’t t hink t he pacing reallysuf fers at all ,” he says. “I t was challenging att imes t o see how far we could open it up andst ill keep reminding people of their [ul t imate]goal. If you ever lose sight of t hat, t here’s arisk of having too mu ch [freedom] forsomeone who wants t his aut hored story.”

T hat approach ext ends t o th e combat ,as we dis cover when D rake and companyhappen upon an old colony out post t hat ’sbeing rigged for demoli t ion by Shoreline, theshady PMC that’s also on Every’s trail. It’s acombat bowl in t he Uncharted t radition,rejigged for t he game’s increased focu s onst ealt h. Cambier insist s it ’s possible tocompletely ghost t he sequence, using t heblandly named ‘stealt h grass ’ in com bination wi t h t radit ional cover t o t ake out t he dozen orso patrolling guards without being detected.

You coul d’ve fooled us . Enem ies are

easily alerted and annoyingly persistentonce you’ve caught t heir eye. T hey moveint elligent ly, and hit hard. St ealt h isencouraged, if not essent ial – perhaps not forthe whole sequence, but certainly for breakingline of sight, circling around and plotting yournext assault . Charging in guns blazing isask ing for t rouble, and oft en a quick deat h.Dropped st raight int o the m id- game wit h not ut orials or t ime t o reacclimatise t o NaughtyDog’s aty pical but t on mappings (T riangle toreload ), we expected a st ruggle, but not quit elik e thi s. T here’s always been a t ensionbetween Uncharted’s breezy, Saturday-matinee

power fant asy and the st ubbornness of itsbaddies, but on t his evidence it has n everbeen so pronounced. Giving Drake t he abilit yto effect ively become invisible by simplybreaking line of sight and t aking cover m eanst hat enemies require a commensurate boost inpower. Naught y D og appears t o have obliged.

St ill, when it finally works, it ’st remendously satis fying. T he only real sournot e is Drake’s grapple hook, which givesNaughty D og’s designers plent y t o t hinkabout in platforming sections but in t he thick

of bat t le sim ply means a canned t akedownanim at ion whose appeal quickl y wanes. T hisis an odd choi ce of demo, in a way, but it ’sclear Naughty D og want s t o commu nicate i tsrenewed focus on freedom, while avoiding arepeat of U ncharted 3’s pre- release m arket ing, which left nary a set piece unspoil ed.

Whatever t he m arket ing st rategy, th is wou ld s t il l be t he pret t ies t game t he cu rren tgenerat ion has yet produced. T he att entionto detail is ast onishing – Drake seems t ohave at least one bespoke anim at ion f or every

possible act ion – and while t he full game’spalett e will doubtless v ary, it ’s heartening tosee a big-budget game where a big blue skylooks down on a world splashed wit hsum ptuous colour. T his is a much- delayedgame but from a t echnical perspectiv e, atleast , it’s been ti me well spent. Naughty Dogis, famously, a st udio that crunches – onest affer described the process of get t ing

U ncharted 3 out t he door as “brutal” – and whil e Cambier won’t qui t e com e out andsay it , it s eems l ike it ’s happened again.

“Delays are bit t ersweet , always,” he says,“but t his game is im portant t o us. We want edto m ake sure we got it right. Last week Ifin ally got t o sit and play t he game all t he wayt hrough wit h everythi ng in place and I waskind of lik e, ‘Holy shit’. But you never know.I ’ve never made a game and gone, ‘Dude, th isis t he best game of t he year, hands down.’It ’s never felt t hat way.”

It clearly has for Sony – it was t heplatform holder, not the developer, that wasbehind U ncharted 4’s latest delay, a two-weekslip designed to address manufacturingissues. Simply put , Sony was worried it wou ldn’t be able t o put enough copies onst ore shelves t o meet demand. When, ont he cover of E276, we call ed U ncharted 4 t he biggest game of t he year, we were talki ngabout 2015. While t his wasn’t t he perfect wayto demonst rate it , it’s hard to see it beingbeaten by anything else 2016 has to offer. n

Pace makersNaught y Dog is oneof gaming’s betterstorytellers. Amongthe small group ofstudios that work wit h bu dge ts in t hetens of million s, it’salmost without equal.But pacing is notsimply a narrativeconcern, Cambierexplains – it aff ectsthe design t eams too.“Uncharted’s about variet y,” he says.“We have thesegreat, ten se sniper

fights. We have thesenarrow hallways withshotgunners closing inon you. Then we havesetpiece moment s, very specif ic f igh t s. Just like t he sto ry arc,our combat arc hasthis pacing, thesebeats we have to hit,these t ransitions that we h ave t o t hin kabout.” Cambier’sconfident thatNaught y Dog’s designteam has pulled it off . We’ll f ind ou t fo r

certain soon en ough.

41

“Last week I finally got to playthe game all the way through

and I was like, ‘Holy shit’”

UN C HARTED 4:A THIEF’S EN D

H Y

P E

Ricky Cambier,lead designer

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


42

To t hink t hat Gears Of War was on cean exciti ng series is an odd t hin g. T heori ginal m ay not have invent ed cover

combat , but it s m eth odical pace and hor rorinf lect ions were a radical depart ur e for Epic

following its twit chy Unreal shoot ers. Whilet he impact of t he game’s engine on t he ris eof HDT V has been exaggerat ed, it made afears ome case for t he X box 360 hardware at acrit ical point in t he war of percepti ons wit hPS3. T he mul t iplayer, meanwhil e, became t hescene of a t ri logy- lengt h clash wit h fans whopreferr ed t o exploit t he hall owed Gnashershotgun rat her t han f ight ing at mid- rangeas t he designers had int ended.

By cont rast , T he Coalit ion’s Gears Of War4 seem s elegant ly const r uct ed but anodyne.T he first brand- new instalment sinceMicrosoft acqui red t he li cence in 2014, it ’s a

game in t hrall t o bot h it s own herit age andmarket research t hat has yet t o make anunanswerable case for t he IP ’s retur n. T heclosest it comes, ri ght now, is in t he wind.Gears Of War 4’s campaign t akes place 25

years aft er t he dest r uct ion of t he L ocust inGears 3, wit h t he vaguely I t ali an planet of Seranow ravaged by enormous elect ri cal st orm s,obliging much of t he populat ion t o live infort ified cit ies. T he series is no st ranger t ohazardous weat her – t he original had it sclouds of phot ophobic fl esh- eat ing bat s –

H Y

P E

Developer

Publisher

FormatOrigin

Release

The CoalitionMicrosoft Studios

XboxOneCanada Autumn

G E A R S O F W A R 4 A band of clockwork

soldiers shoots for the past

but t he impact on play seems m ore sust ainedin Gears 4. At it s m ost severe, t he wind mayerode t he very layout , all owing you t o blastcover spot s l oose and send t hem s pinnin gacross an area, mowing down opponent s. I t

may als o aff ect grenade and h eavi er pr oject il et raject ories, t ossing th em r udely back int o

you r f ace or, once you r elocate upwin d,us eful ly l engt henin g a t hr ow. Charact ers areharder t o manoeuv re in a gale, and you canpick off foes by shoot ing their l egs out fromunder t hem so t he tempest whisk s t hem away.

t’s an enticing layer of t act ical variables,and a way of direct ing and s haping encount erst hat evokes t he perpetu ally collapsinglandscapes of Sony’s Uncharted, a f ranchi sewhose power X box head Ph il Spencer is eagert o count er. But t his si t s alongside enemy

design t hat , so far, repri ses t he X box 360t ri logy’s L ocust a lit t le too narr owly, wit h acombinat ion of ‘fi xers’ who pin t he player,‘fl ush ers’ who driv e you out , and ‘m ir rors’who are t here t o form a clear opposing bat t leli ne. Sera’s n ew bogeymen, t he Swarm , have afew dist inct ive tr icks, in f air ness. T here aret he Juvi es, fl aili ng newborn s who sometim eshatch f rom eggs i n an area, and m ay evolveif left upright int o fully fledged Swarmfoots oldiers. You’ll also r un i nt o Pouncers,agil e quadr upeds wit h un arm oured bell ies,

Studio head andseries co-creatorRod Fergusson

42

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


43

The first Gears was in parta story about absenteefathers. In Gears 4, JDFenix has run away fromhis own and enlist edwith the COG military

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


444

who fli ck dart s at t arget s in open groundand r us h down t hose who hide.

T he volat ili ty t hese new aggressors brin gt o th e sandbox i s welcome, but precedent sexis t in previous games, and t he gunplay it selfis ext remely well- t ravelled. Dis pensin g wit h

Call Of Dut y - st yle mechanics such as off handgrenade th rowing in Gears Of War: Judgment ,T he Coalit ion has revert ed t o Gears Of War 3’scont rol m odel. It ’s a sensi ble decisi on, andt here are t weaks t o t he fl ow in close combatsit uat ions – a more fluid cover- vault t hat s etsan opponent up for a cont ext - sensitive kn ifeexecut ion, and t he abili t y t o reach over andcollar a foe hunk ered down dir ect ly opposit e,at t he risk of exposing yours elf t o a shot gunri post e. Explosive, however, all t his mostcert ain ly i s not , and what new weapons t hedeveloper has revealed so far are equall yperf unctory. T he Dropshot is an evolut ion of

t he L ocust Digger, t he diff erence being thatt he bomb float s over obstacles rat her t hantu nnelling under t hem, while t he Buzzkillspit s r icochet ing sawblades t hat m ay poseas m uch t hreat t o players as t he t arget .

St udio head and seri es co- creat or RodFergusson is u nf azed by accusati ons ofplayi ng t oo safe, arguin g th at t he newdeveloper st ill has t o prove it ’s wort hy of t helicence. “T hat ’s t he best t hing you can t ell m e,t hat it feels a lit t le too mu ch like Gears Of War ,” he says . “T hat ’s great . If we were Epi cand we’d been work ing on t he game for seven

years , it wou ld open t he door f or all sor t s ofideas. But we’re a whol e new st udio, and wefelt we had to be t ru e to t he seri es, rat hert han spinning it out. I t hink it would be seenas dis respect fu l.”

Creat ive dir ect or Chuck Osieja conf essest hat T he Coalit ion i s “always n ervous” aboutchanging th e form ula, even f ollowing t hereasonably accomplished Gears Of War:Ult imate Edition remast er. “I t hink when t hisgame launches and it ’s received well , th enwe’ll st art to look at other opportu nit ies for

where t he I P can go,” he says.Nowhere is Gears Of War 4’s f ondness

of convention m ore dispirit ing than in t heperson of hu lk ing Caucasian prot agonis t

JD Feni x , f lank ed by m ix edet hn ici t y

Gears 4 supports twoplayersplitscreen and online co-op– a welcome step back fromGears 3 ’s chaotic fourplayercampaign. Player two gets tochoose between Kait or JD

GEARS OF WAR 4

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


4545

sidekick Delmont ‘Del’ Walker and t hetom boyish K ait Diaz. Fergusson ins ist s t hatt his quint essent ially dudebro trio offer moreroom f or “nuance” and growth between gamest han, say, t he original’s Af rican-Am erican

caricature Au gustu s Col e. “We had t o createa short hand [in Gears Of W ar 1], and so wecreated archetypes,” he explains. “Because fora while, Cole was t he scient ist , but peoplecouldn’t connect wit h t hat – we had to doa lot of explanat ion. So we thought: t his iskind of known, it’s an archetype that peopleunderst and. Any Given Sunday, that f ootballcharact er, people know t hat. It made it easierto say ‘thi s is who Cole is ’, because we onlyhad 60 minu tes of cinematics, [so t here was]no t ime t o go int o t he backst ory. Whereashere we have much more nuance, we havet ime to develop th ese charact ers, because

they’re young.”

Gears Of War 4’s mul t iplayer is also builtfor growth in a way it s predecessors weren’t .In keeping wit h Halo 5, the off ering has beenrejigged to sui t newcomers and seasoned

players alike. T here are now perform ancet iers that sit alongside basic m ult iplayer XPprogression and feed into m at chm aking, formore balanced games. T he Coalit ion has yetto s ay whet her Gears Of W ar 2’s belovedHorde Mode will ret urn, but t here’s t heoption of co- op against supposedly m ore varied and “personable” AI s on mul t ipl ayermaps. T he new Escalat ion m ode is aimedsquarely at t he t ournament crowd, a gameof capture and hold in which t he loser getsto pick t he map’s weapon drops during thenext round. T here’s a more robust spectatorint erface that allows you to m onitor eachplayer’s healt h and equipm ent , leaping to

t heir viewpoint wit h a single click. T heCoalit ion has even redesigned certain abilit ies wi t h spect ators in m ind. T he famous Act iveReload timi ng mingame, for example, now hasa small cooldown t o discourage players fromconti nually f iring a bullet , then reloading togain a power boost . T his looked “stupid”,Fergusson comm ents during a presentation, which is a fasci nat ing observ ati on t o makeof a game with a chainsaw bayonet.

If you’ve found t he tim e to play t heGears 4 m ult iplayer bet a – and in part icular

t he exhilarat ing Dodgeball mode, whichrespawns an ally for every opponent kill ed – you ’ll know t hat Gears Of W ar is st ill animm ensely ent ertaining shooter, offering amix tu re of bloody int imacy, team t act ics andarchitect ural myst ique that has yet t o beexcelled. However, t here’s t he sense t hat ,as wi t h previous X box One exclusives, t oomu ch of t he game has been assem bled bycommittee. Gears Of W ar saw out t he Xbox360 generat ion wi t h a bang. It t hreatens t oarrive in t his one wit h a whimper.n

Roadie ma p

Gears Of War 4’spost-release contentstrategy is largely asyou’d expect. It’lllaunch with ten m aps,but The Coalitionplans to rotate newand old map s in andout of the lineup o vertime based on p layerfeedback. All will befree, though you canbuy m aps in order tohost private matcheswhen th ey’re out ofrotation. Th e idea,says creative director

Chu ck Osieja, is tocreate the same back-and-forth with theservice that Riot haswith League OfLegends’ freeCham pions. Youcan also buy crateswith cosmeticpersonalisation itemsor earn them in-game,while m ultiplayerchallenges grantXP rewards whencompleting tasks acertain w ay – winninga few rounds of TDMusing a certain customskin, for example.

“That’s the best thing you

can tell me, that it feels a little

too much like Gears Of War”

LEFT The origins of t heSwarm are unclear, thoughthey superficially resemblethe L ocust. JD and co firstencounter t hem whileinvestigating raids onKait’s family sett lement

There are new ways tonegotiate cover, but t he oldtactics hold up f ine. Mostclose-range battles are wonby somersaulting past anopponent and drawingfaster t han they can turn

TOP LEFT Gears Of War continues to resist the lureof Call Of Duty -style loadoutcustomisation – t here areno unlockable perks orgear, only power weaponson the maps themselves.ABOVE On the technology

side, The Coalition is aimingfor locked 60fps and 1080pin multiplayer, complete withrealtime reflections andtemporal antialiasing

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


46

An earlier, pre-VRversion of t he gamewas rendered ingrayscale, in orderto achieve t he idealbalance between formand function. VR hasallowed colour t ogloriously return t oth e game’s world

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


47

H Y

P E

Developer Publisher

Format Origin

Release

KokoromiPolytronPSVRUS2016

S U P E R

H Y P E R C U B EPSVR’s esoteric puzzler from

Phil Fish and friends

47

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


8

Super Hypercube shares only it s basic rul es wi t h N kabe, th e Japanese T V games howin which contestants contort their bodies

int o increasingly unnatural shapes in orderto fit t hrough cut outs i n a series of rapidlyadvancing St yrofoam wall s. T he hilarit y oft he T V show format, exported across the worl d as Hole In T he Wall , is l argely lost int ranslation in Kokoromi’s st ylish and abstractbrand of vi rt ual realit y, which m imics t heanalogue special effect s, lens flare and ret ro-fut urist ic user in t erfaces of evergreen chicreference point s such as 2001: A SpaceOdyssey, Blade Runner and Xanadu.

Here, in esot eric space, you’re rotat ingclust ers of blocks, rat her t han gurninghum ans, and t he soundt rack is one of abuilding elect ronic chorus rat her t han ascreeching gameshow crowd. T he principl es,nevertheless, remain const ant . Using th ePlaySt at ion cont roller’s t riggers you mustrotate t he blob of blocks across t wo axes inorder to m ake it fit snugly t hrough t he wall.Move your head t o mi cro-align shape wit hhole, adding a physical element t o th e ment almanoeuvring. Fail t o find t he perfect

placement and i t ’s game over.

T his was the first game t o emerge fromgamma3D, a 2008 game jam organised by t hecollective K okoromi, which count s amongits num ber Fez developer Phil Fis h. T he jamhoped to encourage people t o create games in whi ch s t ereos copi c v is ion had a meaningfu limpact on gameplay. T he earliest versionemployed anaglyphic s t ereoscopy, a kind of3D eff ect accessed vi a 1950s- st yle red-and-blue-lensed 3D glasses. Kokoromi conti nuedto dabble wit h t he demo, creat ing customglasses that allowed players to move their

bodies, as well as see depth in t he world.T he game cont inued to develop with each

new drip of t echnological advance, first addingmot ion camera cont rol and now, in what i sclearly t he game’s ideal pairing, VR headsetcont rol. “Since our original game had basicallyt he same core int eract ions as VR , and wasdesigned for t hat context from t he ground up,t he t ransl at ion process came rather easil y,”Kokoromi’s H eather K elley explains. “T hereal challenge for u s has been t aking a soli dcore game con cept t hat was designed to be a

local, five-minute experience, and expand it tomake it somet hing with a deeper syst em t hatgrows with the player as their skill increases.”

T he team’s solut ion has been elegant . Eacht ime you squeeze th rough a gap successf ullyby mov ing your head, a new cube adds to t heclus t er, adding bot h diff icul ty and a scoremul t iplier. T he cube’s confi gurat ions arerandom t oo, preventi ng the rot e learning ofpatt erns. As is t he current fashion, t he game wi ll feature a daily chall enge, wit h all playerstackling a one-time-only game generated

from an ident ical seed. Whil e t he des ign and del ivery platf orm

are a natural fit , the team has had to learnt he new rules of VR development quickly –especially as t hey hope Super Hypercube willbe a PSVR launch t it le. “Small t hings like UIand HU D design t urned out t o be trick iert han expected,” Kelley says. “L ots of lit t let hings you would normally have t aken for

grant ed now have to be reinvent ed. Is t heHU D att ached to your head or can you l ookaway from it ? Is it fixed in space or does itmove? Is i t really s mall and up close, or reallybig and far away? Bef ore, it was just an overlay you wou ld apply t o t he s creen . Now it ’s aphysical object and you have to cons ider it sposit ion in space, in relat ion t o ot her objects .”

T here have been m ore traditi onal k inds ofdesign iss ue to fix , too. “As we’ve been t est ingt he game we’ve put it in front of some reallysk ill ed players who were able to fi nd holes in

our design im plement at ion,” Kell ey says. Onet ester was able to fi gure out t he rules for hownew cubes were added to the cluster aftereach victory and use this knowledge to build agiant wall of cubes. “We fixed t hat , of course,”Kelley not es. More surprising is the way in which t he physicali ty of in t eract ion becom eskey to t he game’s appeal. T his is a game t hat wou ld s eem ingly work out si de of V R, yetmoving your head t o peer around t he clust ersin order to bett er understand their s hapehas become an ess ent ial part of it s appeal. n

Sound cubesSuper Hypercube’s

sound effects and

dynamic soundtrack

contribute a greatdeal to the game’s

sense of nostalgic

futurism. Created by

Kokoromi member

Damien Di Fede themusic is yoked to your

interactions within 3D

space. Each of the

cubes ‘sings’ a note

and as you gather

more cubes to yourcluster you add to the

building chorus. It’s

an ingenious designwhich like Tetsuya

Mizuguchi’sRez

causes the soundtrackto match the natural

ebb and flow of the

onscreen interactions.

The higher the stakes

the more intense thechorus while a lost

life will bring

everything to a

quietening halt. Other

sounds are tied to

specific environmentsallowing for the

designers to introduce

a natural progressionto the soundtrack

apart from the

player’s performance.

48

“Things you would normallyhave taken for granted

have to be reinvented”

SUPER HYPERC UBE

H Y

P E

Heather Kelley of theKokoromi collective

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


4949

ABOVE An earlier versionof the game, which usedmotion trackers to follow

the player’s head in orderto achieve the looking’effect, was nominated asan Indiecade finalist.TOP LEFT You have a generousfew seconds in which toalign your cube during the

wait for the wall t o arrive.Hold the X butt on and thegame speeds up, flingingthe wall toward your cluster.LEFT Producing trailers for

VR games is an ongoingchallenge. Kokoromi recent lylaunched a 360-degree

YouTube trailer, makingit possible t o look aroundthe 3D environment usingt he mouse, as a taste r.BELOWBonus points are

available for rotating thecluster wit h a minimalamount of inputs, forspeeding the wall towardt he cubes, and for achievinga perfect fit by fine-tuningalignment with your head.BELOWLEFT Scoring in thegame is finel y calibrat ed.

You earn just a handful ofpoints for a clean pass-through, a figure that scalesonly modest ly accordingto your multiplier chain

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


5

Sur viv al games aren’t generally kn ownfor t heir sunny outlooks. Most havet heir m oments of levity, of course, but

t he str uggle to maint ain exist ence in t heface of fi erce opposit ion – bot h natur al andoth erwise – is rarely a cheerfu l one. Ast roneer ,t hen, is som eth ing of an anom aly: it ’s a gamewith a sense of boundless opt imi sm t hatmight s eem unlik ely in t he circumst ances itpresent s, and yet is wholly befi t t ing of t hepioneering spirit it espouses.

In t ru t h, staying alive is not your chiefconcer n on t hese procedurally generat edplanet s. You have a job to do, af t er all . “You ’repar t of a group of explorers who are looking

for r are and valu able resou rces,” Paul Pepera,of developer Syst em Er a, t ells us . “Once youland, it ’s up to you t o st art your base ofoperati ons and gat her t he basic [m at erials]t hat allow you to sur viv e. Event ually you’ll

be able to craft complex equipment , which

wil l enable you t o go even f art her and getharder- to- find resources.”

I f t he core gameplay l oop is fam il iar,t here’s a wildcard in t he for m of a largehandheld devi ce that gives your ast ronautt he power t o deform t errain. T he process isint uit ive and sat isf yin gly t acti le, wit h audioeffects t hat sound less l ike a noisy excavat orcarv ing t hrough chunks of rock, and morelik e an ASMR vi deo of som eone shif t ingaroun d on a sof t , yieldi ng leat her s ofa. Wit hgent le pops as object s are unear t hed and t helight crackle of sur face grit tu mbling into t he

hole, th e process of digging is a remarkablypleasu rable sensat ion . A good job, t oo, si nce

you ’l l be doing qui t e a bit of i t .For Pepera and fell ow ar t ist Adam

Bromel l, th is mechanic emerged organi cally

A S T R O N E E R

Developer/publisher System Era

Format PCOrigin US, Canada

Release 2016

Giving ground control to Major Tom

TOPThere will be an upgradetree, Pepera explains. “You’llunlock] more powerfuldeformation tools – youcan slap one on the roverand drive around anddeform at the same time.”

ABOVE Certain modules thatuse nuclear fission will haveto be buried underground

Astroneer ’s deformationtech is being refined allthe time. Since the buildSystem Era showed off atGDC, it nowlooks morechiselled and natural

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


5151

from early art project s. Aft er years producingcomplex and detailed designs for blockbustersincluding Assassin’s Creed Unit y and SplinterCell : Bl acklist , Bromell i n part icular hadenjoyed the com parat ively f ast pace ofit erat ion wit h low- poly 3D art. “I decided todo some space[- t hemed] st uff because I wasreally int o space explorat ion,” he tell s us .“I was i nspi red by what NASA was doing, and watching Chri s H adfiel d on t he I SS.” He sen ta mockup to Pepera, and t he two began t obounce ideas off one anot her, falling in l ove wi t h t he fantasy of being an ast ronaut aloneon a dist ant planet. T he simple st yle madesense from a pract ical point of vi ew, too.

“I t ’s just been four of us for a while,” Peperasays, “so we want ed an art st yle t hat wasachievable wit h a very small t eam. T hispolygonal, geomet ric look t o t he game isst riking, but it also [let s] Adam and I quicklyhamm er out cont ent f or it , as opposed tosomet hing that’s more tri ple-A realist ic.”

As he put t ogether t his early concept,Bromell found an unlikely inspirat ion in t he very t ool s he was us ing to m ake t he image.He’d been us ing 3D s culpt ing and paint ingtool M udbox t o create t he terrain for t heast ronaut to s t and on, when, as he put s it ,

“a light bulb suddenly went off ”. What if, he wondered, t he pl ayer coul d in t eract wi t h t hegameworld in t he same way he was doing?Even before t he st udio had an engine up andrunning, it had an engaging central hook.

So, yes, just as you can burrow beneat h t hesurface of t he planet , or even t unnel t hrough

hills and moun tains, you can us e yourdeformat ion hardware to build objects –from m akeshift bridges spanning chasms tot emporary walls around your base’s most v it al equipment t o prot ect it from su ddensand squalls. And if your rover vehicle shouldever get s t uck in a hole, it’s a sim ple processto fashion a ramp and drive out of t rouble.T he idea is t o inject a litt le more creat ivit yint o problem s olvi ng, to give players a rangeof possibilit ies t o t ackle any givenconundrum, but also to afford them t heroom to si mply m ess around. “It ’s almostlit erally a sandbox ” Brom ell l aughs.

T here are, of course, lim it at ions t o thi spower. As in any good survival game, carefulresource management is essential. You’llrequire a regular supply of energy for you rdeformat ion t ool and for your v ehicle,otherwise you risk getting stranded away from

base. Dying isn’t quite t he penalt y it mightbe in other surv ival games, but you st illhave to face consequences for your m ist akes.“Imagine you’ve gone on a two-nightexpediti on and you’ve brought a rover wit h you t hat has enough power f or t hos e twodays,” Brom ell says. “I f you ’re in a cavespelun king, say, and you happen t o die downt here, then you’ve lost everyth ing that wasdown t here with you. But in t erms ofbrutality, it’s m ore Minecraft t han DayZ.”

For t he game’s Early Access debut , at

least , there wil l be a fourplayer co- operat ivemode, which should allow efficient t eams toprogress much quicker, assu ming they canresist t he temptation t o keep sculpting rockphallu ses. “Imagine you’re playing wit h afriend, and they’re deforming the terrain whil e you’re bui ldi ng a solar panel t hat wi llhelp power t hem so t hey can keep working,”Pepera explains , citi ng precisely t he blendof ingenuit y and st rong teamwork wit h which t hi s small t eam has carv ed out abeguil ing and personable debut .n

Goal diggersSystem E ra is still fin e-tun ing one final layerof motivation, theultimate aim thatdrives each Ast roneer.Players will be able t oshare t heir discoveries wit h Earth, t houghthe developer has yetto work out exactlyhow to present t hatconcept. “Th ey’re sentout there becauseth ere’s a gold rushgoing on in space,”Bromell says. “Andone Astroneer is

going to be betterthan another in t ermsof the value of theresources they’vecollected, but in termsof that overall idea we h aven’t nailed itdown 100 per cent .”Meanwh ile, Peperasays the studio isprepared to respondto player feedback:“If there’s an appetitefor a more hardcore versio n of t he game,that’s something we cou ld updat ethe game with.”

“I was inspired by what NASA

was doing and watching

Chris Hadfield on the ISS”

Though plant lif e isn’tgenerally a cause forconcern, Bromell suggeststhat the flora might notalways be friendly should

you disturb its habitat

A smart drag-and-dropinterface let s you see what

you’re carrying in your Astroneer’s pack at aglance, and allows youto access items quickly

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


5

At last , some honesty. T he MOBA’smarch from PC to cons ole has been anodd one, wit h m ost developers almost

embarrassed by t he term. T he imminentOverwatch and Battleborn borrow from t heMOBA s ty le guide, but are wrapped in afamil iar FPS framework t o make them moreappealing to a wider, consol e-owningaudience. Paragon is , purely and unashamedly,a MOBA, it s only concession t o t he consolecrowd being a shift in perspect ive from t hetop- down genre standard to an over- t he-shoulder thirdperson view.

T hat means Paragon comes wit h baggage– and a crucial t ask on it s hands. Un like

Blizzard and Gearbox, Epic Games mustsell an ent ire genre, rat her t han an accessi bletwis t on it , to an audience who may onlyknow it for eye-poppingly large t ournamentprize pools and one of t he most impenetrablyarcane lexicons in videogames. It must doso quickl y and immediately, t oo, sincecrossplatform play pits PS4 beginners againstPC vets . What sort of on- ramp does Paragon give to t hose for whom jungle is a kind of ravemusic, and t hink s a ward is part of a hospit al?

Act ually, quit e a good one, even in t he

current, early-access build. T wo short videotu torials do a fine job of explaining not onlyt he object ive, language and mechanics, butalso t he genre’s flow. You quickl y underst andt hat deat h is t o be avoided at all cost s, whichis perhaps t he most import ant lesson aconsole player has to learn. Respawn ti mesextend as t he m atch progresses, somethin gt hat wil l be anathem a to a Call Of Duty player,if not quit e to a Battlefield one, but as soon as you see an enemy t urn t ail and run t he s econdthey lay eyes on you, a teammate and a band

of AI creeps closing in, you understand you ’re playing qui t e a dif ferent game.

Other gameplay systems will be morefamili ar. Aside f rom t he R2 basic at tack, all you r abil it ies are governed by cooldown s –a recognis able presence in a som et imes

host ile genre – and charact ers are effect iveat different ranges, which is communicatedby an aiming reti cle t hat changes colour when an at t ack is going to conn ect .

Back at your base you can ass ign cardst o spare inputs (D- pad direct ions; a shoulderbutton; t humbstick clicks). At t he start, you’lluse health and mana pot ions , but as you levelup you’ll be able to use more complex onest hat offer passive buffs t hat extend, rat hert han refil l, your healt h and mana met ers, orshor t en cooldown t im es. Cards are the game’sbeat ing heart , its point of different iat ion from

the genre template and, to Epic, the primarybusiness model. While you’ll earn packs ofcards from sim ply playing the game, more canbe purchased for real m oney. Since t he gameis free t o play and all charact ers are given awaygrat is, it ’s Epic’s only s ource of revenue.

Whil e Paragon is commendably easy t o getint o, it ’s hard to sti ck wit h. T he sole map isenorm ous and matches t ake an age. Even one-sided st ompings t ake half an hour, and a moreeven match can be tw ice as l ong. Moment umcomes in short bursts – a clutt ered teamfight,an assault on a tower – and despite t he smartint roduct ory videos and the character- specific

t ut orials on Epic’s forum s, beginners wil lspend most of a match’s lengthy runt ime wonderi ng what t hey s hou ld be doing, and where. Character m ovem ent is sl ow, too, and whil e Epi c has s ped t he act ion up s li ght lysince early builds, console players will findt hems elves pining for an even brisker pace.Epic’s honest adherence to t he conventionsof it s genre may be comm endable, but alsoshow why t he lik es of Gearbox and B lizzardhave chosen to evoke the spirit of t he MOBArat her than follow it t o the lett er.n

P A R A G O N

Developerpublisher Epic Games

Format PC, PS4Origin US

Release 2016

C an Epic sell an obtuse game genre to the console crowd?

Jungle ismass iveW hile there’s muchabout the MOBAthat’s impenetrableto newcom ers, the

jung le is perh aps thebiggest stumblingblock, an d it’s tellingthat Ep ic’s gracefultutorial videos stop

short of explainingwhat it’s for.P a r a g o n ’s map hasfour jun gles, bridgingthe gap between themap’s three lanes.AI enem ies spawn incamps on timers ofvarying lengths: thebasic type reappearsevery two minu tesand offers upexperience points,while more powerfulvariants also awardbuffs when killed.The se boosts last for

two-and-a-halfminutes, unless youdie – in wh ich casetheir effect will bepassed to yo ur killer.Baffling stuff a t first,but you’ll pick thingsup q uickly using ourpreferred tactic:finding the strongestplayer on the teamand sticking to themlike easily killed, qu iteannoying glue.

Even one-sided stompings takehalf an hour, and a more even

match can be twice as long

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


5353

ABOVE

Travel mode,activated by squeezing theleft trigger and pressing X,is the best way of gettingaround, but must be usedcarefully. Get hit during itand you’ll be rooted t o the

spot for a few seconds.RIGHT Ultimate abilitiesare the game’s Supers –bound to t he longestcooldowns and capableof dealing the heaviestdamage. Startup animat ionsare lengt hy, however,giving opponents t ime toescape the blast radius.BELOWThe first t hing youneed to get a handle on is

your chosen character’seffective range. Then youneed to learn everyoneelse’s. If you don’t liket he odds, you can callfor help from t eammatesusing D-pad shortcuts

TOPThe tut orial videosuggests you group up with

AI creeps to ensure you’renot t he lone target when

you run into t rouble. Thissouped-up variety spawnlate in the game and makefor powerful allies.ABOVE CENTRE The jungle’sbuff-giving AI monst ers, andthe cover afforded by itscanopy, mean it’s a t emptingplace to hang out – thoughdoing so leaves t he threelanes, and your bases,exposed to enemy assaults.ABOVE The character selectscreen has been designed

wit h the novice in mind.Categories denote t heirrecommended playstyles,

while some are marked outas being suitable optionsfor beginner players

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


5454

Lucas Pope’s obsession wi t h anti-aspirat ional vocat ions cont inues wit hReturn Of T he Obra Dinn, a game in which

you play as a 19t h- cen tury ins urance los sadjust er. Unli ke t he designer’s previous game,Papers, Please, which placed you in t he must yenvirons of a fictional yet grimly recognisableEast ern European border checkpoint in t he1980s, here t he locat ion is som ewhat moreexot ic, even if the work it self is just asmonot onously gruelling. T he Obra Dinn is anEast Indian merchant ship which was lost atsea, somewhere around the Cape of GoodHope, while en rout e to t he Orient . OneOctober morn ing in 1808, the forsaken vessel

drifts int o port . T he return is m arked, not wi t h rejoicing, but wi t h red t ape. As a t ru st yred-blooded insurance adjuster for the EastIndia Company’s L ondon Office, you embarkon t he shi p and, agains t a soundt rack of creakand sl op, you begin t o figure out whathappened to t he 60- odd crew members (anum ber scaled back f rom Pope’s original,ambit ious c rew of 86), many of whose bodieslit ter it s decks and nooks.

It ’s a drama told t hrough t he lens ofmundane vocat ion, then, in m uch t he same

way as Papers, Please. But in contrast t o Pope’searlier work, t here’s a sprink le of t he myst icalhere. A m agical pocket wat ch, found in acasket dredged from t he sea, means t hat, whenever you happen upon a corpse, you ’reable to t rigger a flashback. T his t ransport s you to t he precise m oment of t he pers on’sdeat h, be it from mut iny or monst er. In t his way, from a few sel ect frames of act ion , youbegin to fill in t he gaps in t he story. You mightfind a wit hered skeleton slum ped behind alocked door, for example, and wind back t he

clock t o discover he took a knife t o th e backfrom a disgrunt led shipm ate. Or you couldfind a body lying in a bed, shot to t he tem ple wi t h a blunderbu ss . In each case you mus tt race the lin e of implied act ion t o discover what happened t o t he pers on i n t hei r f inal

mom ents – and, crucially, t heir identit y.People who appear i n one corpse’s

flashback may reappear later, and much of you r t im e is spent memori si ng faces andrelat ionships as you work to fil l in t he blanks.T hese blanks aren’t only m etaphysical. As t henarrat ive chains between cl ues you’re able toadd a not e to t he logbook t o mark eachdiscovery until, hopefully, every crew memberis accounted for. In t his way, Pope skilful lyblends his idiosyncratic storytelling style witha certain degree of player agency. It’s possiblet o fill in t he logbook incorrectly, a fact -finding mist ake t hat will likely cause later,

spiralling issues wi t h your conclusions.

T he difficulty of the detect ive workis compounded by t he game’s s t rikingmonochrome aest hetic, which has beendescribed, wit h Pope’s blessing, as ‘dit her-punk ’, using variously spaced dots in ordert o achieve shading effects . T he art st yle – at ribute to Apple Mac t itles of old – certainlycontr ibutes t o th e sense of melancholy andanachronistic drama (and nullifies what mighthave been too gris ly if rendered in ful l colourand contour). It also helps t o different iateReturn Of T he Obra Dinn from t he glut of 8bit-

inspired indie games on the market – t it lesusi ng an art st yle t hat Pope, of course, helpedt o popularise. But t he lo-f i look also makesidentif ying crew mem bers rat her difficult .Cost ume design goes som e way t odifferentiate one sailor from t he next, but wi t h such a sizeable cast , it ’s cl ear Pope s t il lhas som e way t o go before every face iseffectively recognisable. It’s a tension betweenaesthet ic and gameplay t hat he mus t find a way to solve in t he coming mon t hs , les t t hegame’s fascinat ing conceit fall apart .n

R E T U R N O F

T H E O B R A D I N N

Developer/

publisher LucasPopeFormat PC

Origin JapanRelease TBA

Insurance adjustment on the high seas

A random xOn e un likely issuethat Pope h asencountered whileattempt to mim icvintage M ac titleswith R e t u r n O f T h eO b r a D i n n relatesto the way in whichindie gam es travel in2016. On Twitch and

YouTube, those crucialchannels for carryinga game beyond therealm of thecogn oscenti, video iscompressed. Thistechnique blurs thelines of the precisedither art style, andcan make imagesillegible. To lessenthe impact of theproblem, Pope hasintroduced arandom elementto environmentaldithering patterns.

Compression,according to theauthor, has the mostdevastating effectwhen dithering usesa regular pattern tocreate shades andtextures. Random nessdoesn’t fix the issue,but it does improvethe situation,ensuring the gameholds up much betterin video form.

Pope blends his idiosyncraticstorytelling style with a certain

degree of player agency

“‘Dither-punk’ is a coolterm,” Lucas Pope saysof the art style, “and I

wish I’d thought of it”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


5555

TOP The game uses aninversion outline st yle liftedfrom t he 1987 Mac shoot erThe Colony , whereby linesare drawn in black whenthey appear in the light,and white in the dark.

MAINPope initially workedat 640x360, introducing azoom function to allowplayers to focus more closelyon characte rs’ faces t o aid

wit h recognition. He foundit painfully clunky, however,and now the game is builtat a robust 960x540.RIGHT Some of Papers,Please ’s pleasingly nippypace has been somewhatlost with t he transition to3D. You are responsible forexploring 3D space, so it ’spossible to stall the dramaif you miss a valuable clue

TOPPapers, Please drewmuch attention for itssocio-political theme,

wit h players experiencingthe alien pressures of lifeas a compassionat eimmigration inspect or. WhatObra Dinn lacks in similarpolitical punch, it certainlymakes up for in mystery.ABOVE CENTRE The shipgradually opens up it s hallsand corridors as you findeach cadaver. Init ially onlya single door is open forexploration, but with eachflashback, new areasbecome accessible.ABOVE In the game’s earlieststages it’s clear that deathcame to t he Obra Dinn viamutiny or disagreementbetween the crew. Yousoon discover that ot herfactors were also at play

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Kotaro Uchikoshi has concocted a mystery even more twistedthan predecessor Virtue’s Last Reward . The story is told infully voiced cinematics, fragmented into chunks of 90 in-gameminutes. With its characters’ memories erased after eachone, player and protagonists must reassemble the timeline.

ZER O TIME DILEMMA

STAR OCEAN: INTEGRI TYAND FAITH L ESSNESS

GONNER

Developer Chime Publisher Aksys Games Format 3DS, Vita Origin Japan Release June 28

Developer Tri-Ace Publisher Square Enix Format PS4Origin Japan Release Out now (JPN), Jun 28 (US), Jul 1 (EU)

Developer/publisher Art In HeartFormat PC Origin Sweden Release TBA 2016

Marking Star Ocean ’s 20th anniversary, the sixth game inTri-Ace’s series cuts back on cutscenes in favour of seamlessdialogue – a decision that , along with a 20-hour runtime,has proved divisive in Japan. Over here, a fl ab-free ARPGcould be just the t icket for t he fallow summer months.

A scruffy art style belies an inventive platform-shooter. Onehit sends hero Ikk’s head and gun pinwheeling away from hisbody, but decapitation isn’t the end: reunite your torso with

your skull and you’ve got another shot. Should you die, youget to try a new head, with each boasting individual perks.

THE LEGEND OF BU M- BO

The Binding Of Isaac creator’s next game is another collaboration with James Id Fingered )and composers Ridiculon. Described by McMillen as “a turn-based puzzle RPG-type thingy”,it appears to be a spinoff of sorts – Bum-Bo was a floating-head familiar that would vacuumup coins and chase enemies in Afterbirth . Its st ages will be randomly generated, while its t itl eand logo suggest it will again indulge it s maker’s fascination with all things scatological.

Frozen Synapse ’s developer turns publisher for this stylish cyberpunk action game set in a futurist ic Japan. It’s as vibrant as it is violent, with an isometric perspective reminiscent of a more colourful take on Bullfrog’s original Syndicate . Here, though, you’rein direct control of a lone assassin, sneaking, leaping and shooting your way through a large open world as you try to uncovera conspiracy. The sprawl, meanwhile, is stripped back for the game’s competitive multiplayer mode, which takes place on small,

densely populated maps. Packed with disguises, secrets and athletic gunplay, this could be one of 2017’s most dazzling debuts.

Developer SMAC Publisher Mode 7 Format PC Origin UK Release 2017

Developer/publishe r Edmund McMillen Format PC Origin US Release TBA

TOKY O 42

ROUNDUP

56

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Search for ‘Total Film’ in App Store

With full-length trailers and iPad-exclusive extras!

Now on iPad

D O W N L O A D

I S S U E S 2 F R E E

* D o w n l o a d t w o f re e i ss u e s w it h a n o o b lig a t io n s u b s c r ip t io n . O ff e r a p p lie s t o n e w s u b s c r ib e r s o n ly . iP a d is a tr a d e m a r k o f A p p l e In c . re g is te r e d i n th e U .S . a n d o t h e r c o u n t r ie s . A p p S t o r e is a s e r v ic e m a r k o f A p p le In c .

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


58

PR INT

SUBSCRIBE NOW myfavouritemagazines.co.uk/edgesubs

WHEREVER YOU ARE IN THE WORLD

S U B S C R I B E T O

Choose a print subscription and get every issue of Edge delivered to your doorfor less than you’d pay in the shops and with exclusive subscriber-only covers.

Choose a digital subscription and get every issue of Edge on iOS and Androiddelivered on the UK on-sale date.

Get the best value with the print + digital package: instant access to the digital edition onthe UK on-sale date, plus a print copy, with exclusive subscriber-only cover, to your door.

DIG ITAL PR INT+ D IG ITAL

Europe 95 36 113US $97 $36 $117

Rest of $106 $36 $126the world

INTHE UK?

SEE PAGE32 B E S T V A L U E

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


VIDEOGAME CULTURE, DEVELOPMENT, PEOPLE AND TEC HNOLOGY

293

60

80

4

94

88

74

60 On Refl ection

74 Collected Works:

Tetsuya Mizuguchi80 Play Nice

88 The Making Of… Axiom Verge

94 Studio Pro le: Dontnod

124 Time Extend: Fable II

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


60

DICE takes stock of Mirror’sEdge’s failings and sets about

redefining an entire genreB Y BEN M AXWELL

O N R E F L E C T I O NN R E F L E T I O N

That the original Mirror’s Edge didn’t make a greater impacton the trajectory of firstperson shooters remains one of itsmore mystifying aspects. Sure, other mystifying things aboutit include ugly cutscenes, risible boss fights, bad acting and

Faith’s unchecked fixation on turning valve wheels, but at its coreDICE’s parkour effort had – still has – the potential to revolutionisefirstperson locomotion. We’ve seen niche standouts such as DyingLight , and a little wall-running seep into Call Of Duty , but Mirror’sEdge still feels unique in its focused commitment to releasingplayers from the shackles of the traditional FPS.

And then there are those visuals. Despite being nearly eight years old, the game’s stylised environments still hold their own

against modern releases, DICE’s bold use of stark whites andcontrasting accent colours remaining as striking today as onrelease. And in Faith, DICE created a protagonist as distinctive asLara Croft or Nathan Drake, but significantly more progressive

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


61

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


“ I LO V E T H E LO O K O F T H E F I R S T

G A M E , A N D H O W O U R G A M E L O O K S .

T H E R E ’ S A H E R I TA G E T H E R E , A N D W E

N E E D T O B U I L D O N T H E S E T H I N G S ”

Early in t he game, a visitto an under-constr uctionskyscaper shows off one ofCatalyst ’s most vert iginouslocales, as well as Fait h’smag rope, which pulls her upthrough the building’s shell

62

than either. All of which is to say, problems aside, Mirror’s Edge

remains a pretty tough act to follow.“It still holds up today,” Mirror’s Edge C atalyst lead producer

Amo Mostofi agrees as we sit in an unfinished corner of the topfloor of DICE’s new offices – a space that’s practically begging forsome ill-advised parkour. “It’s still breathtaking the first time youplay it. When my friends find out I’m working on C atalyst, and Ishow them the first game, they’re like, ‘This was really made thatlong ago?’ It still resonates, and it’s just a constant source ofinspiration for our team.”

Why, then, hasn’t it inspired more studios to follow in Faith’sfootsteps? “I think it’s a very hard game to copy, if you want touse that word,” design director Erik Odeldahl tells us. “The techbehind the movement is a very difficult thing to do. Visually, I lovethe look of the first game, and I love how our game looks. There’sa lot of stuff from the first game that we’ve built on for C atalyst: theaesthetics aren’t the same, but they’re clearly built on the samefoundation, and the same thing is true of the gameplay. For thesoundtrack, we’ve got Solar Fields again. So there’s a heritagethere, and we need to build on these things.”

The result is a dazzling reimagining of Faith’s world. Releasedfrom incarceration after the two-year sentence handed down to herat the end of WildStorm Productions’ prequel comic, the runneremerges into the City Of Glass – a stomping ground that has

Game Mirror’s Edge Catalyst Developer EA DICEPublisher EA Format PS4, X box One, PCRelease May 24 US), May 26 EU)

ON REFLECTIO N

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


ABOVE While st ill gleamingand rat her clinical, the CityOf Glass manages t o exudemore humanity in Catalys t .LEFT Few of Faith’s cuts ceneacrobatics are out of reachto players during t he game

63

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


64

Catalys t ’s contr ols f eelimmediately responsive, butFait h becomes even st rongerand fast er as you upgrade.Swifter ladder climbingproves particularly welcome

changed during her absence and become less familiar – withplenty to learn. It’s an origin story setup that creates room for amore natural progression curve than the original game’s.

“The first game really threw you in there, right?” saysOdeldahl. “Here, Faith has to rediscover the city and prove thather skills are still there – or at least coming back – along with theplayer. That’s been a clear design intent from the beginning: we’renot just telling the player, ‘Hey, you’re the most awesome runner in

the City Of Glass.’ We’re letting the player become the mostawesome runner. The gradual unlocking of the city is a big part ofthat. The initial spaces you play in are easier, but if you play for acouple of hours or finish the main part of the game and then comeback to those early areas, there’s tons there for you to explore. We’ve made areas so that you can return to them not just withnew unlocked abilities, but also as a more skilful player. You cansee things you didn’t see early on because reading theenvironment becomes second nature.”

That environment is a sprawling, shimmering metropolis whoseangular, unnervingly clean architecture was inspired by the high-rise shapes of cities such as Shanghai and Tokyo. Those influences

manifest subtly, and Catalyst’s take on the City Of Glass retainsthe first game’s blend of familiarity and eerie geographicaldislocation. But there’s more life here this time around: you’re ableto spot pedestrians and traffic hundreds of feet below, listen in onconversations taking place in the various buildings you clamberover, and even – occasionally – encounter large crowds of people.

A more convincingly populated space, then, if no less

austere. But Catalyst’s open-world design also means that it hasto function as an entertaining parkour course no matter where theplayer chooses to head off. Balancing these two aspects hasproven to be one of the team’s most daunting challenges.

“It’s been really, really hard,” Odeldahl admits. “There’s not asingle object in the city that hasn’t been hand placed. There’s norandomness anywhere. If you look at other free-roaming game worlds, there’s often a bit of that in there, but every vaultableobject and slide in the City Of Glass is hand placed.”

It’s a remarkable achievement given the sheer scale, especially when it exhibits such naturalism in terms of town planning. But thatdrive to build a convincing space has created problems of its

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


ON REFLECTION

“ T H E F I R S T G A M E R E A L L Y T H R E W Y O U

I N T H E R E , R I G H T ? H E R E , FA I T H H A S

T O R E D I S C OV E R T H E C I T Y A N D P R O V ET H AT H E R S K I L L S A R E S T I L L T H E R E ”

65

FA I T H I N FA I T HIn an industry t hat, even t oday, regularly st ruggles wit h it sdepiction of women, Faith stands out as one of gaming’s betterfemale role models. “She was such a strong character in the firstone, but I hope people see her as a role model for everyone,”Mostof i says. “Yes, she happens t o be female, but we ’ve alwaysjust treated her as a human being – we’re just writing a person.I t hink that s hone through in the first game, and I think it shinest hrough in t his game. Chris [Emgard] and his t eam have done at remendous job of writ ing an individual, a person. I really hopet hat everyone can look at her and go, ‘She’s kick-ass and I wouldquite like t o be like Faith’. I would definitely like t o be as athlet icas Fait h, but I’m f ar too lazy to do what she does. So inst ead I goto the gym t wice a week and pretend I’m athlet ic.”

FROM TOP Design directorErik Odeldahl leadproducer Amo Most ofi

own. “For a free runner like Faith, every street is a river she has tocross, which is why we built new tools in for her – the mag ropeallows you to swing across streets and stuff like that,” Odeldahlexplains. “It’s not just a randomaddition to the move set – if we

want to open up the city and provide places to explore, we needto let Faith cross gaps that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. It’sbeen a lot of work, but I thinkthe attention to detail has paid off.”

The mention of a mag rope might raise concerns among fansof the original, given its potential to introduce unnecessarycomplication into a game about the purity of instinctive free-running. But in practice, by opening up new potential runs which

would otherwise be severed by an impassable gap, the deviceserves to help maintain Faith’s flow rather than diminishing it. It’salso wielded in moderation, only able to clasp onto suspendedsecurity cameras – a design decision that can make its use feelcontrived on occasion but, crucially, also unobtrusive. In any

case, leaping off the side of a building at the end of a run thensqueez ing a button to fire your mag rope and swing across intoanother burst of movement is both exhilarating and entirely inkeeping with the spirit of the series.

In fact, everything in Catalyst has been built around allowingFaith to maintain her momentum, no matter what situation she findsherself in. The newly introduced Shift power has two functions: it

works as an always-available dodge move that can be used inconjunction with an analogue stickto leap out of harm’s wayduring combat, and it also allows Faith to instantly get backup tofull tilt the longer she moves uninterrupted, the faster she becomes)after a bad landing or awkward clamber.

Performing wall-runs, vaults and slides builds your Focusmeter, and as long as it isn’t fully depleted, every bullet will miss

you. But stumble or get knocked down, and you’ll have run for

cover as armed enemies suddenly get their eyes in. Your ownattacks are also more powerful if strung together with parkourmoves, and the game generously corrects your aimto ensure thatany roundhouse kickyou launch froma wall will find its target –a useful consideration given that Faith’s acrobatic fighting stylemeans you often won’t be looking directly at your aggressors.

Faith now has strong and standard attacks, too, each mappedto their own button, and there’s no longer a separate disarmmove– it just happens as a consequence of the combos you perform.Combining the heavy attackwith a nudge on the analogue stick allows you to shove enemies in a particular direction, staggeringand knocking theminto each other. The ability to direct your

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


66

ON R EFL ECTION

blows adds a sense of physicality and control that was absentfrom the first game’s one-button setup, and means that combatis as much about mastering your body and limbs as is the case when negotiating the city at speed. You can launch heavy attacks while on the move, but doing so will bring you a thudding halt, soit’s often better to use the normal attack – which does less damagebut doesn’t break your flow – when you’re in a hurry, and leaveenemies disoriented as you disappear across a neighbouringrooftop or into a doorway. This combination of systems – strongand weak attacks, flow-reliant invincibility, and the ability to useenemies’ bodies against them – results in a uniquely potent feelingof power as you run rings around combatants, but one temperedby a continual sense of naked vulnerability.

“From the start, when we said ‘no guns’, we knew that we wanted to make Faith a projectile,” Mostofi says. “She needed tobe the weapon. She uses her hands, her feet, her body – anythingthat causes damage to these guys. So we built that into the

movement system. As long as you’re moving, it means that you’ve

gained Focus, which means your enemies can’t really do too muchdamage. Doing a wall-run, a jump then a roundhouse kick andknocking a shock protector into a guardian and watching them hitthe wall and fall down is very satisfying. So that was the system we knew we needed to work towards. That element of making hera projectile wasn’t straightforward, but we had a plan for it – it was the hand-to-hand combat that was the real challenge.”

“As long as you’re in that flow, any attack you perform froma parkour move is way more powerful than a regular attack,”Odeldahl says. “And you can unlock stuff in the characterprogression tree to make that stuff even more powerful. But whathappens when you stop? Or the enemies force you to stop? Wedon’t want you to feel like you’ve lost your speed, so the Shiftmove actually started from figuring out how we could let players

quickly gain speed even from a standstill. We don’t want to turnFaith into somebody who’s too reactive, just standing still andblocking. Instead it’s more about dodging out of attacks andcreating a position of advantage for yourself.”

There’s a moreish puzzling aspect to combat – albeit one thatrequires improvisation and quick reactions – as you string togethermoves in such a way that ensures there’s never too much distanceto your next target, that tougher enemies are stumbled at the rightmoment so you can pick off weaker combatants, and that Faith’srelentless momentum is never interrupted. The idea of such agraceful fighter resorting to using something so brutish as a gunis inarguably crass. And the progression tree which Odeldahl

“ W H E N W E S AI D ‘ N O G U N S’,

W E K N E W T H AT W E WA N T E D TO

M AK E F A I T H A P R O JE C T I L E . S H E

N E E D E D TO B E T H E W E A P O N ”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


67

FA N S E R V I C EThe first game was one of the main reasons Mostofi andOdeldahl joined DICE. “I t ’s always been my dream project ,”Odeldahl says. “I st arted here nine-and-a-half years ago, workingon Battlefield , like most people here. But I saw development ofthe first Mirror’s Edge from the sidelines, and I’ve always beenso amazed by what it is. It’s still unique.” Mostofi continues:

“I’m a huge Battlefield player, but Mirror’s Edge was alwayst his unique, innovative piece of t ech, this amazing game.”

ABOVE Antagonist Kruger is f ounder and head of t he shady K-Sec corporat ion. Faith is in opposition t ohis plans, but she’s not above taking on morally dubious jobs in her own line of work.BELOW Busierstreets lend a greater sense of place to the city, and you’ll even descend down to them on occasion

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


mentions bears branches that improve her free-running potential(less speed lost when sliding, or a faster shimmy up drainpipes) as well as her efficacy in combat. Intel on particular types of enemyallows Faith to hit harder and target weak spots, and one abilityallows her to quickly get behind an opponent in order to moreeasily make them stumble with her heavy attack.

“Doing hand-to- hand combat in firstperson is hard,”Odeldahl says. “And a lot of work has gone into that. It’s beentime c onsuming and difficult, but we’ve never wavered. We’venever said, ‘OK, fuck this – just give her a gun’. [Removing gunsfrom the equation] is something we really wanted to do, and it’ssomething that really fits with her character. I think staying ontarget with that has really paid off for us.”

Fighting enemy AI is all very well, but the game’s realchallenge will come from its suite of asynchronous multiplayercomponents. Hackable billboards display your customisable tag

in other players’ worlds, while times set on the DICE-built Dashmissions – which feature both in the main campaign and its

68

RIGHT Faith’s core designhas required little updating,and still feels fresh today.BELOW The city’s variousdistricts are distinguished

by differing architecturalstyles and accent colours.It’s a stunning setting

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


ON REFL ECTION

V I E W P O I N TIn a game so focused on momentum, is the team concerned thatplayers will rush t hrough t he game’s environments wit hout f ullyappreciating them? “When we built the cit y, we set out to createa space t hat people will want t o explore,” Odeldahl says. “Yes,it ’s a game about flow, almost about reaching a zen-like feel ing.But we had the city up in really rough shape very early, so I’vebeen playing in it for years now. And for me, t he whole

exploration aspect of the game forces you to stop and looksomet imes, and that ’s super-rewarding. As soon as you divergefrom the main path, there’s so much to explore and see.”

periphery – will populate leaderboards as players compete to be

the fastest. But it’s the game’s user-generated time trials and

location tagging that will prove the greatest draw. So long as

you’re not in a mission, or being chased by patrolling enemies,

you can switch into creation mode by pressing right on the D-pad.

From there, it’s a simple task of selecting time trial or Beat LE

(Location Emitter) and setting waypoints with the tap of a button.

If you’re creating a time trial you just need to run the route you

want to create, dropping checkpoints as you go. O nce you’re

done, you can save it as a public challenge or one only visible to

your friends, and then give it a go in order to set the time to beat

(represented by a customisable ‘Echo’ that functions as a ghost

lap). Beat LEs, meanwhile, are one-off markers that you can drop

in hard-to-reach areas and then challenge other players to make

it to the same location. C ompetitors won’t be given the exact

location when they take on the challenge (identified, like time

trials, by icons that sit where the creator initiated their creation),

and will have to search for the Beat LE within an area on their

mini-map. O utwardly frivolous, this UG C ’s potential shoudn’t be

underestimated – we lose more than a n hour of our day at DIC E’soffices re-running and perfecting a short time trial that we throw

together in one of the early areas.

“You race against time, against Echoes, and you can restart

instantly,” O deldahl explains. “At its core, Catalyst is a skill-based

game. You can become really, really good at Mirror’s Edge, and

creating your own time trials to show that off is really satisfying.

Dashes have a start point and end point, but there are no

restrictions on how you get between those, and that feeds in

again to the exploration element of the city, finding the fastest

path and improving your skills.”

Listed as bullet points, the multitude of elements that form this

more ambitious take on Mirror’s Edge’s singular formula risk

coming across like distracting noise. But while the mileage inzipping back and forth without the hectoring tailwind of the first

game’s linear progression is something that will need a concerted

playthrough to properly assess, Faith has always deserved better

than to be hemmed in. In our review of the original Mirror’s Edge,

we bemoaned the absence of a sense of achievement from

landing predefined jumps, a lack of sustained momentum, and too

little altitudina l variation. C atalyst confidently tackles all of these

issues, but perhaps its greatest trick is the way it hands players the

freedom they’ve craved ever since first laying eyes on the C ity O f

G lass’s sea of gleaming white skyscrapers, but does so without

compromising or diluting Faith’s unique appeal in the process. n

69

“ D O I N G H A N D -T O - H A N D C O M B A T

I N F I R S T P E R S O N I S H A R D , A N D A

L O T O F W O R K H A S G O N E I N T O

T H A T . . . W E ’ V E N E V E R W A VE R E D ”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


C

hristofer Emgå rd (left) is a writerwho started out in theatre and movies,and also spent time reviewing games inSweden, before joining Ubisoft Massive

(then Massive Entertainment) ten years ago. Hespent seven years with the studio, working on titlessuch as World Of Conflict , before joining theMirror’s Edge Catalyst project three years ago.

Did you have any concerns about taking theproject on in light of the first game’s criticisms?We had a pretty clear idea of what those criticismswere, and how to improve on them. I was broughton board after the project was greenlit, and they[DICE] knew that they wanted to know more aboutFaith, who she is, and why she does the things thatshe does. And also that she should be moreinvolved in the world, and the choices she makes

have more of an impact in that world. So it waspretty clear what the intent was, and then it wasa case of trying to realise it.

In among all that, Faith’s characterisation wasalready strong. How did you feel about gettingto work with those foundations?Humbled! Despite the criticism of the first game,there’s no doubt that she’s had an impact on theindustry just by being the way she is and lookingthe way she does. Going into her past and trying tounderstand her better has been one of the mostenjoyable parts of creating the storyline for thisgame. I’ve worked with her for almost three years

now, and she’s changed a little bit along the way,but I’m very happy with the outcome.

Did the success of Lara Croft’s reboot and originstory have any bearing on your work?I wouldn’t say what Tomb Raider did specificallyinspired us, but I think both [Crystal Dynamics]and us are approaching this in relation to what’shappening with storytelling in general. TV hasevolved over the last ten to 15 years, and we havemore complex character studies now. Way back,Lara Croft was much more flat – she was an

adventurer with a curvy body, and her deepermotivations weren’t really that interesting toanybody. In all sorts of mediums we’re seeing thatkind of simplistic character becoming rare – I even

miss them in a way, because I think there’s a nicesimplicity to that kind of storytelling. But I think withLara Croft and for what we’ve now done with Faith,we’ve been inspired by that idea of going deeperinto who these characters are, and thinking aboutif these types of heroes could exist for real. And ifthey did, what would be their background, andhow would they function? Because obviouslythey’re involved in some level of violence and soon – how do they handle that?

How involved were you with the casting process?Coming from movies and theatre, I love therealisation part – the acting and all that sort of stuff.

I used to do more directing when I was at Massive,but we had a wonderful director called TomKeegan working with us on Catalyst . He and Istarted on the project at almost the same time, sohe’s been deeply involved in the script developmentprocess. When the time came for casting, he and Ilooked at all the actors for the different rolestogether and then made our picks. Usually whenwe find someone it’s pretty clear that they’re theright person for the role, but with that said, I thinkwe were lucky this time around. We got awonderful cast, and the chemistry between themis something I’m very pleased with.

In a game so focused on freeing t he player, do you think there’s more friction betw een thenarrative and open world play?Yes, there is. That’s a constant… maybe it’s atradeoff. But not necessarily. I work very closelywith the game design team. The main impact thata game like this has on storytelling involves pacing.It’s up to the player: you play a main mission, andthen maybe go out and explore for a while, or yougo straight into the next mission. But as a writer Ican’t know what your next choice will be. Thereare different ways to approach that. n

Q&AC H R I S T O F E R E M G R D

W riter and narra tive director, DICE

70

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


LEFT Black and red are themost popular out fit coloursin t his part icular near f utur e.Runner leader Noah (nearleft ) has more than a lit tl eNathan Drake about h im

ABOVE Runner Vision nowhas three set ti ngs: off,t radit ional, and a new GPS-like s etup which displaysrout es across the city.LEFT Later enemies, wit ht he abilit y to move quickly,present stern challenges

71

ON REFLECTION

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


The man behind Rez’s VR resurrection reflects on ajourney through games that began in the arcades

BY SIMON PARKIN

C O L L E C T E D W O R K ST E T S U Y A M I Z U G U C H I

MEGALOPOLIS:TOKYO C ITY BATTLE

Developer/publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1994

SEGA RALLY CHAMPIONSHIPDeveloper AM5 Publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1995

MANX TT SUPER BIKEDeveloper AM3 Publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1995

SEGA TOURING CAR CHAMPIONSHIP

Developer AM5 Publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1996

SPACE CHANNEL 5,

SPACE CHANNEL 5:PART 2

Developer UGA Publisher Sega Format Dreamcast, PS2 Release 1999, 2002

REZDeveloper UGA Publisher Sega Format Dreamcast, PS2 Release 2001

LUMINESDeveloper Q Entertainment Publisher Ubisoft Format PSP, PS2, PC Release 2004

74

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


75

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


COLL ECTED WORK S

76

Growing up in

Sapporo, the

capital city of

H okkaido, Japan’s

northernmost

island, TetsuyaM izuguchi dreamed of

becoming a professional baseball player.

H e spent the majority of his tim e

outdoors, training on the field, till, in

the fourth grade, he became friends with

another boy whose parents owned a

toyshop. Mizuguchi would visit the

shop and gawp at the colourful Atari

videogame boxes that busied the shelves.

A round this tim e, he and his friend

started frequenting the local arcade. A

nascent hobby soon became an obsession;

the pair would begin skipping classes in

order to play. “I wasn’t book smart,” he

says. “I wanted to have more real life

experiences; to becom e street sm art.” In

art, however, M izuguchi found a subject

as compellin g as the arcade. He became

diligent in his studies, earning a place at

N ihon U niversity in T okyo to study media

aesthetics, a pioneering course about the

intersection of art and technology.

T hree decades later, this in terest hasdefined the designer’s oeuvre, which

stretches from the lux urious physical

experience of the racing game arcade

cabinets of his earliest work (Sega Rally,Manx T T Super Bike) through the intricate

fusion of mus ic and games found in SpaceChannel 5, Lumines and the seminal Rez,

which will be given new life later this

year as a PlayStation V R ti tle. H ere, he

describes his journey to date, and the

games that have defined his li fe’s work.

MEGALOPOLIS:TOKYO CITY BATTLEDeveloper publisher Sega Format Arcade Release1994

“W hen I was at university a friend of mine

showed me a copy of T he Bitmap Brothers’

enon 2: Megablast on the Amiga. It was

like a shock to me, opening my eyes to the

new possibilities within the medium. It

was one of th ose eye- popping moments

in my life, when I realised a brand- new

perspective on what videogames could

be as an art form. It’s worth mentioning

because of what came later.

Sega was my first real job out of

university. I had an unorthodox route to

working there, to say the least. Even

though during my university years I was

thinking about games and playing them, I

still didn’t think the videogame industry

was going to be my profession. One day

I visited the arcade and saw this huge

cabinet in the corner, an R360. It could

rotate and the player had to be st rapped in

with a harness. I thought: ‘W hat the hell is

this, and who the hell makes it?’ I saw the

name Sega on the side and immediately

went to their headquarters in T okyo.

I walked straight up to the receptionist

and said to her: ‘I want to work for S ega.’

She patiently explained to me that I

needed to go through the proper channels,

send in m y application, come in for an

interview and so on. I asked her how I

shou ld go about th at and, after that, went

home and applied. During the interview

process I told the interviewer that the

current games on the market were not the

types of games I wanted to make. T hey felt

dated to me. I wanted to make games with

the future in min d. T he interviewer said tome: ‘You are kind of out th ere, but we

could probably use someone like you in

our company. W e need someone with

crazy ideas.’ That’s how I got my job at

Sega. It was a small company at the time;

probably fewer than 200 em ployees. T hey

made me a planner, but my first project

was not a game development project.

Sega and Namco owned a mini

amusement park called Joypolis. It was

larger than an arcade but sm aller than

Disneyland. T hey had an attraction there

called AS- 1, a simulator ride in which

people would take part in a futuristicflying-car chase through T okyo. W e

handled the visuals for the ride, as well

as balancing the motion of the cabinet’s

hydraulics. At the same time, in the U K ,

we were partnering with a virtual reality

company called Virtuality. I worked in the

research department for that project –

so things have really come full circle with

the forthcoming release of Rez Infinite.

Anyway, I was happy because I didn’t

want to make the kind of 2D arcade games

“ S E G A T O L D M E ,

‘ Y O U A R E K I N D

O F O U T T H E R E ,

B U T W E N E E D

S O M E O N E W I T H

C R A Z Y I D E A S ’ ”

Megalopolis: Tokyo CityBattle helped to set a trendfor non-interactive motion-based arcade attractionsthat is still in place today

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


t hat were being worked on at t he t im e.T hey were so st ale and boring t o me. Iwant ed t o work on t he games of t he fut ur e,so t hese projects suit ed me well. T hey k eptme busy for quite some t im e. T hen, whenrealt im e polygon count s began t o increasefor t he first t im e, I k new t hat 3D gamemak ing was t he place I needed t o be.

SEGA RALLYCHAMPIONSHIPDeveloper AM5 Publisher Sega Format Arcade Release 1995

I want ed to make a rally game. T heopport unit y came wit h t he arr ival ofpolygons . Suddenly we had t ext ur es andwe could do so m uch m ore in t he genre.Wit h t extu res we could go to t he desert ,or off road – t hings th at hadn’t really beenpossible befor e. I pit ched t he game to t heexecut ives at Sega. T hey gave me a fl at - out‘no’. T hey t old me t hat no rally game hadever been anyt hing close to a success .T hey even said t hat rally games are jin xed.I was so passionat e. I had it in m y m ind ast o how i t would be designed. I beggedt hem t o give me a chance. T hey said:

‘What if it doesn’t work out and we losemoney?’ I t old them t hat if it was a failur eI would quit t he company and t heywouldn’t even have t o pay m e for t hework. T hey tol d me t hat was an in crediblyirr esponsible t hing to say. I t old themI didn’t care. I had t o make t his game.

I t hink it was t his passion that, in t heend, won t hem over. T hey relent ed andmyself and about t en oth er people weregiven a chance t o make t he game. Now, wewere all in ou r earl y t o mid- 20s. None ofus had designed a game before. None of ushad even exper ienced racing before. T he

execut ives t old us t hat t here was n o proofor hin t of su ccess here. T hat ’s when Iargued t hat , in order t o perf ect t heexperience, Sega should all ow us t o car ryout some research – locat ion scout ing andso on . We want ed to fol low a rally, andint erview th e driv ers, t he kind of researchone might carr y out for a movie.

Again, t he execut ives were in credulous.T ravell ing anywhere to make a game wasunheard of at t he time. T hey t old me th at ,if t he game was a success, I could t ake a

hol iday and do some t ravell ing. We foughtt hat t hrough as well . I t old th e execut ives,if t he company wouldn ’t all ow us t o go, wewould go on our own dime. At t hat point ,t he company said: ‘OK – t his one tim e

we’ll allow you t o t ravel f or r esearch.’It was all t hanks t o us pushing t hrough,encouraging each ot her and, event ually,managing t o make th ings happen.

T he game was a big su ccess , aseveryone kn ows, but my im mediat e bossargued t hat t his was actu ally down t o t heresist ance that we’d faced in t ry ing t o gett he project off t he ground. He told met hat it was all because t he execut iveshad pus hed back, so t he t eam camet ogether and worked harder as a resul t .

Sega Rally Championship was popular in its Saturnguise, but it ’s at it sstrongest in the arcade,

where it ’s one of thehighest earners in hist ory

77

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


COLL ECTED WORK S

78

MANX TT SUPER BIKE

Developer AM3 Publisher SegaFormat Arcade Release 1995

SEGA TOURING CARCHAMPIONSHIPDeveloper AM5 Publisher SegaFormat Arcade Release 1996

Af ter the success of Sega Rally , thecompany gave me a lit tl e more room tomake my next projects . I worked on SegaTouring Car Championship, where we got to vi si t Mercedes, Alfa Romeo, all of theseother car manufacturers. It was amazing.Sega Rally took about 11 mont hs, which was a pretty short amount of t ime. Sega want ed us to come up wi th an idea for what was next and deliver it much m orequickly. For Sega Touring Car Championship we were only given about five or sixmont hs. We had to rush i t and haphazardly

put out a game. It wasn’t a huge success.I learned an im portant l esson t here, aboutensuring that games are given enoughtime to fully develop.

Around that t ime we started work onManxTT Super Bike, a motorbike racinggame for the arcades. T hat involved someresearch too – all t he team got motorcyclelicences. It was better in t erms of t helength we had to work on it – closer to a year – but I learned another im portantlesson on t he project . You see, I had a very

clear idea of how I wanted the game to feel.T he lead programmer told me that what I want ed to achieve just wasn’t possible.T here was a lit tl e back and forth over what would be the bett er way to go. I ended uprespecting the lead programmer’s decision.T he game shipped but, even now, itdoesn’t sit well wit h me. It wasn’texecuted the way I had envisioned.

T he lesson I l earned was that , if youhave a vis ion, you need to push t hrough tothe end. If you don’t, you ult imately justmake everyone else unhappy. T hatexperience had a huge after- effect ondeveloping Space Channel 5and Re . It gaveme the certit ude to push through with my visions for t hose games, even when t here

was resi st ance.

SPACE CHANNEL 5,SPACE CHANNEL 5:PART 2Developer UGA Publisher SegaFormat Dreamcast, PS2 Release 1999, 2002

T he kernel of the idea for Space Channel 5 was actually someone else’s, init ially:T akashi Yuda’s. He had an idea to createa t radit ional music video that rolled as

the player tapped the but tons correctly, intime with t he music. We started thinkingabout how we could make it fun and brightand quirky. T hat ’s when all of t he layerscame together and the idea for what wereleased was born. For our research we watched all of t he music videos t hatMichael Jackson put out. We spent somany hours going to musicals, everythingfrom Stomp to B roadway – every musi cal we could afford t ickets to Musi cals werean ideal reference material because theymerge song and narrat ive. T hey createthi s kind of synergist ic spiral t hat keeps

the crowd going. We wanted to t ransportthe same experience into somethingint eract ive, using a call- and- responsedynamic. We did so much research, andthat’s how the elements t hat you see inmy games were injected.

M ichael Jackson was a huge game fan.He came to visi t Sega quite often. T here was a thread of communi cation betweenhim and us. We sort of got lucky. Duringone of the visi ts we were about a monthout of mastering Space Channel 5. We

“ I F Y O U H A V E

A V I S I O N , P U S H

T H R O U G H T O T H E

E N D O R Y O U J U S T

M A K E E V E R Y O N E

E L S E U N H A P P Y ”

Mizuguchi points to the extreme amount of research that goes into his projects as a factor to help them stand out, and SpaceChannel 5 was born following extensive study of musical theatre, along with every one of Michael Jackson’s music videos

Neither Manx TT SuperBike nor Sega TouringCar Championship weresatisfactory to Mizuguchi,for different reasons

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


showed it t o him ; he said: ‘How can I bea par t of t he game?’ We were so close t olaunch and t here was just no t im e to makeit happen. T he ideal s cenario for us was t osave t his for a sequel. But who is going t osay ‘no’ to Michael Jackson? So, in t he end,we went back t o him wit h a plan f or acameo appearance. I wasn’t su re i f he wasgoing t o be OK wit h what we proposed, orif he was going t o ask for a larger- scaleinvolvement . But he was t otally happy wit hour idea. He reall y ju st want ed t o be a par tof t he project, I t hin k. As s oon as we hadt he ‘yes’, t he t eam worked on it for abouttwo weeks. Such a short amount of t im e.

I t old Michael t hat I needed vocalperf orm ances to put in t he game:

‘Hey!’, ‘Chu!’ and all t he rest of t hoseexclamat ions. He r ecorded himself andsent me a t ape. T he problem was he spokeincredibly soft ly. We put t he eff ect s in t hegame but t hey felt t otally wrong becauset he main character has very hi gh energylevels i n h er vocal r ecording. So I had t oemail h im back t o ask him if he’d re- recordt he vocals wi t h higher energy! Finally hesent anot her t ape. It was bet t er, but st illnot quit e as hi gh- energy as I’d hoped.

REZDeveloper UGA Publisher Sega Format Dreamcast, PS2 Release 2001

Dur ing the tim e t hat I was work ing on t herally games I t ravelled a lot. On one of t het r ips I was led to a St reet Parade in Z ur ichSwi t zerl and in 1997, wi t h 300,000 peoplegat hered in t he cit y cent re for a concert . Itblew m e away. I t hin k it appealed t o t he artst udent in m e! T he merging of s ound andli ght , and t he meanin g behin d it allperf ect ly sy nched in m y head.

I’d had a number of t hought s brewingin my head for years and years. T he

mar r iage of game and m us ic, creat ingmusi c as you s hoot down enemies. Whent he home consol e t echnology caught up,and came to a point where we felt able tobrin g t he idea t o lif e, I k new it was t im e.I want ed t o make a game th at coul d putt he player int o a t rance- lik e st at e.

Again , we had t o do a lot of r esearchbecause th ere weren’ t reall y any gameslike t his at t he tim e, or at least , not enought o consider it a genre. I t ook my t eamclubbing. We also v isi t ed T aiko dru mm ing

fest ivals and wat ched hour s and hour s ofrecordings of st reet mu sicians. It wasn’tjust a case of li st ening to t he mu sic. Wealso t ook not ice of t he shapes and colours,and how we felt as t he perf orm anceprogressed. T hese were all t hings wewant ed t o t ransl at e int o our game.

T he basic idea was t hat shoot ing wouldproduce sounds, which coul d th en synchwit h t he mus ic. Quant izat ion was key toensure t hat t he sounds players made fell inst ep wit h t he music. T his would mean anyplayer coul d play t he game ‘in t im e’, as i twere; th e rhyt hm s of play would always besyn ched, and play would feel good. Whenwe fir st made thi s work, it felt like m agic.

LUMINESDeveloper Q Entertainment Publisher Ubi Format PSP, PS2, PC Release 2004

You know, I didn’t m iss h avi ng my gamesin arcades. T hey have a very lim it edaudience, main ly young males. T here areso many const raint s t o deal wit h t oo. Youhave th is sh ort game lim it at ion, whichmeans t hat you can’t really give peopleproper n arr at ive or st ories. For m e it was arelief t o move away fr om t hose restr aint s.

I r emember when t he Sony PSP was

announced. I could see it was a st rongaudiovis ual devi ce and so I im mediat elyst art ed im agini ng what ki nd of game couldwork well wit h t he hardware. I k new th at ,wit h t he PSP, players wou ld be able to playmy game at any t im e, in any place, so itwas a case of f iguri ng out what ki nd ofgame would work well wi t h t hat cont ext .

I t hought about maki ng a puzzle gamet hat us ed mus ic. I t was a new idea, I t hin k,at t he t im e. I put t ogether an incrediblysm all t eam . T his was a very special projectfor m e. Nobody believed in t hat game. Iguess because it was a new ki nd of game

on a new kind of hardware. When I camet o E3 that year, I showed people my game.Everybody looked very sorry for me. T heysaid t hat t here was no mark et f or puzzlegames th ese days. T he told m e that t herewas no mark et f or m us ic games, eit her. Int he end t hey were proven wr ong. Lumines sold well . I had a conf idence in t he gameand, in t he end, it worked out . It provedall t hose lessons f rom years ago to be right .If you believe in your v ision, and st ickby it , thin gs wil l work out.” n

Rez and Lumines wereboth risky productions,but Mizuguchi’s dance-music-focused experimentsfound receptive audiences

7979

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


80

Toca Boca co- founder Emil Ovemar

Five years and 30 apps in,

Toca Boca is growing up –and taking its players with it

B Y N ATHAN BROWN

P l a ynice

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


81

targeting kids between the ages of three andnine, and expanding its business beyondmobile app stores. But the principles are thesame: the only way to make things for kids isto adopt a child’s perspective on life, and ifthat means filling a meeting room witharmchairs that are so big that a six-foot adultcan only just dangle their feet over the edge,then so be it.

Ovemar met his co-founder Björn Jefferyin 2009 in the R&D department of TheBonnier Group, Sweden’s largest mediacompany. Their employer had tasked themwith finding a way to make money out of

digital content in the smartphone era, andOvemar – then a parent to children agedthree and five – felt that kids were theanswer. After convincing the higher-ups witha prototype, the pair set up Toca Boca in2010, focusing squarely on three-to-six-year-olds and the newly launched iPad.

“When I looked at what was in the AppStore, and what my kids were playing withon my iPad, I felt no one was taking itseriously,” Ovemar tells us from acrossa chunky table in the yellowest room in

W e’ve reached peak colour.The room in which wemeet Toca Boca co-founderEmil Ovemar is painted

from floor to ceiling in bright, pastel yellow;down the hall is the world’s reddest room,its most blue, and two of its pinkest. Vintagetoys line the shelves. There’s a gachapondispenser in the cafeteria. There’s an adult-sized go-kart, an office pug, and beanbagsare everywhere. Toca Boca’s impossiblycolourful new Stockholm office feels not likea development studio but a child’s fantasyplayroom, blown up and spread over a few

thousand square feet.The concept of the tech startup office-

cum-playground is hardly new, of course, butthis is about more than Silicon Valley PeterPans with basketball hoops above their binsand scooters for navigating halls. Since2010 Toca Boca has been making apps forchildren aged between three and six. Its firstproduct launched on the App Store in 2011,and in the five years since it’s released 30apps and notched up over 100 milliondownloads. Now, it’s broadening its reach,

One of oca Boca’s earliest apps, oca

Kitchen launched in 2011, and wassuccessful enough to spawn a sequel

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


82

The kids are all right Focus testing is important in businesses ofall st ripes, but it ’s vit al t o Toca Boca, wheret he need t o view things fr om a child’sperspect ive means t hat, well, you need tofr equently seek t he perspect ive of a child.“I t ’s always an eye opener t o come out ona kids t est and meet t he audience,” sayskids research manager Chris L indgren.“For a couple of weeks after wards youlook at what you’re doing in a diff erentway. It ’s easy t o be in t he off ice and designfor yours elf, but you have t o rememberwho you’re making th ings for.”

Traditional user-testing methods don’tapply here. You can’t sit a thr ee-year-old

down in f ront of a product and ask fort heir t houghts on a specific feat ure.Inst ead you have to watch what t hey doand t ry t o learn from it . Not all sessionsare digital: Toca Boca regularly testsconcepts before a line of code has evenbeen writt en, taking pen-and-paperprototypes or familiar toys (Playmobil

sets were used earl y in Toca Life ’sdevelopment) t o a fr ee-play session to seewhat t he kids choose to do with t hem.

Sessions are of t en held at Toca Boca’skid- fr iendly headquart ers, but are morecommonly conducted at preschool andafter-school clubs, with just two k ids in t heroom – enough for t hem to f eel relaxed,but not as distracted as they’d be in a largegroup. Then t he test er simply points aniPhone camera at t he t ester ’s hands, andwatches what happens.

“You have to be carefu l askingquestions t o kids,” L indgren explains.“Especially t hose that have just start ed

school: they’re just getting used t o theworld of r ight and wrong, and if you askt oo specific a question, they might t ry t ofind t he ‘right’ answer. It ’s them beingpolit e – but t hen other times t hey’re notpolit e at all! They’ll just reach for t heHome butt on and look for somet hing elset o do.” There’s nothing so brut al as a child.

Chris Lindgren ( below) joinedToca Boca as a play designer.She now works on t he stu dio’svit al kids research programme

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


83

them with products. Why would we limitourselves to [following] physical toy stores,and how they divide everything into pinkand blue aisles? Apple has been veryhelpful, and listened. Now we have ageranges in the Kids category [on the AppStore], but it doesn’t do Boys and Girlscategories. That, for us, was important.”

The phrase digital toy’ is key. TocaBoca is not, and has never been, a gamedeveloper. Ovemar and his staff say theymake toys, products, experiences or apps –but not games. It’s a key distinction.Videogames may be essentially toys, butthey come with a set of conventions andrules that have no place in a companytargeting such a young age group.

There are no game designers at TocaBoca – at least not in name. Instead, thereare play designers, and Ovemar admits staffthat have joined from traditional gamedevelopment have had to be coached out oftheir old mindsets. He recalls, for instance,that the initial concept for Toca Hair Salon involved a queue of customers, each askingfor a different colour and style. The playerwould then be scored on how closely theyadhered to the request. Anyone who hasever tried to coax a three-year-old into doingsomething specific, with precision, will knowthat it is a fool’s errand. “They don’t have to

do anything – they can do whatever theywant,” Ovemar says. “Without addingincentives, we have to trust that kids arecreative, that they want to explore thingswithout being pushed to beat a high score.”

Toca Boca’s work varies wildly in style,subject and theme, but all 30 of its apps aredefined by a very pure celebration of thepleasure of play. They don’t do challenges,progression systems or difficulty spikes. Therecan be no tutorial text in a product aimed

Sweden. “Adults were making games, booksand videos, because that’s what’s adults do.But I saw how my kids were using their iPodTouches and my iPad. They’d build a cinemafor Lego Minifigures, or use FaceTime to playhide and seek.

“I saw how they were using these nativeapps to play with the device as a toy. Theydidn’t see it as a scary piece of technology:it was just another way to play. We came tothe conclusion that we should make digitaltoys. Using all these capabilities – mic,camera, touchscreen – how can we use thispiece of technology to play?”

Speaking to Ovemar, it’s clear that TocaBoca benefited enormously from its earlydecision to focus on a largely unexploredsector of the app market, and from the way

its early experiments led to it devising a setof principles for the design and distribution ofits products that in turn helped establish itsbrand. The studio puts a child’s perspectiveat the centre not just of its interior design, buteverything it does: entire projects have beencancelled after one of Toca Boca’s regulartesting sessions (see ‘The kids are all right’).Humour is important, but an app should befunny to all age groups for the same reason– Ovemar points to the way Dreamworksweaves jokes for adults into family films asan example of something Toca Boca wouldnever do. Nor is it interested in fantasy

worlds: only reality is universally relatable,so Toca Boca products are set in hair salons,on train tracks and in schools. Diversity is aparticular point of focus for Toca Boca in2016, but since the start it’s avoided genderboundaries, making games both boys andgirls can enjoy.

“I wanted to define digital toys,” Ovemarsays. “The store was empty: there were noshelves. We needed to define what shelvesshould exist in a digital toy store, then fill

PLAY N ICE

“We have to trust that kids are creative,

that they want to explore things without

being pushed to beat a high score”

By teaching the periodic table,Toca Lab strays

perilously close to the dreaded ‘edutainment’tag. It’s playful enough to get away with it

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


84

P L AY NICE

is that none of us are getting any younger.Older kids may still love Toca Boca products,but as the years roll by, the more optionsthey will have when they sit down with aparents’ device for the day’s allotted screentime. Ovemar knows this only too well: hiskids, three and five at Toca Boca’s inception,are now eight and 11. “It’s hard to compete when Clash Of Clans and Minecraft aretaking over, and you’re competing with othergames, with YouTube. It’s been five yearssince our first app. If you were five then, you’re ten now; can you stay with TocaBoca, or are we too young for you? That’sthe challenge we’re facing now, proving thatit’s fun to play on the iPad with Toca Boca,even if you’re ten.”

The solution lies in expansions into thephysical world, with a range of toys andfigurines of characters from the Toca Bocauniverse. The company is also moving into video: a New York division, helmed byformer Sesame Workshop creative director J Milligan, was set up last year. Ovemar seeskid-oriented online video as a similarly blankcanvas to the one Toca Boca found on the App Store in 2015. But Toca Boca wantsto continue growing its app business, too –and that may prove to be an even biggerchallenge than breaking into toys and video.

If the difference between two childrenaged three and six is stark, the gap betweenages three and nine is staggering. Ovemar,however, believes a single app can appealto both and all ages in between. The youngest can poke and prod and play with what’s in front of them; their elderscan experiment, unfurling more layers ofcomplexity as they burrow deeper downinto the toy chest.

for children as young as three. The userinterface must be simple enough for atoddler to grasp. And with no level structureor IAP paywall with which to gate offcontent, the entire toybox must simply revealitself to the player as they muck about with it.

It’s a focus on the fundamentals that ismandated by Toca Boca’s target market,but whose appeal spreads far wider thanthat. Glance at the App Store reviews of anyToca Boca app and you’ll find enthusiasticmissives from players who almostapologetically admit to their advancing years. “No jokes, I am almost an adult,”reads one review of Toca Kitchen 2. “I loveit, and I’m ten years old,” says another. Athird: “As a 17-year-old, I enjoy this game.I don’t know why I downloaded it, but I’mglad I did.” Adults are at it too: we lost achunk of our flight to Stockholm to thebreezy musical toy Toca Band.

“I guess it’s harder to take out your dollsfrom under the bed as you get older, butplaying on iPhone is OK,” Ovemar says.“And that’s sort of sad in a sense, but it feelsgood to be able to offer kids a chance tonot grow up too fast. We said from thebeginning we weren’t going to do violence; we weren’t going to try to be sexy. Let’s notdivide boys and girls into pink and blue; if

they play with the same toys, maybe they’llinteract better with each other, and we’redoing something good for the world.”

And good for Toca Boca too, of course,though nothing lasts forever, and the declinein the paid app market means the studiomust change tack if it is to maintain itssuccess. Ovemar and company may havemastered the art of making digital toys forthree to six year olds, but the problem withmaking games for so small an age group

“I guess it’s harder to take out your

dolls from under the bed as you get

older, but playing on iPhone is OK”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


85

In Toca Nature (above) you sculptth e landscape and daub it wit hplantlif e, t hen zoom down toground level to l ook at wildlif e.

The Toca Life apps (left ) aresimple, tactil e digital dollhouses

Paint My Wings (l eft ) was TocaBoca’s third release, in a timebefore all i t s apps bore t he Tocaname. Toca Dance (below) isresolut ely on brand, however

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


“Ev en i f you l o ve u s so much you

p lay fo r a hund r ed hou r s , t he re ’s

no way you can g i ve u s any m o r e”

86

After the prolific experimentation of itsfirst five years, the Toca Boca of 2016 isfocusing on three apps that will be updatedmore frequently than its previous releases,each focusing on a different type of play.Toca Dance is an example of creative play: you use the touchscreen to create a danceroutine that can then be played back andsaved as a video to the device’s camera rolland shared from there, if a parent agrees.Toca Blocks, a freeform world-builder in which you sketch out a world for threeonscreen characters to navigate, combiningblocks to form new ones with differentproperties and even objects to be placed inthe world, naturally has a creative element.It also involves what Toca Boca termsexploratory play, where you mess about withthe tools at your disposal and see what

happens – perfect for the upper end of thenew target age group. Toca Life, meanwhile,is for roleplay, a digital doll house.

Toca Boca hasn’t been a regular updaterof apps in the past – typically, it haslaunched a product and updated it once,before moving on to the next project. Nowit’s tinkering with how it can better adjust toan era where players expect regularupdates, without compromising its values. When IAP is off the table, conventional AppStore wisdom doesn’t apply. “If we onlyhave five apps, [their combined price] is thetotal amount of money you can give to us –

even if you love us so much you play for ahundred hours, there’s no way you can giveus any more,” Ovemar says.

While Toca Blocks is being updated inreasonably traditional fashion, with newblock and object types given away for free,Toca Boca’s plan is to expand the basefunctionality of one app into a new one itcan sell separately. Future Toca Dance releases will offer more songs, charactersand shapes to throw; Toca Life is now aseries of three apps, set in a school, a town

and a city. It’s the sort of approach that willhave analysts the world over shaking theirheads, but there’s a clear reluctance to doanything that risks compromising the strengthof Toca Boca’s brand: quality, playfulnessand, above all, trustworthiness. Toca Bocadefined a small sector of the mobile marketon its own, honourable terms, but it hashardly had a pervasive influence on a sectorthat only gets grubbier and more money-hungry as conditions get tougher.

It may not work – but it may not mattereither. “The paid market [for apps] is verymuch declining,” Ovemar tells us. “We’renot declining with it, but it’s definitely goingdown. So we’ll create these new types ofproducts and we’ll just have to see. Can we make more money on apps? Is it evenimportant, or is it just a good way for people

to experience our brand so we can sell themother things? We’ll just have to find out.”

Indeed, though there are cautionarytales. Rovio, for all its success in taking Angry Birds from the touchscreen to the toystore, laid off a third of its workforce lastsummer and is about to release a C G moviethree years in the making to a market thathas largely forgotten about it. Shortformonline video will be a little quicker toproduce, but Ovemars acknowledges theconcern – albeit with the understandableconfidence as the head of a company that,six years ago, found a gap in the market,

cornered it, and defined it forever.“There aren’t really any good examples

of a brand starting in apps making it workacross mediums,” he says. “Cut The Rope,Rovio… you can’t really say they’resuccessful examples of how to take atouchscreen brand into the real world.There are no examples of how to do it.

“Maybe we’ll be the case study. They’llpoint to us and say, ‘This is how the newDisney got started’.” If the past five yearsare any guide, it might just happen. n

Frida Schlaug and MårtenBrüggemann are programmerand play designer on freeformworld-builder Toca Blocks

PLAY NICE

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Spring bloc ksWhen we meet , M rt en Brü ggemann and Frida Schlaug have just ret urned f romGDC in San Francisco – an odd place for acompany that doesn’t st rict ly make games,perhaps, especially given t he f ocus on VRat t his year’s event. The two come fromvery diff erent backgrounds: Schlaug fromcorporate app development , andBr ggemann from t raditional game making(he was lead game designer at Magicka 2 developer Pieces Int eract ive). Both havehad to make adjustments t o t heir ways ofworking in th e production of Toca Blocks.

“We’re so focused on the coreexperience,” Br ggemann t ells u s. “Youcan’t reall y hide behind good graphics,because the kids will see t hrough it . Int raditional games you have a lot ofint eract ion models t hat you know work ,but when designing for kids, it m ight bethe f irst time t hey’ve ever used aninterf ace like t his. It should be intuit iveand welcoming, even f or a person who’snever us ed a digital t oy before.”

Toca Blocks cert ainly does that . It ’ssnappy, sat isfying st uff, and the bar ofinventory icons – one with flickeringcolours, another sl owly rotat ing, other swith blinking eyes – begs to be t ouched.The comparison wit h Minecraft is obvious,but t here’s a distinct nod to Super MarioMaker t oo in what Br ggemann describesas sitt ing somewhere between a worldbuilder and a level editor.

There are also refer ences to t hephysical world. “I really wanted a tactilefeel t o the blocks,” Br ggemann says.“We worked a lot on making it fun t ojust play around with , making t he act ionsfeel r eally t angible. You don’t r eally feelit with ot her digital t oys – even L ego’sown digit al products don’t capt ure t hefeeling of snapping two Legos t ogether.It can be hard t o t ranslate it .” Toca Bocamay have done so here, but elsewherewithin th e company a team is work ingon doing t he opposite – t urning digitaltoys int o physical ones.

87

Whil e some combos in TocaBlocks have predictable endresult s, pat t erned blocks canbe blended forever, producinga different result each time

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


A I O M

V E R G E

A five-year journey from leisure-timehobby to big-time success

Format PC, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox OneDeveloper/publisher Thomas Happ GamesOrigin US

Release 2015

. . .

T H E

M A K I N G

O F

88

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


Thomas Happ had been busy making

Axiom Verge for the best part of three years when he noticed something hadchanged. As a coder at RTS developer

Petroglyph Games, Happ found his workdaymore frequently interrupted by his colleagues, who would enthusiastically express their desire toassist him with the project he’d been developingin his spare time. He was pleasantly baffled bythe influx of offers. “I just thought, ‘Why wouldI want to have someone else do my hobby forme? That makes no sense’,” Happ tells us.“Like, some people collect stamps. It doesn’t

just suddenly occur to them that they shouldget a team of stamp collectors to help them with it.” It would, he adds, “be like payingsomebody to eat my dessert”.

Happ certainly hadn’t expected suchattention when he first decided to spend hisevenings and weekends working on a game;it was just supposed to be something fun to do with his leisure time. He was making this forhimself, assuming “that no one would play it,and it would never be heard of”, since that’stypically what happens to hobbyist gamedevelopers. “I figured I’d just put it on [my] website and nobody would ever see it, so I was

shocked when the first time I put up a video it was being reported on major websites. My pastexperience suggested I’d put up a game and noone would care, and that was the end of it.”

Axiom Verge’s unlikely rise to prominence was, Happ modestly suggests, a confluence ofgood fortune and good timing. When he postedthe first YouTube video of his work-in-progress, hisTwitter account had just three followers – one of whom was fellow indie developer Ben McGraw, who had 1,000. “He was following me because we went to college together,” Happ recalls.“People knew who he was, and [wondered]about this YouTube link he was tweeting out.

And it started to spread from there.”Released in April 2012, that expertly cut

teaser showcased highlights of the game’s firstarea, up to and including the first boss fight, with a closing caption revealing it would becoming to X box 360 and PC in 2013. Whileit gave away very little, the reaction wasoverwhelmingly positive, though Happ wasamused to note a few misunderstandings amongthe comments that followed. “I guess peoplefilled in the blanks with their imaginations, andthey thought it was a whole game where you run

around a red-coloured planet, [ just] because this

first area was red,” he laughs. “They were like,‘Everything is red in this game, like the VirtualBoy And you use a drill – it’s a Drillervania ’”

He had, however, kept one key elementhidden from view. Happ had been working onthe game for a year before he decided that theability to glitch through walls and floors would

be a major mechanic. He didn’t want the abilityto be the first players would discover – and sincehe was developing the game sequentially, it wasin the design document but not in that earlyfootage. Ironically, it was inspired by aninstance of sequence breaking: Happ’s all-timefavourite glitch, Metroid’s secret world, whichcan be accessed by a technique that allows

Samus Aran to jump inside doors and walls.“You enter this part of the game that’s basicallyan area of memory you’re not supposed to bein,” Happ explains. “It gets interpreted by thegame as an unintentional jumble of rooms that you can walk around in. As a kid, that seemed very special to me, and so I researched waysof how I could build that into a mechanic.”

The Metroid influence can be seen in thegame’s aesthetic, too, though Happ was awarethat precisely recreating an 8bit look might notbe well received; players, he says, want games

to look how they remember them, not how theyactually were. ”The background [in Metroid] was always pure black and the world is just fourcolours for the backgrounds and four colours forthe sprites,” he explains. “Whereas this hasmore colours for different objects in theenvironments, it has backgrounds, parallaxscrolling layers, and other effects on top of thatthat are ac tually polygonal. So it couldn’t bedone [with 8bit tech].” Still, many responsesdelightedly focused on its apparently authentic vintage look. “The thing is, they don’t remember[games] in such great detail, so you definitely

want to have some degree of enhancement,”Happ says. “Even Shovel Knight added extracolours and parallax-scrolling backgrounds.”

For the soundtrack, Happ cooked up asimilar combination of old and new, borrowingagain from Metroid, while combining chiptunesounds with sampling of square and triangle waves. Yuzo Koshiro’s work on Streets Of Rageand The Revenge Of Shinobi were keyinfluences, but Happ’s fondness for modernelectronica means you may also detect hints ofGoldfrapp and Ladytron. “Mass Effect left a bigimpression on me, so there’s a certain amount ofthat classic ’80s synth in there, too,” he says.

Meanwhile, ideas for boss encountersbegan to take shape during Happ’s workinghours. As a programmer, he’d often face a long wait for a new build to compile, and in thatspare 15 minutes he’d grab a notepad andsketch out rough concepts. “Most of it was justfree-flowing, whatever was in my head at thetime,” he says. ”Though I was trying to createa general biomechanical aesthetic to fit withthe plot, which is a kind of discussion of theinterface between living beings and machines.”

All the individual elements were coming intoplace, then, but Happ’s determination to not only

go it alone, but to do justice to his vision – inpart, no doubt, to the raised expectations fromthat debut trailer – meant that developmentextended well beyond its planned release date.The X box 360 version was canned, and Axiom Verge was set to come to PC alone. Happ soonrealised that while he could handle the entiredevelopment on his own, ensuring that thegame got its time in the spotlight was somethinghe didn’t have enough experience in.

Enter Dan Adelman. As N intendo Of America’s former head of digital content and

The bosses are imposing and distinctive in their design.Most foes are a hybrid of cybernet ic and organic part s

PLAYERS, HAPP SAYS, WANT GAMES TOLOOK HOW THEY

REMEMBER THEM,NOT HOW THEY ACTUALLY WERE

89

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


THE MAKING OF...

development, he’d accrued a reputation as afriendly, approachable figure, fostering strongrelationships with small studios during a nine-yeartenure that saw him oversee work on four digitaldistribution platforms. Naturally, he was maderedundant, an announcement that was widelyreported, and led to him striking out alone (hisself-effacing job description on LinkedIn simplysays ‘helping indies with the business stuff’). As anindie needing help with the business stuff, Happwas quick to get in touch. “It was maybe a monthor two after I left Nintendo,” Adelman says. “Hesaid he was six months to a year away from

launching this game, and while he was confidentin every other aspect of game development, thebusiness side was another matter.” Over lunchwith Happ and his wife Chloe, the two menrealised this was a good fit for both of them:Happ had never previously had to deal withmarketing, or dealing with press, while Adelmanhad a game he could easily get behind. “He sentme a build and I absolutely loved it,” Adelmansays. “It was the kind of thing I really hoped mightcome across my desk someday – a gameI could feel really passionate about.”

News that Adelman was working with Happspread quickly, with Nintendo fans in particular

jumping to the obvious conclusion that it washeaded to Wii U. So the announcement that itwould be a timed exclusive on PlayStation 4 wasinterpreted by some as a deliberate snub onAdelman’s part towards his former employer. Theinitial reason was much simpler: the MonoGameengine Happ was using to develop the gamewas only supported on PlayStation 4 at the time.Still, Adelman could easily understand theconfusion. “On the one hand it looked like aNintendo game, but [on the other] it was comingto PS4, so that was a little bit surprising.”

Adelman had already forged a strongrelationship with Sony during his time with

Nintendo. “We would see each other at the sametrade shows,” he says. “In the very beginningthere was a bit of cautiousness and territoriality,but that broke down pretty quickly when we foundthat we all had the same interests at heart. Wewanted to see this segment of the industry growand develop, and so we recognised that all ofour different platforms had different strengths, andwe were all trying to do right by the developers.”He contacted Sony’s team to discuss how thegame might benefit from some investment via thecompany’s Pub Fund program, and before long

Thomas HappDesign, programming,graphics, audio

Q&A

Happ found himself enthusiastically signing acontract to bring the game to PlayStation 4.

Now he had official confirmation of aguaranteed return, by April 2014 Happ’s hobbyhad finally become his job. Nonetheless, while heknew he could afford to live, a guarantee wasn’tthe same as an advance. Soon, Happ hadmaxed out his credit cards and was relying onhis mother-in-law to pay for groceries. “I wasworking on the game full-time and started

What kind of impactdid the introductionof the glitch mechanichave on level design?Well, it made a big difference when it cameto considering the width of every wall…

Was it among the biggest challenges?Actually, even before you get to the glitching,

the biggest [task] is making sure everything you want the player to reach can be reached.In game design terms, the way I went aboutthat was to assign every ability a number, andon my game design map I would write downthe number of the item you needed to get pasteach part, because it was just so complicatedto have to keep track of it all. I didn’t wantplayers to inadvertently get some later itemor get stuck in some super-hard area withoutfirst getting the easier item you needed to reachit. That was definitely not easy. Multiple timesI had to go back and change everythingbecause I didn’t have all the abilitiesprogrammed at the outset. And things likedistances between tiles all had to be factoredin there. I’d be manually counting them, saying,“OK, when I draw this platform it has to be

at least 11 tiles higher than the other one,otherwise it’s going to break this other ability.”That kind of thing.

Some enemies have their own glitch form,one of which is a familiar reverse-L shape.Is that a kind of homage to the famous glitchPoké mon, MissingNo?Yeah. I forget exactly how it works but if youcapture MissingNo, then the sixth item in yourinventory gets multiplied by 128. I hadn’tplayed Poké mon, but there was a similar thingin Final Fantasy VI [the sketch bug], where you’d maybe get 255 Atma weapons orsomething in your inventory. And I just reallyliked that idea. Axiom Verge doesn’t haveconsumable items, so I was just trying to thinkof ideas that would stoke people’s memories,

or give players a new experience.

90

3

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


91

1 The t itle screen scrolls t hrough ruins, which are remnants of a civilisat ion onthe planet Sudra, where the game is set.“There are multiple layers of history t othe world,” Happ explains. “Differentenvironments come from different epochsand these ruins come from the oldest .”2 A carcass of some giant creature is

intended to suggest an apocalyptic eventthat may have occurred in the past.“It doesn’t really tie into t he story,”Happ admits. “I just try t o put t hesetouches in t o give it some more flavour.”3 A range of animation frames for

protagonist Trace. “My main goal,” Happsays, “was to make sure that the [player]gets as close t o instant a response aspossible after t hey press t he butt on.”4 Happ conceived more t han 60 enemy

designs. “I completed the art andanimation before the coding, but it turnedout t hat t he guns were in the wrong placeor the creature would have no way todefend itself. There was some regret t hatI focused more on how an enemy lookedinstead of how to fight t he thing”

1 2

4

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


working [at Petroglyph Games] part-time, which Idid for about six months. Then Dan was eventuallyable to secure me an actual advance, and oncethat happened, I was able to work on the gamefull-time for the final six months of development.”

After five years, Axiom Verge was finallyfinished, and launched worldwide on PS4 inMarch 2015, arriving on Steam two months later.Yet such is the developer’s curse that, even havingspent half a decade of his life on the game, andgarnered widespread praise, Happ has beenunable to stop himself from continuing to scrutinisethe game for weaknesses. Despite a keenness to

reward players with more meaningful upgradesthan a simple capacity increase for ammo clips ora few bombs, he now says he’s concerned that hemay have added just a few too many bonuses.“I wanted the things you find to change how youdecide to play the game, but not in ways thatbreak it,” he says. “The challenge was to makeevery weapon be different from another, but ina way it ended up kind of backfiring, becauseeven though my goal was to provide more varietythan, say, Super Metroid, what people picked upon was not that this [gave them] more variety, butthat they kept on finding weapons, thereforeweapons must be less valuable.”

For the time being, Happ has had to putany future plans on hold. After all, there’s thesmall matter of other console owners clamouringto play his game. Which isn’t to say he’s handlingthe ports without help; after careful consideration,he’s chosen to hand his baby over to BlitWorks,a studio that has worked to bring the likes of Fez,Spelunky, Bastion and OlliOlli to various formats.The demand, Happ says, has been there from thestart. “I made it for PC and with the knowledgethat it wasn’t going to be the final platform, and itwas just a case of which of the different fish willbite, and Sony by far showed the most interest. I

said, ‘OK, PS4 and Vita it is’, and once the wordgot out, other people started asking why it wasn’ton other formats.” Though Vita players were themost vocal, one Wii U owner took to YouTube tovoice his complaints. “This one guy said he nolonger believed in God because it wasn’t comingout on a Nintendo console,” Happ grins.

The fans’ faith – and patience – is slowlybeing repaid. By the time you read this, Axiom Verge will be in the hands of Vita owners, whileWii U and Xbox One players won’t have muchlonger to wait. Six years on, this long chapter in

Bringing the game to Vita as originally plannedhas proven particularly troublesome. It's takenso long that Happ has been accused oflaziness and losing interest in the process, butwith the portable unable to support the game’sengine, there was little he could do untilrecently. Sickhead Games’ Tom Spilman hassince brought the MonoGame framework toVita, though it took almost a year to happen.“It’s such a difficult thing to describe,” Happexplains. “It’s almost like they had to write aMicrosoft Word document, but first they had toprogram Microsoft Word on Vita in order to

make the document they needed. They had tomake this whole other application that in itselfis a bigger task than just making a game.”

Adelman has been more heavily involvedwith the Wii U version. Indeed, while he wasstill at Nintendo he’d been trying to encouragehardware support for MonoGame. “I was tryingto get something going, but we were neverreally able to get enough internal buy-in to funda port of the engine,” he says. Once he andHapp had teamed up, he approachedNintendo again – this time more successfully.“From the very beginning Tom really wanted todo it on Wii U, I wanted to do it on Wii U,and Nintendo wanted it on Wii U. So it wasnot a question of if we should do i t, it waswhen and how.” The two sought a studiowith the skillset to convert the game from

MonoGame to C++, and eventually founda willing partner in Blitworks, thus ensuringthat Wii U is the only format where Axiom Verge isn't running in its native engine.

PORT AUTHORITY

Thomas Happ’s life will finally have come to anend. Time, then, to consider a sequel? “I’m goingto have to inject some variety into whatever’snext,” he says. “Just because doing the samething over and over would be monotonous.”

Indeed, if there is a follow-up in the offing, itmay draw closer inspiration from another NESfavourite. “It seems like every Metroid game isbasically the same game,” Happ says. “There’sonly so many times you can have the same

[structure] and arrange levels differently. WhatI’d rather do is make games that have differentmechanics but fit into similar themes. When youlook at the Castlevania games, they go more inthat direction: in some games there are whips,in others you use a sword; in some games youabsorb souls, and in others you collect them.I like that approach a little better.” Whether ornot Happ ends up paying someone to eat hisdessert for him next time, the undeniable successof Axiom Verge should at least mean he hasenough spare for his own groceries. n

TH E MA KI N G O F. ..

92

1

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


93

1 The facility Trace works in isinspired by the Z Machine, theworld’s largest high-frequencyelectromagnetic wave generator.Happ: “I tried to have the artreflect things that would actually

exist in the real lab, but no onepicked up on it. What can you do?”2 By the end of the game, Trace

will have amassed an extensivearsenal, though there are so manysecrets that few players will havefound every single weapon.3

Early sketches showing howTrace evolved. “If you ever sawFarscape, he was like the characterof John Crichton – more buff and ina black shirt, but over time hebecame this gangly scientist figureto make him more relatable andless like your stereotypical no-neckMarcus Fenix kind. A mixture ofEinstein and Woody Allen”

2

3

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


94

STUDIO PROFILE

DONTNODLife really is strange for thisunpredictable Parisian outfit

BY BEN GRIFFIN

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


95

Founded 2008Employees 100Key staff Oskar Guilbert (CEO),Sté phane Beauverger (narrative director)URL www.dont-nod.comSelected softography Remember Me,Life Is Strange Curr ent project Vampyr

Guilbert and his team try and freshen up the office once ayear, discarding what they don’t need and building anew

The words ‘Final Boss’ are written onOskar Guilber t’s office door. Inside, ratherthan an intimidating showdown with achallenging figure covered in glowing

red bits, we find Dontnod’s friendly CEO. Hisspacious workplace features a slanted glass wall offering a grand view of Paris’ Sacré -Cœ urBasilica sitting on Montmartre, which is bathedin an orange early-evening glow.

Guilbert, a self-proclaimed ‘tech guy’ witha PHD in computer graphics and programming, worked on Criterion Software’s RenderWareengine for a number of years before becominga producer at Ubisoft, and started Dontnod in June 2008. “We were only five people at thebeginning – we’ve grown from five to 100,”he explains. “It’s really impressive when I lookback to see how it moved, how it changed.”

The studio’s first office was a 50m² spacenear Gare De Lyon on the north bank of theSeine. The current one, located in a quietneighbourhood at the top of Paris – the QuartierDe La Chapelle – allows the growing companymore creative control. “When we moved, theowner of this place said, ‘OK, we can give youthis space and you can do what you want.”

This explains the unique interior. Withmatte-black walls sliced at odd angles andseemingly randomly inserted windows, Dontnod’s

current HQ could moonlight as a laser-tag arena,and it’s easy to imagine employees at the endof crunch deadlines unwinding with epic Nerfgun firefights. “We were at the end of RememberMe and one of the UI designers had made theseblack shapes for the UI,” Guilbert tells us. “So we had him design the walls and the meetingrooms like that.”

In the largest meeting room we sit not arounda boardroom table and chairs, but on one of adozen, teardrop-shaped beanbags. No wonderthe studio is called Dontnod: from the walls to thefurniture, there is evidence of a wilful resistanceof any kind of convention. Its debut game, the

Capcom-published 2013 action-adventureRemember Me, was a bold first step, not leastfor its female, mixed-race protagonist. Whileflawed, it was a thought-provoking, smartlydesigned action game set in a Neo-Paris of2084, where brain implants allowed thepopulation to upload memories to the Internet.

Despite a lukewarm reception in certainquarters, its vision remains unique. Chromeand glass twirls around iron and stonelandmarks, robots ferry about shopping bags,and holographic menus hovering in front of

restaurant display the price of confectionery.“As far as art is concerned we’ve gained some

street credibility from Remember Me,” says artdirector Grégory Szucs. “We’re completelyconfident in our ability to deliver, and if they wantsomething that they’ve not seen before, they trustthat we are going to be able to carry that vision.”

Dontnod’s beginnings were tricky, however.Remember Me was originally known as Adrift ,and was to be a PS3 exclusive published bySony – but when the platform holder had to make

cutbacks, Dontnod found itself without apublisher. Capcom would come to the rescue,but for a while the studio was in limbo.

“Between the time we lost Sony and signed with Capcom, it was this very strange time where we had no publishers, we had not much moneyleft, but we still had a game to deliver,” saysnarrative director Stéphane Beauverger , whojoined in 2009 (Sony dropped the game in2011). “That was a very strong, very intensetime. We had to find solutions very quickly.

I’m convinced that the more constrained, back-against-the-wall, more trapped you feel, the moreclever a solution you have to find.” Beauvergerrecalls an old quote from one of the MontyPython team: “‘We had to be brilliant because we had no money!’ I liked that very specific timeof Dontnod because we had to be very clever, very efficient, without money.” Dontnod went toGamescom in 2011 with a teaser and someconcept art, hoping to generate press interestand, through that, another publishing deal,aiming to have a contract in place before the

year was out. It worked, but the team learneda valuable lesson. “We may have been tooambitious with what we wanted to do withRemember Me," Szucs tells us. “Now we knowdefinitely how to choose our battles and deliverour specific polish.”

The studio’s follow-up was Life Is Strange, which borrowed Remember Me’s time-rewindmechanic but was otherwise a stylistic worldapart from Dontnod’s debut game. Guilbertadmits some trepidation about the game’s risks.“I challenged them at the beginning,” he says.“I said, ‘Are you sure about the two girls?’ Andthey were all the time very affirmative, and theytold me, ‘Yeah, this story would not work if it

was two boys or a boy and a girl’. It’s alwaysa difficult question to answer: ‘Why this? Whya woman? Why a man?’ For us, it’s more about what kind of emotion we want to create, what we want to convey.”

Life Is Strange retained Remember Me’sthirdperson perspective and movement, yet this was no action game, but rather a choice-drivennarrative that owed a certain debt to TelltaleGames and point-and-click adventures of old.Like Dontnod’s debut, it starred an atypical

protagonist, this time the introverted teenagerMaxine Caulfield. It was episodic, with fiveinstalments spread over January to October of2015. It passed the Bechdel Test. It covereddifficult social issues such as drugs and suicide. And it was, above all, an incredible success.

“We’d learned from our errors,” saysBeauverger. “Each company has to learn fromprevious errors, previous mistakes. And I guess we are more organised now; we are more ableto deliver on time because we know we havemore budget to do so.” Life Is Strange was

“ I T W A S A S T R A N G E T I M E : W E H A D N O

P U B L I S H E R S , W E H A D N O T M U C H M O N E Y ,

B U T W E S T I L L H A D A G A M E T O D E L I V E R ”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


STUDIO PROFILE

96

originally meant to be a single, full-length releasethat Dontnod would self-publish, but when itsigned with Square Enix, the Japanese publisherfelt it would work better split into episodes.

Few studios can boast of having madetwo original games, in two completely differentgenres, with their first two releases. Remember

Me and Life Is Strange are completely unrelatedin terms of tone, mechanics, and genre. So just what is it about Dontnod that fosters these kindof ideas? For Beauverger it has to be freedomof creation. “As narrative director I would sayI really feel free to create many stories, manycharacters. Now we’ve made Life is Strange,

people see us as storytellers. We have this tag

on us: Dontnod tell stories. So we’re moreconfident in that, and we know that we can telleven more complicated, even more intriguingstories to the player because this is part ofDontnod’s DNA.”

Art director Szucs agrees on the importanceDontnod places on narrative: “I really think it’sdedication to telling stories, having the playermake tough choices and face the consequencesof their decisions. That will be in all our games.”

Dontnod’s current project, Vampyr, issimilarly story-centred and similarly unexpected.Set in post-Victorian London, it tells the dark storyof Dr Jonathan Reid, a vampire who uses the

chaos caused by the Spanish Flu and theconfusion following four years of brutal war ascover to skulk around, either curing citizens oftheir affliction or feasting on them. Vampyr tellsof a studio more confident in what it wants tocreate before it creates it.

On our tour, we see developers engrossed.One monitor displays pictures of Ripper Street, Assassin’s C reed Syndicate and Sherlock Holmes(both the Cumberbatch and Downey Jr versions)for visual reference. There are shelves stocked

with literary reference materials, includingLiquid History: The Thames Through Time andThe Book Of Facial Expressions: Babies To Teens. Authenticity, both from a geographical andanthropological perspective, is important toDontnod. Remember Me’s Neo-Paris was not acity rebuilt for the future, but repurposed, itsarchitecture built on top of, rather than replaced– a sense of a city that has grown and evolvedover time, much like the studio that made it.

Guilbert stresses the importance of renewal.“It’s very important to change, to have severalcreative people who are strong, who candevelop their own ideas. And change is good forus.” The studio holds a dedicated ‘de-clutter’ day

each year, for which everyone throws awayanything they no longer need. More important,though, are creative days. “Every month or two we have a day where people can do whateverthey want,” Guilbert explains. “It has to be linkedto the project we’re doing here – something that

will be useful for the company as a whole.”“We call them Dontnod Days,” Szucs tells

us. “We’ve had some pretty silly game jams, likesuper-deformed animals kissing each other. I’mnot sure I can talk about other specifics…”

While Dontnod may seek to reinvent itself with every new release, it ensures it holds true toits past. Traces of its history are everywhere: thereare Life Is Strange-style Polaroids on walls, a bigorange wireframe model of Remember Me’sNilin in the lobby, and a large banner bearingthe name Adrift, a callback to Dontnod’s days

with Sony. Successful studios inevitably expand,but by dividing the roughly 100 staff into groupsof no more than 15, and giving them ownershipover individual projects, Dontnod keeps themmotivated and ensures they feel their work isimportant, despite the rising headcount.

And it’s clearly working. “I’ve always beenfascinated by the passion of the staff, and howinvolved they are,” Beauverger says. “I know itmay sound cliché d, but sometimes it’s quite aproblem in the videogame industry. Even whenit’s not crunch time, the people here work a lot. Working many months just to deliver the gameto the desired quality… there’s a very vividpassion at Dontnod, I think.”

“I’ve been working for Dontnod for six years,"Szucs says. “Every year there’s a birthday party[for the studio’s founding]. We get a shirt every year, and I’m just missing the first one.” And, ofcourse, Dontnod always finds a way to have fun.“We were nominated in two categories at the

Develop Awards and I had promised to goswimming in the English Channel at Brightonif we won those two awards,” Guilbert says.“Well, we won, so I was happy to keep my word and went swimming in water at atemperature of 12°C Fortunately, we drank abit before and the champagne warmed us up.”

So what’s next? Whatever it is, you can becertain it won’t be a sequel. “We want to dosomething different,” Guilbert says. “Not repeatourselves, not say yes to everything.” Finally,the studio’s name makes complete sense. n

The top-floor st udio offers incredible views over Paris, although the interior works hard tobe an interesting space in it self, taking a litt le inspiration from Dontnod’s debut release

“ P E O P L E S E E U S A S S T O R Y T E L L E R S . W E

K N O W T H A T W E C A N T E L L E V E N M O R E

C O M P L I C A T E D , I N T R I G U I N G S T O R I E S ”

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


97

1

4

5

1 Dontnod’s vision of futureParisian fashion was a strengthof 2013’s Remember Me , offeringa mix of sporty and chic wear.2 Artists went for a more

low-key aesthetic for Max,the Life Is Strange protagonist.3 Aesthetically, Vampyr breaks

from Dontnod’s previous work.4 Leapers are mutated citizens of

Remember Me ’s Neo-Paris, drivenmad by their technology addiction.5 Remember Me ’s Nilin, as a

mixed-race female protagonist,remains a rarity in videogames

2

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


98

100 Quantum Break Xbox One

104 Adrift PC, Rift

108 Star Fox Zero Wii U

110 EVE: Valkyrie

PSVR, Rift 112 Chronos Rift

114 Ratchet & Clank PS4

116 Hyper Light Drifter Ouya, PC, PS4, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

118 Dead Secret GearVR, Rift, PS3, PS4

119 Lucky ’s Tale Rift

120 Final Approach PSVR, Rift, Vive

121 J ob Simulator:The 2050 Archives

PSVR, Rift, Vive

122 Salt & Sanctuar y PS4, Vita

123 Trackmania Tur bo PC, PS4, Xbox One

STILLPLAYING

REVIEWEDTHIS ISSUE

REVIEWS. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS

Dark Souls III PCGetting our grasping paws on a game far

ahead of release is often a curse, as well asa privilege. Our weeks-early romp through

a 60fps Lothric went sour when, in onelate-game area, the framerate plunged to

the low double digits, and armour began tofloat in the air a few feet behind its wearer. A driver update sorted the latter issue, andFromSoftware soon patched the former, but

for a while there the toughest game of the year risked becoming an impossible task.

Dark Souls III PS4 While the supposed nerfs to sorcery and

miracles are being a little overstated – staffsand chimes have poise-boosting weapon

skills for a reason, kids – pure casting buildscertainly struggle with Dark Souls III’s

aggressive enemies. Praise the sun, then, forpyromancy, which is as complementary to atraditional sword-and-board build as it was

in Dark Souls. And some of the late-gamespells are simply, thrillingly devastating.

Dark Souls III Xbox OneEverything was going to plan in our boxOne playthrough until we reached far intoCathedral Of The Deep, at which point the

framerate began to struggle to keep up withits PS4 cousin. Our jolly co-opping hasbeen prone to some teleporty play, too,

although that may be an issue relating togeneral server load. On the plus side, ourpassword-matching sessions have held up

well, delivering the most entertaininglyaccessible multiplayer in Souls history.

www.edge-online.comUp-to-the-minute

reviews and previews

Explore the iPadedition ofEdge forextra Play content

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


99

So, it’s nally here. This time ve years ago, Palmer Luckey was knockingtogether a VR prototype in his parents’ garage. Now the VR revival iscomplete, with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in homes and of ces the world

over (widely documented delivery issues notwithstanding), and both HMDspromising to bring about the biggest shift in videogames in 20 years.

The pages that follow appear to tell a different story. It’s true that neither theOculus/Facebook partnership, nor the Valve/HTC one, has yielded an instantclassic to justify the purchase of this tremendously costly new hardware. But itdoesn’t really need one: VR’s USP is VR itself. Games’ shortcomings can be offsetby the experience of playing them from this astonishing new perspective.

In the almost four years since Luckey’s newly founded Oculus took the Rift toKickstarter, the development community has focused on how to overcome a set

of challenges inherent to VR. Over time, consensuses havebeen reached on reducing latency, on mitigating motionsickness, on camera management and player movement.Few of the games that feature in Play this month fail toaddress these technical challenges. But VR is a consumerproduct now and, as ever, that means quality is a questionnot only of presentation, but also of design.

And so EVE: Valkyrie (p110), for so long a standard

bearer for VR’s tremendous potential, falls short for a goodold-fashioned lack of depth. The similarly Rift-bundledLucky’s Tale (p119) is held back by being a by-the-numbers3D platformer. But perhaps the most important lesson to belearned from this month’s crop comes from Final Approach (p120). As a proof-of-concept tech demo, it was astonishing,but as a nal game it’s miserable. Crucially, there’s muchmore to a good VR game than simply being good in VR.

irtu l reality

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


100

Developer Remedy Publisher MicrosoftFormat Xbox OneRelease Out now

Quan tum B reak

Quantum Break’s T V show is considerably bett er thanit has any right t o be. T hese episodes are also enti relyoptional, offering insight into the activities of theshadowy Monarch Corporation rather than your ownprogression , and t hey’re only around 20 minutes long, which feel s l ike a reasonable amount of t ime to askplayers to down pads. Hi deo Kojima has certainly l eantmore heavily on our patience in the past.

Pri or to each episode you’ll switch from cont rollingprotagonis t Jack Joyce brother of Wi ll iam Joyce, t hecreator of t he tim e machine t hat drum s up all of t histrouble in t he first place) to M onarch founder, and Jack’s form er best fr iend, Paul S erene. In t hese‘Junct ions’ you’ll be presented wit h a decisi on t hat

wil l inf luence the event s of t he show, changing cert ainscenes and even removing characters from the rest ofthe story. Before commit t ing, you can watch a vision ofeach possible fut ure that sets out t he broad scope of what wil l happen, and whi le early decisi ons are ratherblack and white, some later instances prove a little moreambiguous. T ellt ale Games- style feedback shows you what percent age of players aligned wit h you.

T he game’s story is an absorbing yarn t hat presentsa fresh- feeling spin on the well-worn concept of animpending apocalypse, and cleverly intermingles eventsand mot ifs between it s game and T V show components.It’s an ambitious attempt to explore a different way oftelli ng stories, certainly, but not every aspect is as

progressive. In the game, much of the backstory is told via emails, radios and other ‘Narrative Object s’ that actas collect ibles. We’ve no problem wit h sc rolling th roughthe occasional email chain – especially when t hey’re as well wri t ten as Quantum Break’s correspondences, whichcan also be amusing – but when you’re meant to be in arush t o save the world and find yourself wit h only fourof 17 Narrative Objects, moving from office to office justto stand and read for minutes at a time, they feel like ajarring, heavy- handed remnant of a more traditi onalapproach t o videogame st ory exposit ion.

When you’re not buri ed under pi les of off ice admin,Quantum Break’s more mobile moment s have much t ooffer. Remedy’s combat mechanics have always been

slick, but the tim e-dis tort ing skills available to you hereare the st udio’s best yet. T apping L 1 will quickly s hift you a few metres in t he direc t ion of t ravel, allowin g youto dodge enemy f ire or get behind a target, whil eholding the same button activates T ime Rush, whichslows everything around you as you zip about the place.T apping the B but ton n ear an enemy launches you int oan instant-kill takedown animation, and dashing to newcover Joyce takes cover automatically when nearfurniture and walls) will leave enemies targeting yourlast kn own posit ion, giving you the upper hand. R1,meanwhile, handles T ime St op and T ime Blast , the

The pre-release concern over Quantum Break’sresolution was, as with so many endeavours thatfocus on numbers without context, entirely

misplaced. Remedy’s output has never wanted for vi sual quali ty, but in Quantum Break’s time-fracturingaesthetic the Fi nnish st udio behind Max Payne hasconjured up it s most s t riking- looking game to date.

Playing out in t he hours leading up to t he end oft ime a catast rophic dimens ional collapse brought aboutby a physics experim ent gone awry), the game’s set t ingprovides the scaffolding for a series of memorable set-pieces in which ti me stops, starts, stu tt ers and rewindsaround you. T he result s are consist ently st unning. Adizzying, shift ing platf orm gaunt let s uspended in m id-air as a freighter smashes through a bridge. T he frozen

spiral of a helicopter’s rotor- ti p lights amid detonatingfireworks as i t hangs ominously a few feet f rom t helanding pad. Cars t hat explode under fire and t hen putthemselves back together again as time fights against your i nf luence. Even i f Quantum Break cont ributednoth ing else to videogames, its int roduction of reusableexplosive red barrels is undoubt edly a wort hy legacy.

T he world is filt ered through fizzing, light - refract ingt riangles, which represent t he fracturing of spacetim e –a visual language that’s echoed more plainly in t heswish archit ecture of scient ific research facilit ies andmansions, and one reminiscent of Deus Ex’s universe – whil e people linger like mannequi ns , petr if ied in afinal moment before tim e came to a juddering halt , their

last words seeping through the cracks as a distorted,horrifying noise. It ’s an ent rancing space to occupyand an effect whose impact never degrades.

T he att enti on to vis ual detail carries across to moremundane areas, too, such as the digitised likenesses ofthe act ors playing the game’s key roles. Shawn Ashmore, Aiden Gi llen, Cou rt ney H ope et al have, for t he mos tpart, an uncannily believable presence in the world rightdown t o the animations that play out during in- gameencounters. Subtl e expressions and movements offer upthe sensati on of directing a movie scene as you spin t hecamera around t o take in t he remarkable emot ionaldetails – alt hough many of t he physical animati ons feelclunky i n comparison to t hese moments , and once a

conversation plays out everyone returns awkwardly totheir less-convincing resting faces.

But overall it’s a powerful effect that narrows the gapbetween t he game and T V show port ions, t he latt erholding up better than expected. Sure, it’s no BreakingBad, and t here are times when t he live- act ion budgetcan’t qui te accommodate the game’s grandeur, butstrong performances from the cast draw you in whilecarrying the plot ’s si llier m oments and, even atit s least appealin g, it ’s never any worse than schedule-clogging tosh such as NCI S or CSI . T hat may seemlike damning wit h faint praise, but t he point is t hat

Remedy’scombatmechanics havealways beenslick, but thetime-distortingskills here areits best yet

PLAY

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


101

BELOWPat rick Heusinger playsLiam Burk e, a heavy working f orMonarch Solut ions who must weighhis job against his desire to ensur ethe safety of his pregnant wife

ABOVE Fallen enemies eerily hangin space during bat t les withi n tim estut ters, making for some st riking,sometimes haunting imagery.LEFT Quant um Break ’s world isconsistent ly beaut iful and packedwith detail. Progress is entirelylinear, but t he sense of a widerworld is eff ectively conveyed

ABOVE As th e stor y progresses, the infl uence of t ime tr avel and impendingoblivion t akes its t oll on charact ers while an increasingly complex web ofcriss-crossing t ime lines is uncovered. It ’s a dark er t ale than Alan Wake

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


102

variati on as t he game’s vanil la gun play simply can’tmat ch th e rush of wielding your t im e powers. But fort he most part Quantum Break manages t o feel quit eun li ke any ot her cover- based act ion game. Your powerscan also be upgraded by f indi ng hidden chron on sources

(chronons being t he part icle responsible for t im e’sprogression), all owing you t o st ack u p more bull etswhen u sing T im e Stop, or t emporari ly revealin g foes’posit ions in t he moments aft er u sing T ime Dodge.

Enemy encount ers are int erspersed with explorat ionand environm ental puzzles, but some moment s f eelcont r ived. An earl y problem r equi res you t o reach araised plat for m by us ing a cherr y picker, whichinexplicably retr acts every t im e you st and on it andneeds to be frozen wit h T im e Stop. Anot her sequencerequir es you t o reach an open f irst - fl oor win dow in anat mospheri cally rendered t rainyard, but forces you t ot ake a circui t ous r out e across car ri age rooft ops whena pile of st acked boxes near t he window – t he highest

of which cannot be climbed for some reason – wouldbe a considerably m ore sensi ble opt ion.

T hese mom ents , t he heavy r eliance on in- gamet ext , and some rudim entary checkpoint ing highli ghta t ension between R emedy’s ambit ions t o innovat e withint eractiv e stor yt elling and a reliance on t radit ionalgameplay m echanics. But whil e it doesn ’t always gelin a way t hat feels genuin ely new, t here are enoughsuccessf ul unf am ili ar concepts here to make QuantumBreak f eel l ike a step forward f or R emedy, ensur ingt hat t he game st ands out in a way t hat can onlybenefi t X box One as a whole.

7

for mer creat ing a bubble aroun d a t arget t hat all ows you t o st ack bul let s int o one massively damaging hi t ,and t he lat t er v iolent ly warpin g spacet im e anddamaging anyone wit hin it s r adius. In addit ion t o allof t his, tapping B out side of R ush wil l briefly deploya T im e Shield, buying you recovery t im e.

Us ed in combination, t hese abilit ies make you

feel fantastically powerful, managing the battlefieldas you plan movements in order t o pick off weakerenem ies before dealin g with arm oured foes or t hoseusi ng t ech t o resist at t acks. St ri kers prove part icularlyproblemati c as t hey’re als o able to T im e Dash and canoperat e with in st ut t ers when everyone else is f rozen,but shoot ing t heir backpacks (or gett ing in close andt aki ng a more hands- on approach) wil l leave t hemt rapped at t he point t heir t echnology f ailed th em.

It ’s not all about manipulat ing ti me, t hough, andguns feel sat isf yin gly beefy, but in one of R emedy’s fewm isst eps you can onl y swit ch between your two specialweapons and handgun by u sin g th e D- pad, maki ngquick swapping in desperat e mom ent s an awkward

aff air. And whil e your T im e Shield doubles up as amelee at t ack, knocking enemies in t o t he air in closeproximi ty, it s at t achment t o a cooldown t im er means

you ’l l somet im es f in d yours elf wish in g t hat usi ng t hebutt of your gun was also an opt ion – an especiallyannoyin g om issi on given t hat everyone else is quit ehappy t o use t heirs against you.

At its best , Quantum Break’s combat is f lowing andim pactf ul. You’ll wish t here was m ore of i t (a feelin gcompounded by th e passiv it y of wat ching the T Vepisodes) , and lament t he occasions when your abili t iesare r emoved in t he name of , presu mably, gameplay

LIK E A BOSS While schlocky in places,Quantum Break ’s story issurprisingly nuanced, intimatelyexploring the motivations ofthose on each side of a struggle,and for much of it s durationavoiding simplistic goodie- versus-baddie representations –a mature approach given further

weight by the excellent cast.The pseudo-science thatunderscores its disaster scenariois also enjoyably detailed, and while poring over emails anddocuments might bedetrimental to the game’spacing, in isolation each findmakes for a decent enoughread. However, all of thismakes it especially disappointing when the game abandonsany semblance of subtlety tocrowbar in a poorly designed,annoying boss fight.

Exploring areas in which awkwardlycontorted bodies hang as if in aspicis disconcerting, but strangelybeautiful. Monarch Solutions’ hi-techcorridors contrast heavilywith the other dilapidated locales you’ll visit

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


103

How did t he performance phase go?For t he mo- cap sessions we had helmet cams , so all t hefacial dat a was already captured, but t he det ail level youcan get today wit h t hat t echnology is not as high as wecan pull off in t he surface- capture st udio. So we broughtt he actors back for all of t he close-ups and re- did theperformances – t hey watched t he mo- cap performanceand t hen acted it out again. And when our act ors cameto Fi nland to be scanned, we had th em vis it a dentist where we t ook moul ds of t hei r t eet h so t hat we cou ldget a model t hat we could scan and put int o t he game. We used su rf ace capt ure f or every in - game li ne as wel l– I don’t t hink any other game has done t hat before.

How dif f icul t was it to balance all of t he tim e-powerdynamics involved in t he combat ?It was a long journey T here were many protot ype tim epower ideas added or abandoned, and slowly we got to where we want ed to be. Originall y t he game was ju stfrozen scenes, which is kind of cool but gets old fast .But in our engine, for a different purpose altogether, we had t hi s s t ate- recording funct ion for objec t s, where you cou ld captu re an object in various st ates . T hat ledto t he idea of broken t ime and individual tim e lines fordifferent components in a scene. I’m not t he technicalguy, but t here really i s all kinds of incredible st uff goingon wit h t he special effects .

Do any of t he t im e-power ideas you abandonedpart icularly stand out to you? Wit h t he s t ate recording we had an early experi ment wi t h let t ing the player record a sequence of gameplayand t hen rewind it and play again wi t h t he recorded version of t he character. But t hat ended up creating a lotof gameplay repet it ion, and pushed the game in to morest rategic territ ory. For a different game, I st ill t hink t hat was a reall y cool i dea, but we want ed t hi s fast - pacedadrenaline rush , and t hat idea was hol ding t hat back.

How do you feel about concerns i nvolv ing readingemails – t hat i t can break up t he f low of the game?

I understand it perfectly, and it fascinates m e: it’s areally interesting part of human psychology, this desireto not miss anything. But at t he same t ime, it’s clearlynot forced on you. If all of t hat was on your crit icalpat h, you’d be really f rust rat ed and would want t o st artskipping it, whereas when it’s made optional throughexplorat ion, some players feel compelled to search forit and not mis s it . T he idea was always t o add all of t hisin t here because it makes it richer and deeper, but I f eelit ’s somet hing for when you replay t he game. On t hefirst playt hrough you’ll be skipping some of it , butt hen you can go back and dig deeper.n

PLAY

R emedy adopt s a ‘ready when i t ’s ready’ approachto game development, focusing its energy onfewer projects and taking it s t ime wit h its

creations. Creative director Sam L ake may exude t hesame kind of t hought ful confidence, but his freneticenergy is a surprising cont rast to t he met hodicalFinn ish st udio’s outward appearance. Here, we discusst he groundbreaking aspect s of Quantum Break andthe steep learning curve they created.

How have you enjoyed workin g wit h live act ion? We’ve been doing lit t le t est s wit h l ive act ion as acomponent [in previous games] and we wanted to takea bigger leap in t hat direct ion. It was challenging andthere was a lot of learning along the way. Creating abig game li ke t his is an it erat ive process. Not every idea you have wi ll work, and part of get t ing to s omet hinggood means you somet im es need to change direction . Whereas wi t h t he t radit ion al liv e- act ion product ionmet hod, once you’re beyond the sc ript being locked, you ’re in a very r igid s chedul e. So it t ook a lot offiguring out t o get t o th e point where we had a goodplan for creat ing both element s.

Were t here any s ei sm ic ch anges along t he way?T he original idea for t he show was t hat it wasdisconnect ed. We’d have a game and a show, and whil e

the show would run parallel during the same crisis andin t he same place, we’d have a different set of charact ersgoing through their own storyline. Along the way wedecided to be m ore ambit ious and have crossover – Ifelt if we could do this wit h an int eract ive narrat ivet hen we’re doing somet hing nobody has done before.

What addi t io nal chal lenges di d t hat br in g abou t ? We kept pus hing t he show schedu le back. We agreedto s hoot i t as late as possible t o when we’d got t hroughprotot yping on t he game s ide, had levels in place andscenes that worked. Only at t hat point did we lock t hescript and t he branching stu ff.

T he facial performances st and out part icularly.Coming out of Alan Wake, t he whole t eam felt t he story we t old wou ld’v e been bet t er i f t he facial anim ationshad been closer t o t he act ors’ perform ances. So wemade a firm decision at t hat point t hat we would pushour t echnology and focus on t hat aspect. We created asurface-capture studio for facial expressions and built ascanning lab of our own for high- detail head captu res. And t hen , of cou rse, a lot of work went in to t he act ualpipeline of t ranslating all of t hat dat a into som ethingdynamic so t hat t he anim ators can t weak and polisht hings where necessary.

“We usedsur face capturefor everyin- game line –I don’t thinkany other gamehas donethat before”

Interview: Sam Lake, creative director, Remedy

Post Script

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


104

Developer Three One ZeroPublisher 505 GamesFormat PC, Rift (tested)Release Out now

Adrif t

fragments of H AN - IV in such a way as to disorient

without con fusing. You might enter a section only to

discover you’re upside down, up and down can just as

easily be forward and back, or a potential route could be

obscured by the angle at which it si ts in relation to you.

But c hunks of station are also used to subtly su ggest

the way forward with out ever looking contr ived. Descent veterans will certainly enjoy th e exploratory freedom,

even if Adrift’s reductive min i map isn’t up to the job

of pointing you to you r next objective.

T hose objectives are always the same: four

systems m ust be brought back online in order to

activate the escape ships, and in all four cases that

means fin ding the sys tem’s mainframe, fabricating a

new core for it, switchin g on its coolin g module, and

finally ins talling the core. Variation instead comes on

the journey to each of these areas, with each route made

increasingly dangerous by exposed components, fast-

movin g debris and less clear signposting. Despite this

slow trick le of fresh ideas and a few standout locations,

the convincingly realistic design of H AN - IV results in a

series of indistinguishable corridors and rooms which,

while undeniably beautiful, combin e with the repetition

of grabbing oxygen canisters and completing s imilar

objectives to make for a rather samey whole.

Even so, this is mitigated by the relatively short

length of the game and suit upgrades later on that

reduce your reliance on oxygen canisters and allow for

more freeform exploration. T he well-conceived andperformed story, which un furls vi a audio diaries, emails

and the occasional transmiss ion from Earth , provides

sur prises along the way, and t he pleasure of proficiently

manoeuvrin g your suit about the place never wavers.

Adrift earns its Intense comfort rating on Oculus’s

store by testing the limi ts of your body’s tolerance for

motion sickn ess as you somersault and barrel roll

through space. But it’s worth acclim atising for what

V R adds to th e experience: the claustrophobia of your

suit’s dwindli ng air is intensi fied by the feeling of being

insi de a space helmet with a visor centimetres from

your face; and the diz zyin g scale of floating m iles above

Earth when ou tside the station becomes overwhelmin g.

In fact, Adrift is at its best when you’re simplytaking in th e view and absorbing the gravity (or indeed

lack of gravity) of you r si tuation. A pos t- release update

that adds a mode that allows you to explore individual

levels (once th ey’ve been com pleted in the m ain

storyline) with un limited oxygen is a very welcome

addition, but it’s difficult not to feel that there was

a middle ground to be explored between the game’s

two extremes. Adrift nonetheless remains an absorbing

and remarkable game, and one of the most powerful

illustrations of how v irtual reality can transform

our relationship wit h gameworlds.

Given the grandeur of its setting, Adrift is a

surprisingly intimate game. Opening in the

aftermath of a catastrophic event on board

the H ardiman Aerospace N orthstar IV research space

station, you find yourself in the space boots of miss ion

comm ander Alex O shim a as she tries to piece together

what caused the event and fin d a way h ome. But whi le

the majestic wreckage of H AN - IV floats around you in

the deadly vacuum of space, you’ll witn ess events from

within a space helmet with nothing but your own

thoughts and an ever- decreasing oxygen meter.

T his contrast of epic scale and introspective human

tragedy is Adrift’s most powerful trick, m aking for a

disarmin gly moving journey through the sterile remains

of a broken science vessel. W hen you open a door to

what was once a corridor and is now a dark void awash

with shrapnel, and float beyond the threshold of what

remains to look down past your feet to the E arth below,

the effect is exhilarating. Later on in the game we’re

forced to cross a large section of space in order to

reach the relative safety of the station’s hub section,

our EVA suit’s thrusters pushing us slowly towards our

destination while mini malist electronica underscores

the awe- inspir ing view. For a game about surv ival,

Adrift is transcendently peaceful.

O shim a’s EVA suit s prang a leak in the disaster, and

your ox ygen reserves require continu al replenishm ent

from O2 canisters that float about the place or, later on,

O 2 stations. T he suit’s propulsion system also suffered

damage, initiating an emergency m ode, which sharesyour air su pply for fuel (we’re not sure if H ardiman

Aerospace’s engineers should be prosecuted for this

innovation). So both breathing and m oving put you i n

danger of suffocation, but at least refills are plentiful.

Addi tional suit- related dilemm as arise from

bumpin g into anyth ing, creating ominou s fractures

that form around th e edges of your vi sor. Leaving this

unch ecked will lead to your suit’s systems being further

compromised, but repair stations dotted about H AN -V I

will provide a quick patch up. T he precariousn ess of

your si tuation is furth er highlighted by the fact that the

slow leak of oxygen stops whenever you find you rself in

a portion of the station that hasn’t been breached,

making trips outside feel increasingly dangerous.Avoiding smashing your suit into bulkheads and

equipment is a tall order at first due to the idiosy ncratic

control schem e. Your thr usters allow you to ascend and

descend, roll to either side and move on whichever plane

you happen to be oriented, but keeping things graceful

and in ch eck requires gentle inputs and contin ual small

adjustments. Despite the sim plicity of the basics, the

regularity of in puts required takes som e mastery and

makes navigation satisfyingly com plex.

T hree One Z ero also fully explores the potential

of a zero- gravity environm ent by positionin g the

PLAY

Adrift is atits best when you’re simplytaking in the view andabsorbingthe gravity of your situation

6

SAS QUASHThree One Zero employs somesmart tricks to help reduce thepotential ill effects from zero-Gmovement in virtual reality. Thefirst is simply a brake, activatedby holding both triggers, thatquickly brings you to a halt –

which is an especially welcomeaddition if you’ve built up moremomentum than your stomachcan handle. Similarly, a button

that reorients you according tothe portion of station that you’re in offers a rapid escapefrom awkward positions. Finally,SAS Relief which is named afterthe very real phenomenon ofSpace Adaptation Syndrome)overlays your visor with a blackscreen, which leaves only asmall porthole into the worldand reduces movement in yourperipheral vision. It works welland can be set to automaticallyengage during potentiallyproblematic sequences.

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


105

ABOVE The jagged edges, broken lighting and clouds of shrapnel conspiret o produce hauntingly beautif ul scenes, soundtr acked only by muff ledbangs against your su it , coupled with Alex’s laboured breathing

LEFT Imposingly large hardwaresuch as t his is contained wit hinseveral glass spheres, and mustbe reactivated t o establishcontact with Earth and escape.BELOWWhile much of th e st ationis st ark and metallic, t he plant andanimal l ife l ends additional colourwhile underscoring the fragility oflif e in space – not l east your own

The HAN-I V space st ation is a sprawling construct ion, which fans out fr om a cent ral hub. Float ing above th e Earth in VR is, in t he realm of videogames at least, incomparably st irr ing

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


106

not m eant to be Call Of Dut y . We really want ed to dosomet hing fresh and unique, and I feel like we did t hat .

H ow did you go about designing the game str ucture?

We’re a su per- sm all t eam, and we onl y had X amoun tof t ime and Y amount of money t o make the game. We want ed t o make the bes t exper ience pos sible. I didn’ tapproach it lik e a game, but alm ost lik e a big level in agame. While you have to do t hose same four t hings, wefelt like each of t hose objectives exist in four or f ive very di ff erent env ironm ent s. And t hat ’s how we choseto differenti ate t he task of building t his syst em back upso t hat you can safely get hom e again. I f eel prett yst rongly t hat t he experience of get t ing t here and doingthose t hings is m uch different to just doing it .

Floating out of the station above Earth is certainly

a moving experience.

Yeah, we want ed to be able to t ell a story wi t hou t havingany st ory. T his is t he ultim ate environment. I knew justbeing in space and looki ng down at all of humanit y would t ouch people. T he narrati ve in Adrif t is broken,just like t he station, the sui t and th e main character. It ’ssupposed t o be messy and out of order and discoveredin t he way you discover i t . I approached t he narrat ivelike seeds: I want you to h ear a bit , get a lit t le chunk andt hen hopeful ly when you’re going across t hose great

divides and no one’s t alking to you, you st art t hinkingabout what you just heard a couple of m inu tes ago.

Gravity came out just a few months after you

founded the studio – how did you feel about that?

What happened was, aft er t he T wi t t er inc iden t whereI made some ill- advised remarks whil e working atMicrosoft , I just kind of disconnected myself from the worl d and st art ed working on t hi s game. Gravi ty hadbeen announced, it was in product ion and due out att he end of t he year, and I just wasn’t aware of it at all. When I plu gged mysel f back i nt o t he int ernet , I veryquickly discovered Gravi ty whil e researching, and soI was li ke, “OK, I can’t make t his game now…” But

some developer fri ends of m ine who’d read my elevatorpitch f or it convinced me t o keep going. T hen Gravit ycame out and I went t o see it. I was relieved becauseour game is very different t o what t he film t urned outto be. And I realised how helpful it was going to be –people come t o t he game wit h an idea of what t heset up is so I don’t have to explain it . Plus, people arecomparing the game t o an Oscar- winn ing film , so it’sa compli ment All in all, it added up to an hour of badfeelings over t ime, and I accepted it early on, so ifpeople need to bring up Gravit y as a descript or forour game, I’m t otally fine wit h t hat .n

PLAY

T hree One Zero creative di rector and gamedesigner Adam Orth has a st rik ing CV, havingheld posit ions at L ucasArt s, Elect ronic Arts, Sony

Computer Ent ertainment , PopCap and, most recent ly,Microsoft . Here, the Adrif t creat or discusses t he processof bringing a very personal project t o lif e, and why hedoesn’t mind comparisons t o Gravit y.

Adri ft was designed for monitors and V R – was it a

challenge to create both versions sim ultaneously?

We’re a team who’ve basi cally made console games ou r whole careers, so we approached Adrif t lik e we would aconsol e game. T here are a lot of anim at ions i n t henon-V R versi on where you get u p close to a door and you open it wi t h your hands , or you go int o a repairst at ion and it t urns you around. We experiment ed wi t h how t hos e t hings work in VR and changedsome animations [ to m ake it m ore comfort able].

H ow did the SA S R elief mechanic come about?

T here’s t his effect in VR called tunnell ing, whichshrink s t he screen you’re looking at int o a sm all window and t hen blacks ou t t he res t of i t so t hat yourperipheral vision settles in and you’re looking at aconcentrat ed version of t he full screen. We t ried that ,and it just didn’t really have the im pact t hat we want ed.But we thought, ‘L et’s just make this part of t he fiction

and have it be a funct ion of your helmet where anoverlay comes down almos t like a sun vi sor’. It wasinspired by some of t he thin gs in Metal Gear games where t hey break t hat wall , y’know? T he idea was t o‘pull a Kojim a’ t here.

Was there debate regarding Alex’s movement speed?

T he first 40 minu tes is su pposed to feel like you’refragile and broken, and right on t he edge of everyt hingfalling apart. So being at a particular speed, and howt hat increases t hroughout t he game, was in t entional.

D id you have any concerns about the tension

between th e game’s contem plative pacing and

mechanical urgency? Yeah, we did, but t he idea was t o play wit h t hos e t hings. And we’re s eeing that i t was a divi sive m ove f rom someof t he comment s and reviews of t he game. But I l ook atit t his way: if I found myself in a dest royed spacest at ion and needing t o get home, I don’t know if t hat ’sa smell - t he-roses kind of m oment , right ? Your oxygencapacit y, and t he way t hat you us e it and it depletes, is alot s lower than I t hink people perceive it t o be – I t hinkt he psychological effect of suf focat ion has an effect.I t hink t he tension between t hose two things is veryint erest ing. We made a really personal art game – it ’s

“This isthe ultimateenvironment.I knew lookingdown at all ofhumanity wouldtouch people”

Interview: Adam Orth creative director Three One Zero

Post Script

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


YOUR

COMPLETE

GUIDE TO THE

FUTURE OF

PC TECH

OR DER NOW from myfavouritemagazines.co.uk

THE BEST VR

EXPERIENCES

OCULUS RIFT

REVIEW

ESSENTIAL

GUIDES

HARDWARE

REVIEWS

F E AT U R I NG

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


108

Developer PlatinumGames,Nintendo EPDPublisher NintendoFormat Wii URelease Out now

S tar Fox Z ero

the pace drops and you’re given a welcome opportunity

to draw breath, this happens rather a lot.

Despite the familiarity of the characters and

the story – which hits m ost of the same narrative beats

as Star Fox 64 – this is strange, exotic territory. It’s not

quite like anything else you’ve played, and yet you’ll

recognise sens ations from oth er games. In presenting

both external and in ternal views of the A rwing

simultaneously, Zero carries a surprisin g echo of the

Siren series’ secondperson perspective, which sim ilarly

recontextualises t he player’s understanding of 3D s pace

by showing the protagonist from the standpoint of a

pursuin g Shibito. T here’s a substantial dose of

Affordable Space Adventures’ panicked fum bling, as you

adjust to m ultiple inputs while attempting to cope with

num erous outside threats. An d, in the way you com e to

rely on aural rather than visual cues to avoid danger, we

were remin ded briefly of Jeff M inter’s Space Giraffe.

T hat Zero should call to mind su ch diverse, esoteric

ideas is an u ndoubted strength.

W hich isn’t to say that it eschews some old-

fashioned thinkin g. Its str ucture is lifted from its oldest

antecedents, with stages designed to be replayed

repeatedly un til their seemin gly in surm ountable gold

trophy targets have fallen, and all their secrets have

been spi lled once and for all. But thi s tim e around th ere

are still more reasons to keep coming back. Completing

optional objectives reveals int riguing n ew routes,

leading to optional boss battles against the clock, orbusy asteroid fields to weave through. Vehicular

upgrades offer a fresh incentive to s peed through

completed stages and, perhaps, try to work out the

arcane solution to earn that fifth and fin al hidden

medal. It m ay seem a little preposterous to describe

as generous som ething that can technically be finished

in an hour, but this is a game with the mechanical

depth to m atch its s tern challenge, and enough tangible

rewards to go with the evident gratification of learning

to tame such a peculiar control setup.

W ith the spirit of G erry A nderson alive and well in

the sn appy exchanges that pepper each stage – keeping

non- interactive story beats to a minimum – Zero

doesn’t stum ble too often after its troublin g start. O neor two mildly grating voiceovers are easy to overlook;

less so a needlessly fussy fi nal boss fight, and the mi nor

but pervasive nuis ance of recalibrating your aim.

Otherwise, Star Fox Zero is a warming reminder of th e

strengths of its host h ardware, albeit on e tinged with

thoughts of what m ight have been. After all, Nin tendo

is un likely to bet the farm on sim ilarly unconventional

hardware next tim e. W ii U might be your last

opportunity to experience delightfully quixotic, offbeat

Ni ntendo games like this; all things cons idered,

it’s a chance you probably shouldn ’t pass up.

The cultural phenomenon of the second screen is

one with which we’ve all grown uneasily familiar.

W ho hasn’t been so absorbed in the sm all device

in their h ands that they’ve mis sed a crucial line of

dialogue, a twist, a goal? By the same token, we’ve been

distracted by 1080 p H D displays long enough to lose a

life, to have time run out, to experience the frustration

of being beaten by seconds to a zinger whose retweet

tally is tick ing upwards by the second. W ii U was

conceived with the notion of relieving this tensi on

somewhat, and y et its m ost fascinating games are those

that choose ins tead to embrace it. After a turbulent

start, you can add Star Fox Zero to that list, though it

will take most players a while to reach that conc lusion,

and some may not have the fortitude to get there at all.

In previous St ar Fox games y our A rwing’s lasers were

bound to its orientation. Now, with the G amePad’s gyro

sensors allowing you to shift your aim by ti lting the

controller, and the st icks m anoeuvring the craft itself,

in th eory you have total control. But in a three-

dimens ional space where you’re attacked from all sides,

a firstperson perspective alone isn’t enough. T he

answer is to have the GamePad show th e view from

Fox M cCloud’s cockpit, and for the T V to offer a

more familiar thirdperson framing. Ostensi bly, this

combination of internal and external cameras is

intended to give the pilot access to more inform ation

than ever before. It is, in other words, for Fox’s sake.

D urin g the game’s early moments you m ay be

tempted to mutter a sim ilar phrase. It is , or at least itseems to be, an impractical solution, especially s ince so

many other games have allowed players to move and

aim in d ifferent directions usin g dual analogue sticks.

It’s not so m uch about solvin g a problem, then, as

creating one to be solved: how best to use two separate

sources to form a complete picture. And th at

responsibility is thrillin gly conferred upon the player.

T rue, it is m ore annoyi ng than invigorating at first.

But with tim e and practice, you’ll gain an instin ctive

understanding of where you sh ould be looking and

when. It’s the G amePad where your attention should be

focused for the m ost part, since it’s only here that you

can effectively marshal your aiming reticle. But when

you n eed to lock on to an enemy that’s either large instature or in health meter – or to pinpoint the position

of a chasing craft – it’s time to look up and reposition

yourself accordingly. Un til then, it’s tough but forgiving,

so long as you’re not too reckless. Silver rings restore a

large chunk of health; gold ones award you retries that

send you back to a checkpoint rather than the start of

the mis sion. Bu t to surv ive, you’ll still have to keep a

calm head in mom ents of cris is, where the screen

becomes crowded with bullets, m issiles, falling

buildings and darting enemy craft. And, excepting a

brief excursion or two inside a hovering drone where

PLAY

Despite thefamiliarity ofthe charactersand the story,this is strange,exotic territory,not quite likeanything else

7

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


109

ABOVE The window of opportunit y to hit certain t arget s can be verynarrow, though it wouldn’t be a Plati num game without occasionallyproviding you with the temptation to hurl your controller hard and far

TOP These aren’t t he prett iest ormost detail ed graphics on Wii U,but t he simple, bold art suits t hegame – and makes t he busiermoment s easier t o read througha GamePad cockpit window.MAIN If you’re str uggling toescape enemies on the ground,t he Landmast er can briefly t aket o t he air; indeed, it’s necessaryt o unlock Tit ania’s alt ernate rout e.RIGHT You’ll need to watch theTV more frequently whencontroll ing the Arwing’s walkerform , especially dur ing some briefplatfor ming int erludes. This blackvariant can be unl ocked earlywith a Falco Lombardi Amiibo

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


110

Developer/publisher CCPFormat PSVR, Rift (version tested)Release Out now (Rift), October (PSVR)

EVE: Valk y rie

lock’ mis siles, which complement your main guns. T ap

Y to target an enemy, and squeeze the left trigger to

stack up a battery of mis siles ready for launch (the total

number available reliant on your recharging capacitor

unit); th en it’s just a case of keeping your target in v iew

– irrespective of your ship’s relative orientation –

while the projectiles close on t heir target. Your m ain

cannons require more traditional aimin g, but your H U D

usefully displays a red square where you point th e guns

when leading a target. Should you find y ourself on the

receiving end of someone else’s missiles, a recharging

anti- ballistics system can be triggered by tapping X.

Ships come in three flavours: fighter, heavy and

support. T he first of these is a mid- range all- rounder

that’s ideal for taking in to the th ick of a dogfight, while

the latter two represent Valkyrie’s tank and medic

classes respectively. All three sh ip types can be

upgraded as you progress, armour, shields and systems

benefiting from in cremental boosts, and th ere’s a

moderate suite of c ustomis ation options available (it

will help if you ’re a fan of skulls and angel wings). Prior

to battle, ships mus t be assigned to launch tubes to be

available. T he first of these is free, but additional ones

need to be rented using s ilver earned in - game.

W hatever their class, destroyed craft leave glowing

green salvage, which can be collected by flying through

it, the team’s total haul shared equally among players at

the end of a match. It com es in three variations (raw,

component and pr ime) and can be used to craft newships from blueprints unlocked as you level up. You

can also find salvage in th e exploratory S cout m issions ,

which allow you to freely explore the game’s m aps and

search out resources and voice recordings, here called

echoes, of former pilots.

All of the kit you create can be deployed in two

multi player modes, team deathmatch and control. T he

latter sees pilots drop drones at objectives to syphon

power and degrade the enemy’s war effort, and employs

a Battlefield- style ticket system in which battleships

hold finite clones of fallen pilots to send into com bat.

T here’s also a wave- based su rvival mode, with two

difficulty t iers, that can be tackled on each map.

It’s a great deal of fun for the first 20 m inutes, butonce you’ve mastered your sh ips and applied your

favourite skull decals, there’s little to keep you hooked.

Combat is enjoyable but lacks depth even with the three

ship c lasses on offer, and th e num ber of (really rather

good) singleplayer m ission s is disappointingly low. For

its opening minutes, Valkyrie is a stun ning example of

what’s poss ible in v irtual reality. But u ltimately, when

the V R- driven awe of finding yourself in the middle

of a beautiful, dramatic space battle begins to fade,

there’s little more than an average, and decidedly

shallow, shooter left in th e vacuum t hat remains.

W hile other high- profile developers have

backed the first wave of headsets, CC P’s

EVE : Valkyrie has become the poster child

for V R. T hat’s partly down to it having been associated

with R ift for so long now (of the launch h ardware

pack-i ns, it’s certainly the most coveted), but also

because of what it represents: a comparatively big-

budget, competitive online sh ooter that promises to

set the bar for V R’s multiplayer potential.

If n othing else, it looks the part. Am ong a first wave

of pioneering games whose graphical quality varies

wildly, Valkyrie’s visual presentation feels luxuri ous:

enormous shipyards, space stations and hulks hang

imposi ngly amid in digo, cobalt and ru by nebulas;

extraterrestrial worlds loom just beyond the battlefield;

and a tangle of glowing red and blue fighter craft trails

records the fin al manoeuvres of desperate pilots.

Your cockpi t, too, is a pleasant place to inhabit. T he

U I is seamlessly in tegrated into the compartment, with

the dwindling state of your health and shield available

via a head-up display while your radar, speed, miss ile

capacitor charge and battle standings are a quick

downward glance away. It’s a pity that this clean design

language isn’t replicated in the game’s menu s, which

are a confusing, unintuit ive mess – in the absence of

a crosshair or pointer, selecting options by looking at

them i s often fiddly, and it’s easy to get briefly lost

among the unfocus ed, cluttered sub- menus .

Fortunately, controlling your s hip is far more

enjoyable. T here’s a su btle but satisfy ing inertia tomanoeuvrin g, which m akes ships feel both reassur ingly

substantial and usefully lithe. You can’t come to a full

halt (unless y ou get yourself wedged in th e scenery), but

holding B will s low you a little while the A button gives

you a boost. Both are essential duri ng combat, the

former tightening your tur ning circle and enabling you

to flip over and face a chasing enemy, and the latter (in

combination wi th som e judicious barrel rolls) offering a

chance to escape from particularly tenacious oppon ents.

It on ly takes a couple of matches before you’re skilfully

threading in and out of complex str uctures as you ch ase

other pilots – or run from them – in a spectacularly

filmic m anner, and there’s a surpris ing amount of

nuance to be mined from the simple control schem e.U nlike many early V R games, Valkyrie demands you

use your ability to look around fully. Your first few

matches will likely be lost due to a mon itor- honed stiff

neck, but looking around to assess the battlefield – not

simply angling your head a little while tracking a target

– is essential to survival. Rift’s well-di stributed weight

and confidence-i nspir ing straps prove a boon in this

respect, as once fully im mersed in Valkyrie’s world, our

head movements became frenetic, bordering on violent.

Awareness of your environment is further

encouraged through th e brilliantly conceived ‘look- to-

PLAY

Once fullyimmersedin Valkyrie’s world, our headmovementsbecame frenetic,borderingon violent

5

SPACE BUCKS While currency earned in thegame should cover everything

you need, Valkyrie also featuresmicrotransactions through

which you can purchase Gold

Bonds. These can be spent onexclusive ship customisationitems though only aestheticupgrades), paying for thetransfer of earned XP betweenships, and buying XP-boostingImplants, which allow your pilotto learn faster. It will also be oneof the ways that you can gainaccess to the game’s legendaryships, which can’t be built viablueprints. Other than jumpinginto a legendary ship early on,

you can’t buy your way tosuccess in Valkyrie.

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


111

ABOVE A handful of levels of fer up singleplayer missions in which yourelive event s as experienced by since-f allen pilot s. The sense of speedwhen launching int o or boost ing t hrough an area reaches dizzying levels

MAIN Valkyrie ’s cockpits have beenconsideratel y designed t o extenda fair way ahead of you, whichensures t hat your brain always hassometh ing to cling on to as youspiral and loop through space.ABOVE Allies leave blue t rails,while enemies leave red ones,making the batt lef ield easy to readeven during more chaotic moment s.Your HUD marks up fr iendlies andfoes, too, for additional clarity.LEFT While gett ing into t hethick of the batt le is an excitingprospect , it’s bett er t o hang backor else r isk being swarmed byenemies. To be successful, teamsmust work t ogether t o ensureindividual pilots aren’t isolated

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


112

Developer/publisher Gunfire GamesFormat RiftRelease Out now

Chronos

see all of this unfold from an altering viewpoint at the

whim of th e world. Fights occasionally play out in th e

far distance, and you have to crane your neck to get any

idea of what’s going on, or even pull enemies over to the

other side of the room in order to see the fight un fold.

Doin g this feels bizzarely artificial, and deadens m uch

of the sense of immersion in the world of Chronos that

its camera system works to create.

W hen not in combat there’s a rudimentary selection

of character- build ing stats to juggle, and it ’s here that

Chronos throws its other bold new ingredient into the

mix ing bowl. W ith each death, the protagonist ages by

one year. T he older you get, the less keenly y ou feel

increases to stats associated with youthfu l vigour.

Strength becomes less im portant, while intellect and

magic skills come more to the fore. W hile this neatly

mirrors the Souls player’s journey from m elee- focused

knight to experimental sorcerer across m ultiple

playth roughs, it also leads to a keen lack of ownership

of your character on the player’s part. W e’re not really

building our character, but the one preordained for us,

not speccing our own build so m uch as following a set

path. W hen the avatar outside of the stats is afforded

little personality beyond that glass- eyed glance at you

every so often, it’s hard to feel very m uch for them.

So t he best thin g about Chronos remains that

incredible sense of place given to the world, thanks to

the fascinating VR angles. But it sh ould also be noted,

especially cons idering the game’s V R exclusivity, thatthe physical act of playing it can be made more

frustrating thanks to the hardware limitation. T his is a

long game, in a genre at its best du ring lengthy s essions.

T he hardware, however, is not. Chronos has been

handed a ‘Com fortable’ rating by O culus, and as far as

the stomach is concerned that’s the right decision , since

the game does not inspire n ausea. But you’re still

wearing on your face a piece of hardware that is steadily

increasing in temperature. As such , for comfort’s sake,

playin g in hour- long bursts makes the most sense.

W hen you’re deep into learnin g a boss encounter, or

struggling to overcome one of the game’s pu zzles, this

can be infuri ating. Not because you h ave to stop playing

and you don ’t want to, but because your every action’sworth is weighed against the time you’re able to play.

For a game n amed after th e personification of tim e, it’s

very easy to feel like you’re wasting yours.

T he things that are frustrating about Chronos, and

the things that are immediately arresting about it, are

linked inextricably with the technology that delivers it.

As the hardware improves, such criticisms should

dimin ish. Bu t that ini tial feeling of being a tangible part

of the inside of a videogame will forever be fantastic,

even if m uch of the rest of the experience feels

like it’s been done before.

Playin g this O culus R ift exclusive takes us back to

the days when we first grasped a pad in our hands.

Not because it’s a 2D retro throwback; it’s a hard-

edged 3D action R PG . And n ot because it has buckets

of warm charm ; it’s a grim fantasy fairytale which

perhaps takes itself a little too seriously. It’s Chronos’sinnovative utilisation of VR tech that inspires a kind

of giddy, almost childlike, rapture.

T his is pr imarily down to the game’s world, and

its delivery directly in to your eyeballs. You view

Chronos’s protagonist, an un named hero/ heroine sent

out in to an ambiguous post- apocalypse fantasyscape, in

thirdperson. But rather than have you also control the

camera (and potentially cause un told havoc with you r

stomach lin ing), you view each room or area from a

fixed perspective. From this C CT V- esque orientation

you can look around, angling the otherwise stationary

camera to get a handle on the surroun ding environm ent.

You can look up at the sky after stepping out of a dank

cavern, look over the edge of a cliff face when traversing

slick precipices, or, indeed, eyeball your action-

figurine- like avatar. T he latter act sees our hero tip

their head to glance back at you, a playful recognition

of this affirming new agency you’ve been afforded.

It may seem strange to frontload a review of an

action RP G wi th notes on the camera system over the

combat mechanics, the ch aracter building, or in deed

the world itself, but i t can’t be overstated just how

muc h of an impact that this system h as on the feel of

Chronos as a whole. It’s like stepping inside the frameof a painting and observing its construct ion from the

inside. A lso, it powers som e cheeky gameplay tricks,

such as peeking around corn ers to see what’s in the

next room, or giving you a better m ental handle on

how the in terwoven environm ents conn ect together.

O utside of this camera system you can see the

num bers beneath th e various gameplay paint strokes.

T hat interconnectivity, as well as the weighty sword-

and- board combat, has clearly been inspired by From’s

work. But wh ile lifting a portcullis or activating an

elevator m ight unlock a sh ortcut in typical Souls fashion, and y ou’ve got th e familiar block/ parry/swipe,

lock- on- focused fighting, neither of these elements

are as grand, nor as clear, in this particular treatment.T he combat feels especially undercooked, in spite of,

or perhaps in some cases because of, the intriguing way

it’s delivered to you vis ually. A lot of your effectiveness

in a fight boils down to your ability to read enemy

animations, gaining familiarity with their tells and

reacting appropriately after accruing knowledge through

previous encounters with them. A mace-wielder’s swipe

will sm ash straight through a sideways dodge upon your

first encounter with i t, but the next time you m eet

you’ll read the strike before it comes and know to step

backwards out of range instead, or just block it. But we

PLAY

It’s like steppinginside theframe of apainting andobserving itsconstructionfrom the inside

6

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


113

ABOVE When t raps are placed in new rooms t here’s almos t always a cluefor t he most deductive players to clock. A t ellt ale grunt fr om a shadowycorner could indicate an ambush in wait, so keep everything peeled

RIGHT Before you get t o swing thathammer about, you’re t old by anold vill age seer t o ‘take a seat ’ asshe recounts a tale – essentiallyinforming you that you’re welland tr uly in t his for the l ong haul.MAIN While most of t he world youexplore is absolut ely jam-packedwith dwarves, dungeons and yourt ypical fant asy fare, t here’s anespecially int riguing modernmilit ary vibe to some areas.BOTTOM As the camera flit sbetween rooms it ’s easy t o becomemore than a lit tl e confused as towhat directional input will leadt o which action onscreen. It’slike t ank contr ols never died

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


114

Developer Insomniac GamesPublisher SIEFormat PS4Release Out now

Ra t che t & Clank

To describe Ratchet & Clank as a platformer is

mis leading: the titular L ombax’s jump is m ore often

used to dodge missiles and bullets sprayed from n earby

turrets than to leap over gaps. Combat is and always has

been th e focus, and Ins omni ac has got pretty good at it

over the years. T he studio subtly shifts the tempo

throughout, asking you to deal with aliens at m id- range

before launching waves of robotic attack dogs to snap at

your feet. Lim ited ammo forces you to engage with a

wider range of weapons, which have been pulled from

the entire series. T he Groovitron, introduced in A CrackIn T ime, pumps out a disco beat to which no enemy

grunt can resist getting down. All 4 One’s W armonger

fires rockets th at land with a thu d. Going Commando’s

Sheepinator – well, have a guess. T here are fresh

additions, too. T he Proton Dru m fires out throbbing

pink shockwaves that zap anything caught within t heir

radius, while the Pixeliser is an ins tant classic: a

shotgun that turns enemies into blocky sprites,

eventually causing th em to fragment into voxels.

Bat tl es are usually challenging enough to avoid

mindlessness without ever becoming frustrating

roadblocks, and can offer quite the spectacle, especially

when m ultiple Buz z B lades are ricocheting between

opponents, as scores of bouncing bolts fountain up

from the defeated. Collecting these has always managed

to satisfy some deep, prim ordial desire for all thin gs

shiny. An d even when y ou’re not firing, there’s plenty

to gawk at. T he Pix ar references may be obvious onesto make, but such comparisons do Insomniac’s artists

a disservice. C onsistently imaginative, detailed and

gorgeously lit, its settings are a reminder of how

the fantastical can easily tr ump the photorealistic.

So h igh are the production values, in fact, it’s easy

to see why the indu stry doesn ’t make them like this any

more. In an era of procedural content and sweeping

sandboxes, there’s som ething quaint about a game

featuring lavish, elaborate, hand- crafted spaces in which

you rarely spend m uch m ore than an hour. It looks and

feels expensive, yet it’s being sold at a budget price.

W hichever way you slice it, those sums don ’t seem to

add up, even factoring in the possible attraction to an

audience of school- holiday cinemagoers and the swellof goodwill Sony h as been ridi ng since PS 4’s launch.

If technology’s i nexorable march suggests Ratchet &Clank may be among the last of its kind, there are plenty

who would respond with a disinterested shrug. T his, in

truth, will do little to sway th at opinion. Non etheless,

it’s solid, three- star entertainm ent: as pretty as it is

inconsequential, as likely to be thoroughly enjoyed for

the dozen hours it lasts as it is to be forgotten within

weeks. It’s not taxing or provocative, it will leave you

neither upset nor elated; it simply wants to give

you a good time. Sometim es that’s enough.

Depressin gly, it’s been 14 y ears – a long time in

a medium that moves at such a pace. T he gap

between Donkey Kongand Super Mario 64 is only

a year wider; likewise, Pole Position and Gran Turismo. In

a similar span of tim e, we went from Asteroids to Doom.

And now Ratchet & Clank to Ratchet & Clank . If at first it

suggests we n eed to accept th at change now comes in

mu ch sm aller inc rements, it’s also a sign of how far

we’ve come. W here the original was likened in critical

circles to a Pixar production , this tie- in to a new

animated feature makes it clear we’re still some way

short of Lasseter and company. Clips from the film

scattered throughout a reworked narrative suggest the

kind of two-s tar release that keeps kids occupied while

parents fru itlessly check th eir watches for the duration.

T he game part is rather better. It’s a significant

reworking of the original by a developer imagining how

it m ight be designed if it were making its debut this

year. T he thrust of the story is broadly the same – a

long- eared feline/ hum an hybrid and a dimin utive robot

reject from a factory product ion lin e team u p to save the

galaxy from a megalomaniacal busin essman – though it

works in characters and other plot elements from later

entries. It serves its purpose adequately, providin g light

motivation for the kind of planet- hopping romp that

seems to h ave all but died out si nce the PS 2 era, but

that its creator has been trying to defibrillate ever since.

D isregarding spinoffs, this is the tenth Ratchet &Clank game, and anyone possessing even a passing

familiarity with the series will have a good idea of whatto expect. For its part, Insomn iac has no intention of

failing to meet those expectations – and, seemingly,

little desire to surpass or subvert them. A s R atchet,

you’ll run around alien worlds, firing an outlandish

arsenal at waves of aggressors while solving the odd

light environm ental puzzle. O ccasionally, you’ll play as

Clank, solving marginally more complex conundrums

that tend to involve more busywork than m ental

exertion. Elsewhere, there are objects to fetch, gaps to

swing across, rails to grind, hoverboard races to win,

guises to don, and doors to hack. Plus a change.

T here is, of course, comfort to be found in su ch

conventions, especially wh en they’re realised with such

competence. T here’s a certain effortlessness to Ratchet& Clank that can only have been achieved through hard

work: from the responsive handling to the zippy pacing

and the snap, crackle and pop of combat, everything

speaks of a smart, organised team doing its job well. It

may never quite set your puls e spiking, but rarely wi ll

you find y ourself letting out an irritated huff. And

though the scr ipt is fu ll of characters you occasionally

wish would stop talking, there’s something endearing

about its ceaseless attempts to m ake you smile. O nce

or twice, it might even succeed. H ardly an envi able

hit rate, but it’s more than many games manage.

PLAY

So high arethe production values that it’seasy to see whythe industrydoesn’t makethem like thisany more

6

STAR TRADEROptional objectives invite you tospend longer at each planetarystop, from earning additionaltrophies in hoverboard races tocollecting more Telepathopusbrains in return for bonus kit.But by far the most persuasivereason to explore every nook ofthese lovingly redesigned worldsis the addition of collectible

trading cards. These aren’tmerely tucked away at the endof branches from the crucialpath, but are coughed up bydefeated foes; indeed, many

weapon upgrades increase yourchance of cards dropping. Theycome in themed sets of three,the completion of which gives

you further buffs; to fill in thegaps in your collection, you canswap five duplicates for anycard. An additional set of hard-to-find variants unlocks thefinal gun, the powerful RYNO.

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


115

ABOVE Clank spends most of his t ime tu rning bots int o springboardsand bridges in order t o solve puzzles. These sections are hardly diff icult ,t hough if his pursuer cat ches up, a single hit is enough to f orce a rest art

TOP Your DualShock 4’s Sharebutt on might get a workout on

your vi sit t o the deser t planetAridia, wit h a grindrail t our giving

you some sumpt uous views. Theydistr act well f rom t he mechanics ofjumping from one r ail to another,which still feels oddly sluggish.MAIN Weapon upgrades areobtained by spending Rarit aniumcrystals, harvest ed from deposit sscattered t hroughout the universe.It ’s wort h invest ing in increasing aweapon’s clip size, particularly forboss fights, so you’re not f orced t oswap guns t oo often mid-batt le.RIGHT Levels are large enough that

you’ll welcome t eleport ers andt ransport opti ons to carry you backt o your shi p. This cit yscape isskilfully repurposed for a shipbatt le, a ground assault and aset-piece aboard a movingtr ain t hat benefit s hugelyfr om such handsome st aging

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


116

Developer/publisher Heart MachineFormat Ouya, PC (tested), PS4, Vita,

Wii U, Xbox OneRelease Out now (PC), TBA (Ouya, PS4,

Vita, Wii U, Xbox One)

Hy per L igh t Dr if te r

does you a rare kindness by returning you to th e room

prior to the one in which y ou fell.

N ot that ‘room’ is always an adequate description for

these intricate spaces, which can be elaborate, sprawling

affairs. Secrets are squirrelled away in distant corners

and hidden alcoves, behind breakable obstruction s and

across chasmal gaps, negotiated via concealed platforms

that flash into existence at specific tr igger points. O ver

time you’ll notice familiar tells – floor lights trailing

into walls, scraps of paper, suspicious clusters of ice

crystals – and although there’s too much wall- hugging

involved in un earthin g some sur prises, largely you’re

simply invited to study your environment more closely.

And why wouldn’t you, when it looks this good?

Neon aquamarines and magentas add an ’80s- sci- fi

sheen to familiar m ountain, desert and forest biomes.

Birds flutter and waters ri pple around a flooded temple

as you pass by a drowned T itan, the mouth of its moss-

covered skull agape, its fingers clawing at the surface.

T here are ruins and robotics, tangles of vines and wires,

suggesting a battle of science and nature, past and

future. You’ll stum ble across piles of bloodied creatures;

later, you’ll look around a room strewn with the warm

corpses of the recently slain. A s grim as it gets, there

are glimm ers of life and hope in th e few figures you

encounter, even if t heir gnomi c utterances and pictorial

tales leave you with as many questions as answers.

T he soun dtrack, too, speaks to a bleak worldview,

which unobtrusively supplements the unsettled,diseased milieu. At times, it’s hard to tell where the

mus ic ends and the effects begin: in quieter mom ents

it drops to a faint whisper, and elsewhere you’ll h ear

bassy, portentous r umblin gs. T he sign of a world with

a gnawing ache at its v ery foundations, perhaps? T he

thrum of some ancient machinery whirring deep

beneath th e surface? O r a herald of imm inent danger?

It’s usu ally th e latter – and just occasionally, the

intensity can feel puni shin g rather than exhilarating.

After a third or fou rth enemy wave spawns i n a single

room you wonder if you’ve missed a trick and they’re

going to keep coming forever. And your heart will sin k

after failing at the far end of an extended gauntlet when

it dawns that the entrance, and thus the checkpoint,was the best part of ten min utes ago.

Yet you’ll grit your teeth, because there’s always a

reason to cont inue – whether it’s a fresh m ystery, a

showy di splay of kinetic swordsmanship and gunplay,

or a thr illing m ism atch against a towering guardian.

As muc h as you m ay h ave found, there’s a persistent

sensation th ere’s plenty you haven’t. L ook again at the

Drifter as he summ ons the will to pick hims elf up once

more, and be inspired. Crum pled, bruised, hacking up

blood but still somehow determined to carry on:

if he can keep going, then you surely can.

The Dr ifter’s respawn anim ation takes seconds. A t

times, it feels like an age. You’ll likely find yourself

irritatedly thum bing the face buttons, but he won’t

rise any qu icker. In a world where death comes swiftly

and often, this is a bold choice, but a necessary on e. It’s

a reminder not to rush back into the fray; that there’s

only so much punishment you can take. More crucially,

it says much about the Drifter himself. Even without

foreknowledge of the game’s semi - autobiographical

elements, there’s somethin g moving in the way h e

slowly hoists him self to his feet. H is body may be

weakened by debilitating illness – and, in our h ands, by

frequent defeat – but he’s prepared to defy it. Hi s spiri t

wills h im to go on and so, despite everythin g, he does.

So, despite everythi ng, will you . Hyper Light Drifter’sworld is so copiously stu ffed with secrets and riddles

that, even without th e luminou s pixel art to compel you

to continue, there’s always an impetus to investigate

further. So reluctant is it to reveal anythin g without

your prom pting, in fact, that it withholds all but the

most essential information. W ithin m oments, you’ll

have learned how to heal – which in itself says a lot –

but your basic sword attack and dash m ove are yours to

discover. A s, too, is the currency. T he map, and an early

glimpse at what looks like some form of schematic,

suggests y our m ain goal with out explicitly revealing

what your motivation mi ght be for achieving it. A nd

while the southern exit from the central village hub is

obstructed, you’re free to wander n orth, east or west.

T he early 2D Zelda games are an obvious touchstone,though you’re not a wide- eyed explorer like Link, but a

nomadic warrior, consistently facing un favourable odds.

O ften you’ll encounter beasts in the field but, as per

tradition, you’ll sometim es be barricaded in with a host

of opponents, and only by defeating them all will you

remove the blockade. Defeating them requires careful

crowd control, not least as the spaces y ou’re confined

to can be claustrophobic and cluttered. You’ll soon

understand the im portance of prioritisin g threats as

you alternate between swin ging your sword and firing

your currently equipped gun. Staying at a safe distance

isn’t always possible, because the only way to refill your

ammo i s to land a su ccessful m elee attack, while a

lengthy cooldown for your grenade means i t shouldonly be used in the direst circum stances.

T he expressive animation conveys conviction and

precision in every dash, swipe and shot, but thi s isn ’t

a game that will allow you to chain endless combos,

and it laughs at the idea of invinci bility frames on your

dash or ch arge attacks. H ealing takes tim e, requiri ng

you to m ake space where it’s u sually at a premium

(think Dark Souls’ Estus flasks rather than Bloodborne’s

vials). As such , there’s a sweaty desperation to combat

that only heightens the elation at survivin g the more

difficult battles. Should you perish, H eart M achine

PLAY

Even without theluminous pixelart to compel you to continue,there’s alwaysan impetusto investigatefurther

9

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


117

ABOVE The enemies and tr aps at each compass point clue you int o t het act ics used by the boss behind the f inal door. Their health bars may looklong, but with an upgraded move set and bett er weapons t hey’re beat able

MAIN There are alt ernate capesand swords t o be found, thoughmost will prove elusive to all butt he most committ ed player. Onerequires you t o chain- dash arounda cramped room for an absurdlylong time – lose the rhyt hm orbrush against a wall and thecounter instantly resets.ABOVE We headed nort h f irs t ,but with hindsight, that mightnot have been t he best i dea.The east ern rout e is sinuous andoccasionally confounding, but it sguardian is t he easiest of the l ot.LEFT By and large, t he gameis generous wit h healt h packs,but on occasion you’ll f ind

yours elf s t ruggling acrossmult iple screens, one hit awayfr om death. Warp point s recover

your healt h but r et urn ing to theplace from which you t eleportedt o safet y can be quit e a t rek

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


118

fi nd specific spot s you can st and in can m ake navi gat ingsome of t he busier s paces t hat appear l at er in t he gamefr ust rat ing, but overall it ’s an effectiv e design t hatmakes Dead Secret perf ectly su it ed for use with t heOculus R emote. Fun cti oning like a mous e point er in3D s pace, it proves t o be a part icul arl y com for t ableway t o play (s ee ‘R emot e possibili t y’).

Much less pleasant are your encount ers wit ha st alk ing presence t hat want s t o add your chalkout lin e to t he house’s exist ing one. Your pat hs crossinf requent ly, which m ost ly poses no real danger, but ona couple of occasion s y ou n eed t o escape or h ide. T hesemom ents are represent at ive of t he game at it s best andworst : the chilli ng proxim it y of an aggressor closing inon you in vir tu al space will t ur n your st omach, but t he

prescribed nat ure of t he sequences – which su ggestchoice but actu ally only have one solut ion – and t heresult ant need to replay t hem un derm ines t heir power.

More consis t ent is t he creeping sense of dreadt hroughout , an at mosphere that’s buil t on R obotInv ader’s preference for slow realis at ion over jum pscares. T he st ory, too, does a great job of pull ing youfu rt her int o th e world and, while t he voice acti ng fallsfar short of pre- eminent genre exemplars su ch as GoneHome and Soma, as wit h every t hing else in t he game

you r connect ion t o it is enh anced t o a su rpr is in gdegree by experi encing it t hrough V R .

Though playable on fl at screens, Robot I nvader ’scuri ous m urder m yst ery has, according to t hedeveloper’s websi t e, been designed as a v ir t ual

reali t y experi ence. Indeed, given t he height ened senseof v ul nerabilit y you’ll feel as you in vest igat e a murderscene and a seri es of increasi ngly more dist ur bingsu per natu ral event s, it woul d be a shame t o play t hegame in anyt hing ot her t han it s int ended form .

Cast as up- and- com ing journ alis t Pat ri cia Gable, you embark on a f ir st pers on puzzle adven t u re look in gint o the recent deat h of Harris Bullard – a man withenough enem ies t o suggest fou l play. I t t akes placeenti rely wit hin t he grounds of a moderat ely sized farmhouse and it s out buildings, and while you’ll in it ially befun nel led by awkwardly pl aced packi ng boxes and

locked doors , soon t here’s a good deal t o explor e.You navi gat e by cli ckin g on t he object you want t o

st and next t o and are th en eit her spiri t ed over t o it v iaa slow- paced on- rails saunt er, or – if you’ve swit chedto Comf ort mode – warp inst ant ly t o the spot. Whilet he latt er is int ended for t hose with greater s ensit ivit yto m ovement in V R , using it also signifi cant ly ups t hepace of t he game, and as a resu lt we soon abandon t hepat ience- t esti ng walk ing anim at ions. T he need to

PLAY

There’s a great deal to interact with in Dead Secret ’s environments –even the cushions can be lifted in the course of your investigation. Beingable to bend down and look underneath things increases your immersion

REMOTE POSSIBILITY The Oculus Remote’s ergonomic

design quickly lets you forget you’re holding it, and the raisedbuttons and differing texturesmake using it simple. The cent rebutton is used to select objects, while the ring that sits around itfunctions as a D-pad, allowing you to reorient your positionrelative to the room. It doesn’talways stick to compass points,however, and occasionallygetting lined up can be alittle fiddly, but it does at leastencourage you to use yourhead to look around.

Developer/publisher Robot InvaderFormat GearVR, Rift tested), PS3, PS4Release Out now

Dead Secre t

6

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


119

At it s best , it ’s t he sort of game Nint endo would’vemade had chil d- safety concern s not compelled it t omake 3DS’s st ereoscopic view opt ional, rath er t hanmandat ory. Developer Pl ayf ul Corp liv es up to it s name,usi ng th e aut omat ic camera t o posit ion collect iblesalm ost but not quit e out of sight behind level fur nit ure.In lat er levels, switches that you f lick wit h a t ail swipecaus e wall s t o twi rl 180 degrees, and reveal previou sl yuns een pat hs. Rif t ’s in- built st ereo headphones meant he st udio can u se audio as a mechanic t oo, aler t ing yout o t he nearby presence of an essent ial it em wit h a faintsound effect t hat loudens as you draw closer t o it .

Despite t he fact you’re guiding L ucky t hrough a360- degree space, you h ave no cont rol over t he camera,and it ’s t his t hat means Lucky’s Tale has been given t he

Moderat e comf ort rati ng by Oculu s. T he camera movesslowly to dampen t he inherent discom for t in your l ackof cont rol of it , but i t ’s oft en too slow, part icularly aft erL ucky r ises or falls at higher- t han- usu al speed. We’vewalk ed st raight off un seen ledges whil e th e camera wasst ill foll owing us u p a hill , and fallen out of sight aft er along drop t o a faraway plat for m . An d backt racki ng isunworkable, t he camera movi ng so slowly t hat L uckyoft en seem s t o be walk ing int o your fr ont al cort ex andst raight out t he back of y our head. Despite it s n ame’sim plicat ions, th is i s a bett er game when you’refoll owing L ucky’s nose, rat her t han his t ail.

W hat ’s in a name? Not m uch, reall y: Lucky’sTale is a 3D plat for mer st arr ing a fox call edL ucky who hits t hings with his t ail. I t ’s

hardly t he most im aginative conceit , or t he mostmodern, t hough as wit h many R if t launch games it’slent a special air by t he technology t hat powers it . Itmay be a game idea borr owed fr om ’95, r un ni ng onhardware wit h or igins i n t he lat e ’80s, but as a movin gplat form t akes you t hrough a t unn el in which youinst inct ively duck out of t he way of t angles of vi nes,before you pop out above in a colour fu l v il lage whosedeni zens , obst acles and t raps st ret ch off t owards t hehor izon, t he sensat ion is t horoughly 2016.

St ill , at it s core, Lucky’s Tale is every i nch t he launchgame you’d expect fr om a publis her whose CEO, Jason

R ubin, co- creat ed Crash Bandicoot . Enemies – includingbat s t hat lob bombs, and bees t hat fi re projectil es – aredispat ched wit h a tail swipe or by ju mping on t hem.Hazards play wit h t he 3D aest het ic: spik e- covered logsswinging back and for t h on v ines, cuboid plat form s t hatrot at e every few seconds. T he level design i t self hasbeen built wit h up- close 3D in m ind, generally pushin g

you in t o t he scr een wit h s ideways det ours forcin g yout o keep an eye on your shadow when posi t ioni ng jumps.

Coins are everywhere: strewn about the level to signal the critical path,shimmering on far-off platf orms, or invisible unt il you draw near. They’resafely ignored: a hundred earn you a 1-Up, but lives are never an issue

FAST-TECH CAMERA

While your first playthrough ofeach level is largely an exercisein pushing forward, the two

alternate modes that areunlocked on completion bringcamera problems to the fore.One has you seek out 25 hiddenred coins miss one, and you’rebetter off using the teleporterto go back to the start ratherthan t rying to retrace steps. A time-trial mode, meanwhile,sees you frequently having to wait for the camera to catch up.Such issues would be less of aproblem were it not mandatoryto dip into t hese modes in orderto progress through the game.

Developer Playful CorpPublisher Oculus StudiosFormat RiftRelease Out now

Lucky’s Tale

6

PLAY

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


120

leavi ng your post , perhaps failin g t o not ice a fi ght er ona collis ion cours e wit h a passenger jet, or a heli copt errun ning out of fu el. All of t his distracts you from t hecore objectiv e of keeping t he ski es clear – which youneed to do to progress. Your cur rent t ask mi ght be t ohelp a set nu mber of helicopters land, refu el and t akeoff again, but t hey won’t even appear in t he sky unl ess

you cl ear ou t t he cur ren t hol din g pat t ern t o make roomfor t hem. Every f ire ext inguished or drone shot down ist im e that would be bet t er spent on t he task at hand.Miss ions, as a resul t , seem t o last forever.

And before long, t hey’re fr ust rat ing for diff erentreasons . An air port t erm inal i s enough of a headachewit h it s criss - crossing runways, and t he need t o getpassenger, mi lit ary and private aircraft t o diff erent

term inals. But Phaser L ock has decided t his i sn’tcomplex enough, adding a fl eet of AI - cont rolled tr uckst hat pot t er around t he place on set rout es with s cantregard for t heir own safety. T hey plough st raight i nt oplanes t hat are crossin g th eir pat h, chipping away at

you r K arma, t hou gh by t hi s point you won’ t reall y care– you’ll be lookin g for somet hin g else to play. A l at edet our i nt o an alien invasion shows the ext ent t o whichPhaser L ock h as st ru ggled to t ur n a convincing demoint o a compelli ng game. T he resul t is a dism all y pacedand hu gely f ru st rat ing expansion of a fin e coremechanic, and a badly m iss ed opport un it y.

Tell you what : how about you put out your owndamn f ire? We’re air t raff ic cont rol, not t he fir edepart ment . Or so we th ought . So frequent ly are

our sk ies clogged wit h passenger jum bos, mil it ary jet sand light air craft wit h engines afl ame that we spend asmuch t im e in Final Approach’s firs t level on t he ground,aim ing a hose at a propell er, as we do up in t he sk y.

Which is a cru sh ing shame, because t hat ’s whereFinal Approach, as t he name im plies, is at it s best . T hepre- release demo was one of t he highlight s of our earlydays wit h V ive (see E292). T he core mechanic, of us ingt he cont roller t o point at a plane or h elicopter and drawit s l anding pat h in a 3D s pace, is s t ill delight fu l, but int he transit ion from demo t o full game Phaser L ockI nt eract ive has decided t hat a li t t le var iety is n eeded.

So it fl ings in a few dist racti ons, adds s ome needlesslyonerous fail s t at es, and ju st keeps on going and going.

As well as put t ing out fires, you’ll f ind yourselfzoomin g down t o ground l evel t o scare birds off t heru nway wit h an air horn , tur nin g on generat ors, evenaim ing gun t ur ret s at wayward drones. I gnore t hem andaccident s wil l happen, deplet ing your Karma bar. I f i t ’sempty, you’ll h ave to rest art – somet hing t o be avoidedat all costs given levels are so overl ong. So down you go,

PLAY

The green arrowsignals an aircraft in need – this one will need to land,taxi to the service hangar, then park up at the terminal to refuel. You’llneed to land just about everything, however, for a three-star mission rating

V OCA L DISCORD

The chocks-away, tally-hoBrit narrator has a somewhat

wavering accent – something we’re more prone to not icingthan players elsewhere in the world, perhaps, but Phaser Lockhas them covered too. As pilotsin need call for your help overcomms, the wonkily voicedstereotypes make it difficult t odistinguish a Scot from anIndian and a New Yorker froma Texan. But then Flight Control has enough problems alreadyin th is context, sounding like aculturally insensitive ’70s sitcomfeels almost appropriate.

Developer/publisherPhaser Lock InteractiveFormatPSVR, Rift, Vive tested)Release Out now Vive), TBA PSVR, Rift)

F ina l A pp roa ch

4

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


121

cust omer want s f ixi ng or sabotage a vehicle on t heorders of your sl eazy boss.

T he game’s great achievement is t he way it bri ngsso many t hin gs wit hin reach, even if your playin g areabarely scrapes past V ive’s m inim um size requirement s.I n t he kit chen a dial swi t ches between blender, t oast er,sandwich board, m icrowave and si nk ; a swit ch t ogglesbetween t he gr il l and a hob wit h a st ock pot, whil e alever let s you alt ernate between f r idge and st orecupboard. In t he garage, a si ngle vendin g machine hasevery t hin g you need, whil e vehicles can be rotated t obring t he part you require wit hin easy r each. It ’s sm art ,and means t his i s one of t he most com for t able games

you can play on V ive. You’re const an t ly m obil e, t u rn in ground, bending down, using bot h hands – but you don’t

have t o move around t oo mu ch, and quickly forget t helong, t hick cable th at t eth ers headset and PC and isV ive’s m ost f requent imm ersion- breaker.

While Job Simulator cann ot ape t he lik es of Goat Simulator by gett ing yuks out of it s cont rols, t hereare st ill laughs t o be had from one- t o- one tracki ng. Wegot t oo much cat hart ic enjoyment out of fl inging paperplanes, doughnu t s and coff ee mugs at colleagues i nadjacent cubicles. But it ’s i n v ir t ual r ealit y, rat her t hanvi rt ual comedy, t hat Job Simulator excels. Whet her

you ’re fl ippi ng a f r ied egg or t u r ni ng a dial, t hi s ist actil e and sat isf yin g, if sl ight, entert ainm ent.

For so l ong a signal of a dry- as- a- bone genre, wit henorm ousl y det ail ed adherence t o a complex r eal-world past im e, t hese days t he word ‘sim ul at or’ has

been well and t r ul y appropri at ed by m any a wag. Nowt he term is as likely t o mean a comedy goat - physicsgame as it is an impenet rable m ili t ary fl ight sim . JobSimulator ’s boxy, low- poly aest heti c suggests i t falls int he form er camp, but in f act it sit s somewhere betweent he two. I t is a game of comedy, cer t ain ly, but it isgrounded in realit y: you are not wrestl ing wit h acomical physi cs model, but us ing V ive’s fl awless headand hand tracki ng to carr y out a series of m enial t asks .

T he action, if you can call i t t hat , is set in a mus eumwhich offers t he robots of t he fut ure a chance t oexperience uns kil led jobs fr om t he era when hum ans

ran t he worl d. As an of fi ce gru nt , you work your wayrapidly u p th e corporat e ladder by kn ockin g outmot ivat ional presentations and cooking (both l it erallyand f igurat ively) t he books. As a gourm et chef, you burnst eaks t o a cris p, make sandwiches wit h whole tom at oesin t hem, and put out fi res when it all goes wrong. Ast int behin d th e til l of a convenience store has yougri lli ng hotdogs, knockin g up slu shies and checkingfake IDs; as a car mechanic you’ll eith er f ix what t he

A fair chunk of development must have been taken up with robot -jokebrainstorming sessions. If this magazine doesn’t tickle your fancy, perhapsa robot jazz mag, with fou r whole pages of wiref rames, will hit the spot

STA N D A N D DEL IV ER

Humans may no longer run the

world, but robot civilisation stillhas its ne’er-do-wells. As amechanic you’ll respray and putnew plates on a stolen car, andstrip a vehicle brought in by a valet in a hurry for parts. Astickup at the convenience storesees you urged by a banditpointing a banana at you andinsisting you open the safe andhand over “that sweet cheddar”. After we’ve peeled the bananaand eaten it, we do as we’retold. Inside there’s no cash –just wedges of Swiss cheese.

Developer/publisher Owlchemy LabsFormat PSVR, Rift, Vive version tested)Release Out now Vive), TBAPSVR, Rift)

Job S im u la tor : The 2 0 5 0 A rch ives

7

PLAY

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


122

off er h andy advice about what ’s ahead in a spirall ingworld f il led with short cuts and secrets.

Ska Studios has a few ideas of i t s own, t hankf ul ly.L evellin g up isn ’t just a mat t er of adding a digit t o apart icular st at , but awards a skil l point t o be spent in asprawling skil l t ree. Wit h t hat comes a st ream lin ing ofFrom ’s oft en obt us e relati onsh ip between gear and stats .Here, weapons are divi ded by archety pes and, wit hi nt hat, num bered classes. I t ems and gear are bought wit hgold, a separate curr ency t hat doesn ’t vanish when youdie (t hough t he cleri c th at revives you and t akes youback t o a sanctu ary levies a small f ee). Single- use it ems,meanwhile, allow you t o sum mon blacksm it hs andmerchant s t o specif ic sanct uari es t o save you warpingback t o t he same base camp t im e and again .

Salt Sanctuary can be bri ll iant , but it ’s held backby unders ized visu al design, bot h i n U I and open play,making playin g it fr om dist ance a pain. T he art st yleit self is a bone of content ion t oo, t he cart oony characterdesigns clashin g wit h t he bleak aust erit y of t he worl d.But t he game’s biggest s in is f am ili ari t y. A f ew weeksaft er we chast ised th e lat est Souls game for feelin g t oomu ch lik e it self, along comes a game t hat t akes t heconcept t o its most logical ext reme. Ul t im at ely, t heproblem is a conceptu al one: put t ing yourselfalongside a uniquely bril liant series of games isa compari son t hat can never be too flatt ering.

W ell, this is ju st inconsiderat e. Were it not solov in g an h omage, Salt Sanctuary would bea brazen clone of t he Souls series. It borr ows

shamelessly fr om nearly every aspect of F romSoft ware’sremarkable form ula – except t he but t on layout . Yourli ght and st rong at t acks are mapped to face but t ons.I t em us age and evasive manoeuv res are perf orm ed wit ht he shoulders and t ri ggers. In t he heat of t he moment,we’ve at t acked when we want ed to heal; we’ve roll edst raight i nt o an enemy when we want ed t o slice th eirheads off . I f you’re going to m ake what amount s t o a 2Dcover of a Souls game, you m ight as well go t he wholehog and give us t he cont roller confi g our t housandsof hours of Souls- game muscle memory expects.

In alm ost every ot her aspect, Salt Sanctuary foll ows t he FromSoft ware house st yle to t he let t er.Defeat ed enem ies drop salt , which you u se t o upgradegear and l evel u p; die, and you lose t he lot , unless youcan m ake it back t o where you f ell on your next lif e.Sanct uaries provide t he solace of candleli ght , a placet o level up and shop, and act as r espawn and fast - t ravelpoint s. Bosses hi t hard and have lear nable at t ackpat t erns. L oot is cossett ed about t he worl d and droppedby enem ies. Messages in bott les, left by oth er players,

PLAY

Surprise! As in the Souls games, stamina is your most importantresource, governing attacking and blocking, though it doesn’t depletewhen you jump, and there’s no sprint button to wear it down either

SOUL LEVEL ONESka Studios is a husband-and-

wife operation, but it wasn’talways that way – James andMichelle Silva met when t helatter was a tester on theformer’s debut game, X BLAhack-and-slasher The

Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.These days Michelle contributesto a game’s artistic direction,but James still codes, designsand soundtracks everythinghimself. Hidetaka Miyazakimay be the genius behind theSouls games, but he doesn’tget his hands this dirty.

Publisher/developer Ska StudiosFormat PS4 tested), VitaRelease Out now PS4), TBA Vita)

Sa lt & Sa n ct uar y

6

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


123

posit ion again st t he clock. One mode even l ets y oushare drivi ng dut ies wit h a fr iend, if t hings weren’talr eady challenging and chaot ic enough.

Nadeo’s selecti on of t racks are div ided betweenfour environm ent s, each with t heir own th ematic quirksand vehicle st yle. T he In t ernat ional St adium areafocuses on precision and corn ering skil ls; Dir ty Vall eyis a bumpy off road test of your sus pension; CanyonDr if t lets you get t he back end out oft en; and L agoonR ollercoast er in dulges t he series’ excesses wit hcork screws, loop- t he- loops and wall ri des.

But all t his f un obscures a brut ally u nforgivingdifficult y curv e and crude unlocking st ru cture whichrequir es you t o get t o get a medal on every t rack inorder t o progress. And while t he cars handle sli ght ly

more lik e real vehicles th an remot e- cont rol t oys, t here’sst il l an excess of sensitiv ity t hat often leaves less roomfor mis judgment t han even T rials’ most f erociousmom ent s. As a result , it r equires a level of comm it mentto perf ecting repet it ion that many will fin d off - putt ing.

For t hose prepared to put in t he hours, T rackmaniaT urbo is an exhi larat ing, sat isf yin g rush t hat managest o dist il every t hin g t hat was good about t he ageing PCseri es while m aki ng it feel f resh again , and considerablymore styli sh. T his l ight ness of t ouch, combined withinst ant rest art s and a Trials- style checkpointsyst em, makes for an ext remely m oreish racer.

That t he T rackmania series has taken so l ong t o fin dit s way ont o consol e feels l ike a sm all t ragedy when

you see what Nadeo can do wit h t he br ief .T rackmania T urbo retains t he fundament als of it s PCfor ebears , off erin g up 200 dizzyin g, predom inant lypoint - to- point obst acle courses on which t o competefor t he best t im e possible. It ’s sti ll t ough, t oo, echoingT rials’ school of lu lli ng players wit h a gentl e breaki ng- inperi od before shif t ing gears t o somet hing alt ogethermore daunt ing. And t here’s a powerf ul t rack editor for

you t o bui ld your own st omach- chu rn in g creat ion s.But t he earl ier games’ barebones st r uct ur e and ugly

UI have been replaced wit h a user- fr iendly, bri ght lycoloured treat ment t hat channels t he sunny aesth eticsand s olidit y of ’90s arcade racers . Cars aren’t quit e as

twit chy as t he fir st game’s, exhi biti ng a weightymoment um but propensit y t o break t raction t hat makesdrif t ing feel l ike you’re slidin g across but t ered t arm ac.

Al ong wit h t he sprawlin g championsh ip, t here’s als ofour player split screen racing, asynchronous onlin echall enges again st fr iends and st rangers’ t im es, a pass-t he- cont roller part y mode, and ret ur nin g (and ent irelyri diculous) sim ult aneous online races in whichhun dreds of non- corporeal driv ers bat t le for a podium

PLAY

Despite the weightier cars, breaking traction is as simple as tapping thebrakes as you turn. You’ll need to start your slide well ahead of the corner,however, making Trackmania ’s drifting feel pleasantly like Mario Kart 8 ’s

FOR THE HORIZONTrackmania’s worlds are colossal.

While you’ll spend much of yourtime hemmed in by barriers, itonly takes hitting a small bumpin the road at speed to send yousailing outside of Nadeo’s low-security enclosures. Aft er onepoorly judged corner, we tookthe opportunity to explore andset out for the horizon. Fiveminutes later we were stillbouncing over hills and downinto canyons. Three minutesmore saw us reach the end ofthe skybox’s reach, and the voidswallowed us after two more.

Developer NadeoPublisher UbisoftFormat PC, PS4 tested), XboxOneRelease Out now

Track m ania Tu rbo

8

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


124

How Albion’s sophomore formrepresented Lionhead’s finest hourB Y CHRIS SCHILLING

able I I

+ + + + + + +

+ + + + + + +

+ + + + + + +

+ + + + + + +

TIM E EX TEN D

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

PublisherMicrosoft Game Studios DeveloperLionhead Studios Format X box 360 Release 2008

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


25

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

L ate afternoon on a balmyday in Oakfield, we fell inlove. No, not with anotherperson – t hough we hadgrown rather attached toour virt ual wife and child –but with Albion itself.Something about that low-

hanging sun, casting the village’s quaintcottages in a sumptuous autumnal glow,together with Russell Shaw’s wistful,emotive score, convinced us that t his rust icidyll was a place we could really call home.Most videogame environments are places todelve into, pick clean and leave behind.Occasionally we’re invited to rest, to set upa base of operations. But most games viewhouses as Le Corbusier famously did: asmachines for living in, and nothing more.T his, however, felt like a place to sett ledown; somewhere to put your feet up at t heend of a hard day’s adventuring.

Albion – more spec if ically, Fable II’s Albion – is almost cert ainly L ionheadStu dios’ greatest achievement . T he originalFable established a pleasantly leafy, pastoralsetting, but it was comparatively flat andbenign. Fable II I’s v ision of an indust rialised Albion, meanwhile, gave us t he grim e but

not the greenery; a world reluctantly caughtup in the middle of a revolution withoutbeing quit e ready for it . T he in- gamehistory books suggest a world in almostconstant tumult, but in Fable II we find itenjoying a rare spell of peace, the calmbefore a gathering storm. Not everythingthere is entirely green and pleasant, ofcourse. T here are plenty of Hobbes, Hol lowMen and Balverines, and also moments ofgenuine tragedy – t he haunt ing, mist -shrouded Wraithmarsh induces shiversrooted in sadness – but in t he main t here’san undeniably appealingly upbeat, convivial

atmosphere. Unless you’re behaving verybadly, there’s usually someone happy to see you. And if not , well , at least t hey’re v is iblyand audibly aware of your presence.

Much has been written about theabsence of most orthodox methods ofpunishment in Fable I I , in particular theremoval of death for player characters. Yetas convenient as it is not to return todistant checkpoints, nor to witness a boss you’d almost vanqui shed re- emerge wi t h adishearteningly full health bar, this is

perhaps the least interesting way Lionheadchooses to empower you. Albion is areactive world, one that yields to yourpresence in ways sm all and large –environments change according to thechoices you make, and people change, too.In most games, you’ll recognise the impactof significant decisions, but in Fable II thishappens on a moment-to-moment basis, wi t h t he sl ight est sh if t s in your phys iqueand stature affecting how the populaceresponds to you. Fate’s designs may havecast you as the Chosen One, but it’s achastening moment when your behaviouron the road causes townsfolk to greet you

wi t h a cheery “Hell o, Knobhead ” Wit hou t it s NPCs, A lbion woul d s t il l be

an unusually rich and attractive world tosave. With them, it’s one to savour. As withso many other RPGs, they’re quest-giversand allies, employers and store owners.T hey sell and craft weapons and armour,give you haircut s and tatt oos. T hey can be wiv es and hu sbands , which is les s common,if hardly unique. Many are there to simplyadd colour; again, that’s nothing new. What ’s dif feren t is t hat each and every oneis there for your entertainment, and you fortheirs. Your interactions with them are

rudimentary yet meaningful, even at theirsilliest. You can dance and flirt with them,threaten them, point and laugh at them, orinvit e them to ki ss your arse. Earn sufficientrenown and they might fawn over you,offering you gift s or proposing marriage –or scut t le off in fear as you approach. T hepoint being, there’s a tangible response toeverything you do, no matter how minor. And, as such, t heir role in your st ory feel sthat bit more significant, your affection forthem grows, and Albion becomes moreloveable as a resul t .

T hen again, Albion had to be loveable to

support Lionhead’s riskier choices. Many ofthese were attributed exclusively to founderand lead designer Peter Molyneux, whichseems rat her unfair – not only t o thestudio’s other creatives, but the poor coders who woul d f ind t hem selves suddenly t asked wi t h t ry ing t o implem ent Molyneux’s morefanciful conceits, often revealed on a whimduring interviews and at industry events.His habit of making outlandish promises, ofcourse, had most infamously manifested inthe idea of an acorn flourishing into a

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


126

TIME EX TEND

mighty oak over the course of the originalFable. Here, this was affectionately parodied– t hough some curm udgeons, st ill annoyedthat Molyneux had not stayed true to his word, considered it no laughing mat t er.

W hoever was respons ible, theaudaciousness of some of these ideas canonly be applauded. Divisive though it mayhave been, the golden breadcrumb trail thatguides you towards your destination is notmerely a handholding device for thoseincapable of reading a map. Rather, it’s aninvitation to actively wander offroad, tofollow your canine companion towardsburied treasure, loot chests and otheroptional asides, or to ignore its barks anddiscover secrets by following your ownnose. And once your curiosity has beensated, there’s none of the frustration that

comes with being lost: just step back onthat snaking trail and you’ll find yourselfback in familiar territory in no time.

Its streamlined combat also had plentyof critics. And yet by attributing all melee,ranged and magic attacks to a button each,Fable II allowed you to combine the threeeffortlessly. With the fear of death all but

eradicated, what could have been a desperatestruggle for survival becomes a flashyshowcase of strength, skill and will. Withsuch a range of abilities at the tips of yourfingers, L ionhead ensures you’re alwaysfacing unreasonable odds. What it may lackin depth, it makes up for in spectacle, as you dance in and out of danger, pu ll ing of fgrandstanding flourishes. You might raisethe dead as a distraction before conjuring ashockwave t hat stun s all opponents wit hin a wide radius. You’ll charge at t acks t hat knock

enemies to the floor, upon which your dog wi ll rush in t o savage t hem . At t im es, it slim it at ions are laid bare – t he series ofarena bat t les at T he Crucible gets repeti t ivequickly – t hough you could argue that ’spartly intentional. Either way, you’ll gainmore experience for efficient kills, a smart way of incent iv is ing mastery as opposed topenalisi ng less com petent players.

It takes bold risks with the story, too,

most notably in the second-act sequence where your hero is held captive for a decade wi t hin T he Spire, a towering condu it for all Albion’s magic. As players, we’reaccustomed to moral conundrums thataffect the narrative of a game, but theserarely carry any great significance beyondthat. Here, Lionhead dares to test the

player’s virtue by ensuring good deeds havea palpable and lasting impact. A guard hits you and inv it es you to t hank him; a def iantmiddle-finger salute to his request willtrigger an electric shock that not only sees you lose subst ant ial experi ence poin t s butscars your hero. Soon after, you’ll be askedto let your fellow prisoners starve, and thento kil l your only ally on t he inside – refuse,and you’ll be zapped again and permanent lymarked. T he experience can easily beregained later, but the disfigurements feel

F A B L E I I F E E L S E V E R M O R E L I K E A W H I M S I C A L A N T I D O T E T O T H E G R I M

P S E U D O - R E A L I S M O F M O D E R N G A M E S

+ + + + + + +

+ + + + + + +

+ + + + + + +

+ + + + + + +

Melee combat felt woolly,but not ranged attacks – ah,the boom of a blunderbussfollowed bythe jolly rattleof collapsing bones

Jobs are simple, and grow steadilytrickier as you level up.Maintaining a combo is key,though you can earn rewardsjust byinvesting more time

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


127

more invasive. For players who’d maintaineda flawless complexion by surviving multiplebattles without falling, this may have beentoo high a price to pay. We, on the otherhand, wore our scars as a badge of honour:an immutable reminder of our desire to dogood in t his judgemental world.

In recent years, the notion of shaping a worl d wi t h your character ’s words andactions has become commonplace, but it’s

still rare to find examples where the reverseis also t rue. Albion, however, changes you –it can leave you bloated or gaunt, blemishedor glowing, reviled or deified. Your fate andthat of Albion is enmeshed, such that it’shard to think of another game where youfeel such a profound sense of connection wi t h t he world. Perhaps, after all, you are Albion’s acorn, your root s embedded deepbeneath its surface just as your heroicact ions see your legend grow and grow.

Not that everyone saw the appeal. Fable

I I has a st rong and coherent vis ion of what acontemporary RPG can be, but as fullyrealised as Albion is, you can see the joins where it s disparate pieces have been pushedtogether. It isn’t a truly open world in thatit is split into manageable chunks, usually wi t h no m ore t han one or two rou tes t o anygiven dest ination. Arrivi ng around the sametime as the sprawl of Fallout 3’s Capital Wasteland, t o som e Fable II felt quaint and

restrictive, while for those seeking achallenge it was a little too eager to please.Sluggish menus , the odd glit ch, and loadingtimes that made a mockery of the idea offast t ravel were sufficient f or some to writ eit off as another Lionhead project that hadshot for t he moon and fallen short .

Yet as t im e goes by, Fable II feels evermore li ke a gaming anomaly – a whimsical,escapist antidote to the grim pseudo-realism of many modern adventure games. A hero, it suggest s, shouldn’ t simplystoically overcome the trials fate puts intheir path, but should be afforded the

opportunity to kick back, get drunk, puntchickens up the arse, and burp so long andloud that t hey end up voiding their st omachon Bowerstone’s cobbles.

In light of Microsoft’s decision to shutdown Lionhead, it’s looking depressinglylikely that we’ll never get to see Albionagain, in any era. But a small corner of that world lives on in our heart s: t hat sl eepy,sun-kissed haven where we chopped wood,kept bar and flipped the bird at our outragedneighbours. T he place we fell i n l ove.n

Levelling up lets you investexperience in Strength, Skillor Will. Each option is givena vocal explanation by Zoe Wanamaker’s seer, Teresa

FUTUREIMPERFECTFable II ’ s endingis as brave as it isunforgettable. Aftera build-up befittinga truly climacticshowdown, with waveupon wave of foeslying slain, you finallyreach the antagonistand he’s killed by asingle bullet. Evenbetter, if you lethim continue hisportentous monologue without interruption,Stephen Fry’s rakishReaver will do thejob on your behalf, adelightful shock inkeeping with thegame’s willingnessto slyly subvertestablished fantasytropes. It’s a pity,though, that Lionheadundercut itself in theSee The Future DLC:those who opted tosacrifice their familyto save all the Spire’s victims during thefateful final decisionare given the optionto reunite with theirdog, reducing theemotional weight ofthe original choice.

There are crookedangles everywhere,from buildings to noses:

‘no straight lines’ wasthe art team’s mantra

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


h e U K ’s b e s t-s e llin g A p p le m a g a z in e

C e le b ra te M a c F o rm a t’s 300th issue b y b e c o m in g a n

A p p le G e n iu s a n d m a s te rin g e v e ry a s p e c t o f y o u r M a c

r e a te st e v e r M a c ti s

E C I A L 3 A N N I V E R S A R Y I S S U E

10 MAY2016

O N S A L

TUESDAY

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


129

Instead we lived by the code of cause andeffect. And revenge. It was a liberating time,

and, thanks to the entirely antisocial hours wewere working, the only people who trulysuffered were the Domino’s delivery guys.

Just playing games, as opposed to writingthem, is also a mind-expanding experience.Civilization alone has taught me that it’s OK touse nuclear weaponry on your neighbours, atleast once, simply to see what would happen.And, staying with the idea of armed conflict, itwas an eye-opener to realise that if you fireenough arrows at a castle, it will eventuallyvanish into rubble. This flash of inspiration

explains why Britain, which must have beencovered in millions of castles during themiddle ages, now only has a few dozen. AgeOf Empires has made me an expert in history,and I’m grateful and newly enlightened.

Furthermore, I’ve learned everything I needto about productivity from the XCOM games.

It’s a life-changer when you twig that youshould never work hard: save half your energyevery turn, or what I call every day of yourlife, in case some alien comes round a cornerunexpectedly. You need the reserves to reactand kill them. Obviously in the real worldthere won’t be aliens. I’m referring to clients, your colleagues, and of course the police.

And what about the fog of war? Withtoday’s televisions and the web, it’s easy tothink we know what’s going on in the nextsettlement. Do we, though? Or are we simplyseeing a snapshot in time of what it was likewhen we were last there? I recently went to

Warminster and my notion of the place is thatit’s a quiet Wiltshire town with a largely emptyarmy barracks. That, though, is what it waslike at Christmas. I now devote a day a weekto climbing a hill nearby and viewing itthrough a sniper scope. It’s astonishing how itchanges in between these observations. Everytime I refresh my view this way, there are more‘charity’ shops there, and the army is nowbuilding an ominous presence. Also, the hill Iclimb, sniper rifle slung on my back, was oncefilled with dog walkers. Now it’s deserted.I sense a rolling metal storm coming my way.

Yes, games can teach us better ways to be.

We should embrace them and weave theminto the souls of the population. If you’re stillnot convinced, play GTA all day, then drive your car in the real world. The people youwon’t crash into will also be driving on theright-hand side of the road. These people havealso been playing GTA all day. Stop, dragthem from their vehicles, and make them yourfriends at gunpoint. Only this way will wespread the word, one street at a time.

I’ve just realised I carry around a permanent,if low-level sense of annoyance that gamesare still not universally perceived as part of

our culture. Of course, you know that, and aremature enough to not be irritated by it, buthave you ever considered why, after 30 yearsof astonishing game evolution, there is still an

overpowering them-and-us element? I justhave, and I reckon it’s partly this: there’s theage thing. Few people over 55 regularly playanything more than the odd phone app. That’sOK. I don’t read Victorian fiction. But I knowsomething about it in a way that if you don’tplay games, you can’t. If someone callssomething Dickensian, I have a great idea ofwhat they mean, even though, possibly to myshame, I’ve read very little Dickens. Butdescribe something in the real world asSkyrim-esque and unless you know Skyrim well, you haven’t got a clue. I mean, it reallyis shameful not to know something about

Dickens, so we all sort of do. We’d be lookeddown on if we didn’t. But no one pities yourshockingly incomplete education if you don’tknow Ocarina Of Time and are thereforeunable to use it as a fitting metaphor. Yep,games are still just too niche to be part of ourshared existence, and I think it’d be lovely if,over time, that ceased to be the case.

I recently received an email from a gamesite, posing some interview-style questions.They asked me which games had actuallytaught me something about the world. I wasrather down on this idea because I’ve alwayssubscribed to the notion that if you stay in and

play games, you learn precisely nothing aboutlife. So I told them to bugger off.

But since then I’ve had a change of heart.Games might not be part of the mainstream.They might not be Charles Dickens’ Origin OfSpecies or whatever, but there is a wealth ofwisdom in them. We can all learn and growas we play. For example, during the years wespent developing Black White, it’s fair tosay that as a company of about 40employees, we were able to cast aside thenarrow-minded concepts of good and evil.

DISPATCHESPERSPECTIVE

James Leach is a BAFTA Award-winning freelance writer whose work features in games and on television and radio

Po stca rds From The Clipping Pla ne

JA MES LEACH

Conveniently ignoring the serious side of videogame development

Civilization taught me that it’sOK to use nuclear weaponryon your neighbours, simplyto see what would happen

I l l u s t r a t i o n b o x - k i t e - c u r v e . c o m

8/17/2019 Edge - June 2016.pdf


294May 26

edge - june 2016.pdf

Documents