Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i Edge

They say the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one, and this issue is characterised by companies at varying stages of, and approaches to, transformation. In An Audience With, we hear how Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney saw the way the wind was blowing seven years ago, and realised his company needed to change in kind. It was a decision that saw some of Epic’s most prized talent walk away from the company. But today, only a fool would claim it hasn’t worked out. Fortnite is the biggest game on the planet, and Sweeney and company are using their newfound power and wealth to improve the industry around it. It’s an inspiring tale, certainly, but the videogame business is full of cautionary ones too. This month,…

BOOK Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant bit.ly/brill5book Joel Golby, writer for Vice UK and author of Edge-favourite column London Rental Opportunity Of The Week, has written this collection of personal essays that veer between sickeningly funny and sincerely beautiful. There are a few nods here and there to the role that games have played in Golby’s life – but ‘Twitch.tv’ is the full-fat homage to their influence on him. We find ourselves nodding along as he tells us how he relaxes by watching hypnotically perfect headshots; he recalls a childhood spent baring his soul to the back of his best friend’s head while he played Quake, and muses on the way Twitch recaptures the same feeling. It’s so spot-on it’s worth the price of admission alone, even before you get…

Like many of my generation, I used to DJ a bit. If you were a club kid of a certain age in the 1990s, chances are you either knew how to mix two bits of vinyl together, or knew someone who did. I was one of the former and knew plenty of the latter, and while it obviously never went anywhere – I abandoned my dream of packed main rooms for a career on the game-journo breadline – it’s something I’ll always love, and always be able to do. There are a few skills in life that, once acquired, will never leave us (an ollie on a skateboard; nappy changes; a few flashy but woefully suboptimal Ken combos in Super Street Fighter IV), and matching beats is certainly one of…

Developer Larian Studios, Logic Artists Publisher Larian Studios Format PC Origin Belgium, Denmark Release TBA Larian Studios has been making Divinity RPGs for nearly two decades, since the tautologically titled Divine Divinity in 2002 up to its most recent instalment, the celebrated Divinity: Original Sin II. With Fallen Heroes, though, it’s hopping the fence into tactics games. But as producer Kieron Kelly points out, “the crossover of RPG, strategy and tactics is actually quite high”. He’s talking specifically about the games that Larian’s team like to play – alongside the RPGs you’d expect, he rattles off a list of tactics and strategy games: XCOM, Into The Breach, Darkest Dungeon, Heroes Of Might & Magic – but it applies to the building blocks of those genres. Turn-based combat, squad selection and…

Developer Typhoon Studios Publisher 505 Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release 2020 We have a good idea of what to expect from Journey To The Savage Planet – and you probably do, too. Creative director Alex Hutchinson regularly vents his spleen about his new studio’s debut game in his monthly Edge column (p32); as such, we’re familiar with much of the theory behind it. Savage Planet is a rare case of a creator having shown us their workings before showing us the result. It’s to its credit, then, that it still manages to surprise us. First, there’s the general philosophy of it all. This may be Typhoon’s debut, with plenty riding on its success, but Hutchinson isn’t about to let that dictate his approach. A firstperson adventure…

Olle Håkansson Creative lead, SteamWorld Heist The strategy genre is traditionally complex, but SteamWorld Heist makes it surprisingly straightforward for beginners. Was that ease of access something you spent a lot of time getting right? Definitely. From the shape of the UI to how we do the tutorial, we spend tons of time on that. We really want to make games that are accessible. That comes with a lot of testing – we have tons of testers of different skill levels that we take in. We always have a problem with finding fresh testers – people who haven’t played the game already. Because if they have played it before, you can’t really gauge their initial reaction. So it’s about scraping our entire network of connections dry, basically [laughs]. Given the amount of…

Developer FromSoftware Publisher Activision Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Every time we boot up Sekiro and see the Activision logo, we think someone must be having us on. This is an absolutely ridiculous product of the house of Call Of Duty, a game of such frequent and frightening difficulty that it risks turning off even the most avowed students of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s work. At its worst, it can feel like a game made entirely of difficulty spikes. At its best, it provides a thrill unequalled even by the rest of the Soulsborne canon. Throughout, it is the least Activision product to have come out of Activision in decades, for better and worse. Yet, as in Call Of Duty, it is all about using a red dot…

Developer Telltale Games, Skybound Games Publisher Skybound Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Lives are brutally cut short all the time in The Walking Dead, though when someone’s time is up it’s usually signposted. Yet we barely got a hint that Telltale was in trouble, until it was suddenly all over – and it turned out it had been in some difficulty for a while, like a survivor concealing a fatal bite beneath its clothes but bravely struggling on. That this final season was finished by Skybound Games, working alongside some of the original team, is apropos for a story that’s all about passing the torch – in this case, the lessons and values we try to instil in those we’ll leave behind. And how…

You wouldn’t say it’s an easy time to be the figurehead of a trade association whose mandate is to ensure the UK is “the best place in the world to make and sell games”. In fact, UKIE CEO Jo Twist has had a particularly busy last 12 months or so. Among the issues she’s been tackling lately are the WHO classifying ‘gaming disorder’ as a mental health condition (a development Twist says has been “highly contested by scientific experts around the world”) and the Gambling Commission scrutinising the business models and mechanics of modern games – chiefly loot boxes, but also skins betting in games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. On the eve of the London Games Festival, and ahead of her keynote address at this year’s Develop in July, Twist…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to PlayStation Plus, courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment Poison Around 15 years ago, we were living in the time of ARGs – games that spiralled out of the screen, into phone messages, geocaches and other real-life facets. Whilst Majestic and I Love Bees certainly seemed to capture a lot of attention at the time, nowadays we appear to be back to staring at a monitor as a self-contained source of entertainment. I have to say, I miss that era – one where I would find the next ‘level’ on a message board or as a video elsewhere, and having thought that the confluence of games and the real world…

On the third day of our four-day demopalooza at GDC, the email came in from Kotaku: had the team considered the implications of using the word ‘savage’ in our game’s title? At this point we’d been running demos for the press who were attending the conference, and livestreaming demos to others who couldn’t make it, from 7.45am to around 6pm each day. It was a gruelling schedule by any standards, but we’d found a rhythm and we thought we were doing a good job of demonstrating what we thought was original, interesting and potentially fun about the game. It’s a crucial time for us, especially since most people will only look at your game once, and so that first communication from their favourite outlet is crucial. It sets the expectations…

When LucasArts hired Mike Gallo in January of 1999, the Star Wars saga was on the verge of seismic change. The Phantom Menace, the first new Star Wars film since 1983’s Return Of The Jedi, was months from release, bringing a whole galaxy of licensed merchandise – action figures, comics, Lego sets, Pez dispensers, videogames – right along with it. The movie, billed as Episode I of the Star Wars saga, would deal with the time period 32 years prior to George Lucas’s original 1977 opus, showing the fabled Jedi Knights at the height of their influence. It promised audiences a nine-year-old hot-rodder incarnation of Darth Vader, a fresh-faced Obi-Wan Kenobi and worlds both new and familiar. Gallo’s first role at LucasArts, the videogame studio Lucas had founded in 1982…

You need a certain steel to last a quarter of a century in the game industry. Since 1997’s Carmageddon instantly put it on the map, Stainless Games has survived a number of cancelled projects, effortlessly moved from car combat to card combat and back again – with an interlude remaking classic arcade games – and now has four projects on the go, having bought back and subsequently resold the rights to its biggest hit in the meantime. The secret of its longevity? “Do a good job,” CEO and co-founder Patrick Buckland tells us. “That’s how you survive.” Buckland had been freelancing in the game industry since 1982, working on the Apple II and then Macintosh for a variety of companies in the early ’90s when he began to feel rudderless,…

Hidetaka Miyazaki has made some of Edge’s favourite games of all time, but for all that his output sits among the best of what this medium has to offer, in many ways it also embodies some of its worst traits. There is often a certain sneering elitism associated with his games, as if their devotees belong to a special club, only for players of pure blood and elite skills. The ‘git gud’ meme is one of gaming’s most wearying. Sekiro frequently feels like it is embracing it in a way none of its spiritual predecessors did. A hot-tempered debate sprung up online shortly after Sekiro’s release, after it was suggested that perhaps Miyazaki’s games should come with a difficulty setting. To the elitist crew, that was heresy, and in fairness…

Developer Good-Feel Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now The sight of a Shy Guy with a knife is one of many signs that Yoshi’s Crafted World isn’t quite the game you’d expect it to be. It’s not the first time the masked minion has been repurposed to more threatening ends – the relative few who played Paper Mario: Color Splash won’t soon forget its creepiest sequence – but here Yoshi also has Ninja Guys, Vampire Guys and Zombie Guys to contend with. By the time a shrieking clown with an axe arrives, it’s clear we’re a long way from the tooth-grindingly twee New Island. It would appear that Nintendo’s recent creative injection from younger developers, perhaps less overawed by the company’s legacy than their elders, has extended to its…

Developer/publisher Three Fields Entertainment Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Developers who leave larger studios to go independent tend to fall into two categories. There are those looking to start a passion project, something totally different from what they’ve been doing in their day job for years. And there are others who simply want to get back to what they’re good at, without the pressure of a publisher breathing down their neck or the challenges of managing a huge team with too many moving parts. Three Fields Entertainment made its intentions fairly clear with its debut: Dangerous Golf was a departure in one sense, but at heart it was Burnout’s Crash mode with a golf ball, a game about making an almighty mess on a somewhat smaller…

YouTube is central to Stadia – not least because of how many people watch videogames on the platform, which proved to Google the promise of games in the first place. The two platforms will be closely integrated: if you’re watching a video of a game that’s available on Stadia, you’ll be able to play it in a single click. The Stadia controller’s capture button will make sharing your session to YouTube just as easy. And Google wants to bring YouTube creators closer to their audiences, letting players queue up to join their favourite vlogger’s game session. Not for us, certainly, but we know plenty of kids for whom this is arguably Stadia’s single biggest draw.…

Porter Robinson is a prolific electronic artist with an uncompromising yet everchanging sound, from 2014’s ethereal Worlds to the gritty neo-trance of his current project, Virtual Self. Here, he discusses dying MMOs, the experimental future of VR and the musical legacy of Jet Set Radio Future. When did you first get into games? My earliest memory would be when I was about four years old. We had an MS-DOS computer in my childhood home and I remember pretty vividly playing a game called Mission To Mars. I had no sense of there being a difference between different videogames at that time. It was also impossible for me to open the game so I always had to call my parents over, and they had to type it in. You’ve said before…

Ezra Winterhand wakes up in an Animal Crossing-style cabin, and a friendly floating sprite tells him it’s time to go to his first class at the Academy. I’ve named my blonde-haired wizard in honour of the poet Ezra Pound, and the sprite walks me through the process of battling monsters by casting spells. In order to cast a spell, I have to solve a maths problem. Easy! The first monster, like all the subsequent ones, is not very threatening, and his weapon of choice is a spell called Fungi Fling, which literally consists of throwing a mushroom at me. Knowing how to do simple sums, I easily beat him and get some battle stars; a chest opens and sprays gold coins at me. Yay, riches! On to class. Unfortunately an…

Form and function Numbers are certainly important – just ask the marketing department at Gearbox, who were no doubt doing cartwheels when they were told that the newly announced Borderlands 3 contains over a billion guns. Having lots of potential options is all well and good. But this month’s Hype crop takes a different tack: these are games that like the idea of having a few tools that are capable of multiple remarkable things. That’s a core design principle in Journey To The Savage Planet (p48), as regular readers of creative director Alex Hutchinson’s Edge column will already know. Its toybox contains tools that have one obvious function, and others that only become apparent through experimentation – and typically result in riotous slapstick comedy, empowered by the designer but generated…

Format 3DS, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, Vita, Wii U Developer Image & Form Publisher Image & Form, Nintendo Origin Sweden Release 2015 This is so long ago that only really old people can remember,” laughs Image & Form’s founder and CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson. Well, we suppose six years, give or take, is a long time in game development. It was August 2013, and his studio had just finished its third commercial release and breakout hit, SteamWorld Dig. Already the game was a critical success, but it was too early to reap the commercial rewards. During an internal post-mortem, Sigurgeirsson insisted that the nine-month development time had been “way too risky” for a studio of that size. Its next game would take more than two years to complete. Needless to say,…

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (p108) is set in a ruined Washington, DC. Regular visitors to Ubisoft’s open worlds, after more of the publisher’s brand of digital tourism, be warned: there’s little opportunity to gawk at the sights. The streets are paved with danger. Failing to keep your eyes on the road in front of you is asking for trouble, and the game is only too happy to oblige your request. It’s exhausting, honestly, and while there’s a fine tension to your first sorties into new areas, as you stalk around trying to keep out of sight until you can unlock a safe house’s fast-travel point, getting into trouble is too easy, and getting out of it often too hard. Thankfully, this month’s Play crop yields some games where escaping…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Massive) Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Washington, DC, seven months after the outbreak. Most of the population have broken off into highly organised militarised factions; a few are trying to rebuild society amid the overgrowth and piled-up bin bags; and we are notionally on the side of the good guys, but mostly here for the sweet yellow guns and to very precisely lob sentry turrets onto the tops of cupboards. And burnt-out cars, abandoned shipping containers and upended fridges. This is a notionally serious game about a serious subject. But as we spend the opening salvos of yet another firefight carefully arcing a turret on top of a filing cabinet, we realise we aren’t treating it as such. Neither is Ubisoft Massive, in fairness. Setting…

Developer Avalanche Studios Publisher THQ Nordic Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Neat, homely Scandinavian houses lie empty in the moonlight. There are cars, abandoned in the snaking country roads, lights on, doors open, not a soul to be seen nearby. The grass sways in the breeze. On the horizon, flashing lights flicker at an ominous cadence. Generation Zero is a beautiful, empty game. So much so that it feels just a few voiceover lines of spoken word poetry away from being a walking sim, although it’s unclear if this is the atmosphere Avalanche Studios is going for or not. At its core it’s a game about shooting robots in fourplayer co-op, and yet it has an eye for sombre natural beauty and an emphasis on exploring…

Developer/publisher Inkle Format PC, PS4 Release Out now Cambridge studio Inkle’s 2014 debut 80 Days was, in a sense, about weaving a timeline, a girdle of decisions and encounters around the globe. It might have been defined by haste, with you searching for the quickest routes between ports, but it also let you spin back the hours and run a finger along the thread you’d drawn through its world. Heaven’s Vault continues this thinking, but widens the scope from 80 days to thousands of years, and from one planet to many. In place of an improvised itinerary, it features a literal timeline that swells with detail as you sail the game’s waterlogged nebula, following celestial rivers to ruined planets and mulling over the artefacts they harbour. Events are gradually sorted…