Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2019 i Edge

The game industry, and those who observe and report on it, are obsessed with what’s next. As we put this issue to press, we are just opening our schedules for E3, where it is rumoured the next generation of videogame hardware will appear. Already this year, Google has outlined its own vision of the future of games through Stadia. Yet this is a sort of progress by consensus. Of course the platform holders will continue to make new platforms. Streaming has been promised as the future for years, and Google’s endeavours have been an open industry secret for just as long. We are far more interested in those who identify opportunities for progress that defy the status quo, rather than being defined by it. In An Audience With this month,…

Founded in 2015, Hadean has worked in financial technologies and life sciences – it collaborated with The Francis Crick Institute, using its simulation technology for cancer research. Hadean became interested in games, a space made up of difficult problems in which the firm could push its tech to find solutions at lower risk. It’s similar to what DeepMind has been doing with AlphaStar (E330), although Dobson points out differences: “Starcraft is not representative of how people actually interact: it’s cool, but we definitely want to think about AI safety in terms of a much more realistic simulated world.”…

Crunch is a topic I’ve consciously avoided writing about ever since I penned the first Big Picture Mode some 380 years ago. If I’m perfectly honest, I’m a little conflicted about it. Don’t get me wrong – I am not about to try and defend multimillionaires working their rank and file to the bone. But as regular readers of this page will know, I like nuance, and lament its absence from modern-day videogame #discourse. This column, after all, was at first envisioned as using print’s distance from the 24-hour news cycle to take a more evenhanded, zoomed-out look at the issues of the day. Admittedly it has since become a monthly cry for help from an increasingly addled new parent, but that’s not to say we can’t yank it back…

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Storytelling in games is on the cusp of transformation: fittingly, so is Amy Hennig. The celebrated creative director and writer has become almost emblematic of the state of narrative design in games. Through her work on the Legacy Of Kain series at Crystal Dynamics, and the Uncharted franchise at Naughty Dog, she helped push the medium to blockbuster heights thanks to an instinct for innovation – and a confidence that, by her own admission, hasn’t always been easy to maintain. She was set to continue with the singleplayer Star Wars game that she was working on at Visceral Games, before EA cancelled the project and closed the studio. Now, Hennig is looking to start up on her own, convinced that the future success of games as a whole lies in…

Mark MacDonald Producer, Tetris Effect The Zone mechanic only arrived late on, and you considered a multiplayer mode for a while too. Is “we’ll worry about that later” a common phrase at Enhance? Mizuguchi-san’s style is very from the heart, very intuitive. If he’s inspired to do something, he does it, and then we ask, ‘Okay, so how do we make that happen? What system does it come out on? When does it come out? How much does it cost?’ A lot of places, I think, do the opposite of that: ‘Here’s how much money we have, here’s what’s happening in the market today…’ We make the emotional decision, and while we have to justify it to partners, or make the money work, and so on, that’s what comes after.…

Developer/publisher SIE (Bend Studio) Format PS4 Release Out now Eight hundred and thirty two days gone, the menu screen tells us as we near the endgame, and boy does it feel like it. We have played longer openworld games than this, but nothing quite so aggressively drawn-out. When, after the ninth cutscene of a single mid-game mission, its title changes to “It’s a long story”, we can’t help but laugh. There are more cinematics to come before this particular quest wraps up, by which time we’ve already had to follow an NPC – by bike and on foot – between waypoints more than half-a-dozen times, including a bit of meaningless busywork where we hold the Square button against a door to feel for vibrations from a turbine behind it. “Well,…

Ucle Lütfi is a fixture of the passenger seat in Jalopy, the road-trip game – a font of unsolicited personal history as you drive through East Germany on the eve of reunification, and a source of cash when you’ve emptied the wallet in the glovebox to buy spare tyres. But developer Greg Pryjmachuk considered removing him entirely, such was the personality of the car itself. The Laika 601 Deluxe, a fictionalised take on the iconic Trabant, splutters and rattles as if it’s fuelled by the nasty cigarettes that line the shelves in every petrol station. It does zero to 60 in 22.5 seconds, has good days and bad, and requires constant maintenance. In other words, it’s the most relatable character in driving simulation. The simulation genre is undergoing something of…

As we often mention in these pages, the annual Develop: Brighton conference in the coastal UK town of the same name is a highlight of the Edge social calendar. Ever since its inception in 2006, it has been a congregation point for an industry that, for all its ability to punch above its weight on the international scene, has often struggled to define a sense of self. That’s not to say it’s a parochial event – speakers come from all over the world, and attendees likewise. But it helps remind local developers that, while they may be making games for overseas financiers, gatekeepers and customers, they are still a community. That’s made clear by the keynote speakers. Jason and Chris Kingsley, founders of Rebellion, know a thing or two about…

Prime suspect Having watched the character models in the trailers for the live-action Sonic The Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu, my interest is piqued by both for entirely different reasons. While Detective Pikachu looks decent, thanks to the humility and talent of Ryan Reynolds, Sonic looks like a trainwreck ready to unfold. Possibly the main problem is the excessive anthropomorphising of Sonic compared to the Pokémon, whereas the latter look cartoonish, detailed and faithfully recreated. The Pokémon seem somewhat less disturbing and off-putting when compared to the hyperrealistic Sonic, with the somewhat normally proportioned legs and trainers, and the unnatural lack of gloves. Looking past that, if you can, the plot as a whole looks awful and highly derivative (somebody’s seen X-Men in regards to that time-pause). Jim Carrey’s character seems…

Sometimes it seems like game development is its own worst enemy. We develop core tech, while building content in parallel, while writing the script, while growing the team, while bizarrely doing press (usually before the game is finished). The industry’s roots in technology probably contribute to the fear of something being old or surpassed, which leads to this ridiculous situation even though it makes a hard job even worse. So it is that we are preparing our E3 demo, while iterating on our alpha build, while showing early code to the press, and to compound the challenge, while Sony and Microsoft decide to announce new hardware. And just like the release of Xbox One X and Playstation Pro, these releases are coming at a much faster rate than earlier generations.…

Developer/publisher Frontier Developments Format PC Origin UK Release Autumn There’s a moment in our demo of Planet Zoo, the follow-up to Frontier Developments’ theme-park sim Planet Coaster, that captures perfectly the fantasy the studio is shooting for. The camera floats above the clouds, overseeing all creation, before plummeting with all the sudden gravity of a rollercoaster drop, into an enclosure filled with lions. Each member of this small pride roams around with convincing independence, one clambering down a slope to paddle around their player-constructed pool. The camera pushes in further still, until we can pick out every strand of fur in their manes. What makes it truly remarkable is the scale, and the contrast between the bird’s-and worm’s-eye views. The demo repeats the trick, zooming out and whizzing across the zoo, past large constructions…

Developer Honig Studios Publisher HandyGames Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin Germany Release TBA When a story introduces itself as a Western, there are a few elements you’re probably expecting. The hats, the horses and, perhaps most inextricably, the guns. But El Hijo promises a Spaghetti Western without weapons – or indeed violence of any kind. It’s a stealth game where you play a small child, evading capture by grown-ups using your hide-and-seek skills and an arsenal that, even when it swells to include a slingshot, is used entirely for distraction rather than destruction. This approach goes both ways: get caught and, thankfully, you don’t have to watch the child suffer – they’ll just get picked up by a chastising adult and sent back to their room, or the nearest…

We didn’t see it coming either. As Panic Inc. co-founder Cabel Sasser leads us through the streets of San Francisco, looking for a place to show us his top-secret project, we’re convinced we’re about to see a game. A quiet corner of a coffee shop is apparently not private enough, even though we’re sure we could hide a screen from view. Then again, Sasser’s not carrying a laptop – in fact, he doesn’t appear to be carrying anything at all. Halfway up a nondescript stairwell, it turns out, is the ideal venue to unveil what Panic – maker of Mac and iOS software, publisher of Firewatch and the forthcoming Untitled Goose Game – has been working on for years. Sasser smiles, and reaches into his shirt pocket. In a flash…

Before we’ve even reached the festival floor, A Maze’s curious charms have begun to take hold of us. The ticketing lobby of the Berlin venue – usually a site of impatient attendees, frantic organisers and stoic-looking security men – is slowly filling up with shredded paper, and will continue to do so over the course of the week. It’s all thanks to The Book Ritual, Alistair Aitcheson’s self-described BYOS (bring your own shredder, obviously) which immediately asks us to pour our heart out into a copy of Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure with a felt-tip pen. “Have you ever lost a thing that was special to you?” the game asks us. “I want to know.” Within seconds, we’re scribbling down our deepest thoughts, safe in the knowledge they’ll be shredded…

Think of a typical Glaswegian family-run business. A cutting-edge videogame studio probably isn’t be too high up your list. Yet that’s precisely what No Code is. Established in 2015 by Jon McKellan and Omar Khan, the team now encompasses not only the former’s brother, Graeme McKellan, but his own wife, Lena and her brother, Ben Hall. Oh, and Khan’s mum chips in with cleaning and odd jobs around the studio. You might also think, not unreasonably, that such a cosy environment isn’t the most fertile ground from which to dream up some of the most forward-thinking and unsettling videogames of the last few years – but the psychological horror of Stories Untold and the forthcoming sci-fi thriller Observation rather disprove that, too. No Code, it seems, is building a reputation…

They say a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, and it turns out Deacon St John has rather a lot on his personal to-do list. “A murdering drifter camp,” he mutters during one excursion. “I’ve seen these bastards before, and I gotta take ’em out.” Then, as we pass a group of ravens indicating a nearby Freaker nest: “I guess I’ll come back and finish burning this infestation zone later.” These are clumsy lines, and there’s a faint desperation about how frequently they crop up, especially when we can easily find these asides on the in-game map. If it wasn’t already clear from the way tarted-up side-quests are folded into the main story, it seems Bend Studio really doesn’t want us to miss a single thing.…

The phrase ‘10,000-player deathmatch’ – whether it fills you with excitement, dread or simply curiosity – is difficult to ignore. Creating one was the ambitious goal of Hadean, a London-based engineering company specialising in large-scale simulation. And at this year’s GDC, with the tech demo Eve: Aether Wars, it hit it. The number of concurrent human players peaked at 2,379: including AI, the deathmatch topped out at 10,412 participants. A cumulative total of 3,852 human pilots battled alongside 10,422 AI pilots, bringing the full number of combatants to 14,274. It’s the sort of outlandish space fracas you might associate with, say, CCP Games. Lo and behold, the Eve: Online maker is involved, as evidenced by the tech demo’s name. Eve: Aether Wars uses assets from CCP’s games – some from…

Sam Sykes is a novelist with two high fantasy trilogies under his belt. When he’s not writing slasher-fiction on Twitter with fellow writer Chuck Wendig, he’s deconstructing genre tropes within his prose. Here, he discusses humanity in Dark Souls, A Link To The Past’s narrative and writing around random encounters. What’s your earliest memory of games? The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past was the first game where I was just completely glued to the screen. My mom rented it from Blockbuster. Until then, I thought games were like, ‘move from left to right, and whatever gets in your way, attack it’. I don’t want to say before I played Link To The Past I wanted to be a banker, and then I played Zelda – but after…

So, is videogame hardware dead, or at least dying? As Sony releases the first details about next year’s PS5, that seems to be the bet that Google is making with its Stadia game-streaming service. In this bright future, gone will be the days of large upfront investments in black boxes that become progressively more technologically obsolete over their lifespans. Instead, cutting-edge games will be more accessible to everyone, everywhere. No one will care about the particular box doing the calculations in some server farm. The videogame industry will be finally free to be all about the games. The attraction is obvious, though you won’t catch me flogging my Neo Geo Pocket Color or Game Boy Advance SP on eBay, because these pieces of exquisite consumer hardware design are physical memory…

Despite decades of technological progress, violence remains the default language of videogames. For all that the designers’ vocabulary has expanded, and continues to do so, most of its verbs are still describing various ways of hurting things. As such, this month’s Hype crop is a rare one indeed; for a change of pace, and to perhaps cleanse the palate before another presumably blood-soaked E3, we have largely put the guns away. We can’t help what we’ve become, however – clearly all that fighting does something to you. That, at least, is our excuse for why we ask Frontier Developments, maker of the intriguing Planet Zoo (p38), what would happen if we were to put carnivores and their prey in the same enclosure. That, judging by the devs’ reaction, is emphatically…

Developer/publisher Terry Cavanagh Format PC Origin UK Release 2019 At first glance, Dicey Dungeons seems like it could have been made as a physical tabletop game. The whole thing is built around a few components and a simple concept: rolling a fistful of dice, then assigning the results to your arsenal of equipment. The latter are two-dimensional blocks with slots for placing dice on – the kind of thing you could easily imagine scrawled or printed onto scraps of paper. But after a few rounds, as the game starts to twist that concept, it nimbly justifies its existence as a videogame. It’s worth noting that Dicey Dungeons was never prototyped on paper, never considered as a potentially physical game. The game first grew out of developer Terry Cavanagh’s participation in the Seven Day Roguelike…

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STILL PLAYING Celeste Switch Returning to a save file mystifyingly abandoned in the final stretch, we fall quickly back in love with Matt Thorson’s beguiling platformer. Despite the difficulty, it’s an easy game to go back to, that sparse moveset meaning muscle memory comes rushing back. The postgame stuff might be beyond us, honestly, but rare is the game that makes failure feel this satisfying. Cuphead Switch We laid groundwork with the original release, figuring out each boss fight’s quirks (it’s worth spending a super on Beppi The Clown’s annoying third phase, for instance, to get it done quickly and retain health for the fourth). We settle into a zen state, able to admire the art while going through the motions. We’re past our PC progress now, though: thoughts and…

Developer Netherrealm Studios Publisher Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch, Xbox One Release Out now We know you’re partial to a bit of grinding, Netherrealm, but this isn’t quite what we had in mind. The grind of buzzsaw against bone, perhaps, of boot against recently liberated spinal column against dirt – in fairness, Mortal Kombat 11 has all the ultraviolent trimmings you’d expect. It’s just that it’s awfully tedious about it. In our quest to collect the 250 Hearts we need to open one – one – Shao Khan loot chest in the Krypt, Kitana’s unskippable Gore-nado Fatality starts feeling routine: fan goes in, guts come out, princess whips up an offal cyclone. We must have watched it dozens of times – in fact, we know exactly…