Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i Edge

As we send this issue to press, it’s the final days of the school summer holidays. One member of the Edge brood is seeing deadline day out in fine style: sitting on his backside playing videogames. Were we not quite so profoundly jealous we might suggest he put the controller down for a bit; maybe go outside, enjoy the sun while it lasts. But we know the feeling all too well – and besides, he’s had plenty of fresh air these last six weeks. Not all parents are quite so understanding, of course. (Fewer still are as jealous as we are.) Perhaps those stuffy old sorts will be a little more welcoming to this month’s cover game. Minecraft Earth drags a popcultural phenomenon into a very different kind of videogame…

Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. Chances are we will never know how much it cost to persuade the most famous streamer on the planet, Tyler ‘Ninja’ Blevins, to move from Amazon’s Twitch to Microsoft’s Mixer. And it is probably better that way. One rumour put the figure at $10m a year for the next five years; in all truth, that is probably on the conservative side. At his peak in 2018, Blevins had some 200,000 subscribers and over 14 million followers on Twitch. He was banking seven figures a month. For all that his star has fallen somewhat since then, he remains the poster boy for live game streaming, and likely will for some time to come. His services will not have come cheap. Yet this is more than just…

BOOK A Game Of Birds And Wolves bit.ly/birdswolves The new book from longtime Edge contributor Simon Parkin takes you back to 1941, when the Allies are facing defeat in a battle raging in the Atlantic. A retired navy captain, together with a group of eight women – some as young as 17 – devises an innovative game of battleships that eventually turns the conflict on its head. In his time in these pages, and the likes of the New Yorker and The Guardian, Parkin has become an expert at making the intricacies of game design accessible – but this is a human tale at heart, and one that seems set to bring him even greater success than a spot on the Edge flannel panel. Film rights have already been snapped…

As a consummate professional, I am writing this on my phone from a steamy business lounge deep in the bowels of Gamescom. I’ve come perilously close to missing my deadline as we prepped Savage Planet for what is likely our last major convention before launch. The room we’re in has no ceiling and somebody seems to have nicked the box of headsets, so not only am I stressed, but the volume has reached unheard-of levels as people bounce around inside the game, yelling at each other and trying to enjoy our final major feature reveal: twoplayer co-op! Any time you’re feeling lonely, you can call in a friend to help you, watching in horrified amusement as they are reconstituted from all the leftover lab protein and meat waste inside your…

Developer/publisher Rebellion Developments Format PC Origin UK Release 2020 There’s a tempting connection to be made to the recent resurgence of strategy-management games. Many, after all, are born in the UK, where the notion of assembling order from chaos has never felt more appealing. On the heels of Two Point Hospital and Planet Zoo comes Evil Genius 2, the Rebellion-developed sequel to Elixir’s 2004 original. Producer Ash Tregay, to his credit, declines to make the Brexit connection, pointing out that UK development teams these days are comprised of people of multiple nationalities (for now, at least). So, why the renaissance? He laughs. “A large part of it is that the people who were playing these games when they originally came out are now of an age where they can actually…

Robot Entertainment began as a rescue operation. While some studios start small, taking cautious steps toward their ambitions, this one crammed as many people as it could onto the lifeboats. The sinking ship was Ensemble Studios, the venerable developer of Age Of Empires. Microsoft planned to close Ensemble down once work finished on Halo Wars, but in a perfect case of corporate contradiction, had also greenlit a new project to follow under CEO Tony Goodman. In those final months, studio management scrambled not only to finish its swan song but to lay the groundwork for an independent studio, knowing it couldn’t save everyone. “The last nine months of shipping a game is always really hard,” Robot CEO Patrick Hudson says. “That project was particularly challenging at the end – the…

Words have power. That’s true both in the story itself, and how the game wields language to tell it. Control offers a novella’s worth of documents tucked away in its corners, and they’re the site of the game’s best storytelling and world-building. Where dialogue can tend towards the declamatory, and Faden’s narration often invites a reaction of “well, duh”, these documents take pure exposition and spin it into something more allusive. Mostly they take the form of Bureau reports – sober accounts of very strange incidents, littered with the black bars of redaction. Occasionally, these reports even tackle the question of the role language plays in this fictional universe. Words are a vital weapon in the battle between the Bureau and the Hiss. Not as much as assault rifles, perhaps,…

Developer PlatinumGames Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now Excuse us. Don’t you know who we are? We have just completed the prologue of Astral Chain and have been advised that we’re playing on the Casual difficulty setting. Frankly: how dare you. We are old hands, and thumbs, at this sort of thing, thank you very much. We know the PlatinumGames oeuvre inside out, and there are constants to the developer’s work that… look. All we’re saying is this. Casual? Really? Many hours later, it’s clear it was the right call. Astral Chain is, mechanically speaking, a sort of grab bag of Platinum’s previous games; it will remind you variously of Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, The Wonderful 101 and Nier: Automata (whose lead designer, Takahisa Taura, makes his directorial…

Developer Double Fine Publisher Bandai Namco Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Weird soon becomes the new normal in Double Fine’s gaudy top-down Roguelike. Rad is yet another Lee Petty game about transformation, following the designer’s ingenious Stacking and the enjoyable Headlander. Only here, rather than swapping heads, you’re growing new ones – alongside extra limbs and maybe, if you’re lucky, an ovipositor. At one stage we find ourselves cutting about in crab legs, sporting a snake’s head that delivers quite the venomous bite, and yet something gives us pause. All of this should, surely, feel stranger and more exciting than it does. These are just a few of dozens of possible mutations, which your young hero, chosen from a selection that ranges from punks…

There’s arguably no genre better-suited to Nintendo’s home console/handheld hybrid than the open-world RPG. Breath Of The Wild was the ideal launch game for Switch, demonstrating how a vast adventure could scale according to a player’s needs: all-consuming on a TV, yet even more magical on the go, the world’s breadth and depth perfectly preserved and always available. Then again, it was built specifically for it. Retrofitting a technical powerhouse of an open world – a seminal one at that – is another matter. CD Projekt Red, with the help of porting veteran Saber Interactive, is partway through a Switch port of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – the game that made it a household name. Over the course of a year, the Polish studio has joined a rush of…

Love is a drug We live in strange times. If you had told me 20 years ago that the people of today could get paid to play videogames I would have probably requested a restraining order. Yet here we are. The Fortnite World Cup has come and gone. Teenagers have won unholy amounts of cash. And that timetravelling weirdo suddenly starts to seem very reasonable. The story has, of course, offered a fantastic springboard for the mainstream media to demonise videogames. On the day of the big event I switched on the TV to find a newslady frothing at the mouth over supposedly horrifically violent scenes from Fortnite. (As opposed to the sorts of life-affirming scenes we see on the news every day.) Let’s just say that I’m glad she…

With Hollywood’s superhero obsession showing no signs of abating any time soon, we often find ourselves pining for some perspective from the other side of the good vs evil divide. Games, too, tend to prefer to cast us as saints than as demons. Happily, this month’s Hype crop offers a raft of opportunities to indulge our inner villain. Leading the charge is Evil Genius 2 (p46), the long-overdue sequel to Elixir’s 2004 supervillain management sim. This is a cartoony, comical and, Rebellion hopes, guilt-free style of evil-doing, a game of empire-building in which the only visible fatalities are those of the cocky super-spies who try to break into your hidden lair. If you’ve seen one too many blockbuster films, it’s a pleasant sort of catharsis. If you always preferred Dr…

Developer Illfonic Publisher SIE Format PS4 Origin US Release 2020 The jungle is as silent as the grave. The question is, whose? Hunkered down behind a boulder, we risk a peek at the treeline across a narrow river. There’s nothing visible save an NPC soldier idly lolling. We peer around the other side of the boulder, and – yes, there it is, shifting undergrowth and the drum-roll of feet. Straightening, we set off at a cautious trot over the hillside. The interloper breaks cover in front of us, a torquing mass of light and colour. We take a breath, leap and plunge two enormous wristblades into the centre of the mass, ripping the bogey apart before it can turn. Alone again, we jam a massive hand into our victim’s muddy…

Developer/publisher Greg Lobanov Format PC Origin Canada Release 2021 They say boredom breeds creativity, and two weeks before Wandersong came out, Greg Lobanov was very bored. The fun stuff had been over for a while; he’d spent the last few months working on important but dull jobs, from porting to bug fixing: “All kinds of horrible crap,” he laughs. With all that finally done, and nothing to do but wait for launch, he began experimenting with ideas for a follow-up. Again, he wanted to create an uplifting, happy, non-violent game; again, he wanted to allow players to express themselves. Rather than music, however, this new game would focus on art. And before long, Chicory was born. Chicory is a key character in the game, but she’s not actually the protagonist…

STILL PLAYING Slay The Spire, Switch What a magical journey this is turning out to be. Realising our early successes were almost entirely owing to RNG, our ascent through the ranks is about two things: hoping for another blessing from the OP gods, and working out how to build a successful deck when the algorithms fail to smile upon us. We wish we were playing it now. Stuff it, we’ve probably got time for a quick one. Destiny 2, PC The arrival of cross-save means we can abandon the 114 Power Hunter we’d been neglecting on our PC save, and transfer over our more powerful console characters – and all that sweet loot – to the land of unlocked framerates and adjustable FOV. It is bliss. Going back after this…

Developer/publisher Terry Cavanagh, Marlowe Dobbe, Chipzel Format PC Release Out now Dice are the oldest gaming technology we have. Predating recorded history, they were the first way humankind found to condense luck into a solid object, and have survived through the millennia as a symbol of chance and of play, a symbol we all can understand. Even when they’ve got arms and legs, and their sides are plastered with a smiling cartoon face. Dicey Dungeons might not all that reverent about its six-sided subject matter – beyond the breezy presentation, its characters are constantly poking fun at the idea of ‘good luck’ – but the game understands the power dice hold, and wields that power brilliantly. At its core, Dicey Dungeons is a game about rolling dice. Not so much…

Google Stadia made its Gamescom debut, and got right into the swing of things with a rather boring pre-recorded broadcast. Headlines were made – Cyberpunk 2077 was the main attraction, and Robot Entertainment’s Orcs Must Die! 3 the star in terms of new exclusives – but the format did nothing to sell Stadia’s potential. Like Google’s pre-E3 show it was talking heads on all-white backgrounds, barking out the names of forthcoming games. With launch a matter of months away, Google not only has to bolster its launch line-up, it must also work out how to properly convey to a sceptical audience that the tech works, and is something to be truly excited about.…

A variety of saves in our hands-on demo allow us to hop quickly from Kaer Morhen to blustery Skellige, Nilfgaard and the sumptuous countryside of Toussaint from the Blood And Wine DLC. The riverbanks in the latter buzz convincingly with flies – we wouldn’t notice it, but audio is one aspect where CD Projekt and Saber have been able to save on memory and compress files. Elsewhere in the duchy, however, we’re reminded that the port is unfinished, and that these later DLCs are probably still works in progress: riding Roach too quickly through one village causes bursts of music to switch on and off seemingly at random.…

On September 25, 1982, in Pennsylvania, George Emil Banks murdered 13 people, including his own children and a stranger walking past his house, using an AR-15 assault rifle. The most violent videogame in existence at the time was the classic Robotron: 2084, a 2D topdown twin-stick shooter in which you must fend off hordes of killer robots. Coincidence? On September 6, 1949, in New Jersey, war veteran Howard Unruh strolled through his neighbourhood and murdered 13 people with a handgun. He later told a psychologist: “I’d have killed a thousand if I had enough bullets.” Videogames did not exist at the time, but four days before Unruh’s mass shooting the film White Heat, starring James Cagney as the leader of a homicidal gang of robbers, had been released. Coincidence? On…

Developer Star Theory Publisher Take-Two Interactive Format PC Origin US Release 2020 Dozens of attempts were made by many Kerbal players before one reached the moon. Heaven knows how many tries it will take to reach another solar system. In development at Planetary Annihilation studio Star Theory following the departure of series creator Squad, Kerbal Space Program 2 raises the stakes like only a NASA-endorsed space sim can. You can now build colonies on other planets, allowing you to shift your launch facilities away from the debris-strewn grasslands of the Kerbal homeworld. You can also build orbital stations, bolting together zero-G dockyards for ships too vast to build on the ground – vessels with the fuel capacity required to travel to another star. Everything looks rather spectacular even in pre-alpha,…

Developer Remedy Entertainment Publisher 505 Games Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release August 27 The opening line of Control could serve as a sort of motto for the entire game. “Fair warning,” says a disembodied voice you soon learn belongs to lead character Jesse Faden. “This is going to be weirder than usual.” You’re picking up with Faden at the end of a decades-long quest: tracking down the mysterious government agency which, after a childhood experience with the supernatural, took away her brother. This is the FBC, the Federal Bureau Of Control, whose New York offices she is now wandering into unchallenged. Inside Faden will find the bodies of office workers, floating above their desks. She’ll meet an inverted black pyramid, speaking in subtitles, which oversees all Bureau operations.…

As the spiritual sequel to Sam Barlow’s 2015 game Her Story, Telling Lies was designed to build on the database-searching magic rather than simply repeating the trick. Here, Barlow explains some of Telling Lies’ unorthodox design choices, which exist to blur the limited particulars of how we currently interact with both film and videogames. Telling Lies feels like a significant evolution over Her Story. What were the areas you focused on developing, and why? The thing I didn’t want to do was a True Detective season two, or even like, good stuff – like Serial when they did the second season, and they shifted genre slightly and shifted content slightly. I guess the guiding principle of this one was understanding the ways in which this is not an interactive movie.…

Developer Foam Sword Publisher Double Fine Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Foam Sword’s exuberant debut is at its best when it abandons any pretence of challenging its players, and instead celebrates the simple joy of two kids on an adventure together. Nowhere is that more apparent than in its wonderful introductory sequence, as we witness (and struggle to control) two young girls hurtling downhill on their bikes. There’s Demelza, legs splayed, eyes screwed tightly shut, screeching in delight with a toothy smile as wide as her face. Then there’s Nessa – a little older, a little cooler – riding beside her, the wind pushing back her floppy fringe, as she too grins happily, having every bit as much fun without being quite so keen to show…