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D I S H O N O RE D 2 THE STORY BEHIND THE GAME OF THE YEAR

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N Ov e M B e r 2016

NO MaN’s sKY MetrOiD PriMe: FeDeratiON FOrCe PaC-MaN Ce 2 tHe turiNg test uNBOX

Let’s do another one.

How hard could it be?

Dishonored 2 and this year’s Doom reboot both carry the Bethesda logo, and they’re both firstperson-viewed action games, but in terms of tone, presentation and scope, they’re quite unlike each other. But both games faced the same challenge: what to retain from their predecessors? The starting point for every sequel – or reboot – should involve pinpointing the root appeal of the thing that was successful enough to leave people wanting more. For Arkane Studios, the process involved looking at how Dishonored was received, not only by critics but also the community. What did players like? What might they want more of? What would they be happy to never clap eyes on ever again? There was no shortage of opinions, shared via all sorts of media, to take into account. For Id Software, the process was a bit more difficult. Work on the Doom reboot began in 2008. Having left the series alone since 2004’s Doom 3, the team wasn’t able to simply pick up where it left off. Should a new version follow in 3’s footsteps, and move even farther away from the original’s motifs, or should it turn back towards the trailblazing spirit of yore? The designers made a call, and it was the wrong one. In 2012, Id trashed nearly four years’ worth of work and returned to the drawing board. It was an onerous decision but, as we know now, eminently worth it.

The common understanding among consumers is that sequels are easy options, but the story behind Doom illustrates the realities involved in trying to elevate a well-known game to the next level. Deciding on a new starting point for its reboot turned out to be just one of many tests, as the team explains in this issue’s The Making Of… on p96.

Back at Arkane, we find a group of artists, designers and programmers whose vision for their new game may not have required a change of tack, but it’s inspired some long looks in the mirror as they’ve faced up to the challenge they’ve set themselves in trying to surpass 2012’s majestic Dishonored at every turn. Our report begins on p64.

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sections #298

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NOV emb er 2016

Knowledge 8 Into the woods

Why do indie developers pine for an isolated cabin in Sweden?

12 Northern exposure

A look ahead to the Yorkshire Games Festival, with John Romero

14 Art of darkness

Frédérick Raynal on 2Dark and his return to survival horror

18 Dare to inspire

Scotland’s biggest indie event showcases a new generation

20 Wolf haul

Possession is nine-tenths of the laws of nature in Lost Ember

26 This Month On Edge

The things that caught our eye during the production of E298

Dispatches 28 Dialogue

30 Trigger Happy

100 Studio Profile

Three decades after his first space trip, Steven Poole heads out again

32 Big Picture Mode

Nathan Brown on No Man’s Sky and the perils of over-ambition

129 Postcards From The Clipping Plane

Game commentary in snack-sized mouthfuls, with Reggie Fils-Aimé

Features

Rapper Adam Drucker on indie games and a second childhood

96 The Making Of…

Why Id Software threw out its old identity, and the game design rulebook, to reinvent Doom

James Leach frets over the impact his games have on young minds

24 My Favourite Game

How Frontier is building, piece by piece, the ultimate theme-park simulator with Planet Coaster

Edge readers share their opinions; one wins a New Nintendo 3DS XL

106

22 Soundbytes

88 Best Coast

Inside Climax, the 28-year-old work-for-hire specialist reinventing itself as a powerhouse in VR

124 Time Extend Feel-good ink: how the online gamble of Splatoon kept players hungry for more

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64 Made Of Honor

In the towering Dishonored 2, Arkane levels up the immersive sim by harnessing the power of two

78 Health Points

Is the serious-game sector ready to capitalise on videogames’ terrific potential for healing?

78

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Specialist Magazine Of The Year

Knowledge Stugan

Into the woods How can dropping developers into the middle of nowhere be good for the game industry? Stugan has the answer

W

ho in their right mind would spend two months in the Swedish wilderness, with just a bunch of indie game developers for company and epically vast deciduous forests for a backdrop? Lots of people, apparently, if the Swedish nonprofit project Stugan (‘the cabin’) is any indication. But even though many want to sample the delights of the Swedish back country, few are chosen.

Those who are get to enjoy local home cooking, falling stars, evening dips in the lake, an awful lot of boardgaming, and, if they’re lucky, the Northern Lights.

The Stugan accommodation is quite large, comprising several buildings, situated at the edge of an abandonedfor-the-summer ski resort. Its isolation, though, is no exaggeration. The radio cuts out as we approach, and it won’t be back again until we leave. Thank goodness for landline broadband.

It’s lunchtime when we arrive at the cabin, Bäverhyddans Värdshus (Beaver Lodge Inn), just outside the tiny township of Bjursås. Today’s fare is traditional: homemade meatballs and potatoes. The atmosphere is one of quiet, contented concentration, and the conversations around tables mostly revolve around solving tricky programming issues, or the awesomeness of last night’s falling stars, as viewed from the top of a nearby hill.

Stugan is a game accelerator, a project started by Swedish game industry veterans to help budding developers get started, and in some cases get around to finally finishing their games. The isolation and the company of likeminded people is supposed to encourage them and let 8

Project manager and sponsor Jana Karlikova

VIllage people Tom Francis, formerly of PC Gamer, caught the development bug and produced the clever stealth puzzler Gunpoint in 2013. Why, after the success of his debut game, is he here rather than at the helm of a studio in some UK suburb?

“I wanted to prototype things by myself, and feel free to experiment,” he tells us. “I like to have no pressure while testing ideas. The best thing about Stugan is the support network it provides. But also the fact that we’re all friends now, hanging out together. It’s a little bit like an oldtime village where everyone knows each other and helps each other out. Everyone’s life is kind of on hold – there are just the games to focus on.”

cranny, and what at first seems to be a them focus on their work, free from the broom closet turns out to be the working distractions of everyday life. It’s all held space for two teams who happily show together by project manager and sponsor off what they’re working on. Laura Yilmaz Jana Karlikova, who handles the dayand Michael Fallik from Los Angeles turn to-day business of keeping people fed their screens around to show us scenes and happy during their eight-week stay. from their game Thin Air. “The idea came from Oskar Burman and Tommy The clatter of keyboards “We try to achieve here is ever-present, and Palm,” Karlikova tells us.

“They have both worked in invigorating to walk a balance between it’s the game industry for many through a space where different genres, years, and wanted to help everyone is clearly new developers get into the focused on producing backgrounds, business, and to build a their best work, while also nationalities, and network. And since many looking somehow relaxed. people in Sweden have a developers are men and women” These small cottage where they happy to be here, but can relax and be inspired many didn’t make it. by nature, what better way How were the lucky few chosen? to do it than by placing everyone in a “The participants were chosen classic red cottage with white corners, based on several criteria,” Karlikova out in the middle of nowhere?” explains. “Not least the 90-second This is the second year Stugan has presentation video they all sent in with brought to Sweden indie development their application. We tried to achieve teams from all over the world. But as a good balance between different beautiful as the location is, right in the genres, backgrounds and nationalities – middle of an old copper-mining district, and, of course, between men and it’s clear that this is no holiday. When we women. We have people who have visit, we find developers toiling on puzzle just started developing games, and we games; a semi-autobiographical title have people who have worked on centred on the war in Yugoslavia; and several games already. even a game about relationships between “We have 13 teams here this year, tiny cats. There are regular presentations, 21 people in total, from 14 different where teams can help each other with countries. We had about twice as many specific issues or simply be inspired by applications this year as we did last time. each other’s work, while guests from the This was planned as a yearly thing from wider development community drop in the beginning, and we’re hoping to do frequently to share their expertise.

Stugan 2017 as well.”

In the main building, where everyone The project’s rise in popularity since meets to eat and work every day, small the first iteration a year ago has seen it teams are crammed into every nook and ramp up all round. Stugan now has a

It may be no good for picking up radio signals, but this environment provides the kind of inspiration most attendees cannot find at home

Ivan NotaroĹĄ

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Knowledge Stugan

The atmosphere may be informal on the whole, but Stuganeers are encouraged to meet frequently in order to share ideas and collaborate on solving problems

resident reporter, who produces YouTube videos to promote what’s happening here – not that the project seems in need of much promotion throughout the local development scene. Stugan’s list of sponsors and mentors reads like something of a Who’s Who of Swedish gaming luminaries, featuring the likes of Fredrik Wester (Paradox), Karl-Magnus Troedsson (DICE) and Jens Bergensten (Mojang). This is a group of people with intrinsic links to Sweden’s success story, establishing its position as a region that constantly punches above its weight.

“Finding sponsors and mentors has not been a problem,” Karlikova says.

“Many people in the industry are happy to help out and, of course, come up here to give talks and help the teams.

Most of them actually don’t seem to want to leave after seeing the place and feeling the positive energy!”

On the face of it, Stugan feels a little too idealistic. Where is the catch? What do the founders and the many supporters of Stugan get out of all this? Do they own a piece of the games created here?

“This is a completely philanthropic project, and we want to give something back to the industry,” Karlikova explains.

“We believe that we’re helping not just the people who come here, but by extension the entire game industry. All 10

focus on his new game, Heat Signature.

“I get stuck very easily, as I’m not really well suited to programming. I was going a little bit mad on my own, but it’s so much easier to deal with problems when there are other people around. Not only for direct help, but also so that when you think you’re an idiot and will never fix this code, you can see that others have the same problems. Every now and then I have a problem that takes me seven days to fix, but when I mentioned one of those problems at the daily meeting here, I instantly got help fixing it.”

It works, then. That’s the lasting impression of our visit. Stugan gathers ambitious, fresh and hungry indie developers together, away from the world’s many distractions. It allows them to cooperate, critique each others’ work, and get fresh sets of eyes on the inevitable hurdles they encounter. It feels the participants are required to do, once inspirational – a progressive way of selected, is buy a ticket to Stockholm – making sure that most, if not all, of these we handle everything else. We provide games see the light of day, rather than food, room to work and sleep, and, of being pushed to one side or forgotten course, the great, distraction-free location. about when the going gets too tough.

And the teams naturally retain ownership Last year’s results certainly look of their work, which is kind of unique.” promising. From the teams After talking to many of that spent the summer at the people who have “It’s a completely Stugan 2015, Data chosen to spend their Realms’ Planetoid Pioneers summer away from philanthropic civilisation to work on their is in Steam Early Access, project, and dream projects here, we Clint Siu’s hard-to-Google see that Karlikova’s claims mobile title _PRISM has we want to give stand up. We hear the been released, and the something back same things again and promising 20,000 Leagues again: that coming to Above The Clouds from to the industry” Stugan has enabled these Swedish studio That Brain developers focus on is close to completion. projects and get help from each other, By the time you read this, we might while at the same time making new and already know if this year will be as valuable friendships among likeminded successful. As we prepare to leave, people. At the time of our visit, it’s been Stugan 2016 is looking towards its grand a little over five weeks since the group finale at the Museum Of Technology in arrived, and a tight-knit community has Stockholm on August 27. After that, the evolved. Several attendees talk about organisers plan to maintain Stugan as an specific instances when they hit a wall annual event, and at its current location. and were offered either direct help from Several other countries have expressed one of their fellow Stuganeers (the semian interest in bringing the concept to official name for the participants) or their shores, but according to Karlikova, simply a different perspective that helped Stugan is destined to stay in the Swedish them work things out for themselves. woods. For now, at least. There really “I mostly work out of my bedroom [at can’t be too many of these little red home],” says Tom Francis, who’s here to cabins in the world, after all. n

ABOVE Some of the spaces here are best described as cosy, but the setup encourages collaboration

PULLING FOCUS

How a change of scenery can help turn a corner

LEFT CatDate, by Austin And Diana, is a mobile game focused on, well, you might be able to tell from the name. ABOVE Thin Air, by Michael Fallik and Laura Yilmaz of indie studio Portmanteau

LEFT Tom Francis’s Heat Signature, which sees you infiltrating space stations. ABOVE If you look up ‘stuga’, this is what you’ll find – the classic Swedish cottage, red and white, and with lots of rural charm

Stuganeer Ivan Notaroš is from Serbia, and his game House Of Flowers is focused on the war in Yugoslavia during the ’90s. In it, you deal with food rationing and try to avoid the draft in a hugely interactive world.

“I had taken a break because the game is so big,” Notaroš says. “I needed time to focus, and here I have two months to do that. There are so many new ideas coming into my mind here, just talking to others. There are distractions, but this place also keeps me focused. In Serbia I see things every day that distract me. At Stugan I’m kind of detached from it and can look at it from the outside.”

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Knowledge YoRKSHIRe gAMeS FeSTIVAl

northern exposure John Romero will be among the guests at the inaugural Yorkshire Games Festival

Y

a number of free elements. And despite orkshire is one of the UK’s most being a way to promote the local game prolific, longest-standing game industry, the event is anything but development hubs. Numerous iconic parochial, despite its name. studios have called the region home, “It’s not just about Yorkshire,” Penny from Team 17 and Revolution Software says. “There will be local, national to Rockstar Leeds and Sumo Digital. and international speakers. We’ve got Quite rightly, then, there’s a little Yorkshire John and Brenda Romero. Warren pride when it comes to games.

Spector and Rhianna Pratchett are there, The general public may not primarily and then there are our local guests like associate the county with the craft and Charles Cecil from Revolution. It’s all business of building digital worlds, but about access to industry, and students game development arguably deserves a getting an unrivalled opportunity to place on any list of local archetypes. In meet that industry and learn about a an attempt to share what games mean to range of topics, from diversity in games the region – and to help stimulate and and programming Doom to reviving bolster the area’s industry – Bradford’s classics and writing in games.”

National Media Museum is hosting the John Romero will be taking to the Yorkshire Games Festival this November. stage at the festival for an “We’ve hosted a interview hosted by Edge, number of game events “It’s all about access and the famed gamehere over time,” says maker will also deliver Kathryn Penny, festivals to industry, and a detailed look at his director and film business students getting professional past, and manager at the National the lessons he learned Media Museum, as she an unrivalled on the frontlines at Id considers why 2016 opportunity to Software, the studio he provided the ideal time to launch a new gathering. meet that industry” co-founded 25 years ago where he worked on “This year we wanted to seminal shooters including go really, really big on Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. games, and we wanted to have a “My talk covers the early history of platform for the game industry in Id Software,” Romero says. “It’s a short our festival calendar. The motivation history of the beginning of the company, behind the Yorkshire Games Festival all the way through to shipping Quake. was to have an event where students During the process of telling that story and recent graduates in relevant games I’ll have lots of other little quick stories courses – mainly in the region – could about things that happened back then. get closer to the industry.”

“I’ll also cover 13 programming Penny firmly believes that process principles that helped us make the amount should inspire and inform, by giving of games that we made during that fledgling talent a chance to meet with period, which was – I think – 28 games and learn from a spread of visiting in five years. That was a time when we luminaries. There are family- and playerhad to write the engines ourselves, too. focused elements too, taking place over The funny thing is, even on the PC – the festival’s closing weekend, offering

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Kathryn Penny, festivals director at The National Media Museum in Bradford

compared to previous ’80s consoles and computers like Commodores and BBC Micros that had sprite hardware and sound hardware – we didn’t have any of that kind of thing.”

That, Romero believes, led to a distinct development method and mindset that remains relevant and applicable today. “[David Kushner’s] book Masters Of Doom kind of tells the story of Id Software, and I get a lot of feedback from people that have read the book,” Romero explains. “They basically tell me it’s so inspiring. A lot of people that are feeling depressed or burned out or whatever, they read the book and it re-energises them. Most of that comes from the fact that they realise they are like we were at Id Software, and I think that’s still relevant today.”

Back in Bradford, organisers are drawing up the final plans for the festival, which runs from November 9–13.

Narrative expert Pratchett is set to discuss the challenges and opportunities that face those looking to thrive as game scriptwriters, while System Shock producer Spector will join via video link to offer insight from his three decades at the leading edge of game development.

The closing weekend will also feature Yogscast hosting a live Q&A session; there will be careers advice for those pondering a move into videogame development; and, for the family-centric final day, there will be a collection of events based on Minecraft.

“We’ve got a few fringe events as well,” Penny says. “There are things like DJ Yoda on the Friday night, which will see games clash with other art forms.

There’s plenty to get excited about.”

For tickets and more information, visit www.bit.ly/yorkshireGF. n

National Media Museum

The National Media Museum hopes to draw a spotlight on Yorkshire as a game-making hub, while hosting speakers from around the world

hOMe FROM hOMe

Trisha Rankin

Why Yorkshire reminds Romero of Id’s home state

ABOVE DJ Yoda will spin a set clashing games and other art forms using his trademark high-energy, comical turntablism

ABOVE John Romero will talk about his time at Id, which involved the creation of Quake (pictured right, as the game existed 21 years ago, while still in production)

For John Romero, a visit to the Yorkshire Games Festival is a chance for him to visit a games development hub he tells us he greatly admires, and a place that reminds him of the backdrop against which Id Software established itself as a firstperson-shooter powerhouse. “When you have ten per cent of the UK’s game development in one area, it’s a big deal,” he says. “I think it will be similar, say, to an Austin game dev conference, where there’s a bunch of developers who have a long history in the industry, with Origin Systems being founded there in ’83, and Akalabeth developed in Austin in 1980.”

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Knowledge FredericK raynal

art of darkness Alone In The Dark creator Frédérick Raynal on 2Dark, Resident Evil, and returning to the genre he helped create

F

rédérick Raynal wrote his first videogame at age 14, and went on to create 1992’s Alone In The Dark, kickstarting the survival-horror genre in the process. The next year he co-founded Adeline Software International, which was responsible for the Little Big Adventure series and Time Commando.

When the company was acquired by Sega in 1997 it was renamed No Cliché and worked on Toy Commander, Toy Racer and an unreleased Dreamcast survival-horror project called Agartha.

Now, together with Yael Barroz (an artist on Alone In The Dark and Little Big Adventure) and two other experienced collaborators, Raynal is returning to the genre he helped to define with the creepy, dimly lit 2Dark. Here, we discuss his return to survival horror, Capcom’s years of silence regarding Alone In The Dark’s role in Resident Evil’s genesis, and the delicate issue of featuring children in a horror game.

Why is now the right time for you to return to survival horror?

I’ve learned a lot since 1992. When we were working for Sega, they asked us to make a very weird and dark survival horror for the Dreamcast, and that became Agartha. We started something very special – long before Black & White, we allowed players to play as a good or bad character, to choose their behaviour. But we were making it in 2001 when Sega started closing down everything to do with the Dreamcast, so it was never finished. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to make another survival horror, and two years ago we started on 2Dark.

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is raytracing the sprites every frame, so There’s been a lot of progress since you can have all the rotation but achieve Alone In The Dark. Can you compete? this almost hand-drawn sprite look.

It was easy when we started as nothing existed – we started a genre, but it was Are there any aspects of survival horror luck! We didn’t ask too many questions. games you don’t particularly like?

My father owned a VHS tape store, so When I did Alone In The when I was young I Dark, I thought a lot about watched a lot of horror “Alone In The Dark the effect of camera movies. The inspiration because it was came directly from those was one of the first angles very new – it was one of movies. But this time, we full 3D games, the first full 3D games. I sat down and said, “OK, wanted to make something what is a survival horror but there were that felt like a movie, but today?” You have huge a lot of mistakes there were a lot of projects like Evil Within, mistakes in that system. For Resident Evil, all these big in that system” example, in Alone In The triple-A games with tons of polygons. I’ve worked in Dark, you can’t see what huge teams at Ubisoft, but I don’t want the character can see if, say, he opens to make another triple-A game. So we a door on the other side of the room. It decided not to do 3D because if we bothered me a lot, but with 2Dark you went down that road we’d need big 3D. always know where you are, even if We needed to try to find something sometimes you’re completely in the dark. different. I started to work on an engine Also, a lot of games limit how often that was kind of 2D tiling like a Super you can save. In our game you can save Nintendo game, but actually all of the whenever you want – you smoke a tiles that build the backgrounds are made cigarette to save, but the more you with normal maps and all the lighting is smoke, the more you’ll cough and that 3D and uses advanced shaders. That’s could give away your position. We want why we have this very different look. the player to be scared because of the story, not because they might have to The characters, in particular, look great. redo a part of the game they’ve already Thank you. I like to mix technology and played. And if you can save whenever I wanted to keep this kind of retro feeling. you want, you can experiment and try I wanted the look of sprites, but I hate exploring places you might miss them because you only have a few otherwise. Just don’t smoke too much! positions to use. I want a very [reactive] game with 360 degrees of rotation for Like Alone In The Dark, 2Dark relies on the characters, so I made all the stealth. What appeals to you about it? characters out of voxels. They’re made In an action game, you have to keep the with a lot of small cubes, but the system pace up for the player with no timeouts

Raynal was convinced of the potential for 3D graphics while porting Alpha Waves from Atari ST to DOS, his first job after joining Infogrames

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Knowledge FredericK raynal

ABOVE As the name suggests, light plays an important role in 2Dark. Stick to the shadows and you’ll be hidden, emanating circles depicting the noise you, and enemies, are making.

RIGHT Despite its cartoonish visuals, 2Dark is a macabre, mature-rated game

or anything like that, in case it gets boring. But in a stealth game, the player needs to be rewarded when he doesn’t play: ‘Oh, I’m hiding. I hear this conversation, they’re talking about me…’

So the most rewarding moments are the ones where you’re not actually playing!

It completely changes the experience of the game, and I find that fascinating.

You mentioned Resident Evil – how do you feel about Shinji Mikami’s admission that Alone In The Dark did, in fact, influence the series?

For 18 years, Capcom said the team never saw the game. That was the official line. I wasn’t looking for recognition from them, but the opposite of it was very cruel. There are the same puzzles, the same ideas, the same cameras… And the first thing Mikami-san said two years ago when his contract with Capcom was over was that without Alone In The Dark, Resident Evil would have been just a firstperson shooter. Thank you, Mikami-san – I hope we’ll meet one day, because I really want to thank you for that.

How are you innovating this time?

I realised that survival horror games are very selfish – you just have to save yourself. So my first thought was, ‘OK, what can frighten somebody more than just dying?’ And when you have kids, your priorities change and you say,

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‘OK, the life of my kids is more precious than my own’. That felt like a good start for a survival horror.

A game in which children can die seems like a risky proposition.

It’s true. In 2Dark you need to save children from six serial killers, so that naturally means that they can be killed.

Nobody does that in games. We went back and forth on that, and worried about it. I don’t want to be the game where you can kill children – it needs to be the game where you save children.

Part of our solution is if you try to kill any children, the screen fades to black and it’s game over immediately. When we were researching the game, the reality of serial killers was worse than what we’d

conceived, so there are some subjects we don’t want to touch on. Instead, we focus on gore – somebody the other day described the game as ‘gore cute’! With those visuals we can balance the game with the reality of the subject matter.

Are you concerned about controversy?

Of course we are a little bit scared of how people will react to the idea of a game in which you can see kids being killed by bad guys, yes. But we all play war games, and what do you think war is? It’s not playful and nice – people are killed, and the industry still makes games about that. We’ve made a game about serial killers in which you have to save children. Someone who saves children is a good role you could have in life. n

Knowledge dare protoplay

dare to inspire Scotland’s biggest indie event shines a light on a new generation of game developers

I

nclusiveness: if there’s one overriding quality that defines this year’s Dare ProtoPlay festival, it’s a communal sense of unifying passion. You can see it in the eyes of countless families who flood the marquees of this constantly expanding Dundee-held event, and you can certainly feel it in the 16 student games all vying to win recognition from BAFTA at the festival’s showpiece Dare To Be Digital design competition.

“Games are embraced by the community here in a way unlike any other place I’ve seen,” says Dr William Huber, who acts as both ProtoPlay’s director and the head of School of Arts, Media and Computer Games at Abertay University, the event’s host institution. “It’s very intergenerational.” A stroll around Dare To Be Digital’s floorspace confirms this,

ProtoPlay director Dr William Huber

From top Dare To Be Digital remains ProtoPlay’s star attraction; the Junior Judges initiative gives children the power to vote for their favourite games

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with scores of children partnered by Indeed, it’s this hands-on approach parents who appear inquisitive when to game-making that Huber believes is presented with titles showing a sense of invaluable for nurturing the next purpose and playfulness that captures generation of developers. “Increasingly, the imaginations of young and old. studios do not hire based on the boxes The trio of winning titles, whose you can tick on what programming teams have now been nominated for languages you say you’ve learned. They BAFTA’s One To Watch award, boast hire based on your portfolio: ‘Show me a remarkable level of coherence what you’ve done’. Careers are built on considering their short gestation the games you’ve made.” With all 16 period. Among The teams gaining not only invaluable development Stones, Pentagrab and “It’s overwhelming, experience during Dare, Rebound (see facing also direct feedback page) all demonstrate it’s scary, but after but from the public, the a commitment to a while you get festival is a useful tool accessibility, and it’s in helping a wave of an approach shared shoved into a game makers prepare for by the other 13 finalists’ team and start an increasingly crowded, projects – a legitimate competitive industry. achievement given that making games” Dare’s rapid expansion many were made in just – some 13,000 attended eight to ten weeks. the event over four days in August – has It also speaks to the strength of led Abertay to collaborate with other Abertay’s prospective graduates that institutes in recent times. The Digital all three winning teams hail from the Games Research Association (DiGRA) Dundonian school. Despite facing now hosts annual talks on a nearby commendable competition from campus, with UKIE’s Dr Jo Twist most a variety of overseas projects, it’s the recently presenting a keynote on making homegrown games that appear to hit the UK the best place to produce and the most resonant note with crowds. sell games and interactive entertainment.

Seminars such as these are part of Among The Stones – a colourful ProtoPlay’s overarching philosophy to 3D platformer that has been crafted get young people thinking about games with a painterly poise reminiscent of not merely as entertainment, but as the Okami – is a particular standout, with basis for a prospective career. its art designer, student Rory Sweeney, Though the festival’s Indie Showcase, effusive about the value of not only held inside Dundee’s Cairn Hall, may Dare To Be Digital, but also Abertay’s lack the presence of big-name game design course. “It’s been developers, there’s no doubt that Dare phenomenal. In a practical sense, is continuing to grow year on year, Abertay is the best. They put you in so many projects at once. It’s overwhelming, providing a rare opportunity to see the it’s scary, but after a while you get shoved work of future developers at a raw yet exciting stage as it inspires children to into a team and start making games, look at games in a whole new light. n which is the most valuable part.”

rebound

rebound

This frenetic fourplayer arena effort combines elements of twin-stick shooters with that of a sports title, namely a sci-fi take on dodgeball. Action is relentless, with players jostling for possession of two energy spheres. The Tron-aspiring wireframe design is striking, while the heated multiplayer duels suggest an ideal party game.

glaze

Crowbar Games

With its serpent-like star and jolly ambience, Glaze owes much to Hohokum. The goal is to glide around interacting with townsfolk, be it helping them grow veg or brushing against giant piano keys to serenade their floating kingdom. The papercraft art direction is akin to a 2D Tearaway, while the dream-like atmosphere feels inspired by Journey.

elk

Wee Door

Combining Limbo’s monochrome art stylings with elements of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation, Elk is a bold 2D puzzle/platform hybrid. As you try to reunite the titular beast with the rest of its herd, you must become one with Scottish woodlands to avoid the unwanted attention of expressively animated trolls.

among the StoneS

Blue Door Games

Among The Stones sets out to unite the spirit of Super Mario 64 with a watercolour art style that evokes memories of Okami. Its child hero has the ability to forge platforms by throwing small rocks at the ground – which quickly sprout into mighty boulders – on an island dotted with simple yet whimsical puzzles.

Pentagrab

Ludico

A madcap 2D party game where four players control hooded cultists who are all vying to sacrifice items to top up their points tallies. Matching specific objects with onscreen prompts evokes the playfulness of Simon Says, and the addition of bombs – which can be dropped into fellow players’ cauldrons to sabotage scores – adds further chaos.

no trace

Square mountain

Playing an assassin who must silently take out his targets, this inventive sneaker plays out like a top-down Hitman. In another nod to Io’s suited sociopath, your contract killer has multiple ways to complete jobs, ranging from poisoning cocktails in a club dappled with neon lights to piercing a steam valve to cause an explosion.

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Knowledge lost ember

While early footage of Lost Ember suggests an open world, it follows a fairly linear path, which balloons into areas you’re able to explore at your leisure

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Wolf haul

Possession is nine-tenths of the laws of nature

Like a gentler, more ecologically minded Body Harvest, Mooneye Studios’ Lost Ember goes out of its way not to restrict you to a single shell or set of abilities. While the central protagonist of the game is a noblelooking grey wolf, you have the power to possess any animal you encounter amid the ruins of a fallen civilisation. You’ll need to get close to effect the switch, and that will be easier in some cases than in others – birds will require a careful approach, for example.

Once possessed, you can control the creature indefinitely, just so long as you are close to other members of the same species.

“The idea to play as animals was one of the first things we settled on, because, well, everybody loves animals,” Mooneye CEO and programmer Tobias Graff tells us. “Some of our biggest inspirations are games like Journey, Shelter and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. We didn’t want to stress the player with fast combat action or hard puzzles, and instead offer ways to have amazing experiences within our world.”

Mooneye plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign in the near future, and hopes to release Lost Ember in 2018. n

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Knowledge talK/arcade

Soundbytes

Wikimedia commons

Game commentary in snack-sized mouthfuls

“this game is the biggest social crusade of all, as we safeguard the weak and helpless. You don’t get that from Pokémon Go.” decreasingly charming man Morrissey launches his Meat Is Murder-themed mobile game for animal rights group Peta

“we have to do a better job… Make sure people understand the concept, make sure you’ve got a great library of games, and when you do that, you tend to do well.”

“we need to find a way to address the future gamer, [who] doesn’t necessarily play the games their parents and grandparents played. we’re looking at how we appeal to that generation.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé readies his body for the imminent unveiling of Nintendo’s NX

Konami’s grand plan, then, exec Steve Sutherland? More Frogger slots in Vegas casinos

“If you’re getting a refund after playing a game for 50 hours, you’re a thief… we’re talking about a work of art. You can’t treat it like a widget.” ex-Sony bod Shahid Kamal summons the No Man’s Sky over-reaction faction

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arcade watch

Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene

Game Densha De Go!!

Manufacturer Taito There is some consternation in coin-op circles at the resurgence of virtual reality, because of the threat a 3D headset poses to the arcade’s last great competitive advantage: the sense of immersion of playing a game in an enormous cabinet. With its chain of 40 arcades across Japan, Taito has a vested interest in keeping the scene alive, which goes some way to explaining why it’s celebrating the 20th anniversary of traindriving sim Densha De Go! with a frankly ludicrous train-cockpit cabinet. Inside, three widescreen displays mimic a windscreen and side windows, while a touch panel replicates the dials and meters of a real-world subway train. Set to debut in the spring, only Tokyo’s Yamanote line will be included in Densha De Go!! at launch, though Taito intends to expand that slender offering by adding more lines and operating companies through updates. There’ll also be cross-functionality with forthcoming iOS and Android puzzle game Renketsu! Densha De Go!!, though Taito is yet to specify how it will work. Neither seem likely to find their way to western shores, but given the state of the UK railway, that’s probably for the best. You can’t drive a train while sitting on the floor four carriages back from the controls, after all.

KnOwledGe FAvOurites

My Favourite Game Adam drucker Rapper Adam Drucker on Jersey Shore Facebook games, his love of indie projects, and buying a second childhood for $100

A

dam Drucker (AKA Doseone) is a prolific producer and rapper, and co-founder of indie record label Anticon.

More recently, he’s produced music for videogames, including Samurai Gunn, Gang Beasts and Enter The Gungeon, and is currently working on Absolver.

You’ve made indie rap for years – how did you get into game music?

I had to bail myself out of all my music debt, so I took this shitty gig working for Viacom – MTV, Nickelodeon. I worked on everything from Spongebob to a Facebook Jersey Shore game. I did it for five years. It was torturous. But I learned the ropes like nobody’s business, and when that was ending I reached out to my friend Chris Dahlen, who co-founded Killscreen, and he put me in touch with Brandon Boyer who then put me in touch with Vlambeer. JW [Jan Willem Nijman], Rami [Ismail] and I hit it off, and I did the sound effects and rapping for Gun Godz.

That must’ve been a satisfying shift.

Every indie game I’ve done, I meet the person and then a few months later we’re working together. When I was performing the Samurai Gunn music on Giant Bomb, right before the show I’m there and I don’t know anyone, but there are these two dudes who are also nervous, so I’m like, “Hey, guys, you look like me…”

And then we just start talking and it ends up being [Enter The Gungeon creators] Dave Rubel and Brent Soderman. We have this amazing conversation and after I do the rap, I come back and Dave is like, “Wait a minute – you’re Doseone”, and we hit

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OverdOse Drucker is a pioneer of alt hip-hop, helping to set up Anticon in 1998 and playing a key part in the scene. As well as his solo work as Doseone, Drucker has been part of a long list of influential groups, including Greenthink, Deep Puddle Dynamixs, Clouddead, Themselves and 13 & God. He recently teamed up with TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe and Faith No More’s Mike Patton in the supergroup Nevermen, and is currently putting the finishing touches to a new album with fellow Anticon rapper and founder Alias.

it off. Right before he leaves, he just leans in and whispers in my ear: “We’re all getting fired from Electronic Arts, and we’re going to make a game. I’m going to call you…” And just leaves. And I’m like, ‘That dude was cool as fuck’. A few months later he called me, and now Gungeon has changed my life. Both artistically and humanly.

Spelunky, Nidhogg, Gungeon, Binding Of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers, Downwell – I play the fucking shit out of these games. I want to play games that have the fingerprint of people and eccentricity. It’s like indie music to me – it just makes me so happy. So starting around 5pm, I play for two to three hours, and every once in a while the love of my life will let me binge on a game when I’m stuck. And then I have a classic console collection, too.

How does your approach to game writing differ to your own stuff?

I have a really intense work ethic – I’m a What’s in the classic lineup? workaholic. My own music grows a lot NES, SNES, Genesis, 2600 and pretty slower, like mildew – you grow a whole much every… When I was song for one month, you “I’d be like, a young kid, I grew up know? With the game pretty poor. But there was stuff, there’s so much that ‘Fuck, I want all this one rich kid in my needs to be made I can the Nintendo neighbourhood, and he work like a fucking had every Nintendo game. maniac. I can start the games too!’

I’d be like, “Fuck, I want all water level beat and then the Nintendo games too!” be like, “I don’t know what It used to keep It used to keep me up at I’m doing with the water me up at night” night. And then, in my beat yet; I’m going to go early 20s, I was at a swap meet in over to the cathedral beat.” And I can Oakland and I thought, ‘Wait, now I can really have this mad-scientist thing going. just buy that childhood dream.’ So I took Of course, ultimately I execute and out about $100 and bought everything deliver with precision and correctly titled this rich kid, Alan, had. My favourite files and shit, like a pro! [Laughs] But classic game of all time is Tecmo Bowl. when I create I love to have everything I used to play it for money with kids. all over, laboratory style, and get completely immersed and obsessed.

How about your favourite game ever?

If it’s a desert-island situation and I can As a workaholic, do you still find time only take one, how can I take something to play games? that isn’t procedurally generated? I love I bought the latest Madden, played it for watching those Games Done Quick one week, and will never touch it again. videos, and I’m beside myself every time I played Destiny for one week, too. I a human mind can map a game in that don’t really enjoy any of the disbelief that way. So I’m going for Spelunky. n triple-A is trying to generate for us. But

Drucker uses elements from game sound effects to colour his soundtracks.

Enter The Gungeon’s Black Powder Mine level song, for example, uses tools hitting stones in its beat

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Knowledge THIS monTH

web game

webSITe

XCOM 2 concept art bit.ly/xcomconcept Firaxis concept artist Dongmin Shin has shared a batch of marvellous XCOM 2 concept art on his ArtStation page.

There are several 3D models of in-game tools such as the X4 charge, Overdrive Serum applicator, Battle Scanner and Magnetic Cannon, but better still are the examples of in-game advertising signage.

The collection takes in propaganda and recruitment posters, adverts for boxy futuristic-looking cars, fashion and domestic appliances, and – a particular highlight – fast food. The latter category uses clean, abstract designs to market dauntingly proportioned burgers, ice cream and milkshakes. But the geometric prints used by some of the propaganda posters are equally beguiling.

It’s a fine opportunity to ogle the angular aesthetic of XCOM’s universe up close.

VIdeo

The Lord Inquisitor bit.ly/lordinquisitor Crytek art director Erasmus Brosdau has spent the past six years working on a Warhammer 40,000 short movie in his spare time, including some of that period spent porting the project to CryEngine Cinebox.

Now he’s released the first nine minutes of the film, called The Lord Inquisitor, as a prologue. The script and voice acting are a bit iffy, but thankfully the majority of the running time is occupied by epic wide shots of spacecraft, sprawling cities, and military pageantry.

The remarkable-looking, fastidiously detailed animation is all rendered in realtime, too.

Monster Hull bit.ly/monsterhull Software engineer, artist and teacher William Anderson has been working on a shmup for PICO-8 called Monster Hull, and you can now play it in your browser. Powerups in this vertical scrolling shooter are monsters that bind with your ship to give it new abilities and different types of ammo.

You can switch between forms at any time by pressing X, and must match your shot type to each enemy – a red dot on impact means it’s particularly effective, orange is a standard hit, and a hollow circle means the enemy is unaffected.

Further depth is added by monsters that will level up, granting you, for example, increased power, more health or a larger damage radius.

You’ll need these tools as Monster Hull’s bullet hell gets crowded early, and there’s also damage from exploding enemies to worry about.

THIS monTH on edge When we weren’t doing everything else, we were thinking about stuff like this booK

A Boy Made Of Blocks bit.ly/boyblocks Guardian games editor – and, back in the distant mists of time, Edge staffer – Keith Stuart’s debut novel tells the tale of a man struggling to develop a relationship with his autistic son.

Protagonist Alex is kicked out of the marital home as a result, but finally finds a way to bond with his offspring: shared sessions of Minecraft over Xbox Live. It’s a vaguely autobiographical work – Stuart has spoken and written at length on the effect Mojang’s sprawling sandbox has had on his own autistic son, Zac – but, ultimately a tale of a man struggling to grow up while also rediscovering the joys of play, it’s a touching story that is capable of resonating far beyond its seemingly narrow target market.

continue quit wheel good Mario Kart Hot Wheels are 30 years too late, but we’ll take ’em

Forever alonesie If you think that Xbox Onesie looks like a good buy, we can’t be friends

Starting to happen Cancelled PT-alike Allison Road is back in active development

Pokémon gone A tinge of sadness. Still, we haven’t been almost run over for weeks now

The X Factor Two-step authentication on PSN at last. Welcome to the present, Sony

Slim pickings Console refreshes don’t fully scratch the itch.

Your move, Nintendo

Closed convention Conference season is almost over. Time for a good sit down

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british telecon BT further endears itself to videogame fans by suing Valve over patents

TweeTS The onscreen prompt to “Destroy” everything in NMS makes me genuinely quite sad. It’s like a fossil fuel company’s filter on the world.

Ed Key @edclef Creator, Proteus The design is: ‘Here’s an infinite procedural world. I hid a game in here, see if you can find it’– Daggerfall, Mercenary, Elite and NMS. Bennett Foddy @bfod Indie developer Game design secrets: I increased enemy health and damage by 20% the day before ME2 went gold and didn’t tell anyone.

Christina Norman @truffle Designer, Mass Effect 2 Ok, back to No Man’s Sky. At least there I can leave the planet if I discover disgusting indigenous life forms.

Chris Kluwe @ChrisWarcraft Retired NFL kicker

P R E S E N T E D

B Y

VOTING IS OPEN HAVE YOUR SAY! Is Abzu your best visual design game of the year?

THE ONLY GAMING AWARDS VOTED FOR BY GAMERS

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PA R T N E R S

Dispatches november the oracle

Issue 297

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com.

Our letter of the month wins a New Nintendo 3DS XL, supplied by the Nintendo UK store

Whenever I think about Nintendo NX, the first thought that springs to my mind is that it must not fail.

Nintendo announced NX in March of 2015 at a conference, along with several other things, including mobile games – one of which has succeeded and rocketed Nintendo’s share price. The mobile games have seriously showed that innovation has benefited Nintendo once again, as the N64, DS, and Wii did. However, Nintendo tried this with Wii U. It didn’t exactly succeed. Wii U has flopped massively, becoming Nintendo’s worst-selling home console.

It has sold, to this day, only 13 million units, eight million short of the company’s secondworst seller. Nintendo expected to sell 100 million.

The Nintendo NX is a big risk for Nintendo in this case.

With the success of its mobile games, it could potentially draw back fans that moved to smartphone after the Wii and DS era, but once again that’s a risky strategy for Nintendo.

What Nintendo must have with NX is a smart concept idea, and thirdparty support – especially the latter. These are what Wii U missed out on. I think the GamePad was far too chunky for its own good, and whatever thirdparty support did come Nintendo’s way was always the worst version available.

And if NX does fail? Nintendo will struggle to get back into the rhythm that the Wii and DS provided. Fans will start to move elsewhere and, unfortunately, it will surely mean the demise of Nintendo in the console market, the company following perfectly in the footsteps of Sega.

James Baldwin

Gravemind E297 exposed a striking synergy, but also important contradictions, in the interrelationship between videogames and real-world events. While Battlefield 1’s senior producer Aleksander Grøndal argues that, “First and foremost we’re a game”, so relegating any ethical considerations to secondary concerns, both Hideo Kojima and the developers of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided demonstrate considerable levels of sensitivity to the capacity of games to deliver ethically sophisticated social and political commentary.

What seems crucial to the successful delivery of a game with politically informed sensibilities and sensitivities is the effective intersection of the story of the game and the gameplay possibilities the game affords.

While I have not yet had the opportunity to play Battlefield 1, it seems clear that the developers have little intention of thinking hard about this. WWI, it appears, is to be used as no more than a backdrop, essentially to secure commercial advantage by differentiating the game from Call Of Duty’s rush to a sci-fi-oriented future. For EA DICE, WWI is a mere framing device with its politics explicitly depoliticised – itself, of course, a political act.

In contrast, both Kojima and Square Enix Montreal are acutely sensitive to the role that games could play in the delivery of narratives and gameplay experiences that allow us encounters with politically complex issues.

Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series has wrestled with themes such as the power of the

“It has sold, to this day, only 13 million units.

Nintendo expected to sell 100 million”

Pokémon Go’s effect on Nintendo’s share price was more about the investment community hitching itself to a phenomenon

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– however shortlived that phenomenon might prove to be. It’s earnt Nintendo goodwill and good PR, if not a proportionate amount of revenue. Given the momentum, the right time to launch NX would be now, but of course Nintendo isn’t ready yet.

Dispatches DialoGue

Military Industrial Complex, the threats of nuclear war and perils of technologically facilitated warfare; Deus Ex: Mankind Divided explores social polarisation in a world beset by terrorism. In light of such themes, it’s integral to the coherence of these games that they allow, even encourage the player to operate within their respective game worlds based on stealth. In contrast to Battlefield 1 with its focus on a shoot-and-destroy mechanic, many players are explicitly attracted to stealth-based games precisely because they challenge a focus on gunplay.

Games that explicitly seek to provoke thinking are vital in these increasingly complex political times and I for one am delighted that Kojima didn’t see fit to move into movies, instead taking the time he needed to find a project that stimulated his creativity. Edge rightly describes him as an auteur. If that is a term used to describe a visionary who exploits the possibilities within games to invoke critical and reflexive thinking then Kojima is certainly worthy of such a label, as perhaps are the developers of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. It is to be hoped that his forthcoming production delivers a similar synergy between narrative and gameplay. It would be a true sign of the maturing of the industry if the developers of Battlefield 1 similarly sought to deliver a reflective engagement with war. Perhaps it’s best that we don’t hold our breath.

Nick Robinson Well put, Dr Robinson. A New 3DS is on its way. We look forward to your next missive – on the sociopolitical subtexts of Rhythm Heaven Megamix, perhaps.

truth and reconciliation Edge magazine is changing. It’s been a subtle change, but it was always inevitable, right from issue 1 in October 1893 (or something like that) when the magazine declared itself as “the future of videogaming”. It was only a matter of time until there were reviews of virtual reality games within the magazine.

Over the past year or so, VR games have pushed themselves onto the pages of Edge.

I have to confess, up until now I have skipped over them because VR is something that just doesn’t interest me. In fact, I almost get a feeling of frustration each time virtual reality gaming gets a mention. But wait! I’m sure I’ve experienced this feeling of magazine rage before… Back in the day when I subscribed to a Commodore magazine, it used to annoy me no end that Amiga games were gradually squeezing the coverage of C64 games off the pages. Eventually I bought an Amiga, and it represented a true golden age of gaming for me.

So I’ve come to realise that maybe I need to have more of an open mind when it comes to VR gaming. There are naturally obstacles to me accepting this new method of videogame witchcraft (the cost of the new hardware, my suspicions on the comfort of wearing the new gear, and the varying quality of the games themselves), but perhaps one day I too will find myself embracing the future of videogaming.

Ben Bulbeck Fortunately, VR deserves the attention this time around – although there’s no shortage of subpar Rift/Vive titles. But there’ll always be a place for traditional games within these pages. If they ever stop being made, we can fill the magazine with old Amiga stuff.

the library This summer, I decided to take my old Nintendo DS with me on holiday. My plan was to play, from beginning to end, one of the games I most enjoyed on Nintendo’s handheld. I am talking about Professor Layton And The Lost Future, the best instalment in the series. How big my surprise was, however, when I discovered that I didn’t have the cartridge: a friend of mine had lent me the game years ago. I quickly visited every videogame shop in the area, but the game was nowhere to be found. It had been discontinued years before.

Emulators for my Android and other different alternatives soon sprang to mind, all of them of dubious legality. Despite the fact that the industry has progressed by leaps and bounds in recent years, fundamental questions remain the subject of lively and often thought-provoking debate. However, none is as poorly addressed as the matter of how we are to preserve the legacy of the interactive medium. Technological obsolescence is part of the essence of videogames, but it may well be time for both players and creators to think about how we are going to ensure access to old videogames in the future.

All of us, both experienced players and newcomers, should have the chance to educate ourselves by playing the classics: those games that changed, redefined and moulded the industry we love. We should be able to have instant, and legal, access to a digital shop where we can buy and play any game regardless of its release date. How are new players going to learn about videogames if trying to play Shenmue, Super Mario 64 or Metal Gear Solid in an emulator is an absolute nightmare? Steam has done a great job on PC, and Nintendo’s Virtual Console is another case in point, although nothing compared to what it should be.

That’s right – I am talking about building the Library Of Alexandria of videogames.

I know what many people will think: it isn’t just about emulating the games. There will be trouble related to controlling them, related to copyright and censorship. It’s a daunting challenge, undoubtedly, but one that must be tackled sooner or later if we want to preserve the legacy of the industry. This Library Of Alexandria 2.0 is vital if we really want to have a medium with a traceable history and past in the same way literature has.

Noel Arteche You’re not alone. Organisations such as www.efgamp.eu are growing, and we’re right behind them. If we can help anyone involved in these initiatives, drop us a line. n

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Dispatches perspective

steven poole

trigger happy Shoot first, ask questions later

Illustration kaeru.com.ar

T

he year was 1984, and a young boy came home from a computer fair at Olympia clutching the most amazing game ever made. It was a space combat game in which you could warp at lightspeed from one star system to another throughout the galaxy. If you spotted a planet you could fly straight at it and smoothly transition to surface flying, in order to destroy enemy outposts and liberate the planet. The universe seemed limitless and epically suggestive. Dark Star,

by Design Design Software, was surely the apogee of space games.

Decades later, I want to go into space again, but this time it’s not so easy. I awaken on a luridly coloured planet, and the first thing I have to do is go shopping. Here is my shopping list of elements, and over there is where I have to trudge. Suddenly I am being shot at by flying drones. Only 200 bits of heridium silicate to go. Sigh.

As Philip K Dick didn’t quite ask, does Elon Musk dream of No Man’s Sky? In terms of the aesthetic emotion of wonder, applied to visions of space, this game is the apogee of the form to date, and the realisation of all the dreams of the young boys and girls who grew up playing space games of earlier technological generations. Light scattered through dust clouds takes on all the hues of the spectrum, planets loom imposingly with a real sense of enormous scale and mass, and spacecraft mash up the designs of the coolest sci-fi designs from the 1950s onwards. To the question of ‘How do you make the essential blackness of space visually interesting?’, the game’s artists respond by channelling the tradition of aesthetic liberties taken by generations of sci-fi book-jacket designers. The whole thing feels comfortably retro and astonishingly futuristic all at once.

Apart from the starfield generating the striking sense of movement, there are no celestial bodies that are simply decorative placeholders. Everything really exists, bending gravity around it. This is rare in

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A few hours later you are still farming according to prompts.

But I wanted to be a space hero, not a space farmer videogames of any genre, where we are used to seeing objects that look useful or interactive turning out to be just a part of the polygonal set-dressing. (Modern videogames have taught us over and over again to expect the mild sense of deflation when we walk or fly up to something that looks interesting and don’t see an action-button prompt appear.) The fact that you can fly directly at any planet to burn down through the atmosphere and investigate its surface, and also seemingly go anywhere you like in the galaxy – just as in Dark Star – generates an enormous sense of freedom and possibility.

So it is a bit of a downer when you realise that what there is to do in space is just what there is to do in so many virtual worlds: farming. The game’s first hour, making you farm the local rocks and wildlife to repair the ship, is efficient in the way it generates suspense and impatience in the player to be able to finally take off and enjoy all the eldritch pleasures of the whole star system.

But a few hours later you are still grimly farming according to prompts, and you realise that this is the ‘game’ that the whole extraordinary galaxy has been structured around. But I wanted to be a space hero, not a space farmer.

No Man’s Sky recalls Dark Star in its technologically cutting-edge vision of space; but it also of course recalls Braben and Bell’s original Elite, with all the finicky business of galactic trading and ship-upgrading. It makes a real difference, though, that in Elite the heart of the gameplay (apart from the notoriously difficult docking procedure) really was in the stats, while the visuals were mainly just an abstract illustration of their mathematical ideas. No Man’s Sky, however, puts you in actual, populated, high-definition solar systems and invites you to marvel at their vastness and beauty — and then constantly drags you away from its own dazzling vistas in order to make you fiddle with flat icons on inventory screens.

One can’t blame the developers, of course, for choosing a way to structure the experience progression that a lot of people seem to enjoy — or at least put up with. And No Man’s Sky is still an extraordinary and beautiful achievement in the artform. One may just suspect that less forced farming would have enabled more autonomous moments of wonder. Like the time I ambled up to a sort of dinosaur-dog hybrid and fed it. It gambolled around smiling happily, and I felt I had created a tiny moment of good in a hostile and uncaring universe.

Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net

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Dispatches perspective

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Big picture Mode Industry issues given the widescreen treatment

Illustration kaeru.com.ar

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ess than two weeks into my brief spell at a London university, I was staggering home through Soho late at night and spotted an unmistakeable figure up ahead. It was 1996, and there wasn’t a shred of doubt in my mind about who the lanky, bespectacled ginger fellow was. I picked up the pace and there, indeed, was Chris Evans. These days he’s the voice of BBC Radio 2 in the mornings and the face of Top Gear’s postTory-gobshite-era ratings nosedive, but back then he was actually, like, cool. But not, in turns out, in person – at least not when accosted by a drunken student on Shaftesbury Avenue at midnight on a Tuesday. He was brusque; I, offended and full of teenage bravado, said some unpleasant things. He crossed the street to avoid me, so I started shouting instead. For a few years I would dine out on this story: look what a dick this famous man is. The penny dropped eventually, of course. The dick was I. I can only hope that one day a certain subset of No Man’s Sky players will feel the same. Passion is what drives this medium, admittedly, whether you play games, make them, or write about them (god knows the latter camp isn’t in it for the chicks and money). But rarely have I seen so stark an illustration of what happens when passion spills over into something much darker than with all this No Man’s Sky business. I might, in my margarita-induced fervour, have been a bit unpleasant to Chris Evans. But I didn’t send him death threats – I just slagged him off to everyone I met for a year or two, which is, of course, absolutely fine.

These people. Oh, you reported that No Man’s Sky was going to be delayed again?

Death threats. Better send some to the people making the game too, just in case, because nothing motivates a team to really knuckle down and focus on the task at hand than the niggling worry that the guy that brings the sandwiches round is really active on the subreddit and has stashed a knife in the tuna brioche. And when the delay is

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With no disrespect to the others who made No Man’s Sky, Sean Murray is Hello Games, so this is all his fault officially confirmed? Tell Sean Murray, the likeably dishevelled head of studio, to watch his back, because we’re coming for him.

This is a reflection of the world we live in, of course. Yes, I saw Chris Evans on the street one night in 1996 (20 years ago? Good god). But after that he retreated to his TV and radio studios while I got on with the important business of spending my student grant on watered-down cocktails and PS1 games. Yet the death-threatener, the online abuse-hurler, the comments-section-ragefrother and so on go to bed at night, wake up the next morning and maintain the exact

same relationship with the object of their ire that they had the day before. And it is precisely because of the apparent closeness of this relationship, I think, that people have turned so ferociously on Murray now that No Man’s Sky is in the wild and failing to meet expectations. When such a small team, dreaming big, is judged to have failed to meet its promises, the reaction is more personal than if a 600-person team had done it. When Ubisoft Montreal made – OK, half-made – Assassin’s Creed Unity, the entire company’s reputation suffered. With no disrespect to the dozen-or-so other people who made No Man’s Sky, Sean Murray is Hello Games, and so this is all his fault.

I realise I’ve written about this before – of the power of the online hate mob, of the darkness beneath the delight that is the social Internet’s direct line between creator and consumer. But I’ve written about an awful lot of other things too, and what really strikes me about No Man’s Sky specifically is how many of them the story of its development touches upon. The consumer’s distrust of, but simultaneous inability to not get swept up by, the hype cycle. The perils of over-ambition, even if that’s what we really want from our games. Our failure to accept the need for delays. Our assumption that if a publisher delays the arrival of review code, it must be sitting on a stinker. And that if promised, or hinted-at, features don’t make the final cut, it’s because the developers are liars. How appropriate that a game of such unprecedented scope, that gives every player a universe to explore, should also encompass just about every troubling aspect of the way the games of today are made, played, marketed and discussed. I’ve enjoyed my time with No Man’s Sky, though I’m also disappointed with a lot of it. I expect a lot of you feel the same about this column, too.

That’s fine – but easy on the death threats, please. I get enough of that in the office. going to be procedurally generated, so let’s never try that again but it didn’t really work out, This column was

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THE GAMES in our SiGHTS THiS MonTH 38 42 46 50

Worlds Adrift

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Little Nightmares

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Get Even

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PC

PC, PS4, Xbox One PC, PS4, Xbox One

Prey

PC, PS4, Xbox One

For Honor

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Metal Gear Survive

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Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

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The Sexy Brutale

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PC, PS4, Xbox One PC, PS4, Xbox One

PC, PS4, Xbox One

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PC, PS4, Xbox One

Dreadnought

PC

The Surge

PC, PS4, Xbox One

Grand Values: Monaco

PS4, Xbox One

Scalebound

PC, Xbox One

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for extra Hype content

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To go boldly Given that big-budget sequels are where the serious money lies, it’s especially heartening to see a Hype section stuffed so full of bold ideas this close to Christmas. Even the big-name sequel among this month’s lineup, Resident Evil 7 (p56), has chosen to veer away from its roots by switching to a firstperson perspective. It’s a long-overdue refresh that’s as daring as it is welcome – even if many of Resi’s more familiar elements remain.

Tarsier Studios’ striking Little Nightmares (p42) is also steeped in familiarity – thematic comparisons to Limbo and Inside are unavoidable – but its blend of LittleBigPlanet-style platforming tactility and nightmare-fuelled stealth gameplay feels both fresh and pleasantly mutable. Prey (p50) reimagines an already unusual game as a freeform firstperson shooter in which you gain alien powers by injecting Neuromods into your eyeball – one of which allows you to transform into a coffee cup and toss yourself into an office.

You don’t get that in Battlefield now, do you?

Bossa Studios’ Worlds Adrift (p42), meanwhile, continues to astonish with its sheer ambition. But while the game’s sprawling, persistent world is a groundbreaking technical marvel, its focus on physics and MoST creative construction, together with a refreshing absence WAnTEd of grinding, threaten to upend our notion of what Frostpunk PC The first step towards getting people to constitutes challenge in a modern MMOG. take your emotionally resonant survival game seriously is to avoid naming it Not every innovation is so appealing, of course. Metal anything along the lines of Frostpunk.

While 11 Bit has fallen at the first hurdle, Gear Survive represents the first post-Kojima entry in the the studio’s previous form earns it the benefit of the doubt for now. fiction, and despite this still manages to somehow be the Forza Horizon 3 PC, Xbox One most bizarre yet. A fourplayer co-op survival game set in While the Forza Horizon 3 build at Gamescom was exactly the same as the an alternate universe populated by shambling, crystalised one on show at E3, we couldn’t help but hop on for some more time with what is shaping up to be the most intoxicating enemies, Survive appears to abandon everything, bar blend of petrol and Australia since George Miller’s return to Mad Max. unchecked whimsy, upon which the series is built. We’ve Steep PC, PS4, Xbox One only had the briefest of glimpses, but it’s clear Survive is There remains the potential for some of Ubisoft’s worn-out open-world design not exactly the game Metal Gear fans had in mind. You’d tendencies to encroach on the company’s spin on snow-bound extreme sports, expect Konami to want a clean break with Kojima gone, but Steep’s easy-to-learn trick system and breezy 2001-era atmosphere but maybe a change isn’t always as good as a rest. make for an appealing combination.

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Worlds Adrift Bossa’s physics-driven MMO continues to give us vertigo Developer/publisher Format Origin Release

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Artificial islands are possible – just rope together a few hulls. You’ll be extremely vulnerable to sabotage, however: all somebody needs to do is slice away your lifter cores

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he solid-gold engine was a mistake, in hindsight. Lightning lashes the screen as our squat, lop-sided airship struggles to hold a sou-westerly heading through a boiling mass of cloud. This is a storm wall, one of the regions of inclement weather that break up Bossa’s Worlds Adrift, separating the MMO’s biomes and the different grades of resource they contain. Somewhere below us, designer Luke Williams dangles from a grapple line, frantically zapping hull panels and turbines with his repair gun before the wind can prise them free. Another blast of lightning and the helm’s artificial horizon disappears in a flurry of sparks. Without it, we’re unable to distinguish up from down. Producer Herb Liu winces. “I think you might have to bail.”

Weather walls vary greatly by thickness and intensity. Setting off into one at random is, as we’re discovering, a suicidal exercise.

Williams claws his way back on deck just as our mast snaps under the strain; we only have one propeller left, and barely enough fuel to keep it spinning. The airship flops forward drunkenly as a wing comes loose, leaving us hanging from the bow. Time to bail, indeed – but suddenly the air clears and the real horizon reveals itself, a blissful sunset dotted with impossible rocky silhouettes. We’ve made it. Our proud vessel might be a capsized, limbless carcass held aloft by a couple of anti-

Bossa Studios PC UK 2016

gravity cores, but we still have our wingsuits, and safe ground is just a short glide away.

Emotions are heightened by the awareness that were this the live release, that drifting hulk would linger indefinitely – a monument to our triumph, or at least a source of spare parts for a beleaguered crew. Half a year since we previously saw it, Worlds Adrift is still uniquely tantalising: an aerial archipelago powered by sophisticated distributedprocessing technology, in which every object is subject to realtime networked physics and every change you make is persistent and apparent to every player in your shard.

This is an MMO whose complexity and longevity derive not from grinding and levelling, but tangible problems of weight and balance, in which opposing crews can rip components off each other’s vessels or drop chunks of lead onto them to force them earthwards. It’s a world whose archaeological texture will be generated by players as they travel between islands, scour them for resources, interact with wildlife and blow each other to pieces. Kill all the flying manta rays in one region and they’ll be gone for good, at least till breeding pairs from a neighbouring region arrive to repopulate the waste. Crashland and the rusting wreck will still be there, months later, for others to pick over.

FROM TOP Producer Herb Liu and designer Luke Williams

The colourful but believably proportioned art direction evokes The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker and Studio Ghibli’s airship movies, with a dash of Polytron’s Fez

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WOrlds Adrift

Erecting a world around flying islands allows Bossa’s small team to focus its efforts, creating lovely dioramas rather than labouring over the geography of a continent

The only caveat is you can’t alter the terrain itself in-game, but you can carve out your own island for Bossa’s consideration using the standalone Island Creator, freely available on Steam. “Originally, we designed the Creator to be an internal tool,” Liu tells us.

“Then we thought, ‘Why don’t we release it to see what people can make?’ And it became huge. We have, like, 1,800 islands now.”

Williams estimates that about 30 per cent of Worlds Adrift’s exquisitely chiselled airborne monoliths are community-made – the rest are a mix of developer-designed and procedurally generated. “It’s [a scale] we could never achieve otherwise, not with a studio this size. It adds so much to it. If your game is about exploration, you can’t beat handcrafted.” The other advantage of this approach is that it gives contributors something else to shoot for when they start the game. “You see player Alliances that have designed islands

The possibilities range from cheery snub-nosed dogfighters to serpentine behemoths with cave networks that are huge docking systems, like a space station. And they’re like, ‘We’re going to find this island among thousands when the game goes live, and that’s going to be our home base’.”

Bossa’s commitment to a playerdetermined world extends to the social and economic structures, or rather the scarcity of them. There are no currencies, no established factions, no cities a-bustle with NPC traders who’ll merrily relieve you of all your junk, just other players and their Alliances. “Our setting is after the collapse of a civilisation,” Liu says.

“It’s this new age of discovery, where we figure out our own social circles, and there’s no currency because there are no NPCs to buy things from. If you’re just trading with each other, you can figure out your own ways of doing that. Players might end up using gold as a currency, and that would be hilarious, because gold is more or less useless.”

Players will also have a hand in composing the lore, which combines several novels’ worth of official backstory with whatever airship

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pilots dream up by, for example, leaving enigmatic messages in the bowels of remote islands or waging wars with other Alliances.

“It’s kind of like how EVE Online works, where player-run corporations and agreements and politics shape how the game feels,” Liu says.

How exactly Bossa will balance this essentially lawless environment remains to be seen – Williams and Liu insist the world and community will autocorrect, as players engineer responses to each other’s strategies and animal populations wax and wane – but it’s easy to imagine a newcomer struggling.

The controls, at least, are straightforward, though the camera is unwieldy at present.

Your repair and resource-harvesting tools are mapped to left-click, your all-important grapple line to right-click, and your wingsuit, once crafted, to the space bar.

The shipyard interface has yet to be finalised but seems just as digestible. You pull out a 3D wireframe model to design the frame, then attach components such as cannons, spawn pads and navigational aids by dragging and dropping. There’s no artificial fail state: providing you can get your creation off the ground, it’s yours to fly, and the possibilities range from cheery snub-nosed dogfighters to serpentine behemoths whose vulnerable spots are hard to locate. You can even create circuit boards using precious metals to, for instance, trigger a broadside from the helm without enlisting a gunner. Shipwrighting accounts for the bulk of the crafting options, but you’ll also fashion items for your character, such as non-automatic firearms.

The ‘thrill of discovery’ is a popular refrain from designers today, but their creations often arrive preloaded with waypoints and breadcrumb trails, not so much uncharted regions as exotic workplaces where you toil for predictable rewards. In Worlds Adrift, by contrast, little is given, and exploration actually feels like exploration. It’s a step away from the grind that now clouds the MMO’s appeal, a return to the days when all players wanted was to look over the horizon. “It was new, exciting, you weren’t sure what you were going to see – we want to have that all the way through,” Liu says. “Not just at the beginning. Not just when the world’s fresh.” n

Mob dick Worlds Adrift’s ecology extends from oversized beetles that help spread plantlife by ingesting and excreting seeds, to gigantic sky whales that arise infrequently from the deadly clouds at the archipelago’s base.

They’re persistent and evolving entities, growing over time and even retaining battle damage between encounters.

It’s possible more obsessive players will develop a Captain Ahab complex towards a particularly elusive or resilient whale, pursuing it to their own destruction.

“You’ll get to the point where you have this ancient, legendary creature, just because it’s survived in the world since it was a little baby,” Williams says.

“And it’s now a legend in the world, but not because we made it that way.”

TOP The game’s splendid volumetric cloud shaders may be used as cover – a particularly effective strategy in the absence of radar. They won’t stop cannonballs, though.

RIGHT Bossa’s expansions may take us high above the atmosphere, or deep into its hazardous depths. You’ll probably need an airtight vessel in either case

TOP There are no traditional dungeons, but expect grand interiors – an imposing door that leads to winding catacombs; a bisected fortress hiding a huge statue.

ABOVE CENTRE Uncovering the secrets of the ancients, creators of the game’s antigravity tech, is the thrust of the story, but players will doubtless weave their own alternative mythologies.

ABOVE The very first ships must rely on sailpower.

Given that engine noise attracts predators, you may also wish to equip more advanced ships with sails.

MAIN You can only freely and instantaneously customise ships at construction pads, so it’ll take a boarding party time to lop off components

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LittLE nigHtmarEs Tarsier Studios’ childhood nightmare re-emerges under new management Developer Publisher Format Origin Release

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The Maw has a strangely organic look about it, which makes moving through its grimy bowels an even more disquieting challenge

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hen we previously saw Tarsier Studios’ paean to childhood fears, in mid-2015, it was still called Hunger and running in Unity. Since then, the name has changed to Little Nightmares, Bandai Namco has signed the project as part of its new focus on indies, and Unreal Engine 4 has been adopted to do the heavy lifting. It’s also our highlight of this year’s Gamescom.

To recap, the game casts you as a young girl called Six who, after being kidnapped by monsters, finds herself trapped within the bowls of a sprawling submersible called The Maw. A small portion of the vessel sits above the surface, topped with a single chimney that belches out smoke. Within its bowels, however, nightmares lurk.

Our demo begins as Six, dressed in a striking yellow raincoat, wakes in a cabin with two beds and a couple of perilously tall cupboards. The camera sways softly as The Maw rocks in the dark sea, making cupboard doors flap and a ball and empty tin roll across the floor. A group of tiny, pointy-hat-wearing creatures – who look like a cross between mushrooms and Dark Souls III’s Thralls – scatter as we land on a suitcase, disappearing behind furniture and under the bed.

Six can grip most loose objects and pull them around – doing so is a simple matter of holding R2 – and can climb up the shelving at

Tarsier Studios Bandai Namco PC, PS4, Xbox One Sweden 2017

the back of the room. The quality of her animation is striking as she bobs about the place and pulls her diminutive form up the teetering furniture, looking childlike and vulnerable but purposeful, too. She’s a charming presence, and Tarsier’s experience on LittleBigPlanet’s DLC and Vita release, as well as Tearaway Unfolded, resonates in every solid-feeling, tactile action Six performs.

Dragging the heavy suitcase over to a door on the far side of the room allows us to reach the handle, using Six’s weight to pull it down as the door swings open. Beyond is a dark corridor, at the end of which is an elevator.

Six, despite her tender age, carries a lighter, which can be activated at any time by clicking the right stick. It casts a sickly yellow glow across a small area around her, and using the dim illumination we locate the clunking lever, which opens the lift cage.

What waits at the bottom makes us wish we’d remained on the upper floor, however.

A corpulent, clammy-looking chef sharpens a knife over a table full of meat. He towers over Six, his grubby whites stained yellow by… something, and the thought of catching his eye is immediately unappealing. Holding L2 makes Six creep, and we nervously flit between the dark spaces under tables and shelving units. The chef has a series of tasks, which unfold the farther we progress

Six’s bright-yellow mac stands out against the faded ’40s- and ’50s-era decor, drawing attention to her displacement. She’s clearly not meant to be here

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ABOVE Environments are wonderfully detailed, and the way everything moves and reacts with the swaying of the water-borne Maw brings its spaces to life.

TOP RIGHT While the details of why The Maw exists and what exactly’s going on remain under wraps, there’s something of an industrial-scale childkidnap racket in progress.

MAIN Any noise will draw the chef’s attention, but he won’t immediately give chase, instead investigating the disturbance as if seeking out a possible rat.

BELOW LEFT The image of so many discarded shoes is a bizarre one. Wading through them is nightmarish.

BELOW RIGHT Everything in The Maw is distorted and unnerving, a result of being filtered through the illogical, hyper-real viewpoint of a child

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through the room, his meandering route making it ever tougher to avoid detection.

At first he moves, laboriously, between chopping meat and grabbing sausages to plop into a pot of boiling broth. When we get close to a doorway, however, he moves through to the next room where he sets about checking on an assortment of other pots and pans. He wheezes, sniffles and expectorates as we move silently from shadow to shadow, and then, just as we spot a vent to escape through, one of those little mushroom people knocks over a pot as we startle it. The chef wails and suddenly exhibits a disturbing turn of speed as he thuds to where we’re desperately trying to scale a set of drawers to reach the vent.

His podgy hands reach for us as we disappear through the hole into the next room, and he switches to bashing the door which, thankfully, is barred by a plank of wood.

While sneaking plays a big part in gameplay, Tarsier is keen to avoid labelling Little Nightmares as a stealth game, and the next section we play showcases the puzzling and platforming elements. Despite the chef’s best efforts, the door seems to be holding, and we’re afforded time to explore the next room. A giant sausage-making machine sits on a wooden table; the walls are covered in sea-green tiles up to the picture rail before ageing flock wallpaper finishes the job to the ceiling. The floor sports wipe-clean red tiles, but dried blood remains splattered around the drain beneath the machine’s nozzle. On the opposite wall, too high to reach, another vent offers an escape. But on turning the machine’s wheel, only one moist-looking sausage emerges – too short to be of any help.

We take a lift into the room above and find a walk-in freezer filled with hanging meat and a big chunk of the stuff on a trapdoor. There’s another hunk on a box nearby, which we push over the edge, and a third on top of another set of shelves. There’s a sickening thud followed by squelching after we toss it down and then drag it into position. It’s in this room that the game’s only miscommunication mars proceedings: all that meat looks like it can be grabbed and swung on – the shelf at the side of the room even puts us in range –

and it’s disappointing to find that, after trying and failing several times, there’s no path to follow across the physics-enabled carcasses.

Still, a quick lift ride back downstairs, where we find the chef has relented in his pursuit, allows us to yank on the pull chain and fill the grinder, creating a string of sausages long enough to swing across the gap with. It’s a familiar obstacle, but feels fresh reimagined in Little Nightmares’ singular, macabre style.

The ventilation shaft is dark and as we approach a junction a pair of shoes drop from an opening above, clattering into the metal tunnel. But even that ominous sign is nothing compared to what waits for us at the end. We drop out of the shaft onto another suitcase, but this one is buried in a sea of discarded footwear. Hopping down into it, Six struggles to move as she pushes her way through hundreds of boots and bluchers. But there’s something else in here with us, and whatever

They come across more like lumps of sculpted clay than assemblages of polygons it is suddenly starts burrowing through them, scattering shoes everywhere, before it reaches us and the screen fades to black.

While the game isn’t due out until next year, it’s already feeling remarkably polished.

And despite some familiar elements – the setup of a puzzle-platformer in which a child protagonist finds themselves lost in a disturbing world is deeply reminiscent of Playdead’s Limbo and Inside, for example, and we can’t help but think of BioShock’s opening when we see the chimney-topped island that serves as the entrance to The Maw – Little Nightmares feels oddly refreshing. The imposing physicality of its characters is bewitching, making them come across more like lumps of sculpted clay than assemblages of polygons, with remarkable animation that characterfully responds to your inputs. Its dank setting may be filled with dread, but this is the exuberant branch of horror exemplified by the likes of Tim Burton and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and we can’t wait to again descend into Tarsier’s particular brand of madness. n

Beat sneakbranded While Little Nightmares, in its Hunger form, was announced in 2014, the idea has been in development for much longer. An earlier, subsequently cancelled, project called City Of Metronome was revealed at E3 2005 and featured many of the same themes. Set in a night-shrouded city filled with longarmed, big-nosed creatures and monsters that lurked in the shadows, it exhibited a similar penchant for childlike exaggerations of frightening ideas. Its dark tone was less stylishly realised, but a central mechanic that involved recording and playing back sounds in the environment to progress remains an intriguing prospect.

On its website, Tarsier hints we may not have seen the last of City Of Metronome.

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GEt EvEn Confusion reigns in The Farm 51’s smart firstperson horror thriller Developer Publisher Format Origin Release

The identity of this girl – and why you, as Cole Black, became involved in her rescue attempt – are the central mysteries that must be unravelled

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The Farm 51 Bandai Namco PC, PS4, Xbox One Poland 2017

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You can’t use your phone and weapon at the same time, so you swap between them when you want to check enemy positions. In this section, we panic when our phone picks up an enemy on the floor above

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et Even first broke cover back in 2014, its cryptic launch trailer blending live‑action footage of a military squad in a dilapidated, near‑photorealistic version of the same environment. The words “What is real?” flashed up at the end of the trailer, and then the game went back into hiding.

Reemerging at this August’s Gamescom, Polish developer The Farm 51’s enigmatic firstperson horror is now in playable form and threatening to be formidable.

Don’t let the genre or hackneyed abandoned‑asylum setting fool you: Get Even’s tone is closer to Ben Wheatley’s crushingly dark 2011 film Kill List than it is to Outlast or FEAR. The game casts players as Cole Black, a man who awakens in the dilapidated asylum with no memories other than that of an attempted hostage rescue he was once involved in. We’re informed, through a video link, that we’re here for “treatment” and tasked with a series of macabre, flashback‑triggering tests.

The crumbling plaster walls are covered in graffiti, and the floors strewn in rubble

and detritus. Light streams in through the windows and throws a dusty haze across the space. Our screen is a little dark in the overly bright Gamescom business‑area booth, so it’s a little difficult to assess how the visuals in this build of the game compare to that early trailer and subsequent tech demo.

This build isn’t quite as punchy visually, but on a number of occasions the way the light catches the 3D scanned environments is enough to make us stop and stare for a moment. External environments don’t fare quite so well, nor character models, so clearly there is some way to go if The Farm 51 is to reach the high quality bar suggested by Get Even’s reveal trailer.

Despite Black’s apparent military past, much of our time is spent wandering around with an app‑filled phone as we investigate the environment for clues. Green lights next to the screen illuminate as you close in on evidence, and a green AR box denotes when you’re in the right position to scan it for intel on the situation. A UV torch, meanwhile, highlights blood stains and handprints,

Your anonymous tormentor uses screens around the asylum to explain what is expected of you, but you also receive taunting texts during flashback sections

TOP LEFT The grubby asylum’s abandoned rooms contain evidence of past and present inmates, as well as the people who vandalised it in the intervening years.

ABOVE In our demo we use the infrared app to trace an electrical system through the walls and back to a blown fuse, but there will be other puzzles that make use of it

Your phone’s UV app is not only useful for finding DNA traces in environments – and, as a result, leading you to secret passages – but also serves as a general torch in the game’s darkest corners

that killing him is unnecessary as the path ahead is locked – the door we wanted was actually behind us and we could easily have sneaked past. In another instance of questionable morality, we use an advanced military rifle to take aim around a corner and shoot a hostage‑taker talking on his phone.

As we approach the body and the dropped phone we hear a female caller suggesting that he take the kids for a burger this weekend, before repeatedly asking if he’s still there.

The gunplay itself feels solid, and a scene in which everything slows to a crawl as you burst into a room and open fire on two targets is spectacular. Thanks to the paucity of while an infrared camera allows us to trace the path of a damaged electrical system back to its faulty origin. Pictures you take using the phone can be flicked through at any time, and a handy map function shows the whereabouts of enemies. Switching between the different apps lends the game a substantial puzzle element that makes your time in the mostly empty corridors and rooms feel more involved.

When we do pick up a gun, it feels incongruous amid the tense, but unhurried, exploration game the opening minutes suggest. In one of the demo’s disorienting segues, we find ourselves wandering through long grass outside of a building, armed with a silenced pistol. A guard patrols nearby, whistling. He enters a tunnel and we follow, crouched and taking aim, before dropping him with a single bullet to the head. It turns out

We’re informed, through a video link, that we’re here for “treatment” enemies and The Farm 51’s deliberately provocative guilt trips, each kill feels consequential and pulling the trigger becomes a weighty decision.

The combat and exploration components of the game are bound together with some exceptional audio work, the game’s convincing script brought to life by a talented cast of voice actors. Black’s goal in all of this is to mine his memories in order to understand who the girl was, why he was there, and why he is now being tormented under the guise of treatment, which makes his frustration and panic understandable. But it’s the abstract music that really stands out in this demo, a thumping industrial pulse that builds and envelops as you close in on key events.

If The Farm 51 can build on the smart pacing and tight structure of this first showing, Get Even has a shot at shaking up a genre whose beats and scare tactics are becoming increasingly familiar. n

Alone in the dark The game shown in 2014 was an early concept that proposed a design in which other players could seamlessly inhabit enemy characters and challenge you. That proposal also featured two selectable protagonists, each of whom was in opposition to the other. Choosing one or the other would give players a different perspective on the game. Get Even has evolved since those early ideas, and our demo focuses on a singleplayer story with none of the aforementioned components. But while The Farm 51 is keeping quiet on the subject, it hasn’t ruled out some form of multiplayer aspect in the finished game.

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Developer Arkane Studios Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2017

Prey Arkane brings its immersive-sim know-how to space

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The space station will be completely open for exploration. “It’s like one big facility,” Bare says, “and sometimes you can go into an area and get your ass handed to you”

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rey’s lead designer, Ricardo Bare, is clear about his upcoming game’s relationship to the 2006 firstperson shooter of the same name: there is none. “In terms of a highlevel concept, it’s aliens on a space station – survival stuff,” he says. “But there’s no fictional or universe connection.” This isn’t a reboot or remake, and it certainly hasn’t anything to do with Human Head’s nowcancelled Prey 2, which was about a bounty hunter on an alien planet. No, Arkane Studios wanted to make a sci-fi game, and Bethesda happened to own the name to a sci-fi series.

Square peg, meet square hole.

Whatever the internal politics behind Prey 2’s cancellation and Arkane’s acquisition of the name, the key point remains: Arkane Studios is making a sci-fi immersive sim.

That’s an exciting prospect given the studio’s calibre at forging open-ended systemic

playgrounds. “Arkane specialises in one kind of game,” Bare says. “We make firstperson immersive sims. Games with depth.” The Prey team has the credentials to back up that claim. Bare got his break at Ion Storm, as a designer on Deus Ex. Prey’s creative director, Raphael Colantonio, is Arkane’s CEO, and has had a key role in all of the studio’s games, including Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic and Dishonored.

All great immersive sims build on the concepts and systems of what came before.

With Prey, Arkane is channelling System Shock. “Players take on the role of Morgan Yu,” says Bare, who also reveals that players will be able to select Yu’s gender at the start of the game. “When you emerge onto the space station, it’s just moments after the disaster has happened. Most of the people are dead, and the aliens are running around and taking

Ricardo Bare, lead designer of Prey

Dishonored’s design director, Viktor Antonov, consulted on Prey’s design, helping the team craft the backstory with an eye to how the world’s past would affect its present visual style

TOP LEFT You’ll meet bands of survivors throughout Talos-1.

“The way that you treat them has a significant impact on the end of the game,” Bare says, promising multiple conclusions.

ABOVE Weapons will be scarce in Prey, but not because Arkane is interested in making a survival horror.

Rather, it forces the player to experiment with Yu’s full suite of tools and powers

Yu is able to collect resources to use a fabricator station that allows him to craft a Zero-G pack, along with many other items

of our games, a few little notes – a few funny little things. But the mug thing is funny because the player makes it funny, right? The power itself is that you turn into an object. If you bounce around as a cup, it might look funny, but, hey, you did it.”

The power needn’t be so passive. Yu could instead transform into a turret to gun down approaching aliens. Similarly, though, the aliens might become unassuming pieces of furniture, waiting for you to pass in order to set up an ambush. “We wanted to have something that wasn’t your typical two or three archetypes of aliens,” Colantonio explains. “It took a while to really define over. They’re up to something. You don’t know what, and you don’t know why you’re on the station, how you got there or what the hell is going on.” Yu’s first job will be to figure these things out, before ultimately working out how to escape.

The space station, Talos-1, is involved in human experimentation, and that research will be available to Yu. It would be a poor immersive sim that didn’t let you upgrade strength to carry large crates and items, and here such enhancements are available through the Neuromods that Yu injects into his (or her) eye. Prey then goes a step further, letting you scan the shadowy alien presence to learn and utilise their own strange powers.

In an off-stream presentation at QuakeCon, the audience is shown one of those powers: the ability to transform into an object. In the demo, Yu passes through a security window by mimicking a mug and rolling through. It’s an amusing moment, at odds with Prey’s otherwise dark tone. “The tone is grounded and serious, mostly,” says Colantonio, “and then there are, as with any

The aliens might become pieces of furniture, waiting in order to set up an ambush what they were, and so we went with these paranormal, sonic, ghostly figures that morph into things.”

“Their ability to imitate objects is not driven by a level designer’s scripting,” Bare continues. “We have some scenes like that at the beginning because we’re teaching you the game, but it’s just something that the aliens have as a behaviour. When they walk into a room they go, ‘OK, there are 20 physics objects in this room that are on my list of things I can turn into… Oh, god, the player’s coming – hide’, and they just pick one. Even we on the team are surprised when we’re just running the map. We’re not sure which thing is the Mimic until we shoot it.”

Such action may lead to silliness on par with Garry’s Mod’s PropHunt, or Dark Souls’ multiplayer trolling, but it also means an emergent and surprising experience. In other words, it’s the perfect set of systems for a new Arkane game. n

Space race Arkane has gone deep with Prey’s backstory. The world it’s created is one in which JFK was never assassinated. “What if he lived and he came back and doubled down on the space tech and stuff?” Bare asks. “What if there was a space station or something orbiting the Moon as early as the ’60s, and they just kept building and building onto it? How would that change things? The result is Talos-1.” As you move through the station, disparate architectural styles will speak to the political history behind its creation.

“You’ll see parts that have decor from the ’60s and ’70s, but then you’ll go deeper and be like, ‘Wow, this part looks Russian!’

There’ll be a ’50s and ’60s Russian style.”

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Developer/ publisher Ubisoft Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Canada Release February 14

For Honor Ubisoft aims to take a slice out of the team shooter

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e’re at ‘Break’ time in our match of Dominion. But far from being a moment of respite, this end-ofround showdown, where the last surviving members of each four-strong team face off against one another with no respawns, is adrenaline fuel. The map we’ve been darting around, picking our opponents while tactically eyeing up each of the three capture points, has been a close one, and the points earned here could steal the game. Moments such as these are what For Honor does brilliantly. While a standard multiplayer shooter might fade in some music, show you the final scores and be done with it, here, thanks to the sense that a

A sweeping execution move ends the encounter with a flourish and a decapitation skilled single player could still take out your whole team, finishing the job is every bit as vital as putting points on the board.

As we spy our final quarry, a solitary Viking Heavy standing amid a flaming ruined bridge arching over the milling hordes of trash-mob warriors below, two of our team are unceremoniously decapitated. It’s down to us, and we can hear gasps from the six other players now watching the final seconds of the match. We’re an Orochi, an Assassin-class Samurai fighter who’s slight and squishy but has quick evade moves and powerful attacks.

While the clock ticks down, the Viking – who’s huge, slow moving, and wields a giant axe – wheels around to weigh us up. We leap forward and kick him into a fire nearby, stunning him. A sweeping execution move ends the encounter with a flourish and another decapitation. Cheers erupt through our headset from the watching players.

For Honor does spectacle marvellously.

There’s something akin to a one-on-one fighting game about it, especially in these

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clutch moments. While there’s an obvious clarity to the victory conditions (the guy with no head by the end is the loser), within each victory or defeat hundreds of tiny moments of skill are involved. Heavy attacks can be faked out of, for example, allowing you to bait a defensive player into the wrong footing ready for a quicker light attack. Levels are multi-tiered and suitably complex, allowing for tactical movement prior to a fight starting.

The Overwatch map we play on, featuring a besieged medieval castle, has narrow ledges that slight-footed players will find optimal for nudging off foes to their death.

Each of the three factions – Vikings, Samurai and Knights – are split up into four distinct warrior classes. Vanguards are the all-rounders, suitable for beginners. Assassins and Heavies we’ve mentioned above. Hybrids, meanwhile, are the more nuanced of the bunch. Intended for skilled veterans to get to grips with, these advanced warriors can cause bleeding effects or stack up combos.

There are still a few UI and clarity issues when it comes to reading the busier maps, however. With a multitude of NPC soldiers milling around onscreen at once, it can be hard to even see what’s happening while battling in their midst. This is especially problematic when more than two players face off. The palette of the player-controlled characters is often of the same range as their surroundings and the enemies around them.

Registering where players are, who they’re playing as, what attack they’re about to use and where you need to position to block them can add up to a clumsy number of things to contend with in the moments before a claymore’s wedged between your collarbones.

This lack of readability, beyond the simple ‘guy with no head’ rule, might condemn For Honor to niche territory. But we can’t see too many heads rolling for that when the meat of the combat is so thickly sliced. Well, apart from our enemies’, perhaps. n

Sword points Five different PVP game modes will ship with the final game, as well as the singleplayer campaign mode.

Dominion is the base‑capturing kicking‑off point.

Elimination is a single‑ life, no‑respawns match, while Skirmish is a points‑based deathmatch mode in which you’re given more points depending on the opponent you choose to take on. Especially intriguing are the game modes Duel and Brawl. One‑on‑ one and two‑on‑two respectively, these modes are the perfect fit for the game’s split‑screen multiplayer. With its Nidhogg‑like combat leanings, we expect some intense bouts here, as the system is built for encircled combatants to clash off one another.

TOP Each warrior type has their own progression track, which as you play will unlock gear, skills and colour schemes for character customisation.

RIGHT Maps are designed with elevation in mind, which means getting to a high viewpoint is a great tactic for overseeing and communicating the fighting down below

TOP Feats are special abilities, which you can save up renown for in battle.

Cut off enough heads, for example, and you can call a catapult for reinforcement.

ABOVE The campaign mode aims to give the clashing combat bones some meaty consequence beyond a game-over screen, with pitched battles framed with narrative sequences.

MAIN In PVP you’ll be able to play across the three factions freely, so two friends can play as Viking and Knight but still team up

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Developer/ publisher Konami Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Japan Release 2017

Metal Gear Survive Gearing up for the post-Kojima wasteland

T

Considering the zombie-like Skulls were the least popular enemies in MGSV, it’s worrying to see armies of similar-looking foes here

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he announcement of the first Kojima-less Metal Gear (pachislot notwithstanding) was never going to go down smoothly with the series’ core fanbase. Predictably, minutes after the game was first revealed, the outcry began. “This isn’t Metal Gear Solid,” was the dominate complaint. To which Konami’s answer can quite rightly be, “Well, no, it isn’t.” But the word ‘Survive’ tagged on to the name can’t sum up just how different a proposition this outing is from its Solid forebears.

Metal Gear Survive is a co-op multiplayerfocused spinoff, set immediately after the events of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, as Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller are whisked away from Mother Base ready for the events of The Phantom Pain. As their chopper disappears into the distance, a giant wormhole opens up in the sky above the smoking

remains of the Militaires Sans Frontières’ HQ, sucking up the remaining soldiers. Suitably, considering how Survive is being put together by the vast number of Kojima Productions’ former staffers left behind as Kojima and Konami parted ways, these abandoned Mother Base soldiers are our new player characters.

Wormholes? Even alongside the wildest moments of Metal Gear Solid’s past (possessed arms, immortal wall-walking vampires and meowing Russian triple agents among them), this might seem a bit farfetched. But we’re told to expect a solid grounding (pun not actually intended) of both familiar stealth gameplay and that co-op sandbox action once we rejoin these unlucky soldiers on the other side.

What greets them and us is a mysterious alternate timeline, completely divergent from the events of The Phantom Pain. This

ABOVE Besides the nonzombies seen in these screens, there’ll be ‘massive threats’ requiring player co-ordination to bring down. Those titular bipedal tanks, perhaps?

LEFT There’s no confirmation whether microtransactions are involved, but we’d expect a similar system to MGSV’s FOB insurance model.

BELOW Melee is an especially interesting prospect for a series predominantly based around firearms. Platinum isn’t around to take the reins, Revengeance style

landscape is sandblasted, like a Mad Max film only with half-formed ruins of metallic structures dominating the horizon.

This setup, while bizarre, is by no

How will stealth work in co-op with zombies? We envisage Shaun Of The Deadstyle scenarios, where one player can cause distractions to lure the horde while the others raid bases

means the only reason fans have come away peeved. While Stealth Action might be the hybridised genre buzzphrase of the day, the enemies we’ve seen so far appear to be mindless shuffling corpses (much like The Walking Dead and its ‘walkers’, the term zombie, while immediately jumping to mind, is never used). These strange mutilated beings charge towards players when they’re spotted, gathering in large numbers to attack.

For a series that’s built a reputation for knife-sharp AI, wherein half the game revolves around playing with the smartness of your enemies rather than smashing reams of shuffling cadavers in the face, this is perhaps the oddest direction we could have predicted the series would go.

Especially when you consider the tools we’ll have at our disposal. Makeshift weapons seemingly crafted from the detritus around you can be wielded – we spot a pike assembled from a knife and some rebar.

There’s more fantastical gear to tote, too.

One soldier leaps acrobatically into the air to fire a rotating arrow, which explodes once it enters its target. All this is hugely at odds with what’s come before; Snake’s arsenal always had a sort of tangible air to it, even as it descended into game-breaking cheat items. Your infinite ammo toggle was a straight-up piece of cloth.

Since Konami itself is answering no questions at the moment (“Can you play in singleplayer?”, “Who’s directing this?” and “How long has this been in development?” are all met with a polite but curt, “We’re not talking about that yet”), there are still plenty of unknowns. We do know, however, that the game will not be a decade in the making – we can expect it to land sometime in 2017. We’re also aware the game won’t come at us as a

We’ll soon discover how much of Kojima’s magic kept Metal Gear as good as it has been ‘full-price’ product. That could mean a release akin to Ground Zeroes.

What else can we extrapolate? Well, as for who’s working on it, obviously it’s not Kojima, but we also know several Metal Gear luminaries are still in the employ of Konami, not least among them series stalwart Yuji Korekado. We also know no game of this scale gets made in a few months. It would be safe to assume something akin to Metal Gear Survive has been in the pipeline for a while. Since before Kojima departed? We may never know.

Ultimately, discovering if the game is any good will have to wait. While much of the community seems united in thinking it’ll go the way of Capcom’s ill-fated Umbrella Corps, with much of the talent behind The Phantom Pain still in place, and the strong foundation of the Fox Engine backing it up, it’s hard to bet against it. But then we are missing the magic ingredient. The fascinating prospect is that we’ll soon discover how much of Kojima’s magic kept Metal Gear as good as it’s been for as long as it’s lasted. n

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Developer/ publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Japan Release January 24

Resident evil 7: BiohazaRd Old scare tactics are back from the dead

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lot has been said about what’s different this time out of the gates for this long-running survival horror series. Gone is the thirdperson viewpoint and over-the-shoulder gunslinging. Gone is the camp dialogue and unbelievable characters with overly styled hair, skin-tight leather costumes or arms like tree trunks. But while the decidedly PT-like firstperson direction in which Resident Evil is heading does feel stark, fresh, and very much what the series needed, it turns out that Resi 7 still recaptures many of the iconic elements from the series’ past.

During the game you discover notes that flesh out the story. There are puzzles to solve

Capcom hasn’t thrown the mutilated baby corpses out with the bathwater along the way. And as you move around the Louisiana plantation where the game is set, there are sumptuously creaky doors that open achingly slowly. These returning elements are not merely nostalgia bait. Rather they’ve been rethought and rebuilt anew to deliver upon the series’ original core goal: to ratchet up that tension; to get your blood pumping.

Our second opportunity to play Resi 7 – after the Beginning Hour demo available to download now – comes in the form of Lantern, a short sequence which, unlike that first offering, forms a part of the final game.

Lantern is essentially a note, here taking the form of playable sequences rather than a few paragraphs of ‘itchy tasty’ text. Happen upon a VHS tape on your sojourn through the Baker family plantation and watch it back to trigger these past sequences, fleshing out the story as you go. These standalone slices of game feature different styles of play from the ‘main’ game, which Capcom tells us will feature weapons and melee combat. The Lantern demo is a much subtler affair.

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We are Mia, a young woman running from a haggard old lady with the titular lantern in hand. We jog across a rickety bridge, wire fences to either side of us adorned with broken children’s dolls, and into the plantation estate proper, wherein we’re forced to play a deadly game of hide and seek with our angry and vocal pursuer. We have to sneak around, keeping as far away from the glowing light of the lady’s lantern as possible, while the house plays its haunted-theme-parkride tricks. Doors slam of their own accord, and the critical path pushes us down tight, narrow spaces ripe for getting trapped inside.

It’s right in the middle of this that a puzzle is thrown at us. We can hear the shuffling feet of the old woman elsewhere in the house, and we find ourselves frantically aligning a small statue’s shadow on a wall to unlock a potential escape route.

You’ve got notes, puzzles and, yes, those Resi doors. Here they open only as fast as you push them, inviting you to peer through the gaps as they creak ajar. Do this and the next room flushes into focus as your depth of field adjusts. These transitions from room to room feel every bit as tense as they did back in the PS1 era, though here they aren’t cunningly hiding a loading screen – they’re lending the environment just one more element of tension to contend with.

There is still an awful lot more of Resident Evil 7 to see, not least the actual game that these demos have done little to fully reveal.

Will it really not feature any of the past characters from the series? How will combat work? Will it be different enough from the rock-punching exploits of Resident Evil 5?

But as showcases of the developer’s intention, and of its awareness of what worked and what didn’t with past games in the series, these parcels of Resi 7 prove that Capcom hasn’t thrown the mutilated baby corpses out with the bathwater in its bid for a restructured resurgence. n

isolated thinking Stealth horror might sound like Alien: Isolation’s shtick, but what’s on offer here is of a much more slapdash nature. And we don’t mean it’s been shoddily put together – we mean that as you’re forced into corners by your hunter, you have to find hiding spaces in places you’re not even sure contain them.

There are no lockers, no preordained game assets you know you’ll be safe inside or behind. On more than one occasion the curses of the old woman are so close we can almost feel her spittle, and it’s impossible to know if she’ll spot us.

TOP They might only be dolls, but these figures have a shiny waxwork finish to them, just for that extra-creepy flavour.

RIGHT The plantation is the same one from the Beginning Hour demo, and will feature as the main game’s location, though here we’re seeing it in the context of a different period of time.

BELOW If you’re spotted by the old woman, she’ll scream and burst towards you at terrifying speed. She doesn’t stop screaming when she reaches you, either. Nor when she palms your face into a red mist

TOP Weapons will feature in the main game, and herb-based healing items will also make a return.

ABOVE Lighting plays a big part, both pushing you towards certain things – such as here, with the white glow of a movie projector – and away from others, such as the yellow haze of the old woman’s lantern

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Roundup

The Surge Developer Deck13 Interactive Publisher Focus Home Interactive Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Germany Release 2017

The Sexy bruTale Developer Cavalier Game Studios, Tequilla Works Publisher Tequila Works Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin UK, Spain Release 2017

The Surge is the follow-up to Deck13’s Souls-inspired Lords Of The Fallen, and transplants the now familiar gameplay beats into a sci-fi setting. But it has plenty of its own ideas, too, including an enemy dismemberment system in which you must target exposed body parts for the greatest rewards.

grand ValueS: Monaco Developer Bearhands Games Publisher TBC Format PS4, Xbox One Origin Germany Release 2017

Don’t worry, Rime is still happening. But Tequila Works was so taken with Lionhead alumni collective Cavalier Game Studios’ time-bending concept it insisted on being part of the project, and is now publishing and co-developing the game. Recalling Gregory Horror Show, The Sexy Brutale is about observation, and charges you with trying to prevent the systematic murder of every guest at a masked ball by repeatedly living out the same 12 hours of the party. Each successful prevention is rewarded with a new power-granting mask, opening new doors and opportunities in this charming nightmare. More next month.

dreadnoughT Developer Yager Development Publisher Grey Box Format PC Origin Germany Release 2016

This rather wonderful-looking stealth game casts players as Amy, a cat burglar who just pulled off the heist of her career by stealing from big-time gangster Magnus. Unfortunately, he wants payback. The game blends stealth with a smartly designed pickpocketing mechanic that requires a steady hand.

Scalebound Developer PlatinumGames Publisher Microsoft Studios Format PC, Xbox One Origin Japan Release 2017

Onslaught is the third multiplayer mode to be revealed in Dreadnought’s growing lineup, and it’s the game’s largest and most accessible yet. Rather than the 5v5 matches we’ve seen so far, Onslaught expands teams to eight players as well as adding dozens of AI-controlled ships into the mix. While some of these are formidable, they’re easier to down than a player-controlled craft and the sheer numbers involved ensure a surfeit of pyrotechnics and points for all.

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The dripfeed of Scalebound details continues. We still don’t know what form the game will take, but the newly revealed Dragon Link system – which lets players control Thuban from Drew’s firstperson perspective, at the cost of leaving him temporarily vulnerable – is an enticingly destructive prospect.

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VIDEOGAME CULTURE, DEVELOPMENT, PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY 124

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Made Of Honor

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Best Coast

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The Making Of… Doom

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m a D e o f h o n o r Arkane levels up the immersive sim by harnessing the power of two

By Ben Maxwell

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Game Dishonored 2 Developer Arkane Studios Publisher Bethesda Softworks Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release November 11

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N

obody was more surprised by Dishonored’s runaway success than its creators. Arkane was extremely proud of its achievement, of course, and everybody in the studio had worked hard to build something special enough to follow Dark Messiah Of Might And Magic. But Dishonored was a new IP at a time when sequels held even greater sway over the market than they do today. Its console versions were arriving at the end of a hardware cycle, traditionally a risky time to launch anything new. And any goodwill directed towards creative director Harvey Smith – fresh from an acrimonious split with Midway – for his work on the Deus Ex series was clouded by the fact that his most recent high-profile project at the time was the troubled BlackSite: Area 51.

But Dishonored’s combination of uncommonly high production values,

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evocative setting and gleeful, open-ended cruelty made it one of the most appealing takes on the nebulously labelled ‘immersive sim’ genre yet. Bethesda vice president of PR Pete Hines was certainly delighted, thanking fans for supporting the game and generating sales far in excess of the publisher’s forecasts before issuing the corporate warcry, “We clearly have a new franchise”.

Dishonored’s advantage, of course, was that it was unique. It felt hand-crafted and truly special, a self-contained marvel that championed the benefits of letting a talented team create its vision rather than one shaped by market research. With Dishonored 2, Arkane no longer has the element of surprise on its side, and it must shoulder the additional burden of living up to fans’ sky-high expectations without watering down the game’s potent fiction 66

by stretching something that was never intended to bear a sequel.

“We feel the pressure, certainly,” Smith tells us. “But the leads at Arkane are all very experienced. I’ve only been at the studio for eight of its 17 years, but I’ve been in games for 23. This isn’t the first time I’ve sequelled a popular game that I also worked on, and you learn a few things.”

Key to making a convincing sequel to a popular game, he says, is identifying the core of the game that chimed with players and making sure you bring that back, irrespective of embellishments. The flipside of that is to try to weed out everything that people didn’t like about the game. And in all cases, if it is possible, try to exceed successful areas that went before. It might sound obvious from an external viewpoint, but it’s easier said than done.

g a m e ”

“I wasn’t as conscious of this earlier in my career,” Smith explains. “You can’t do it for everything because there are always production constraints, and we’re now having to deal with the fact that we signed up for a very ambitious game. But to that end, all the things that people liked about Dishonored we’ve brought back, and we’ve extended most of them.”

It’s a philosophy that Arkane has embraced wholly. Though ill-informed criticism of the number of missions featured in Dishonored means Smith is reluctant to put an exact number on Dishonored 2’s total (“Fans tend to target that – it depends on how you count them”), he’s happy to state that there will be one-and-a-half times as many this time around. There will also be more urban hubs attached to the beginning of missions – exemplified by Lady Boyle’s

maDe best of honor coast

Karnaca is a city with an extensive history. Like Dunwall, the central setting for the first game, it’s located next to water and heavily reliant on its port for industry. But Karnaca sits in a picturesque bay under tall cliffs, and has become a popular tourist destination for the upper classes. Street-smart Corvo, then, isn’t exactly welcome

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Last Party in the first game. Corvo and his powers are back, too. But now players will also be able to choose to play as Emily Kaldwin with her own set of supernatural abilities. And both protagonists’ repertoires have more extensive upgrade paths than the first game’s single boost per skill.

“From day one we knew we were facing a huge amount of work,” art director Sébastien Mitton tells us. “It multiplied everything and it cascaded. We put a lot of energy into the game – especially Emily, because we’re in love with her from the first game.”

“Bringing back Corvo’s nostalgic powers was quite a workload already,” Smith adds.

“They’ve all been upgraded with these little trees under them. So instead of rat swarm you can have two swarms, or swarms that follow you, and you can mix all of those. So it’s very comfortable for players from the first game, plus there’s something to explore there. But Emily represents something totally new. And mixing and matching her skills and then experimenting with Bone Charm crafting is really cool, and recontextualises Dishonored. At some point in the future, perhaps we’ll stop making games that are five games in one, just to save ourselves some sanity.”

Where Corvo’s powers are drawn from the plague-ridden streets – he is an ageing foreigner in Dishonored 2’s new setting of Karnaca, the capital of the island Serkonos, whose residents look down their noses at him – Emily’s powers are derived from her position as ruler. Mesmerise allows her to induce a temporary distracted fugue state in others. With Far Reach, a spin on Corvo’s Blink power, she can grab distant scenery and pull herself through the world, whip items towards her, or even yank enemies into the air for spectacular assassinations.

Doppleganger generates a clone distraction and Shadow Walk sees the empress turn into a creeping shadow capable of dismembering enemies as she briefly gives in to the darkness of her past.

But most interesting of all is Domino, with which she can bind enemies together in order that all suffer an injury inflicted on any one of them. It’s a bold addition that, especially when combined with her other powers, can be a devastating tool. But it also proved the most problematic to implement.

“Domino was pitched when we had the basic suite of Emily’s powers, but weren’t entirely happy with them – they didn’t feel complete,” Smith recalls. “We were wrestling back and forward between [having two sets of powers or] throwing all the powers into 68

There will be more optional exploration outside of missions, allowing players to delve deeper into Karnaca’s culture

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01 The game’s striking cast were first modelled in clay by sculptor Lucie Minne.

Art director Sébastien Mitton feels the process helped to maintain their unique look across departments and artists.

02 Dishonored’s crossbow returns, albeit in modified form, among many options.

03 While Emily’s breeding is regal, her troubled past manifests in Shadow Walk, which sees her transform into an unseen beast.

04 Despite Karnaca’s wealth, the city isn’t quite the beauty it used to be and, as you’d expect, a seedier thread runs through everything and everyone there.

05 The Overseers, a clandestine order who clamp down on anyone who associates with The Outsider, also return

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s k i n i n t h e g a m e The new Void engine has released the team from the constraints it faced on the last game. “Last time, we felt like we had very strong art direction – thanks to Sébastien [Mitton, art director] – but the rendering technology was a little long in the tooth,” Smith says. “But this time… wow, have our tech guys made a renderer. Holy shit.”

“How cool is it to create your own engine?” Mitton says. “You have all the programmers on demand.

We prepared some documents saying what we want to target in terms of lighting, shaders, the water, the wind, the VFX, etc. Production built it and we went back and forth with them to polish everything. There was a point where we were in love with the eye shader, for example, but the eyes were better than the skin.

So they added subsurface scattering so you have sunlight going through the ears and arms. It’s been great to finally do exactly what we want with the art. We’ve always used thirdparty engines where, at some point, you reach a limitation. Now it’s totally different. It was hard to build it at the same time as making the game, but we knew that we’d reach a point where it would be beautiful. And that’s what we have now, and we’re super-pleased with it.”

Co-creative director Harvey Smith (top) and art director Sébastien Mitton

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The Clockwork Mansion’s machinery is used against you initially, but you can turn it to your advantage

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one pool and letting either Emily or Corvo choose whatever they wanted. But we kept hearing from people over and over that their expectation was that Emily would have her own set of powers, and Corvo would have some that reflected who he was.

“A lead technical artist on the team named Johann pitched Domino in a basic form. [Lead designer] Dinga Bakaba and I started talking about it and the team began prototyping it. It was really, really hard to get the UI right so that it felt easy to target three or four enemies. And it was also hard to get the visualisation of the UI right, so that it communicates what’s happening. The way it ended up working was, you target multiple guys, and then you do something to one of them and you literally see an effect move down the line to the others. That was an epiphany for us – it really worked well.”

The base version of the power allows you to tether two people together, the effect propagating down a shimmering golden connection relatively slowly. Using runes, you can upgrade it to three, and then four targets, while another enhancement eliminates the lag from your connection, meaning the results of your actions are

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Karnaca has its own police force, the Grand Serkonan Guard, whose attire echoes the uniforms of continental European forces

“Part of it is down to the way we work at Arkane,” Smith says. “When new programmers join the company, the other programmers really indoctrinate them with our game design philosophy. Because what they learned at other studios probably needs to be rethought here. When a programmer describes how a system works, and the game designer listens and says, ‘Yeah, but we need it to be able to do this thing’. Or when an artist says, ‘Here’s what I want to do’, and the level designer says, ‘Yeah, but what if I wanted to do this other thing?’

“I’ve been at places before where the other person goes, ‘Oh, man, what a pain in the ass. Really? Can we avoid doing that?

Because it would be much easier if…’ But

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getting creative with it, there were brief concerns that it might be. But there is, of course, a mana cost for using it, and a rune cost for upgrading it. And more than that, Smith and Mitton believe that the openminded, iterative design process that’s applied to every aspect of the game ensures that no component spirals out of equilibrium. Creating in this way takes faith, however, and no small amount of courage.

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almost instantly telegraphed. Tethering four enemies together is all very well, but if a pistol-wielding commander spots you attacking one of their number, you might very well be dead before she is.

“People instantly started using it in ways that we didn’t anticipate, and that made us feel like we’d done our jobs,” Smith says.

“Which, in an immersive sim like Dishonored, is in part to make players feel creative.

They’re not just following a trail of scripted breadcrumbs, they’re literally discovering, exploring and recombining things creatively.”

One such example saw a player, backed into a corner, Domino a group of enemies to their own doppelganger before slitting the short-lived unfortunate’s throat. A passing servant might make an equally docile touch paper for Emily’s black magic. On first sight, Domino can appear overpowered – indeed, when the team first witnessed playtesters

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you can also be at a place where people are excited. Like, ‘Holy shit, our artists, programmers, designers and audio guys are taking it to the next level’. And so it becomes about trying to facilitate them, even though it’s not your discipline and it might set you back a little bit. There are production and technical constraints, of course, but when somebody tries to take their area up a notch, the player gets something better, and so we’re very supportive of all that.”

Arkane’s confidence in the game’s cascading systems was put to the test during a Bakaba-helmed press demo. A playthrough of the Dust District with Emily went smoothly, but a scheduling problem meant there were 30 minutes to kill. Dutifully, Bakaba repeated the section, and on reaching a scene in which a heretic is about to be executed by an Overseer firing squad, decided to go off script.

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“Normally what he does,” Smith explains, “is come out of this dentist’s office onto a balcony and, just before the guy fires, uses Far Reach to yank him up on the balcony and assassinate him in mid-air. It’s pretty dramatic, then all hell breaks loose down below and you jump down and whip ass and that’s it. But on a whim he was like, ‘Wait, what happens if I Domino together the heretic and the guy about to execute him?’

It worked, mostly. “The piece that we never tell anybody is that when the Overseer fired the pistol, the bullet killed the heretic, and the effect propagated back to the Overseer. However, whoever had initially set it up had used the head as the point that the propagated damage would come back to, and so it actually ricocheted off of the metal mask that the Overseer was wearing. The power isn’t set up to be this scripted thing that in certain scenes looks good in videos; it’s set up so that it literally propagates a damage type to the attacker. So the result was technically right, but the player’s intention was to have the Overseer kill himself and it didn’t work because we were a little too consistent and hadn’t thought that through. It’s a great story, but in the end we moved the damage point to the attacker’s centre to make it a little more player-friendly behind the scenes.”

Corvo and Emily’s expanded powers and enhancement system are counterpointed by some corporeal gains. The mantling move, used to gain access to the greater vertical space of Dishonored 2’s levels, is now more acrobatic, and a newly introduced Dark Messiah-style Focus Strike, charged by holding the attack button, can break through certain defences. Hold it for too long and get spotted by a guard, however, and you’ll face an attack that will throw you off balance and squander your preparation.

Corvo and Emily’s improved physicality will serve them well in the newly introduced no-powers playthrough. While there was an achievement available for beating the first game using nothing but Blink, it wasn’t possible to reject supernatural influences altogether. Now, on first meeting the Outsider – the mysterious entity who bestows powers on Corvo in the first game – you can spurn his intervention and crack on in Flesh And Steel mode.

“The no-powers playthrough was much harder to implement than, say, having two protagonists,” Smith reveals. “Even just taking that first scene in the Void, the way you get out of it is to Blink from rock to rock, and then you get to the exit and 73

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advance in the real world. How do we do that? Do we move the rocks around in the Void? Do we secretly have a path where you can just toddle off the rock to some place?

And so the level designers were faced with the very difficult task of crawling through the game brick by brick and making sure there was a way to do everything without powers. Sometimes it just worked, but other times it was like, ‘Oh my god, what are we going to do here?’ And it literally required rethinking an entire street.”

Flesh and steel will also meet when you go toe to toe with Kirin Jindosh’s grandiose Clockwork Soldiers. The four armed guards have dropped the reveal trailer’s ceramic look in favour of something a little more utilitarian, mixing metal, wood and ceramics in a nightmarish bird-like form. They can be dismembered, limb by limb, but picking them apart in that way is no small challenge.

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Better, then, to drop onto them from above and cut off their head, blinding the defensive machine and forcing it to rely on sound. Or, if you can get in close with a Rewire Tool and without being noticed, a small panel on their legs enables you to hack them so that their allegiance switches.

“You’d be surprised at how many departments had to work on that fucking thing,” Smith laughs. “Initially they were about two metres high. They were imposing.

But in a firstperson game there are all these problems with the trick of perspective, where sometimes somebody who’s over two metres tall looks short to the playercharacter camera. I kept pressuring and pressuring to make them taller, and then finally we realised that there were only three doorways in the entire game that blocked them. And so we just changed those three doorways, and then Seb came back and said, ‘Guess what? They’re three metres tall now’. And I went to Dinga’s desk and we played with it, and I was like, ‘Holy shit, that’s so cool now!’”

Players happy to dabble in darker arts can take advantage of the new bone charm 74

crafting system. The team went through many iterations of the idea, but the one it settled on should allow for highly specialised character builds. Now, fairly weak bone charms are scattered across the world for you to find and collect, and have one or two basic traits that will mildly improve various skills and abilities – swimming a little faster, for example, or enjoying a slightly longer parrying window. If you acquire the Bone Charm Crafting enhancement, however, you’re able to sacrifice found charms in order to extract the raw whale bone and traits from them. Upgrade your crafting skill enough, and these can then be recombined into charms that boast up to four traits.

A further upgrade will allow you to stack multiple examples of the same trait, making an extremely potent talisman.

You are, however, at liberty to have a crack at making a powerful charm even before you’re capable. You might get lucky,

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but you also run the risk of creating a corrupted bone charm. These contaminated charms feature one positive trait and one negative. They can still be useful, but you’ll have to endure whatever disadvantage they bring about at the same time.

“This is one of those areas where an aesthetic or thematic goal runs up against raw mechanics,” Smith explains. “We thought, ‘What if I was a sorcerer, and I had a reasonable level of shit I can do, but then I also have the darker, crazier, wilder thing that I shouldn’t be messing with yet, but I can try and sometimes it runs amok because I’m in over my head?’

“But we’ve also added things called black bone charms, which you can’t actually make.

They’re historical artifacts that you find periodically – there’s a list and it’s semirandomised. Black bone charms were made by very powerful sorcerers in the past and they’re very precious in the game. You can fill up your charm slots with regular ones, corrupted ones, black ones, crafted ones, or any combination thereof.”

Meddling with the dark arts isn’t the only area in which things can spiral out of

Delilah Copperspoon, an antagonist in the first game’s The Knife Of Dunwall and The Brigmore Witches DLC, returns, but it’s not clear what her role will be

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Your melee skills can be upgraded, allowing you to deflect bullets and other projectile attacks.

The game also introduces a suite of non-lethal combat moves

While Dishonored drew praise for its striking character design and deep backstories, there was one area in which it came up a little short. “We had a lot of women and people of colour in the game before, but they weren’t in interesting roles,” Smith admits. “Almost every woman in the first game was either a little girl, queen, prostitute, witch or servant. So from the DLC forward we started having union bosses, lawyers and gang leaders. It’s just one of those things that was an oversight, I guess.

Maybe that’s the wrong word, but we feel better from the DLC forward.

And so the women in Dishonored 2 are much stronger. They’re guard officers, gang leaders, things like that, but then [they’re also in] more mundane jobs, too.”

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your control. Arkane has worked hard on dynamic swarming behaviour for rats and bloodflies. The latter, in particular, can get a bit rowdy. Approach a nest or infested body and they’ll rise up in agitation to warn you away, settling down again once you back off.

But they aren’t anchored to predefined locations, and are quick to exploit any opportunity afforded to them.

“I was playing a mission called The Edge Of The World, and there’s a big, sprawling area to explore before you actually get to the mission,” Smith recalls. “I neared a canal and a guard came up and surprised me. I choked him out, and then I saw an officer with a pistol. I was playing on Hard, so I was like, ‘Fuck, this is a problem’. I tried to hide the unconscious guy in a dumpster, but as I opened the lid I realised that the level designers had put a bloodfly nest in it. So all these fucking bloodflies came out and starting attacking me, and the officer heard the commotion and came running up shouting and firing her gun. That drew another couple of guards my way and so I had to drop the body to deal with them. I blocked the officer’s attack and took her out, but the other guards were coming and by this point the bloodflies had started stinging the unconscious guy and laying eggs in him. So more flies were hatching out of him, and then they started on the dead officer, and I was just like, ‘OK, fuck this situation!’ I just had to run away.”

It’s an anecdote that perfectly encapsulates Dishonored 2’s capacity to surprise players with its interlocking systems and its potential to create unique stories. The first game allowed for a great deal of player expression, but its sequel looks set to serve up one of the most pliant collection of sandboxes yet created. And this time around, it’s hard to imagine anyone will be surprised by any success the game enjoys.

“There’s the kind of narrative that people pre-can, which can be very good – and I admit I like that in games too – and then there’s the type of narrative that emerges from gameplay systems,” Smith says.

“Other players will have similar stories to mine in that spot, but in other places – especially as players have ways of spawning bloodflies – I think they’ll have their own stories too. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of stuff in this game, but it all comes down to putting you in a situation and letting you react. It’s letting you formulate a plan based on the information you have, and letting you move through a world that’s as dynamic as we could make it.” n 76

Whether you choose to accept his gifts or not, you’ll still be visiting The Outsider in the Void, reimagined in even stranger form for the sequel

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01 While Dunwall was based on London and Edinburgh, Karnaca draws its influence from southern Europe and the Mediterranean coast.

02 Although the game is set in the equivalent of our mid-19th century, the studio based much of its architecture on reference photos from the 1920s.

03 Karnaca’s location means that, while whale oil is still widely used, some of the city can be powered by wind.

04 Not a creature in the game, but a painting depicting the folklore of the city’s residents.

05 As well as the local port, there are also silver mines near the city. But while gainful employment is available, the Howler Gang still rules the streets

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Are serious games ready to capitalise on their ability to cure our ills?

By Lewis Gordon

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Pamela Kato, professor of serious games at Coventry University

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e’re in the engineering and computing building at Coventry University, attending the Games For Health UK Conference. It’s an irregularly shaped construction, slanting and jutting in ways that defy old-fashioned architectural thinking. And it’s held together by giant hexagons, themselves irregularly proportioned, their imperfections speaking of the natural world. It feels like an appropriate setting for a discussion of what is increasingly touted as the future of medicine.

As Pamela Kato, professor of serious games at Coventry University and chair of the conference, introduces the day’s proceedings, the audience sits back in ergonomic chairs. The auditorium is packed with academics, developers and practitioners keen to thrash out the landscape of serious games; where they are, and where they can go. After an initial boom in the early 2000s, with a focus on military training and gamification, serious games have dropped out of mainstream view. Health, though, marks one of the key areas in which progress is being made. Crucially, the potential that exists within the field is only just being formulated.

You may remember Re-Mission or Snow World from the mid-noughties. They were, loosely speaking, the breakout hits of the serious-game industry.

Mainstream media latched onto them as concrete evidence of videogames’ capacity to effect positive change, these bewildering creations acting as a sharp tonic to the negative press interactive entertainment can attract so dependably.

In Re-Mission, released in 2006, you play as a nanobot, injected into the body to fight off different cancers, infections and the potential side effects of treatment such as chemotherapy. It was designed to effect behavioural change in adolescent cancer patients, to help assist in the delivery of potentially life-saving chemotherapy and antibiotics. Kato – also founding president and CEO of Hopelab, the game’s publisher – oversaw the project as well as conducting the most scientifically rigorous randomised trial on the effects of a game, results of which were published in 2007. “The kids who played our game took more of their chemotherapy and also more of their

antibiotics,” Kato tells us. The game shipped 275,000 copies, distributed through medical practices across the US and other parts of the world.

It was, at least in serious-game terms, an emphatic success, and pointed to what videogames are capable of in the context of healthcare.

Snow World, developed by Ari Hollander and Howard Rose at the University Of Washington, was actually being used a few years before Re-Mission, with the first study into its effects being published in 2001. But the story around it has continued to grow. In Snow World, players – generally burn victims – don a VR headset and fight off snowmen in an ice-cold setting. A mix of distraction and psychological persuasion, the winter environment offsets the painful heat sensations the burn victim might hold. And the game is played while painful exercises such as skin stretching are being undertaken, replacing, or used in conjunction with, traditional drug-based pain-relief methods.

“VR pain relief delivers,” Rose, now CEO of Deepstream VR, tells us. “And having that precedent is very important.”

But it’s a precedent the serious-game industry doesn’t appear to have capitalised on, at least to the extent that was once forecast. Certainly it’s a view that those within the industry are aware of. “I went to a conference and someone said to me, ‘OK, there’s Snow World and there’s Re-Mission, but there’s nothing else. And your games are really old’,” Kato recalls. “That’s really frustrating in the field.”

The unique nature of these games means that they can’t be compared to traditional releases. Their afterlives, and the research projects that underpin them, set them apart. “We didn’t just make Re-Mission,” Kato explains. “We said, ‘Does it work?

Does it do what we said it would?’” And for Rose, pain-relief projects at Deepstream VR are informed and advised on by Dr Alex Cahana, a pain doctor for 27 years and former head of pain medicine at the University Of Washington. These steps are, of course, necessities. They’re crucial components of

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SeRiouS about DiStRibution While serious-game specialist Grendel Games is delivering most of its output through partnerships with health insurers and hospitals, it’s also looking to develop a commercial platform not only for its games, but also serious games as a whole.

“There’s no such thing as Steam for selling serious games,” Grendel founder Tim Laning says. He’s looking to change that, though, bringing together a global community of serious-game developers.

“That’s something we’re working on very hard behind the scenes, together with a lot of different partners and serious-game developers from around the world. To basically all say: ‘Let’s stop the bullshit – let’s make sure we have a sales platform that enables us to sell that product, for people to rate that product, and to immediately see if it’s a quality product or not’.” It’s an effort Laning hopes will curb the rise in poorly realised games.

ABOVE A water-friendly headset allows a patient to enter a VR environment while getting dressing changed in a hydro tank.

RIGHT Rose cites the feeling of presence as being crucial to the success of VR title Snow World: “It integrates all these aspects of the person in that you become part of the place”

Re-Mission was developed for teenagers suffering from cancer, a group that, prior to the game’s release, didn’t have a lot of treatment support

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Dr Ted Jones has been using VR to treat pain relief at his clinic, the Pain Consultants of East Tennessee. Here he guides a patient through Deepstream VR’s Cool

ABOVE Rose hopes to capitalise on the rise of consumer VR for games such as Cool. “Ultimately, we want to help people at home.” RIGHT Weston, a young sufferer of chronic pain, plays Cool using an HTC Vive headset. The pain-relief benefits have been shown to last up to 48 hours after treatment

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a process whose outcome must be safe and effective, and subject to the same careful scientific evaluation as any other new drug, treatment or practice.

Richard Brady, a specialist colorectal surgeon and the founder of Research Active, echoes not only the need for integrated expertise in the design process but also robust regulation. “There are a lot of products launched from ideas or innovation that don’t always have quality research or data behind them to support the claims that are made,” he tells us. He is, though, keen to emphasise the potential benefits in this shift to digital means of treatment. “It holds great potential in reducing costs of healthcare, in providing consumer-led and patient-centred care, being paperlight and efficient, and being able to collect lots of population-based data that we can use as medics to decide on future advances in medicine.”

The benefits that might be felt are the result of a fundamental shift within healthcare, from a model of treatment within a hospital to one of prevention and therapy through lifestyle. This, Kato tells us, lies at the heart of the push within games for health.

“Our healthcare systems cannot handle the fact that we have done so well by making people live so long,” she explains. “When you live long, you get the gift of having a chronic illness – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia. You go to the hospital, you see a doctor, you have to take your medication every day, you have to change your lifestyle, you have to eat differently. So how do you support that?

The excitement around serious games is that we can make those really critically important behaviours fun to engage in.”

Fun: that’s the crucial point. But it’s one that is missed by many serious-game developers. And it’s not only games for health that missed the mark – it’s a problem that has plagued videogames used in a serious way for the past 20 years, educational games bearing the brunt of the criticism. Tim Laning of Grendel Games is all too aware of the problem and the catastrophic effect it can have on a product’s capacity to deliver the type of change it says it can.

“The reasons why some of these serious games are failing is because they’re not games at all,” he says. “They’re not. They’re boring. They nearly don’t

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have any actual gameplay. The graphics look horribly outdated. And they might work from an academic point of view, but if the target audience is simply not interested, because it’s not intrinsically motivating, then it’s not going to work.” Righting that wrong is part of Laning and Grendel Games’ current mission. The studio’s tagline, ‘Seriously entertaining’, neatly pokes fun at the term serious games, while also laying out the fundamental route these games need to take in order to become a success. It is, though, a stance that has evolved, along with the studio.

Grendel Games started out as a group of likeminded friends in 1998, based out of Laning’s apartment in Leeuwarden, a small city in the north of the Netherlands. Grendel’s activities ramped up in 2003 when it entered into talks with Microsoft about developing a title for Xbox Live Arcade. That game, Slave To The Blade, was “a mix of Guild Wars and Mortal Kombat”, Laning says. Although the project would ultimately be cancelled by Microsoft, demands made by the publisher before that point took Grendel down an unexpected, but fruitful, path.

Microsoft wanted motion-captured animation in the game – something of which Grendel had no experience. So the team turned to a local motioncapture company, Motek Entertainment, to assist in delivering it. But as Slave To The Blade teetered back and forth, Grendel was offered an opportunity by Motek’s sister company, Motek Medical, to develop a game for military rehabilitation using infrared motion capture. Motek Medical had already tried and failed to make the concept work on its own.

Now it was Grendel’s turn. It was with this project that the company ethos began to be forged.

“Basically, the target audience didn’t like what Motek Medical had built,” Laning tells us.

“Academics liked it, physicians liked it, but the target audience – infantry people who had stepped on landmines and had lost their extremities – didn’t like it. The problem became clear and the solution became immediately clear. These were all young guys, guys our age. They were accustomed to playing videogames on their PlayStations and Xboxes that looked like actual videogames. The games

themselves were not fun at all. So that’s when we decided to take a look at it.”

That project led to further serious-game work, and gradually the ghost of Slave To The Blade was pushed to the back of the team’s minds. Grendel continued its exploration of rehabilitation in Gryphon Rider but with a shift in focus away from military personnel towards children, typically those suffering from cerebral palsy or brain damage. Using Microsoft’s Kinect, the player guides their character through a fantasy world using deliberate body movements. The game, ironically, takes advantage of Kinect’s failures and repurposes them for an audience that requires a slower type of game. “Kinect failed because it did a lot of things wrong,” Laning notes.

“It tried to work around the fact that it was quite laggy and would have all these other problems.

But what Kinect can do very well is perceive slow motions very accurately to control something.”

The game is also entirely customisable, allowing parents and practitioners to quickly and accurately alter settings in order to meet the physical needs of the child playing. “You can press pause and then it will show you all the hurdles that are there and you can increase or decrease the difficulty,” Laning explains. “But you can also set it up so that children can play it who are able to only move their left arm.”

There’s often talk of customisation empowering the player, giving them the experience that they want, but Gryphon Rider goes further, giving players the experience they need while also giving them a profound sense of empowerment and agency. This, after all, is a game designed specifically for them, where they might usually be excluded because of the dexterity required to use a typical controller.

Customisation also lies at the heart of Howard Rose and Deepstream VR’s current project, Cool.

Like Rose’s previous project, Snow World, it’s being used in chronic-pain clinics and for acute pain relief in hospitals. The experience this time, though, is more open-ended, designed to incorporate a broader range of patients. And part of this drive is the integration of wearable body technology. “The big leap is to bring sensors into this,” Rose explains.

“With the rise of wearable computing, it’s not just

Richard Brady, founder of Research Active

Howard Rose, CEO of Deepstream VR

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A cancer patient using a Deepstream 3D viewer prototype. Patients don’t note any side effects when playing Deepstream VR’s pain applications

“ y o u c a n p R e S c R i b e p L ay i n g L e v e L S Like you wouLD pReScRibe meDicine f o R t h e R e h a b i L i tat i o n o f y o u R c h i L D ”

Tim Laning, founder of Grendel Games

the same experience every time. It’s creating a world [players] can come and manipulate. The virtual reality knows you and adapts.”

That adaptation is down to the data-collection possibilities of games for health. “VR is something that [practitioners and clinicians] can track. We can get all this data, and then adjust it,” Rose says.

“You can modulate it in realtime to say: ‘Well, that’s working? That’s not working? Let’s try this.’ It enables people, I think, to be better at that rehabilitation model.” That flexibility is something Laning is keen to stress, too. “You can literally prescribe playing levels much like you would prescribe medicine for the rehabilitation of your child,” he says.

But games for health aren’t just being used for treatment and rehabilitation. They’re also being used to aid in the training of practitioners, particularly surgeons. Grendel’s biggest commercial success to date, Underground – released on Wii U – is a laparoscopy (more widely known as keyhole surgery) simulator in everything but name. It’s a puzzle game in which you guide two explorers through a fantastical underworld but, crucially, it utilises a novel control mechanic that mimicks the tools used to carry out real-world laparoscopic surgery. Though the game was released in 2015, the control method was prototyped on the original Wii hardware. “The Wii Remote is very accurate but not when you’re flinging it around,” Laning says. Grendel went on to design a custom controller for specialist use: the device costs $250, and it’s been incorporated for laparoscopic training at facilities around the world.

Grendel is keen to develop this commitment to surgical training. The week after we speak, Laning and other representatives of the studio will fly out to the US to shore up the details of their biggest project to date, partnering with two of the largest surgical companies in the world. Details at the moment are hazy but Laning tells us, “It’s either going to be mixed reality combined with a dedicated controller, or it 84

might become VR.” And despite the practical application of the technology, it will still fall in line with Grendel’s ethos. “It’s going to be an actual game like the other games we’ve built, with high production values but catering to a completely different public.”

In working with established partners in the medical field, Grendel is creating a distribution model as well as fostering trust with potential users, a crucial factor in the widespread adoption of games for health. “As far as I know, Gryphon Rider is the only game that is being distributed, and reimbursed, by a health insurance company,” Laning says. “And I think that’s important because people need to access it. And if it becomes recognised as a wholesome therapy and a health insurance company stands behind it, that’s a really good signal for parents at home, because it’s really hard for them to tell what’s good from what isn’t.”

That trust is also supported through the embedding of scientific expertise and evaluation into the design process, something Grendel has worked hard to cultivate. “We have two shareholders – one a hospital and the other a health insurance company,” Laning explains. “Which makes sense for us because we get to create a business case based on the statistics, and we get to prove what we’re doing together with the university medical centre by finding the right people worldwide that can help us.”

The benefits are obvious. And that level of scientific evaluation is something Grendel takes incredibly seriously. It’s the reason why Underground took seven years to make and Gryphon Rider took four. “You have to iterate every step of the way and make sure it does what you claim it does,” Laning explains. “What’s basically littering the serious-game industry right now is a minefield of very badly designed serious games that don’t do what they claim to be doing.”

The risks involved in poorly designed games for health are manifold. It’s not just a case of feeling

Underground is available via Nintendo’s digital store, with 90 per cent of copies sold to hospitals and skills labs. It has a custom controller (right), but it can also be played more traditionally, using the Wii U GamePad

irked that time has been wasted, as might be the case with a traditional game. Safety is key – there’s the potential that harm could be enacted, particularly in the case of a poorly designed rehabilitation game, for example, that pushes the body too far or in the wrong ways. Testing, reflection and iteration must be incorporated at every step of the development process. The downside is that all of these things take time, a point Laning stresses throughout our discussion.

“What you need to understand is that everything in medicine is slow, but it’s also very deliberate,” he says. “I never got that when I went to the first games for health conferences.” But it’s not only because of testing and regulation. “Medicine is a multibilliondollar business. I mean, the game industry is large, but the medical industry is a lot bigger.” Healthcare, then, is a lurching behemoth in comparison to the fleet-footed videogame industry.

There’s no doubt that, although games for health have proven their value in certain circumstances and applications, it will take time for their potential to be realised extensively, and for their widespread integration into health practices. And it will take more companies such as Grendel to push it forward. With its emphasis on fun, rigorous research, and adoption not only by consumers but corporations, plus regional and national governments, the company is paving the way for future developers in the field.

Laning is quick to emphasise the limitations of such a fledgling field, however. “I’m not saying videogames are a solution for everything,” he says.

“They’re not. They’re absolutely not.” But given an increasingly ageing population, and the rise in chronic illnesses that has emerged as a consequence, society and its governments are duty bound to explore every possible option. Games are not some form of ultimate cure, but if they’re implemented properly, they can only become increasingly effective parts of healthcare. “We hope to be an example of how you should pull it off,” Laning smiles. n

ta b L e t DinneRS

ABOVE Garfield Goes To Town is being adapted for territories across the world with food types specific to each region.

RIGHT Children have played an important role in Garfield Goes To Town’s development, providing feedback to Grendel through QA reports. The NHS has facilitated this through its connections with schools

Grendel’s latest title, Garfield Goes To Town, will launch later this year for tablet devices. The game, designed to tackle obesity in children, will be distributed through the NHS in the UK and other healthcare insurers around the world.

Utilising a pre-existing, well-known brand was important to Laning in order to get people buying into the product.

“It’s hard to market something people don’t know,” he says. “So I figured if we can do this in a non-belligerent manner with a cartoon character that has a lot of marketing power, then it would absolutely help.

And the first thing I thought of was Garfield because he’s a fat cat that loves to eat lasagne and doesn’t like to move a lot.” The tactic could pay dividends, reducing not only obesity in children but also the risk of people developing diabetes, heart disease or cancer later in life.

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best coast How Frontier is building, piece by piece, the ultimate theme-park sim

By NathaN BrowN

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Game Planet Coaster Developer/publisher Frontier Developments Format PC Release November 17

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essentially a couple of thousand Sims. As rontier’s chief creative officer, Jonny Wilcox, remarkable as that may seem, you really have loves a good queue. He’s English, of course, to see them move to appreciate it: whether so it comes with the territory to an extent. But part of a group or on their own, there is a put Wilcox in a theme park and he’ll shun the graceful, natural flow to the way the crowd offer of a priority pass, which offers the rollermoves through your park – providing you’ve coaster aficionado a speedy route to the front got your pathing right, of course. of the line. “I like to queue,” he tells us. “My It turns out that ‘flow’ is the right word for family doesn’t! But I just like to look around at it, as principal programmer Owen Mc Carthy the theme park. Also, it’s the only chance I get explains. Planet coaster’s crowds are, to talk to my kids.” essentially, guided by an invisible body of While Wilcox has a professional interest water. “I’ve always been interested in physics in the thrill ride in front of him, he’s just as and fluid simulations, and there was a lot of invested in the complex workings of another research into using fluid and flow to simulate machine: the park itself. Books have been [the movement of] a crowd,” he says. “Instead written on how best to structure a theme park. of simulating for every person – where’s this They’ll tell you to put the most exciting ride as one going to go, then this one, then this one – far away from the entrance as possible, both you just have to do one solve of the [fluid] to let guests get acclimatised with some lowerflow. It takes a while, but once it’s done you stress rides and to eke more money out of them can have as many people as you want in along the way. They advise on the correct there. Thousands.” placement of food stands and toilets in order to

A l m o s t ev ery t e A m is b r e A k in g n e w g r o u n d – l i t e r A l ly, in t h e c A s e o f t h e

br A i n s behi n d t h e vox e l - b A s e d t e r r A in

FROM TOP Chief creative officer Jonny Wilcox; principal programmer Owen Mc Carthy; lead audio designer Matthew Florianz

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It’s a technique that’s been used before – maximise the visitor experience – and their for unit movement in RTS games such as expenditure. They’ll share best-practice advice supreme commander – but only on flat terrain. on crowd management, on structuring paths By breaking the map up into tiny sections, and placing scenery to optimise the flow of an Mc Carthy has made the tech work in a excited, teeming crowd. Before our visit to game which, thanks to terrain sculpting and Frontier, we had no idea these books even deformation, is a lot more vertical and less existed. After a day spent in the company of a predictable. And it’s a godsend in a game team making what is, by a distance, the most where the player can relay paths and place ambitious theme-park simulator ever created, essential objects such as benches and bins on we have a strange urge to read one. the fly, since the fluid simulation just guides Almost every team working on Planet them around any obstacle. Crucially, it’s not an coaster is breaking new ground – literally, in intensive process – for Mc Carthy, anyway; the case of the brains behind the voxel-based the rendering team would disagree – and terrain deformation tech, and figuratively just when we’re shown a vast plaza teeming with about everywhere else. And, as any good a crowd of several thousand, the framerate theme park designer will tell you, at the heart barely dips. It’s scalable, too, the effect far of it all is a busy, happy crowd. “It’s all about from restricted to only players with monster throughput,” Wilcox says. “The first principle PCs. “If you have a slow machine, the flow just is the guests are the most important thing in updates less often,” Mc Carthy says. “And you the simulation, so everything you do affects can continue to flow on the old data until the the guest. Whether you build a convoluted new data is ready. They walk slowly anyway, path, where you put scenery, toilets – so you don’t need to update every frame.” everything affects them, and it’s all about It’s a heck of a sight, and even more so managing this ideal throughput. They’re when you see it happen in realtime – a slight like the lifeblood of the park.” tweak to a path or the addition of some Powered by over an hour of custom deliberately awkwardly placed scenery animations, speaking a new language of causing the crowd to instantly, seamlessly Frontier’s invention, and individually clickable change how it moves. Realtime response to to reveal their current mood, wants and needs, your actions is critical in a game whose a Planet coaster park teems with what are

Mascots entertain guests, but can cause a blockage if their performance draws too large a crowd.

No worry – fire them on the spot and they slope off, miserable

B ac k e r culture While you’d be forgiven for thinking that working for a publisher such as Microsoft is a world apart from dealing with a thronging, noisy crowd of alpha backers, Wilcox has been around long enough to see common ground between the two. “Rather than having one external producer,” he says, “we’ve got 30,000.” Anonymous forum posters are, inevitably, more prone to frothy outbursts than a sharp-suited publisher rep, but Wilcox is full of praise for the Planet Coaster community and sees a growing appreciation and understanding of the developer’s lot. To a point, anyway. “People are good at looking at individual problems and coming up with solutions, but not so much at how all these different problems need to be judged as a whole.

That’s what I do. They’re definitely well educated; they understand games, and game mechanics. But if they really knew all the answers, I’d employ them.”

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As well as meaning players can build parks with familiar set dressing, themed scenery adds an appropriate sense of atmosphere when placed next to rides. A pirate ship’s cannons will fire as a rollercoaster trundles past, for instance

Branding, coaster and mascot concepts show the extent to which Frontier’s art teams, like the studio at large, have had to think differently about things since Elite Dangerous. The animation team’s work on crowds involved a cluster of staff walking in circles around a staircase in the studio foyer, the artists studying the way people change their walking speed to keep pace when turning corners in a group

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best coast Unlike a Universal or Disney, Frontier has no pre-existing IP on which to base its park designs.

The art team essentially had to write its own dark, Grimm-style fairytale before it could begin building the scenery for this particular theme

every facet can be tweaked on the fly, and it’s a challenge that’s prompted fresh thinking in just about every aspect of the game’s development.

Nowhere is that more true than in the audio department, which began work on Planet coaster by being told that the techniques it used in developing elite Dangerous would have to be discarded. “You’ve got so many objects on screen,” lead audio designer Matthew Florianz tells us. “You’ve got so many people walking around your park that if we were to put a single sound on all of them and then check which ones are in range – which is how we normally do sound – just checking who’s in range would take longer than a single frame.

“If you take elite, or a shooter or anything, you’re a ship or a gun or a person moving through a world, and that gives us a very solid starting point. We design really cool gun sounds, or car sounds, or in the case of elite, really cool ship sounds. It’s all about getting the sense of moving through space. But in this game, what is ‘you’? Unless you’re riding one of the coasters [in firstperson], ‘you’ is something that’s nothing at first and evolves over time.”

The solution is a sort of audio LOD: the closer a person is to the camera, the more in sync their audio. Pre-recorded crowd sounds will be played from guests that are farther away, while those in front of you will be speaking perfectly synced Planco, a replacement for the English language devised by one of the audio designers, which both avoids localisation headaches and fits with the cheery, cartoonish theme of the game. Head of audio Jim Croft calls the technique “contextual mixing. It’s definitely the future of games, because we have no hope, in these huge games, of being able to realise every single thing, entity, emitter that exists in the game. We have to think about what’s important to the player.”

Great, you’d think, problem solved. Then there was just the small matter of renting out a theme park for two days so a professional sound-recording artist could get coaster samples, which were then split up and assigned to various track components – according to materials, curve and incline, speed and pitch, and so on – allowing the game engine to call for the right sounds in realtime. Then distortion was added, since no person’s rollercoaster experience is a cleaned-up, digital one. Then effects were added for scenery rushing past.

Then Frontier had Toronto musician Jim Guthrie 93

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Nest iN class Wilcox’s pet phrase that guides Planet Coaster’s design is ‘nested complexity’ – Frontier’s way of making what sounds intimidatingly intricate as friendly as you want it to be. Workshop support is perhaps the beating heart of the idea, letting those who are put off by the complexity of the building tools download pre-made Blueprints from Steam and drop them into their parks, making little adjustments as they see fit. But the concept runs through the entire design: coaster building, for instance, has by default a ‘snap’ function that prevents you from angling a turn more than 22.5 degrees. As we move from team to team, the phrase comes up time and again. “It’s a corny term, but it’s quite real,” Wilcox says. “We really wanted to put this level of sophistication in there, but keep it accessible. There are different levels you can play this game on, and each level is celebrated and embraced. There’s no shame in it at all.”

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Wilcox has operated for a decent chunk of his career; he made expansion packs for Rollercoaster tycoon 2 and worked on Rct3, too. “Ten years ago, people were sharing parks via email; now we’re fully embracing sharing.

I like that because we haven’t done it before – it’s new, fresh, a challenge, the idea is good – but I think a management game is the sum of its parts. Everything we’ve done… all the disciplines working together have created a whole. If the game were to fail it would be because of a weak link that breaks the whole vision, and so far we haven’t encountered that.”

Yet Wilcox is lucky to have been able to get Planet coaster off the ground at all.

Mc Carthy’s work on the crowd fluid system began in pre-production, where he was given a few months to see if it could be done – a luxury that, were Frontier beholden to a publisher, simply wouldn’t have been possible. “They want something now,” Mc Carthy says, “and they want something that works. You don’t get to experiment.” Dealing with 30,000 alpha

record a 15-track album that plays when the camera’s zoomed right out, and also when you’re in the frontend, the music shifting slightly as you load into submenus, then syncing up perfectly with loading times so that it comes to a coda and stops as the park appears before your eyes.

The attention to detail is staggering, to the point that we wonder out loud – a little impolitely, in hindsight – if it’s all really worth it. “There’s nothing we don’t spend time on,” Croft says. “Every little detail, we want to get just right so that people’s experience is the best it can be. We’ve a very ambitious studio, and a very ambitious audio department. We want to be the best in class. You don’t do that by cutting corners.”

When we visit, staff at Frontier are hard at work on Planet coaster’s third alpha, which sees the game’s simulation elements – including that remarkable crowd – come online. It’s a significant addition to a game that debuted with modular building of coasters and scenery, then added terrain manipulation in its second alpha. The update also

“ w e’v e A v ery A mb it io u s s t u dio , A n d A v ery A m bi t io u s A u dio de pA rt me n t. w e wA n t to b e t h e b e s t in cl A s s ” backers presents its own headaches, of course, adds what looks set to be a vital component in but Wilcox recognises that were Frontier not Planet coaster’s likely appeal beyond the hardcore now fully independent, Planet coaster might coaster-builder crowd: Steam Workshop support. never have happened. A publisher would see it Bolstered by a Frontier-designed frontend that not as a nostalgia play, rather than an opportunity only brings Valve’s mod-sharing framework in-game to revisit a beloved genre of yore with 2016but also gives it a much-needed cosmetic overhaul, era production values. Instead, working under it adds an element of curation to the game. “From its own steam, Frontier is able to offer a couple a data management point of view,” Wilcox says, of generations’ worth of progress to a crowd “Workshop is awesome. From a user experience who are still playing Rct3 ten years after its point of view, it’s too much.” Frontier saves you A realtime readout lets you release – while expanding this niche’s appeal wading through the overwhelming flood of usersee a coaster’s excitement to a wider audience than ever. That would be made content by showing you what your friends and nausea values. Oldfashioned rides are unlikely no small feat given that combined sales of the have been up to. to generate much of either, Rct series are in excess of 20 million units, but While coasters and scenery can be built, part by but variety is essential Wilcox clearly feels that the stars have aligned. part, from scratch, Wilcox and team recognise that He might just have a point. not everyone wants, or is able, to do so. So you’ll be “We’ve always wanted to make a proper able to download some unfathomably intricate work management simulation again,” he says. “It’s of thrill-ride genius someone has poured dozens of hard to convince some publishers, because it hours into creating, and drop it straight into your gets too detailed – is there a market for it? park with a few clicks. “I’m not creative at all – I’m a Now we’re self-publishing, from a creative producer for a very good reason,” says – yes – point of view it’s our decision. And our mistake, producer Rich Newbold. “I prefer the management if it is a mistake. But with games like cities stuff; I’m a simulation guy, I like economies, I like skylines and Prison architect, management managing numbers. I just want to be able to simulations are back in vogue. We can make download people’s creativity, put it in my park and the game we’ve always wanted to. Production then worry about the price of burgers.” pipelines and hardware have improved. With Wilcox is especially excited about Workshop FROM TOP Head of the cloud, we can expand upon community. In support. While there is a tremendous amount of audio Jim Croft; terms of timing, it’s brilliant. Everything’s seemed innovation going on on the development floor, formal producer Rich to slot into place. It’s a dream come true.” n mod support is a truly new thing for a genre in which Newbold Extravagant creations such as this (above) may seem a little fanciful, but the tools are available to all, and the Planet Coaster community has already done remarkable work

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t h e m a k i n g o f. . .

D o o m How Id threw out its old identity, years of work and the game design rulebook to reinvent a classic

By Edward Smith Developer Id Software Publisher Bethesda Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2016

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oom. Marty Stratton had thought he’d known the meaning of the word. But only now, looking back at three years of hard development work and realising it would all have to be thrown out, did he truly understand. Binning dozens of your designers’ levels and concepts, telling the publisher you were abandoning a project and would need the money to start from scratch – this was doom.

Stratton and Id had made Hell for themselves.

It just wasn’t the kind they’d intended.

Production on what was originally called Doom 4 had started back in 2008. Stratton had overseen creative direction; John Carmack, the last of Id’s four original founders to remain at the studio, had designed and iterated Id Tech, the game’s engine. Doom was not only Id’s flagship series but one of the most famous names in all of videogames, so Stratton and his team had wanted to make the new iteration the best it could be. Which was why, come the beginning of 2012, all of their work had to be scrapped.

“It’s not that it was bad,” Stratton explains.

“I’ve worked at Id for almost 20 years and it doesn’t do anything bad. But we changed direction because, when we got to the point when the game was tangible and we were focusing on it properly, we started to question whether this was really the future of Doom.

Doom 4 had a real-world setting. You were playing along with multiple characters, it took place in a US city and there were big set-pieces.

It was very cinematic, very grand. In two words, it was a ‘more serious’ version of Doom.”

Stratton knew the game had to go, but after three years in development – and with many more now needed – he was doubtful about Doom’s future. ZeniMax Media had acquired Id in 2009; its subsidiary, Bethesda, was now the studio’s financier. If the publisher wasn’t sold on Doom’s total change of direction, it would likely pull the plug. But Bethesda signed off on production of a new, reimagined Doom.

“I give Bethesda a lot of credit for sticking with us through that period,” Stratton says. “A lot of publishers wouldn’t have supported such a big change, especially at that level of investment. It was tough. It’s one of those things, as a game developer, you never want to do.”

With years of abandoned concepts behind them, Stratton and team had a good idea of what the game was not. It wasn’t set in the real world. It wasn’t linear or scripted, and it wasn’t

and it felt a bit wrong. You didn’t get a trickle of blood – you got a fountain. But it wasn’t meanspirited. When you watched people playing the early Doom games, they were smiling. That’s something games today have stopped trying to do – make you smile. So we tapped into that reaction as early as we could.”

In the original designs for the new Doom, enemies would attack from a distance, in large spaces. It was halfway through development that the game changed pace

filled with different characters. The accepted model for contemporary shooters didn’t apply to Doom – it wasn’t Call Of Duty or Battlefield. So what was it? When modern videogame players thought the word ‘doom’, what was in their minds? Hugo Martin had the answer. A freelance character artist who’d previously worked at Naughty Dog and on the movie

“THAT’S SOMETHING GAMES TODAY HAVE STOPPED TRYING TO DO – MAkE YOU SMILE. SO WE TAPPED INTO THAT EARLY” Pacific Rim, he arrived at Id in 2013 and quickly gave Doom its unique identity.

“I spent a lot of time in intellectual property development in LA,” Martin tells us. “Everyone there has something they’re trying to develop.

They want it to be a brand that has legs, so they can have an animated series and a comic book and so on. Working there, I’d picked up a lot.

So the first night I arrived at Id, Marty and I started talking about the Doom brand. We wanted Doom to be a significant moment in pop culture, for people to look back at 2016 and think about Doom. We had hours of conversations trying to figure out what made Doom cool. We did lots of little exercises. For example, we’d go to Google, type in ‘Doom’ and see what came up. That was a great litmus test to see what consumers thought of the brand.

“The original Doom had a punk rock spirit.

It was something you played in your basement

By now, it wasn’t just the new Doom that was changing; Id Software itself was, too. In April 2013, 22 years after co-founding it, John Carmack left the studio to join Oculus VR. Martin was elevated from concept artist to art director and finally creative director of what was now simply called Doom, while Stratton was hiring in dozens of new designers and programmers to help the game take shape. What was once a top-down production – fronted by Carmack, the last remaining face of Id – became flatter and more collaborative. The initial panic following Doom 4’s cancellation was turning to cooperation and productivity.

“Taken on the surface, John’s departure felt like it was going to be a challenge,” Stratton says. “You can’t work with someone like John for as long as most of us had by that point and not have a tinge of worry. But soon after he left, I said to myself, ‘There are a lot of games out there made without John Carmack’. John, like anyone of his ilk, wanted to do things his way.

His leaving let us try other ideas. People who had worked under John were able to come forward and suggest different things.

“Plus, we were already talking to a lot of talented developers and hiring across the board.

Shortly after John left, we hired Tiago Sousa from Crytek, a super-talented engineer. And we had engineers here already who were amazing, people who had been working on Id Tech for ten or 15 years. When I started working here, I had blinkers on and thought John and people like him were magicians. But his leaving Id created a new culture, a rallying-around, team mentality. We had a whole new vision about how we could approach technology.”

One thing, however, remained a constant.

Like its 1993 namesake, when Doom launched, it had to stand at the cutting edge of graphics performance. Consequently, Id Tech 6, the latest version of John Carmack’s benchmark-setting game engine, was constantly being iterated upon and improved. Over the course of Doom’s development, Id’s technology team created 97

tHe making of...

dozens of new tools for the level and gameplay designers. Textures became more detailed, animations faster and smoother. Where typically a game developer builds or licenses an engine, then sticks to it throughout production, Id was unlocking the power of its tech as it went.

“There were a lot of times – and this speaks to the passion of the whole team – where a technology change would mean going back over old levels and updating them,” Stratton says.

“We arrived at physically based texture rendering part way through development, and that required the artists to go back and redo a lot of textures.

Again, it was one of the things, as a game developer, that you didn’t want to do. But when people saw what the technology would let them do, they put in the extra hours and tried to push it as hard as they could.”

This type of collaboration was a cornerstone of the new Id Software. Stratton, Martin and the other directors asked for – and received – a lot of hard work. In kind, everyone on the Doom team, regardless of role or seniority, was given a voice at creative meetings. “If you had good ideas and could make good contributions, we were going to have you in the meetings,” Martin says. “We’d go around the office, find all the people doing good work and make sure their work got elevated. I pulled in so many people to the stakeholder meetings, it was crazy.”

“I don’t know that Doom would have felt as unified if we’d had a formula and a massive pre-production schedule,” Stratton adds. “The way Doom came about, basically, was a lot of people being suddenly pushed together. And as long as the studio culture stayed like this – ideas can come from anywhere; best idea wins – these things kept coming. It wouldn’t have worked if we’d all been making assets individually and just throwing them over the wall.”

But even with the technology humming and the team working in unison, there was something about Doom that still wasn’t coming together.

Looking at the original game, Martin and Stratton knew the reboot needed colour, momentum and brio. Analysing the current shooter scene, it was clear that scale, customisation options and at least a modicum of story were also important. Tying it all together, however, was far from simple.

Described by Martin as “like spending three years giving birth”, perfecting the pacing and combat in Doom – essentially the game’s heart and brain –

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Q&A Hugo martin

Creative director, Id Software

From your perspective, what was the hardest part of Doom to get right?

The first ten minutes of the game. We went through so many versions. So many people worked on that intro, just to get the tone right for the rest of the game. Probably half the team was involved in that. When people say they like that opening, I feel like sagging back in my chair and saying, ‘Oh, thank God'.

How would you describe Doom’s art style and the tone it sets out?

Everything in Doom looks like it was drawn in the back of a notebook by some 15-year-old during math class. And it’s all meant to make you giggle. The canvas that is Doom is massive.

We put as much colour in as possible. We also changed the proportions of the characters. We wanted it to be violent, but in a way that was palatable. Powerpuff Girls, which I watch with my kids, has a lot of violence but because the characters are so exaggerated, it gets away with it. That’s what we wanted. That’s how we knew it would stand out.

To help modernise Doom, you created a more tangible narrative – how did you balance that with the fast pace of the action?

If the story had a goal, it was to make the character and the player both feel like badasses. And badasses don’t come through the front door. They come through the roof or the vents, like John McClane. That’s what makes the hero a hero. He does things normal people don’t have the courage to do. So we had the player, and the character, walking on rafters, climbing towers, going to places no man would want to. A lot of it had roots in the original, but it was unfamiliar, too.

required a long time, exhaustive amounts of iteration, and several unconventional solutions.

“We got to a point, about a year and a half into development, where none of the combat was feeling right,” Stratton recalls. “We were constructing levels that were very open, very flat, and you’d just have enemies who were charging at you – the maps didn’t open up lots of strategy.

However, early in development, one of our designers created a prototype, just a grey box level, which we’d called the ‘movement map’.

Originally it was to try out the double jump and the mantling systems. But we’d continued to use it throughout development. If we brought a new

enemy online, he’d get dumped in there. If we had a new gun, it’d go in there. It ended up as this kind of zoo, full of ideas. So we went back into that movement map, where enemies would spawn constantly and all around, and honestly, you couldn’t stop playing. The distance of the encounters, the multiple paths you always had and the way you could improvise and break line of sight with enemies, it was so fun.”

“There was a lot of attack and evade,” Martin tells us. “You could use the geography to get into space for a brief moment, or move around to flank enemies. The movement map captured that sense of an arena. You felt like a skater in a skate park, except you had a shotgun.” The movement map was a revelation. Now, the ideas, the designs and the levels for Doom were coming thick and fast.

“We’d found the fun,” Stratton says. “Pretty soon we were creating spaces. The concept work got into the hands of designers pretty fast and we had the guns and a lot of the enemies already in mind. There were some formulas, relating to designing arenas and breaking line of sight. And every level would have an owner, who would work on it from start to finish and give it their own stamp. But really, we just started to build it.”

“We developed a couple of mottos,” Martin adds. “‘Don’t take ourselves too seriously’ and ‘Let the game tell you what it wants’. We played the game constantly. Felt the nuances. Let it tell us what it did and didn’t need. The minute the story got serious, it wasn’t fun, so we changed it. The minute the player got slowed down by a mechanic that felt like it had to be there because other shooters had it, it wasn’t fun and we took it out. It became a contest between designers to see who could make the craziest things.”

By the time it launched, Doom was bloody, action-packed and on the bleeding edge of game-making technology – everything for which Id had hoped. Thanks to the streaming service Twitch, Martin and Stratton were able to watch, live, as players around the world tried Doom for the first time. All of them were smiling.

“They say in game development if you’re going to fail, you should fail fast,” Martin says.

“Well, we failed fast and hard, and many times.

We made a lot of difficult decisions on this game and committed to it all the way. But watching people play Doom, especially on that first night, and seeing them getting it, knowing we’d killed ourselves to make it work, that was amazing.” n

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1 The Hell maps were conceived as abstract and extra‑bloody, in the spirit of the original Doom. Other levels were more straightforward and geographically familiar.

2 The Foundry level is what Marty Stratton describes as Doom’s “beautiful corner”, a specific section of the game used to define how it would look and feel overall.

3 Doom 4, developed between 2008 and 2011 and eventually scrapped, would have been set on Earth, in a fictional American city. The finished game, like its namesake, took place on Mars.

4 Hugo Martin describes Doom’s levels as “skate parks”.

Their style originated from a prototype built to test new guns and monsters.

5 The Revenant was one of the first monster designs that Id settled upon. Chainsaw artist Rob Bast created this life‑size statue.

6 The Cyber Demon, one of three boss encounters, is significantly redesigned from the 1993 game.

In the original, it arrived several times across various levels.

7 The new game’s weapon lineup was one of the first aspects to be finalised. “On the first day I was at Id,” Martin recalls, “I played a test, with the shotgun.

Straight away, it felt good.”

8 Most of Doom’s enemies have been updated and changed. The Imp, for example, is a leaping, shrieking insect‑like creature rather than a horned demon

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studio profile

Clim a x StudioS The work-for-hire studio that’s reinventing itself at the forefront of VR production

By Ben Maxwell

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o gain access to Climax Studios’ premises, we have to enter a four-digit code into a jury-rigged keypad that sits above the lift’s standard controls. And as if to further underscore this company’s relationship with videogames, the numbers on the four keys that we need are all but rubbed off, while the remaining buttons look brand new. We’ve seen this obstacle in games before and, using a combination of the smarts gained from a recent fortnight spent breaking into buildings as Adam Jensen and, er, the receptionist telling us which combination to use, we ascend to the office unhindered. That your first act on entering the building immediately calls to mind a videogame puzzle is appropriate, but those worn-away buttons also suggest a longstanding routine.

Until recently, such a charge could be reasonably levelled at the studio. This is, after all, an independent company that owes its 28 years of stability to a solid foundation of work-for-hire projects. Its first credits, in fact, were late-’90s console ports of Warcraft II: Tides Of Darkness and Diablo, but Climax has produced its fair share of original work, too. After acquiring Brighton-based Pixel Planet in 1999, later renamed Climax Racing (a studio that went on to become the now-defunct Black Rock Studios after its acquisition by what was then Buena Vista Games in 2006), the group released a series of racers including Rally Fusion: Race Of Champions, ATV Quad Power Racing and seven MotoGP games. An early shot at an MMORPG based on the Warhammer universe, started in 2002, went awry when Games Workshop pulled the plug on funding, but the JRPG-inspired Sudeki emerged in 2004 unscathed.

one of Climax’s most notable moves, however, was taking the reins from Konami’s Team Silent, a switch that manifested in 2007’s Silent Hill: Origins, which originated in LA but was brought over to Portsmouth after a troubled start. At the time, Her Story writer and director Sam Barlow headed up a Climax team that rewrote the script, redesigned the levels and remade all of the creatures in the space of a week. Konami was pleased with the 2007 release, earning Climax a reputation as a pair of safe hands, and the breathing room to create Shattered Memories, a reimagining of the original game. Konami’s new-found trust in the studio also led to other collaborations with Climax, including Rocket Knight and the PC port of Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow.

Founded 1988 Employees 100 (UK); 20 (New Zealand) Key staff Karl Jeffrey (chairman), Simon Gardner (CEO), Rhys Cadle (design director), James Sharman (CTO) Gary Welch (art director) uRl www.climaxstudios.com Selected softography Assassin’s Creed Chronicles, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Silent Hill: Origins, Bandit Six, Bandit Six: Salvo Current projects Gunsight for Gear VR, Balloon Chair Death Match for Vive, plus Google Daydream and Tango projects

into it now. With things like Daydream and even Google Cardboard we’ve been able to operate in that space from a position of knowledge and experience and say, ‘Yeah, we know what we’re doing here’, because we’ve built considerable experience and expertise that has enabled us to spread our net in the VR space.”

Indeed, the studio has embraced the technology wholeheartedly and with gleeful platform agnosticism. Alongside several Rift ports, Climax has put out WWII shooters Bandit Six and sequel Bandit Six: Salvo on Gear VR, while Gunsight will bring retro-themed run-and-gun

The Balloon Chair Death Match team, headed up by Jolyon Leonard (far right). Climax’s small teams change regularly

The studio’s growing reputation and expertise landed it work with other prominent publishers too, leading to Eyepet & Friends, the PS3 and Vita versions of Resogun, and Dead Nation’s PS4 and Vita iterations. It’s also behind the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles trilogy, a 2.5D spinoff from the main series spanning China, India and Russia. Over the past three years, however, the studio has undergone something of a metamorphosis, ditching large team

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structures in favour of multiple, smaller projects – it currently has nine games in the works – and a zealous focus on VR and AR. “It’s nice to be at the cutting edge for once,” CEO Simon Gardner tells us. “We missed the boat with mobile – we were just way too slow.

There’s a lot of work in those early days, and it doesn’t necessarily make financial sense when you look at it on paper. So you think, ‘I’ll wait a bit’. Then, by the time you jump in, you have such a lot of catching up to do. So really that was one of the drivers for us for getting into VR. I was like, ‘I’m not going to miss this – let’s just do it’.

“But we were lucky – more through accident than design, if I’m honest. We’ve always been reasonably careful, and that’s why we’re 28 years old. We only started with one VR title, then very rapidly began our second on Oculus. We kind of fell into the mobile side of it with our Gear VR stuff and – certainly from the revenue potential and installed base in the short term – we’ve lucked out there. We’ve been doing VR for three years, and most people are only jumping

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action to the platform, taking inspiration from the Metal Slug games and the Transformers animated series. Towers For Tango is a SimTower-esque construction and management sim by Climax’s Auckland team, using Google’s Tango AR technology to bring its little people to life. Balloon Chair Death Match for Vive sees players try to shoot out each other’s flotation aids with a revolver while navigating a high-rise city. The studio is also working on an unannounced project for Google’s forthcoming Daydream.

“We’ve had to learn flexibility,” Gardner says. “We don’t start an 80-person project now and think, ‘OK, that’s it for the next three-and-ahalf years’. That will change, of course – as this technology expands, the teams will grow and the projects will get bigger. But at the moment, the teams are about ten people, peaking at between 15 and 25 depending on the size of the project.

That’s tiny compared to a console game.”

That shift has had an inevitable and profound effect on the studio culture that defines Climax, which has found a new lease of life since

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studio profile

Climax is expanding as it moves to maintain its place at the head of the emerging VR market.

Thanks to sizeable investment in the sector, the studio has lined up a wide range of VR and AR projects, and CEO Simon Gardner expects the audience for such titles to grow rapidly

focusing on VR and AR. A number of staff have moved on to other companies as the opportunities to work on larger console projects dropped off, and Gardner and his management team have repositioned former specialists into new, more generalised roles as new working practices have been adopted.

“It’s been a great opportunity to promote people within the studio, to give them more responsibility within projects,” Gardner says.

“I’m a great believer in giving people a go at stuff and helping them – giving them the opportunities so they can expand their abilities, and it keeps their job fresh and interesting.”

“When we started Gunsight, it felt exactly like when I first started in the industry making games on PS1,” says ian hudson, Gunsight’s lead designer. “The biggest team I worked on was probably Split/Second, and there were 100-and-something people on that, and it was over two floors of the office. Gunsight is just a few rows of desks, and things get changed really quickly – you can try things without affecting loads of other people, and decisions are made quickly as a result.”

having so many teams in the same building means that collaboration is easy, giving teams a leg up when they collide with UI or gameplay issues in VR that another team has solved previously. But it has also brought about a more tumultuous distribution of talent as employees intermingle and switch teams as projects and deadlines require – a system that also has social benefits, since everyone gets to work with everyone else, rather than existing in silos.

“When you work in smaller teams, you get more ownership of your stuff, and people care and are more motivated, which is reflected in the end product,” says Jolyon leonard, senior designer on Balloons. “[And working with VR]

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blows a whole bunch of traditional game design ideas out of the window – they just don’t work any more. You have all these problems and you don’t know how to fix them, so I’m having to learn everything from scratch again. I love it – it’s rekindled my love for my job.”

While Climax has found a comfortable space in which to operate, switching from a predominantly work-for-hire studio to a market that, despite huge corporate and publisher investment, remains an unproven one, might be seen as a risky approach. Gardner, however, takes a different view of the situation.

“I don’t think we’ve felt vulnerable at all in this transition,” he says. “The exact opposite, in fact –

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it’s just filled us with confidence. Be under no illusion: even porting a game is really hard and technically difficult. And we have some of the best people in coding working in the game industry because the types of things they have to do are so complex. But the people we’ve got have been able to take this stuff in their stride.

Yes, it’s all new, but it hasn’t felt risky at all.”

And Climax hasn’t entirely abandoned its past. During our visit, we also see a couple of as-yet-unannounced traditional console projects in development. Meanwhile, the studio’s formidable technical knowledge has positioned it as a kind of unsung hero of the industry.

“We’re doing engineering work for people all the time – it’s something we rarely get recognition for,” Gardner says. “If other companies are having problems, we quite

often get brought in by the publisher to add our expertise and knowledge. That’s not to say we’re better than they are, it’s just we can maybe focus on something that then frees up the team to finish the game. Bug fixing, for example, or content creation. Interface is another big thing we do – it’s a big part of how you get information across.

Because we use multiple engines, we’ve got lots of experience across platforms, and those are skills we’ve honed over 30 years.”

Gardner’s excitement for the future, and his obvious pride in Climax’s achievements and the people that work here, are tempered by a modesty that runs through the company’s DNA. This is a studio that’s happy to help others

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achieve their best work without taking any of the credit, and Gardner’s outward confidence in Climax’s grasp of VR shouldn’t be mistaken for unchecked arrogance.

“It’s always nice when people know about things that you’ve made and things that you’re doing – getting recognition from your peer group,” he says when we ask about how he sees the company’s profile today. “It’s nice when people say, ‘Hey, I’ve heard you guys are doing some really interesting stuff’. We didn’t get that when Climax was a work-for-hire studio. And we genuinely do believe that [VR and AR] is going to turn into something that touches everybody’s lives. But we’ll see how we do with Balloon Chair Death Match. If it’s the success we hope it will be, then that will open a new chapter on where we’re going.” n

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1 Rocket Knight was the third game in Konami’s series, which began in the 16bit days. 2 Gunsight is a shooter in which you target enemies by looking at them.

3 Initially released on PSP, Silent Hill: Origins was a prequel to the original game. 4 A fluffy asset from a Climax-built showcase of Amazon’s Lumberyard engine VR tech. 5 The Assassin’s Creed Chronicles trilogy puts a 2.5D spin on the series. 6 Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was a new take on the original title. 7 Smart As… is a brain-training game for Vita.

8 AR title Towers For Tango

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REVIEWS. PERSPECTIVES. INTERVIEWS. AND SOME NUMBERS STILL PLAYING Elite Dangerous PC Anybody underwhelmed by No Man’s Sky’s current condition should look to Frontier’s game and take heart at just how far it’s come since launch. The latest update allows you to hire crew to pilot deployable attack craft, or look after your ship while you do, while an alien wreck has been discovered by hardy explorers. That’s all very well, but is it OK that we’re more excited about the prospect of ferrying tourists around the galaxy in space buses?

Red Dead Redemption Xbox One Microsoft’s 360 backwards compatibility initiative continues to provide much-needed incentive to turn on our Xbox Ones – every login is met with an old friend to revisit – but now Rockstar’s marvellous open-world western is available, nothing else will get a look in. Despite its age, Red Dead is still a beautiful game, and remains the warmest, most believable world Rockstar has crafted.

Dishonored: Definitive Edition Xbox One Has there ever been a more playful explanation of stealth mechanics than Dishonored’s extracurricular game of hide and seek with Emily? Heading back to Dunwall to refresh our memories for this month’s cover feature also revealed how well Arkane’s game stands up four years later. Sure, the tech’s looking a little long in the tooth, even with the Definitive Edition’s bells and whistles, but moving through Corvo’s world is as delightful as ever.

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for extra Play content

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REVIEWED THIS ISSUE 106 No Man’s Sky PC, PS4

110 The Turing Test PC, Xbox One

112 Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 PC, PS4, Xbox One

114 Metroid Prime: Federation Force 3DS

116 The King Of Fighters XIV PS4

118 Unbox PC

121 Batman: The Telltale Series – Episode One 360, Android, iOS, PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One

123 Hue

PC, PS4, Vita, Xbox One

Nostalgia play It’s a heck of a month for players of a certain vintage. For all that this is a medium defined by, and inextricably wedded to, the forward march of technology, developers aren’t afraid to use more powerful hardware to riff off the past, rather than look to the future.

Some do both. To those of you grey enough about the temples to remember when it was your imagination, rather than a procedural algorithm, that filled in the blanks between Elite’s stark vectors, No Man’s Sky (p106), despite its problems, feels like a childhood dream come true. Though, admittedly, we don’t remember fantasising about being a spacefaring carbon-gatherer.

If you’re a little too young for that to resonate, first of all, congratulations and enjoy it while you can. Then, perhaps we can point you to Unbox (p118), which doesn’t so much pay tribute to the mid-’90s 3D platformer as completely reprise it, albeit with a lick of 2016-era polygonal paint and a sprawling approach to level design that 32bit-console processors could never match. Playing a little closer to that visual template is the, er, ‘lo-fi’ Metroid Federation Force (p114), a sort of spiritual successor to Metroid Prime that loses out to its 14-year-old predecessor in more than just aesthetics.

Warp back 30 years and offer an Elite player No Man’s Sky and they would bite your hand off; likewise a Banjo-Kazooie fan for Unbox. Yet travel back a quarter of a century and offer an arcade-goer a Pac-Man game in which you can jump, fight bosses and – heavens – brake and they would probably send you packing. It shouldn’t work, yet Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 is this month’s star: a game that drags an old idea into the present, kicking and screaming, and gets almost everything right. Perhaps the future looks bright after all.

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play

No Man’s Sky

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hile No Man’s Sky delivers on its promise of lushly forested planets populated by strange and unique indigenous creatures, the most affecting moments in Hello Games’ ambitious space adventure occur further from the seeds of life. Despite the added time pressure of an issue cycle bisected by Gamescom, we find ourselves spending an inordinate amount of time stood on clifftops looking out over barren, but astonishing, landscapes. The rocky, Prussianblue surface of a planet baked dry by a nearby sun that sits in pink and turquoise skies, for example. Or the one in which undulating, dark purple tubes of rock snake across a craggy landscape bathed in a green-blue dusk.

And then there’s that memorable, deep-red sphere whose horizon melts into an amber firmament that is broken by giant, towering pillars of copper. No game has ever made us feel quite this alone, or this small.

But despite the scale of No Man’s Sky’s playground, it’s best sampled as a short journey punctuated by lingering stopovers. In fact, if you commit to one of the game’s narrative threads, it’s possible to reach the centre of the galaxy in relatively short order. And for all the dizzying potential diversity contained within the clever algorithms at the game’s core, attempting to see too much of it inevitably begins to unpick the captivating spell this galaxy initially casts.

The game begins with us waking next to a crashed spaceship, a plume of smoke denoting a host of shot systems that will keep it, and us, grounded for the time being. The first order of business is to set about repairing the damage, and it’s here that the fundaments of No Man’s Sky’s gameplay make themselves explicit.

Every component in your ship and exosuit can be crafted, repaired and fuelled by materials collected from plants and mined from the ground. You extract the various elements on No Man’s Sky’s embellished periodic table using your multitool – a mining gun, laser beam and environmental scanner rolled into one convenient package. Most plant matter yields carbon, while iron can be pulled from the majority of rocks and boulders. Rarer elements, meanwhile, such as aluminium, gold and the fictional heridium can be found in pillars that rise from – or float above – the ground and in larger asteroids and crystal formations.

In an appealing touch, the conditions of your starting planet will affect how your early forays play out, and influence what you prioritise. The sphere we begin on, for example, is a less-than-balmy -56 degrees centigrade during the day, which places a heavy load on our suit’s environmental shielding. A more hospitable environment would allow for a more leisurely pace of exploration, but we must regularly duck into caves or hop back into our ship’s cockpit in order to avoid freezing to death. The final push for heridium – which, on the three occasions we start the game, is always a

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Developer Hello Games Publisher SIE, Hello Games Format PC, PS4 Release Out now

No matter what form creatures take, there’s little in the way of unique behaviour to observe

slow-moving nine minutes’ walk away – is a fraught journey even without aggressive wildlife to contend with.

Once the ship is up and running, the game is a little too keen to get you into space, our next two objectives being to go into orbit, and then jump out of the system altogether. While some players will be eager to travel, at this early point we’re far from done exploring our first planet, let alone the two or three others in this closely grouped solar system. We choose to ignore the insistent requests that remain in the bottom right of our screen and set about scanning every creature and planet we can find with the multitool’s inbuilt analysis visor.

Everything you discover and scan nets you a small payment of credits, with further remuneration for uploading your finds in the pause menu. Plants and rocks are worth 500 credits, creatures between 1,000 and 2,000, while systems provide a 5,000-credit windfall. If you manage to find all of the animal species on a planet – each species contains a number of variants, but you only need one example to tick off the order – you’ll get a sizeable bonus payment.

Discovering and naming things that no other player, nor even the game’s developers, has ever seen is intoxicating at first, and we hoover up every bit of data we can find from that first rock. But committed naturalists will start to notice repetition quickly. No two animals are ever exactly alike, but you’ll spot similar structures and body parts after only a few planets. There’s plenty of strange and wonderful life to discover along the way, but it’s rarely graceful, and no matter what form creatures take, there’s little in the way of unique behaviour to observe.

Plants are even more similar system to system.

Part of this is down to smart gameplay design: zinc can always be found in drooping yellow, single-pistil flowers, for example, while thamium9 sits in fruiting, multi-headed red plants. They’ll have a different name on each planet, but vary little aesthetically or structurally. While this makes sense from a design perspective, the less-specialised carbon-yielding groups also tend to sit within a narrow spectrum of shapes and sizes. A few outliers will surprise you, but a growing sense of uniformity, combined with their low discovery value and the fact the analysis visor can’t be upgraded or its process accelerated, means that we soon stop bothering to scan plants at all. You have to upload each discovery individually, too, quickly making the whole thing feel like busywork rather than adventure.

Mine too heavily or kill too many creatures and a host of environmentalist drones will make their presence known. Escaping is simple enough, and shooting back will also prevent reinforcements being called, but on-foot combat is rarely enjoyable. Finding drones on every planet and moon also contributes to

ABove Ruins are scattered about planets and allow you to learn alien words. They’re also points of contact for a mysterious power. leFT various structures provide shelter from harsh conditions, as well as the opportunity to trade or locate other points of interest

Below Caves are spectacular sights initially, but turn out to be among the least variable ecosystems from planet to planet

ABove No Man’s Sky’s inventory and crafting system is smartly devised, if hardly intuitive, but space comes at a premium early on and proves cripplingly limited. Poke around enough and you’ll soon find upgrades

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the ever-building sameness that weighs more and more heavily on your wanderlust.

Each planet contains a variety of structures, such as giant trading posts, observatories, manufacturing facilities and ruins. There are supplies and save points at most, along with the possibility of discovering or being given new technologies for your suit, ship and multitool, and either trading computers or aliens, which allow you to buy or sell resources, tech and rarer trading items. You’ll only ever encounter one alien at a time, and they’re always rooted to the spot, but their presence offers welcome respite from the loneliness of your journey. But, as with so many aspects, over-exposure begins to grate as you start to see repeated passages of text, already know the answer to riddles or problems they set, and wrestle with the agonisingly slow process of engaging with them. On each occasion, the UI elements for trading fade in one by one, you’re forced to use two separate inventories for what’s in your suit and ship, and selecting an option requires you to hold the button down as a circular meter fills.

Away from conversations, however, those dual inventories provide an engaging management minigame.

Each slot in your suit can hold 250 of any resource, while your ship’s slots can hold 500 each. As long as you’re in range of the craft, you can teleport any items in your possession between the two inventories, aspiring to the most efficient use of your upgradeable, but minimal, available space. Any tech you install will take up a slot, too, so you’ll have to decide whether the ability to stay underwater for longer or a higher resistance to toxic environments outweighs your capacity to cart valuable trading items. Further to this,

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No Man’s Sky frequently throws incredible views at you, both from the air and the land, although a heavy-handed loD system – which is at its most prominent when you descend to a planet – is both distracting and ugly

OOlON COlluphid

One of the most intriguing aspects of No Man’s Sky is its language system. There are three primary alien races you’ll spend time conversing with, and you’ll initially have no knowledge of their dialects.

Guess correctly, visit ruins and obelisks, and seek out cultural references, however, and you’ll gradually learn individual words that will stand out from the otherwise indecipherable collection of glyphs onscreen.

As you piece together languages, your standing with each race will increase and new options will be opened to you. The process genuinely endears you to each race, and we found ourselves with a particular affinity for the Gek simply because trawling our starting planet yielded a good 20 or so Gek words.

upgrades all stack, and placing them adjacent to tech of the same type will proffer an additional bonus. If you commit to searching out exosuit capacity upgrades and saving for a larger ship, much of the system’s initial stress can be mitigated, but you’ll still need to prioritise your kit based on your particular play style.

Offworld, space flight feels epic, and combat, while lightweight, is thrilling for the most part. Your view will zoom a little when you target an enemy, and you can switch between phase beams and photon cannons depending on what you’ve installed. The inability to move the camera more than a few degrees can be frustrating, but an Elite-style radar means you can easily keep track of enemy positions and enjoy the spectacular explosions that occur when you down them.

But these encounters highlight a problem with the need to refuel every aspect of your ship’s tech, as when you lose your shields you’ll have to dive into the inventory, locate your shield, click on it, and then click on one of the appropriate resources to repair it. There’s every chance you’ll be dead before the process is complete.

Despite its sizeable achievements, No Man’s Sky is beset with niggling problems. But while some poorly designed systems and mechanics chip away at your patience, the feeling of flying seamlessly from space down to a peninsula you spotted from orbit never fails to enthrall. And for all the familiarity you’ll experience despite travelling hundreds of light years, the pull of the unknown raises the pulse on each planetfall.

Ultimately, No Man’s Sky feels like a foundation 6 for a vision that’s yet to be fully realised.

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post Script When accessibility and simplicity share the same space, who wins?

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etting around No Man’s Sky’s galaxy is almost frictionless. Epic journeys from planet to planet or across light years between solar systems are executed with the tap of a button (or two), requiring you to do little but point the nose in the general direction of your intended destination and hold on to something. It means hopping between colossal celestial bodies is a trifling matter. Which is not to say that the result doesn’t feel epic. That, even compared to other space-based games, it manages to delivers sights that feel fresh is a remarkable technical achievement.

It’s an experience born out of the idea of a boundaryless galaxy that lets you explore at every scale.

Yet while the experience of landing on a new planet never fails to get the blood flowing, the whole process feels a little detached. Sure, the occasional oddly shaped asteroid might tempt you into a brief detour, and aggressive pirates will sometimes pull you out of warp speed to have a pop at acquiring your cargo, but for the most part there’s little to do while the stars flick past your spaceship’s canopy. It’s symptomatic of a wider malaise that runs through every aspect of the game. Decisions on whether or not to streamline processes feel a little off.

When we reviewed Elite Dangerous, we praised Frontier’s unflinching embrace of the mundane, necessary aspects it imagines might go hand in hand with advanced space travel. Asking for landing permission at a space station, for example, and carefully managing your quite terrifying velocity so that you don’t overshoot a destination, bringing your speed down gradually to make your approach as efficient on time and fuel as possible. Even using a scanner in Dangerous requires you to interact with your ship’s complex cockpit HUD and menus for auxiliary systems.

In No Man’s Sky, everything is handled for you.

You’ll be slowed automatically when you’re next to a space station or breaching the atmosphere of a planet.

Landing is as simple as tapping a button and letting your ship’s autopilot worry about the logistics.

Planetary flight is simplified, too, as your ship will stick to a minimum height above the planet’s surface.

You can barrel roll using the left and right shoulder buttons, but don’t expect heart-in-mouth dashes through canyons, loop-the-loops around natural bridge formations, or ill-advised rocket-propelled spelunking.

No Man’s Sky isn’t designed to deliver those things.

At first, the stripped-down mechanics feel like a boon, with little standing in the way of your voracious appetite for exploration and the procedurally generated wonders that lie ahead. But after a short time, the shallow nature of the mechanics of flight start to feel

oppressive, and subsequently repetitive. There’s pleasure in discovering somewhere new, and there’s certainly excitement in anticipating what might await along the way, but there’s little to be derived from the actual act of flying or travelling itself. Your wings are clipped above planet surfaces, and moving in a straight line between planets is, mechanically at least, joyless.

This is a particular shame given the fun involved in the sporadic dogfights, but even these are marred by the decision to lock your viewpoint to a scant few degrees of forward-facing movement.

Your wings are clipped above planet surfaces, and moving in a straight line between planets is, mechanically at least, joyless

The meat of the game instead lies in inventory management and resource gathering. A smartly devised setup plays like a simple board game in which careful placement of components proffers bonuses, and available space must be juggled with resources and other finds. But while the rough edges of some parts of the game are smoothed almost to the point of banality, here there’s a stultifying lack of shortcuts when they’re needed. Tinkering with your setup in the safety of a space station or some harmless planet is diverting enough. But when you find yourself with failing shields in the middle of a huge space battle and must manually, and laboriously, dip into your inventory – which doesn’t pause the game – to recharge it, your final moments will be occupied with a longing for some kind of quick command.

On terra firma, there are similar problems to worry about. If you choose to focus on mining for resources, there are plenty of upgrades to build for your multitool to expedite the process, but the fact that everything you own is fuelled or repaired by gathered resources means that it never feels like you spend any less time hoovering elements out of the ground. There are some shortcuts put in place for later on in your journey – Atlas-Pass-gated cargo and doors, for instance, will often yield rare resources or more complex components that save you the effort of mining the constituent parts. But by the time you reach that point, you’ll have a great deal of the relatively shallow pool of available technology already installed. The Analysis Visor, meanwhile, with which you must scan fauna and flora, enjoys no such streamlining and remains a clunky tool throughout – so much so, in fact, that scanning individual animals and plants soon loses its allure. The result is that anyone set on the idea of earning their credits solely through exploration and categorisation will find themselves in a disadvantageous position. Rather than freeing players by removing complexity from their journey, No Man’s Sky’s uneven approach to simplification ends up feeling like a burden in itself. n 109

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The Turing Test

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hese tests, we’re told, are beyond the capacity of machines; they can only be solved by a human brain. Well, perhaps not this one. Oh, we get there in the end – it turns out that this isn’t an example of needlessly finicky puzzle design so much as a reminder to look up occasionally – but it’s enough for us to concede that maybe we don’t represent the ideal of intelligent behaviour to which Turing’s paper referred.

Such sticking points are, thankfully, rare, which says much for the elegant escalation of challenge and complexity in Bulkhead Interactive’s designs – not least since it’s all accomplished without a word of assistance.

These conundrums are built around the transferral of control, as you use a gun-shaped Energy Manipulation Tool (EMT) to vacuum up and launch energy orbs from one power source to another.

At first, that means nothing more taxing than finding a door that’s held open and removing its energy source to power another that lies between you and the exit. Then the number of doors increases while your supply of orbs shrinks. Some orbs reside within cubes that must be transported manually to their destination.

It’s only really this physical element that would seem to disallow machines from taking part; otherwise these all appear to be single-solution logic problems. The most efficient option tends to be the only one.

This central mechanic features to the end, but as you pass from one area to the next, it’s steadily accompanied by more new elements. Purple and green orbs lack the consistent power of their blue counterparts, flicking on and off – though that makes them ideal for objects you don’t necessarily want to remain in place. Reds, meanwhile, lack staying power, supplying just enough energy for you to cross a light bridge, perhaps, but running out of juice within seconds of you reaching the other side. There are levers to move giant magnets and reposition walkways, pressure plates to weigh down, and beams of light controlling hydraulic platforms whose path you may need to temporarily obstruct. To this end and more, you’ll later be able to interface with a robot ally and CCTV cameras – as long as you maintain an unbroken line of sight – both of which can trigger electronic switches that can’t be manually activated.

But wait, weren’t these tests designed for human brains? We appear to have been misled. Then again, that’s kind of the point: EMT no longer seems such a functional name when you consider the wider meaning of that M. From the outset it’s clear your mission was never likely to be straightforward. As astronaut Ava Turing investigates an ISA research facility on Jupiter’s moon of Europa, ostensibly to look for its missing occupants, the warning signs are obvious as soon as you touch down. Take, for example, your seemingly friendly AI guide, Tom. He is courteous and polite as he and Ava converse between each puzzle room, but a couple of

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Developer Bulkhead Interactive Publisher Square Enix Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now

He is courteous and polite, but a couple of hours in you’re already half expecting him to break into Daisy, Daisy

seven asides

Each of the main chapters outside the prologue and epilogue contains an optional puzzle that lies off one of the corridors between the puzzle chambers. You’ll quickly understand why they’ve been kept apart from the main tests, as most of them are a little out of step with the rest: some are simple, while others are a lot more time-consuming. They are, however, worth taking time out to complete, often expanding upon themes that crop up in dialogue between Tom and Ava: one leads to a Chinese room, another to scattered pages pertaining to Alan Turing’s research. Others function as standalone challenges, including one extended puzzle based on Boolean algebra. Don’t worry: a bit of backtracking aside, the latter isn’t as tricky as it sounds.

hours in you’re already half expecting him to break into Daisy, Daisy. In truth, the hints of a quiet, underlying malevolence come a little too soon, but your unease grows as you listen in to audio logs of earlier exchanges between Tom and the ISA crew. There’s something simultaneously childish and chilling as Tom concludes an argument by saying, “You’re not better than me,” even though his argument is rooted in the logic of his programming. “It is not a threat,” he insists in another, in a way that deeply implies the opposite.

Even so, the story doesn’t quite go where you’re expecting and the weighty philosophical, ethical and moral quandaries that come into play as the real reason for your mission crystallises are intelligently handled.

If occasionally it feels as if you’re being lectured by a student majoring in thought experiments, and the dialogue is too on-the-nose, there are passages that resonate – notably an observation about the controlling influence of social stimuli on our decision-making. And while you’ll have an idea of the story’s destination well before it gets there, the writers confound expectations in the game’s climactic moments, leading players to assume they’ll be forced to make a final choice, before replacing it with another. Its ambiguities raise a number of questions, not least in inviting you to consider your own role. Who, exactly, is in control here?

There’s plenty to think about, then, but the more you do, the wider the cracks grow in its austere façade.

Tom, we’re told, can’t solve these puzzles, because he’s not permitted to think laterally. And yet rarely are you given the opportunity to consider a conundrum from a creative new angle. Only once, in the later stages, are you called to react against the game’s conditioning, to think about an object in a different way to solve an outwardly simplistic stumper. And on a foundational level, the fact ten of these rooms lie between each area of the facility is one leap of logic that’s never resolved: it’s like negotiating the most ludicrously extended and convoluted security procedure ever devised.

That’s symptomatic of a wider disconnect between systems and story. As a two-hander involving a test subject and an enigmatic AI, it’s difficult not to draw comparisons with Portal. Valve’s game found a way to embed its narrative within the walls of its challenges; here, conversations between Tom and Ava stop and only restart once a sector is completed, with a late-game barrage of audio logs to fill in the gaps. Longer, more elaborate tests kill the pacing, too – just as the truth seems to be getting closer, you’re forced to spend 20 minutes in a single room, solving a slightly more complex variation on the kind of puzzle you’ve been tackling for several hours. There’s promise in The Turing Test’s constituent parts, but considered 6 as a whole, it fails the imitation game.

ABOVE The initial drop to Europa feels disappointingly flat, with little sense of weight or impact. Given the limited budget, we didn’t expect another Adrift, but landing on icy moons shouldn’t feel quite so pedestrian MAIN If in doubt, follow the wires – though that’s easier said than done when they spread across an entire level. With multiple rooms and doors in most chambers, you’ll save a lot of time by exploring as far as you can before returning to the entrance in order to formulate a plan.

ABOVE The base is inevitably rather sterile, but some decent lighting effects and reflections enliven all those clean white surfaces. The deliberate visual glitches when you’re viewing a room from the perspective of a camera or robot are neat touches, too. lEFT Tom’s interjections rarely last much longer than it takes to size up a room, which makes solving puzzles a quiet, lonely experience.

A moody soundtrack will sometimes fade in, but otherwise all you’ll hear is the whoosh and hiss of electronic mechanisms powering up and down, along with the occasional rattle as an energy cube tumbles to the floor

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Pac-Man Championship Edition 2

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ait a minute: Pac-Man can brake? That the tutorial detailing the changes in this edition runs through 18 separate steps should give you a clue as to extent of Bandai Namco’s tinkering.

If not, it’s confirmed by the presence of a button that brings to a halt a character whose momentum has only previously been curtailed by walls. Pac-Man Championship Edition 2 doesn’t appear to be drifting away from first principles so much as sprinting headlong in the opposite direction. Yet before too long, what at first feels more like a Benny Hill chase than an elegant game of cat and mouse reveals itself to be another fine reinvention of this ageless classic.

Championship Edition 2 builds upon the sleeping ghosts mechanic, as seen in 2010’s CE DX: pass by slumbering spirits and they’ll be added to the chain trailing behind Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde. But now the mazes are more rigid. Rather than gulping down all the dots in one half to transform the other, you need to traverse both sides, consuming enough dots to trigger the fruit’s appearance in the maze’s centre – which, once eaten, transports you to the next. And rather than power pills appearing throughout, you must earn them.

Things are different once you’ve turned the tables, too. Ghosts don’t slow down once they’re vulnerable, showing far more urgency in their attempts to lose you than before, though translucent lines will show the routes they’re likely to take, allowing you to head them off. Eat the leader and the train will follow them down the hatch, adding numbers to the remaining trains, until the fourth is gobbled up. Each time you connect with the head of the train, the camera will adopt an angled 3D perspective to show you demolishing the rest.

In most mazes, the trails of dots form a clear racing line. This, together with the transitions as you descend from one maze to the next, suggest someone at Namco has been playing a lot of Pix The Cat. You do, however, get more wiggle room here, and straying from the most obvious route isn’t automatically fatal for your score; indeed, as bombs now bump Pac-Man to the centre of the map rather than remove ghosts from your path, you can actively factor them more into your strategy.

If the bombs and sleeping ghosts felt iconoclastic in DX, then CE2’s final key ingredient is tantamount to blasphemy: hitting a ghost is no longer automatically fatal. In practice, it’s a logical extension of DX’s slo-mo feature, whereby the pace would temporarily drop whenever a collision was imminent, allowing you a brief window to take evasive action before your combo was lost. With potentially four trains on screen at once and the pace accelerating from fast to breakneck within half a minute, it’s a smart decision to let our ghostbusting hero get away with actual physical contact. A collision on anything below Extreme difficulty has little effect, giving you space to course correct, but if you persist

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rather than reversing you’ll enrage the ghost in question. The effect here is twofold: you’ll bounce them into the air, letting you continue in the same direction, but you’ll enrage them in the process. They’ll get quicker and more aggressive, and if you hit them while they’re glowing, you’ll lose a life. More ruinously, your score per pellet will reset to zero.

It’s a reminder that the Championship Edition

What at first feels more like a Benny Hill chase reveals itself to be another fine reinvention of this classic

games have transformed a series that was originally about pure survival to one where the focus has shifted towards chasing high scores. And because first contact is never fatal, and the tempo never drops – Pac-Man can hit the skids, sure, but that’s more about evasion than controlling the pace – it’s easier than ever to achieve a state of flow, where you’re playing on instinct, making snap decisions without thinking, all for the sake of building momentum and, with it, a score big enough to reach the upper echelons of the leaderboards.

Considered in that light, the brake becomes the game’s most misleading feature. It’s not a pause for breath; rather, it’s a simpler way to slow your approach to a junction than wiggling the stick back and forth. It’s still a game that requires you to process a lot of visual information quickly and respond to it. Here, Namco is simply giving you more ways than ever before to do just that, without once taking your foot off the gas. The first difficulty setting self-describes as “a casual, fun stage for beginners” – well, it’s all relative (Extreme gets rid of 1ups and a single nudge is enough to enrage a ghost) but even here, this is a game that feels designed for those who found CE DX a little too slow and easy.

As before, there are several varieties of maze, with scoring consistent across all game types. The layouts of Hexagon and Mountain are fairly self-explanatory, while Highway has plenty of warp tunnels on either side of the map and Junction offers escape routes at the top and bottom. Trouble is hard to avoid in Dungeon’s claustrophobic spaces, while Championship I recreates the course used in the Pac-Man World Championships.

Jumping will likely be the most divisive mode, with springs bouncing you across the map. It’s fine on other mazes where the landing point is obvious, but here you’ll need to trace the arc of a leap that might take you down and across. In a game where there’s already plenty to keep your eye on, it might just be an idea too many.

An Adventure mode that has you completing a series of short missions against a strict time limit offers a similar kinetic rush in bite-sized form, by which time any initial misgivings will probably have melted away. For some, this exhilarating sequel won’t quite topple the excellent DX, but at a time when many of his contemporaries have long since entered retirement, it’s a pleasure to see Pac-Man still 8 here, refusing to grow old gracefully.

ABOVE There are boss stages in Adventure mode, with giant translucent ghosts that hover above the field of play, periodically slamming down on the maze and enraging the smaller ghosts

TOP Who’d have imagined Pac-Man would ever embrace the cinematic cutaway? The transition from 2D to 3D for these so-called gobblefests isn’t elegant, but it’s a strangely satisfying flourish all the same.

MAIN Corner-sparking remains, letting you gain a slight boost by turning just before you reach a junction. At first, you’ll barely notice the difference – unless a ghost is right on your tail – but to achieve high-level play it’s an essential technique to master.

RIGHT As in DX, each different mode has its own default visual style, but you can mix and match, and select from a range of musical themes. More can be unlocked, but they require good scores across all game types and difficulty settings

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Metroid Prime: Federation Force

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ell, our 3DS hasn’t exploded. We haven’t considered quitting games for good. And, believe it or not, our fond memories of Metroid Prime remain entirely unsullied. How odd.

Wasn’t Federation Force the game destined to ruin not just a much-loved series, but to bring down Nintendo and destroy the medium, too? Away from the howls of disgust and horror that greeted its announcement, Federation Force is far from the absolute disaster it was immediately assumed to be; nor is it the kind of game to inspire feverish devotion. It’s a firstperson co-op adventure that hardly disgraces the Metroid name it should never have been lumbered with, even though it falls some way short of the series’ finest outings.

Having been handed such a poisoned chalice, some credit must go to the small team at Next Level Games.

The Metroid name is a little more than just a wrapper, and not only because its light story elements ground it within the fiction of the universe. The default control scheme, for example, will be familiar to those who played the GameCube edition of Prime: you move and turn with the left stick, hold the left shoulder to lock on and strafe, and the right shoulder to fine-tune your aim.

It works a treat, such that our experiment with the alternative – which uses the newer 3DS models’ tiny analogue nub for a more traditional twin-stick style – lasted less than a single mission. You’re piloting a mobile suit, so there’s a heft to your actions that give it a more deliberate pace than the Prime games, but the feel is comparable. It also upholds another series tradition: a strong, reliable firstperson jump.

The setup for every mission can be roughly summed up thus: the Space Pirates are up to no good. Yet there’s surprising variety in their staging. You’ll infiltrate enemy bases, protect a terminal as it uploads valuable data, prevent a marauding creature from toppling a Federation probe, and take down missile transports before they can deliver their payload. Some have lastminute surprises; others have environmental puzzles or rudimentary stealth interludes; all have optional side objectives that you’ll need to complete to achieve the ultimate target of three medals. These aren’t just for show. Earn enough and you’ll unlock new slots for suit modifications, which are found within each stage, usually off the critical path, or awarded upon destroying stronger enemies. Increased frost damage is worth equipping if you’re carrying plenty of freeze missiles, or if you’d rather assume the role of healer then you’ll benefit from the mod that lets you regain health whenever you aid a damaged ally.

Three seems to be the magic number when it comes to players, too, making for a manageable challenge without too much getting in one another’s way. Most missions are doable with two: though it can get hectic on occasion, you’ll share a pair of hovering drones that

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Developer Next Level Games Publisher Nintendo Format 3DS Release Out now

It’s a firstperson co-op adventure that hardly disgraces the Metroid name it should never have been lumbered with

will automatically fire at nearby threats. Anyone thinking of going it alone may wish to reconsider. Next Level Games assumes an extra drone and a mod that doubles offensive output and halves the damage you receive will compensate for the absence of help. On some levels, that suffices, though boss encounters become much more attritional, and when you’re being attacked from multiple angles you simply have to suck up the hits. Others refuse to make any allowances. The very worst forces you to carry an object through a level, restricting your ability to attack and slowing you down considerably. A single hit is enough to knock it from your grasp, so naturally the game repeatedly spawns cloaked enemies between you and the dropoff point.

Needless to say, the par time was untroubled until we attempted it with a partner; with one trooper now protecting the carrier, we finished it with room to spare.

It works better offline than on, too, since the ability to discuss tactics makes a crucial difference.

With voice chat absent, online communication is limited to a handful of messages, with four mapped to the D-pad. As such, missions can devolve into farce if you’re not on the same page. Crossed wires can’t, however, account for the sometimes ponderous pacing, nor the awkward contrivances of certain objectives.

One mission presents the most laughably inefficient reloading method we’ve ever seen, as you shoot to push cannonballs up narrow ramps towards catapults to fend off a pursuing gunship.

Otherwise, the set-pieces are nicely mounted, though they don’t offer much in the way of spectacle.

The art style does it few favours: it’s necessarily simplistic, perhaps, to keep everything running smoothly for four players, but it comes at the cost of the atmosphere the audio and encounter design work hard to sustain. The guttural growl of a Space Pirate should be unsettling, but it’s hard to fear the angular model behind it. Likewise, the belated arrival of the Metroids.

Their threat to your survival might be more apparent once they latch onto your mech and you’re mashing B to shake them off, but they never feel like the terrifying creations they’re painted as. The aesthetic doesn’t always keep the action readable, either. You’ll see pink bolts flashing in your general direction, but when you’re strafing, it’s pot luck whether or not you take a hit.

Oddly enough, at its best, Federation Force most resembles Destiny. Its rhythms are similar, with tense, quiet moments followed by extended bursts of fierce action; both have small groups working together against the odds, reviving fallen comrades en route to scraping a hard-fought victory. But most of the time, it’s another Tri Force Heroes – a reasonable co-op multiplayer that’s much less fun on your own. After all that fuss 6 and fury, there’s little to get worked up about.

Right blast ball, the frantic multiplayer aside that was released on the eShop for free, is here, with your save data carrying over. it would be kind to describe it as a poor man’s Rocket League.

MAiN Failing the longer missions is frustrating for obvious reasons, but dying is doubly punishing, since it also means losing certain mods, which are destroyed on death. bottoM in the heat of battle, it can be easy to confuse the button for cycling through special ammo types (X) with the one that shoots them (Y). Yet it’s preferable to the alternative control scheme, which has you reaching over the sidestep button (L) to lock onto enemies (ZL)

Above earning medals unlocks new skins for your mech, while two Amiibo grant additional bonuses. Zero Suit Samus gives you more ammunition for your Slow beam, while the suited version gives you ten missiles per pickup

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The King Of Fighters XIV

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ell, look, it’s got a lovely personality. While The King Of Fighters XIV has come a long way in visual terms since it was unveiled late last year, that’s damning with faint praise. Terrifically ugly back then, it’s merely thoroughly disappointing at launch, especially so given that KOFXIII’s spritework was some of the best in the business. Here, rather than call back to the golden era of fighting games, SNK seemingly wants to evoke the early days of PS3. This is the first game in this storied series to be rendered in 3D. We rather hope it will also be the last.

It’s particularly galling given SNK’s stated ambition to make KOFXIV the world’s number one fighting game – an aim that, at any point in the past couple of decades, would’ve seemed fanciful in the extreme, but which now feels like a real possibility. Capcom, for so long the king of the genre, has left its competitors with something of an open goal by making a complete hash of Street Fighter V. Unfortunately KOFXIV is hamstrung from the get-go by a visual style that isn’t exactly going to turn many heads. Stomachs, maybe.

It’s particularly frustrating given the quality of the work elsewhere. A roster of 50 characters is one heck of a launch offering. The cast is split into teams of three: Fatal Fury’s Bogard brothers join up with Joe Higashi, for instance, while Ryo Sakazaki, Robert Garcia and Yuri Sakazaki are on hand to represent Art Of Fighting.

Others come from Samurai Showdown, and then there are series stalwarts such as Geese Howard. Plenty of characters are brand new, and with a grappler dinosaur, a geriatric flask-swigger, and a Harajuku girl with electromagnetic hair, there’s no shortage of variety.

It’s a little overwhelming at first, especially since you take a team of three fighters into battle, and so must learn three movelists at once. Genre-standard experimentation with the usual quarter-circles, halfcircles and Shoryuken inputs will get you started, though a KOF character’s movelist can confound even experienced hands with some uncommon joystick motions. Novices can deploy the Rush combo, SNK’s spin on an increasingly popular fighting game technique. Mash the light punch button and your character will perform an automatic combo string whose ender changes depending on how many stocks of super meter you have. Even with none, when the Rush ends in a regular special move, it does a decent chunk of damage for the bare minimum of effort.

Before long you’ll be ready to try something a little more complex, and SNK is only too happy to oblige.

There are plenty of ways to spend that multi-stock super meter, and many can be cancelled or linked into others. A dip into the character-specific combo challenges yields valuable information on a fighter’s flashy array of potential combinations that you know 116

Developer SNK Publisher SNK (JP), Atlus (US), Deep Silver (EU) Format PS4 Release Out now

While there are some concessions in place for the mere mortals among us, there aren’t quite enough

you’ll probably never use in a real match. Input recognition is strict – there’s no equivalent to Street Fighter V’s Shoryuken shortcut, for instance – but that just makes it all the more satisfying when you hit everything perfectly and lay out some ludicrous string of increasingly powerful super moves that takes off over half an opponent’s life bar. It’s only an AI dummy, of course, but we’ll take what we can get.

So, yes, it’s a complex game, despite the veneer of accessibility. A four-button control scheme might suggest a more approachable game, but within that there is considerable nuance. Tap both light attacks, for instance, and you’ll perform an invincible back or forward roll. There are three types of jump, depending on whether, and for how long, you nudge the joystick downwards before you take off. EX moves can only be performed once you’ve pressed another two-button combination to enter Max mode, a fixture in older KOF games that was ditched for KOFXIII. Just as characters are pinched from across SNK’s back catalogue, so are some mechanics: a Just Defend system, for instance, which reduces the blockstun and chip damage of blocked attacks when you start to guard at the last moment, is an import from Garou: Mark Of The Wolves.

Further intricacies emerge over time. Two dozen hours in, we learn that the Blowback attack, which pushes away an opponent who’s pressuring you in exchange for a chunk of your super meter, gains a wallbounce effect on counter-hit. Manna from heaven for fighting game nerds, but not exactly the sort of thing to propel you to the top of the genre in terms of appeal.

With so much to learn, good tutorials are vital.

While KOFXIV may have SFV’s paltry offering licked, it tries to teach too much too quickly, rattling through the various movement options and ways to spend your super meter without ever really stopping to explain when, or why, they should best be used. There’s a big difference between being able to perform a move once and doing so consistently, while understanding the context in which it’s most useful; the latter is arguably the most important skill in fighting games and it’s a continuing source of frustration that so few games seek to teach it. Combo trials, similarly, get right into the complex stuff: you’ll go into battle knowing a great way to spend four meters, but with no real idea of how best to build those meters in the first place.

These are fundamental problems for a game with KOFXIV’s aspirations. Like its predecessors, as a highlevel pursuit it’s a fascinating sight: fast, fluid, intelligent and deeply tactical. While there are some concessions in place for the mere mortals among us, there aren’t quite enough, nor is there sufficient help for those who want to improve. Capcom may have left the field with an open goal, then, but SNK’s 6 effort has fizzed narrowly wide of the post.

ABOVE Projectiles are always a problem for newcomers, but there’s a smart concession to the novice player here, with a two-button dodge move that’s briefly invincible. You can use it to quickly recover after a knockdown, too MAIN If the wait for your super meter to fill is too much, Versus mode lets you tinker with settings so it’s maxed out from the start.

ABOVE Look, we really did our best with these screenshots. You can find better fire effects on consoles long since consigned to the loft.

LEFt If the 3v3 team setup feels overwhelming at first, try time Attack or Survival mode, where you’re limited to a single character

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Unbox

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ouble jumps? Pah. Triple jumps? Yesterday’s news. Unbox’s contribution to the platformer is the septuple jump, a thrilling, physics-defying feat that lets you cross the kind of chasms that would make Mario gulp. Not a problem for the Newbie, a sentient parcel that can, after a single leap, shed its outer cardboard shell – or ‘unbox’ – for up to six midflight boosts: a press of the right trigger followed by as many squeezes of the left as you need to make a safe landing. Sometimes, you’ll use it for exhilaratingly swift traversal. More often, you’ll use it to recover from a fall, or to gain that bit of extra height you need to get over an obstacle. The springy physics are almost perfect, giving you just enough control even as you hurtle through the air at high speed.

In the game’s fiction, these self-delivering packages are the final throw of the dice from the struggling Global Postal Service to save its business in the face of aggressive competition. It’s the kind of delightfully daft setup you’d expect from a 1990s platformer, and Unbox’s makers have a clear affection for that era.

Characters communicate in subtitled gibberish, puns and none-too-subtle references abound (the level hub is an offshore rig called Other Base), and each world is studded with collectibles. Your rivals are a group of cardboard greasers whose leader will only consider you worthy of fighting once you’ve amassed a given number of stamps, most of which are awarded for completing challenges set by your boxy friends.

The structure, then, is very familiar. Broadly speaking, the challenges are, too. You’ll be asked to complete three laps of a race circuit, transport a package to a distant colleague against the clock, and retrieve several items from the local area while being attacked by enemies. Some offer neat twists on the formula: one delivery mission has what seems to be an overly generous timer until it’s revealed that you have to head back to the start to return the favour, while another sees you drag a frozen ally across the map to thaw him out in a sauna. If you thought one box was hard enough to control, try manoeuvring two linked by a tether.

Occasionally, you’ll be asked to fetch fragile objects, during which you’ll be temporarily disallowed from using your unboxing ability. Presumably, the aim was to echo the FLUDD-free stages in Super Mario Sunshine, removing the player’s safety net and forcing them to master their avatar’s basic move set. In reality, though, Newbie’s movement physics are not as reliable as Mario’s, and that skittishness, combined with environment design that tends to prioritise form over function, leads to moments of grinding frustration.

Prospect Games sensibly attempts to mitigate for these issues, allowing you a single recovery skip off any body of water before a fatal dunk, and often removing the timer so you can retry as many times as you like. But in

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Developer/publisher Prospect Games Format PC Release Out now

The springy physics are almost perfect, giving you just enough control even as you hurtle through the air at speed

Boxing stUpid

Combat is Unbox’s most obvious weak link. In the main, your only attack is a slam move, which gains power the higher you leap. But since you’re fighting boxes that move at similar speed to your own, you’re better off repeatedly jumping and slamming around the same spot until your aggressors disappear. It’s often quicker to dispatch them this way than with the projectile weapons you’re handed for some missions, as the aiming reticle can take a few seconds to home in. By which time they’ll likely have fired on your position, cursing you with a ball and chain or a cluster of balloons that carries you high into the air before popping. This chaotic approach works much better in the splitscreen multiplayer mode.

these moments a game that already feels rickety, albeit endearingly so, feels cloddish and crude. Even with a handful of checkpoints on the way up, one mountainous climb resulted in our taking a long walk to calm down.

Admittedly, our stubborn refusal to accept defeat was part of the problem: you don’t need every stamp to move on from one world to the next. And besides, the missions, while pleasantly varied, are arguably a secondary concern. Rather, it’s the simple act of moving around Unbox’s sprawling environments that’s its trump card. You’re never quite in complete control, but given the ability to unbox – and with plentiful checkpoints and pickups ensuring you rarely run out – that doesn’t matter. Instead, you can careen about the place, blithely disregarding the fact you’re near the edge of a precipice.

As soon as you fall, you’re one or two hops away from safety. That sense of wild, dizzying momentum carries over into a messy multiplayer mode where up to four players can leap around madly, blasting fireworks at one another. It may not be tidy, polished or even particularly well designed, but it is disarmingly good fun.

The level design is similarly unrestrained. These are some of the most expansive playgrounds we’ve ever seen in a 3D platformer. They might even be too big; certainly, it’s hard to mentally map these places in their entirety, and you’ll spend plenty of time digging around areas you’ve already visited. But they are joyously colourful, and stuffed with charming visual flourishes, characters to talk to, jeeps and toboggans to drive. They don’t always function perfectly as game environments – the camera can get stuck, as can you – but there are moments of careful craft in evidence. Between the peaks of a mountain resort, there’s a cable car system in disrepair, with vehicles and scaffolding dangling precariously above a perilous drop. Crossing from one side to the other involves a brilliantly tense bout of oldfashioned platforming; yes, you can unbox, but the gaps are wide enough to require you to time them well, while some platforms dangle from wires, seesawing dramatically as you touch down.

Elsewhere, an inquisitive eye is required to tease out every one of the 200 rolls of golden tape scattered throughout each world, with some requiring daredevil leaps to secure. Don’t worry too much if you’re not the collecting kind: these objectives are optional, and your reward is merely another cosmetic accoutrement. A shark’s fin, a curly moustache and a parka is all our Newbie needs, thanks. Such outlandish getups are all part of Unbox’s irresistibly childlike approach to play, like a toddler unwrapping an expensive gift, tossing it aside and then spending hours messing about inside its receptacle. You don’t have to look hard for more refined alternatives, but sometimes there’s nothing 7 you’d rather do than play around with boxes.

ABOVE Checkpoints refill your unbox counter, and there are plenty of individual pickups between them, too. Be sure not to confuse them with the other green boxes, whose volatile contents will explode if disturbed

TOP You’re free to explore the level hub after the opening tutorial, though worlds remain locked out until you’ve earned enough stamps.

It’s a huge playground in its own right, with another 200 rolls of gold tape to hunt down.

MAIN Completing missions for quest-givers unlocks their box design, though movement physics are the same. You’ll notice a difference with accessories and clothing equipped, however, particularly when wearing the most extravagant headgear.

RIGHT Hit the switch on the back of these fans and they’ll produce a powerful draft that carries you high and far. That’s useful when distances between critical missions are measured in kilometres – which gives you an idea of just how expansive these levels are

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Batman: The Telltale Series – episode one

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s there anyone who isn’t now familiar with Batman’s origin story? Telltale seems to think so, and in the first episode of its latest licensed hook-up it takes pains to ensure they’re fully apprised of the details.

One striking shadowy flashback should be more than enough, but no, it goes several steps further, most glaringly during a comically expositional exchange between Bruce Wayne and a rich older couple as he presses the flesh at a lavish fundraiser. And yes, you can be assured Alfred has remembered that, and will remind poor Bruce at every opportunity, going as far as to hand him the bloodstained theatre tickets that fell from his parents’ pockets. “Don’t let tombstones be your family legacy,” he solemnly warns, shortly after admonishing his charge for excessive brutality. “Be careful you don’t turn into a monster.” We’ll give you something to remember in a minute, you insufferable nag.

Anyone with even a passing awareness of the Dark Knight will be familiar with the cast list; only cosmetic differences distinguish the majority from past interpretations. There’s a stolid and overworked Jim Gordon, and a diligent, ambitious Harvey Dent.

A reimagined Oswald Cobblepot, meanwhile, seems to have acquired his look from Brick Lane and his A grisly crime scene offers the chance to link evidence to piece together an order of events. You don’t need to be the world’s greatest detective to solve this simple puzzle, but it’s an agreeable change of pace

Developer/publisher Telltale Games Format 360, Android, iOS, PC, PS3, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now

Two-faced

On the rare occasions Wayne stops thinking about his dead parents, Realm Of Shadows explores the complexities of duality in interesting ways.

Glad-handing Carmine Falcone will raise hackles among Gotham’s press, but it may be worth taking that hit to boost Dent’s campaign – particularly if the incumbent mayor is as corrupt as he appears. Though if Dent is positioning himself as the squeaky clean candidate, why is he consorting with a gangster such as Falcone?

apparently cockney accent from Don Cheadle. With Troy Baker delivering a low-key performance in the lead role, the standouts are the excellent Laura Bailey as a flirtatious Selina Kyle and Richard McGonagle as Carmine Falcone – once you’ve acclimatised to the mob boss sounding like Victor Sullivan’s evil twin.

Elsewhere, an apparently new and improved game engine is anything but, with regular framerate drops on PS4, bizarrely stilted animations, and sound effects cutting out entirely during action sequences further deadening the impact of already sloppily edited fight scenes. On more than one occasion we were misled by a dialogue summary that didn’t match the subsequent line. As for the narrative adjusting to your choices, well, after a text prompt that noted our nonviolent approach to extracting information from a hired goon, Alfred immediately chided us for “beating him half to death”.

Realm Of Shadows eventually steadies itself, leaving some intriguing narrative threads dangling ahead of episode two. A handful of scenes remind you what the studio is capable of: a mid-game press conference, for example, expertly mines tension from a buzzing phone and some invasive questions. Later, a set-piece that allows you to formulate a plan of attack before executing it in effectively snappy QTE fashion shows Telltale has at least one new trick beneath its 5 cowl. Much more of that next time, please.

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hue

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o matter what unearthly powers you’re given in a 2D puzzle-platformer, there’s usually a point at which you end up dealing with crates. You’ll push them, you’ll pull them, you’ll clamber on top of them to reach higher areas, and, on occasion, stack them. The first crate is always the most disappointing: a sign that however unusual a game’s core mechanic may be, it’s happy to rely upon the most rudimentary of puzzle ingredients. Hue’s colour-changing hook is a strong one, but too often it’s in service of the kind of conundrums we’ve seen many times before.

With characters and buildings silhouetted against a grey backdrop, at first it looks like a CBeebies remake of Limbo. A paper trail of letters reveals that you’re looking for your absent mother, a scientist conducting dangerous experiments with colour.

Before you can locate her, you’re tasked with locating eight colour fragments, steadily unlocking more of the world and eradicating the grey. In real terms, your power amounts to making things disappear and reappear: the colours attach themselves to a radial wheel bound to the right stick, and you nudge it in the appropriate direction to reveal or hide objects from view. The only limit to your ability is that you can’t be in the

A highlight is a puzzle that invites you to formulate a multi-step plan to proceed. Remembering the order you need to switch colours is simple enough, but combining that with timely movement is something else

Developer Fiddlesticks Publisher Curve Digital Format PC, PS4, Vita, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now

MuM’s the words

Hue’s story is told almost entirely through voiceover, via letters the eponymous boy’s mother has left for him. Though it’s never really woven into the game’s mechanics, and its attempts to marry colours to emotions feel contrived, it’s affectingly delivered by actor Anna Acton. As Hue’s mother, she conveys both an ebullient passion for her work and regret at how that has impinged on her relationship with her son.

It’s just enough to encourage you to see how it all shakes out.

same position as an object you need to reappear; as a result, you can never paint yourself into a corner, which cuts down on the frustration of having to restart a room after a mistake.

Some puzzles will, however, require a few retries.

Hue smartly mixes up more thoughtful, sedate challenges with those that demand sharp reflexes. In one room, you’ll ascend a stairway as coloured skulls bounce down towards you, forcing you to shift colours with the right analogue as you climb with the left.

Later, you’ll run across platforms of the same hue as descending lasers, leaping for safe ground and shifting in mid-air before the beam connects. If most puzzle games try to make you feel smart, Hue is often most successful when it makes you feel stupid; in the heat of the moment, with your feet resting on a crumbling platform and a large gap in front of you, a panicked shift might just make it disappear all the quicker.

Even during its most demanding sections, Hue never stoops to frustrating fussiness, while its smart pacing ensures that no ideas outstay their welcome. Its story is nicely narrated, its art is charming, and its puzzles are decent enough. In other words, it’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend a few hours, if that’s all you’re looking for.

But mere hours after playing it, Hue is already vanishing into the background of our minds, leaving only 6 a vague sensation of something more tangible.

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months to come would be more telling. And the numbers didn’t lie: Nintendo’s financial results, published in April, showed that Splatoon had sold to more than one in three Wii U owners. Perhaps more significantly, the number of Splatfest participants had risen – particularly in Japan. The 13th Japanese Splatfest might not have seemed the kind of debate to provoke fierce competition, offering a choice between tuna mayonnaise and red salmon to determine the nation’s preferred flavour of rice ball.

And yet almost 800,000 players took part – more than half the installed base.

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platoon must surely rank as one of the most unlikely hits of recent years. If you doubt that, try relaying a story about a favourite multiplayer moment and consider how ludicrous you must sound to a casual observer. Our moment of triumph, for example, came during the final Splatfest, a contest designed to crown the global favourite of the two Squid Sisters, the game’s resident idol duo. It happened at Moray Towers, a parking lot spread across two elevated structures, with ramps zigzagging down towards a central zone liberally coated in lurid neon ink. Wearing our pink T-shirt with pride, paired with a fashionable snorkel and a pair of turquoise trainers, our time came in the final 30 seconds of battle, as we swam up a wall carrying a washing-machine drum, passing unseen behind an opponent too busy gazing down his scope at our hapless teammates below to notice us sloshing our colours onto the ground behind his perch. We finished with no kills and six deaths, yet rarely have we felt so responsible for turning certain defeat into narrow victory at the 11th hour.

This was, for all intents and purposes, Splatoon’s last hurrah: a 48-hour celebration marking the end of Nintendo’s support for the game. It came more than a year after the very first Splatfest, during which time Splatoon has managed to retain a robust playerbase. Plenty of online games have lasted longer, of course, but rarely with the odds stacked so heavily against them.

Splatoon arrived in May 2015 with a range of handicaps that would’ve sunk lesser games. It was, simply, one heck of a gamble.

Here was a company known for leaning on established brands choosing to ignore them all in favour of something completely new: an online-focused multiplayer game in a genre in which it had little to no experience, and on an ailing console to boot.

Not long after its launch, Splatoon was widely declared to have been a success. But the real acid test was still to come. It may have had a slender (albeit enjoyable) singleplayer component, but this was a game designed primarily to be played online, and as such couldn’t reasonably be judged within its first few weeks. The

If Splatoon’s vibrant presentation and accessibility were what made it appealing in the first place, Nintendo needed ways to hold players’ attention. It achieved that simply by regularly providing tangible reasons to keep coming back. It’s worth remembering the multiplayer offering seemed miserly at launch, with just five maps and a single game type, the default Turf War mode, available on day one (the King Of The Hill-like Splat Zones would unlock once enough players had reached level ten, which was achieved a mere two days after launch). Tower Control came later, a thrilling tug-of-war with each team attempting to push a moveable structure deeper into their opponents’ territory. Last up was Rainmaker, which had a similar back-and-forth feel to Tower Control, but resembled a running play in gridiron, albeit with the quarterback carrying a weaponised football. Though these three were the ranked options, each was built with accessibility at its core – they can be understood with minimal instruction, with a glance at the overhead map on the GamePad screen making it instantly obvious where your attention should be focused.

The number of stages steadily swelled from five to 16, with each new map adding purposeful variety. Moray Towers was a snipers’ haven; Port Mackerel’s multi-laned layout led to MOBA-like incursions; Flounder Heights added verticality via an apartment complex; the expansive Kelp Dome felt rather like being invited to vandalise the Eden Project. With later maps, Splatoon’s designers began to add more unique features, like Piranha Pit’s conveyors, Museum D’Alfonsino’s rotating platforms 125

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and Mahi Mahi Resort’s receding water level. Ancho-V Games, a level set inside the studio of a fictional game developer, featured fan-propelled platforms. Some would argue that these gimmicks detracted from the game’s immediacy, but no one could quibble over getting 11 maps over eight months for no extra outlay, even before considering the new wardrobe options and creative new weapon types.

From gatling guns to buckets and bamboo pipes, Nintendo kept giving its players more ways to customise their Inkling and to tailor loadouts to better fit individual playstyles.

Post-launch support is hardly unprecedented, but for a company with a relatively poor reputation when it comes to online gaming, and with precious little experience of handling the expectations of an online shooter community, Nintendo

a presentational point of view, Nintendo nailed both the sensation of friendly rivalry and the kind of big-match build-up that would have even Sky Sports taking notes. In the gaps between new stock arrivals at the plaza’s various stores, Splatfests offered a further incentive to log in again.

Not to mention putting an additional map in the rotation. One of Nintendo’s canniest tricks of recent years was to make a

NiNteNdo Nailed the kiNd of bigm at c h b u i l d - u p t h at w o u l d h av e eveN Sky SportS takiNg NoteS

It wasn’t always the case, but it’s rare to find two Inklings with identical gear and weapon sets as part of the same team

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surprised many in how well it kept up its end of the bargain. Free extra content was only part of the equation; Splatfests were another. A tangible sense of spectacle and ceremony surrounded these tri-weekly events, with the Splatoon community encouraged to swear fealty to their chosen side. Nintendo clearly communicated upcoming events for players through its online channels and within the game itself.

In the days leading up to each Splatfest, the plaza hub would fill with other players wearing their team’s colours, adding to the sense of anticipation. Then, on the big day, night would fall, Miiverse posts would be displayed as flashy banners stacked high and wide, and the Squid Sisters would leave their studio to perform on stages either side of the lobby – beyond which, matches would be played under darkened skies. From

random selection of three feel like a special treat. Yet the perceived weakness of having only two maps available in each game mode at any given time (and limiting ranked matches to a specific game mode) played to Splatoon’s strengths. On hardware with a comparatively small installed base, these restrictions ensured waits were kept to a minimum: even now, it rarely takes more than a minute from loading Splatoon up before you’re in a game. It’s a decision typical of a company that’s always sought to curb downtime, and even on the occasions you find yourself idling in a lobby, you’ve got a choice of simple GamePad minigames with which to busy your thumbs.

If these choices invariably led to occasions where you’d find yourself on the same map several times in succession, they encouraged most players to dip in and out of

Nintendo made some minor tweaks to maps, but Urchin Underpass underwent a more extensive renovation

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Nintendo worked hard to make sure its relative inexperience with online games was rarely apparent, but Splatoon wasn’t without its problems. We only experienced a handful of disconnections during our time with the game, but during its early months other players were more frequently kicked out. The August update ensured a much smoother experience for most, but those not blessed with fast Internet services were doubly cursed: Nintendo belatedly acknowledged that anyone with download speeds below 1.5Mbps and upload speeds below 1.0Mbps would be affected by disconnections.

Elsewhere, the crossregion matchmaking led to instances of noticeable lag – particularly against Japanese players – while no effort was made to rebalance teams when dropouts occurred. For most, these were minor irritants, but it’s unlikely that players will be so forgiving next time.

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Not all of Turf Wars’ features cross to ranked modes: Port Mackerel’s forklifts are removed

Splatoon rather than play for hours on end.

And by refreshing the maps every four hours, it avoided the fate of many other online shooters where a handful of maps would dominate the voting process. It was clear Nintendo didn’t expect people to play Splatoon for long sessions when co-director Tsubasa Sakaguchi expressed his surprise at how quickly players had hit the early level cap of 20. Three months after launch that was raised to 50, with ranking up dependent on wins as well as points scored. It’s a testament to Splatoon’s longevity that even with Nintendo exponentially slowing progress, you’ll still encounter players who’ve hit the new cap.

The restrictions undoubtedly turned some players off. And there’s an argument that Nintendo’s hasty abandonment of Wii U helped give Splatoon a bit of a free run, certainly for those Wii U owners who didn’t

also own other hardware. With gaps between new releases getting wider, a game that gave players something different every time they logged in was obviously a good reason to keep the console plugged in.

As such, it’s hard to say what lessons other online games could learn from Splatoon. Some of the choices Nintendo made may have suited the game, but wouldn’t fly elsewhere: imagine if EA took voice chat out of the next Battlefield, or Activision waited three months after Call Of Duty’s launch before adding an option to create private matches for friends. Which isn’t to say that other companies shouldn’t take note. Everything Nintendo added after Splatoon’s launch was in service of a consistent, focused central vision. While it did respond to user feedback, making minor adjustments to stages and rebalancing weapons, it did so in ways that never compromised the core. Every new weapon or map felt like it had a place in that world.

There was nothing to massively unbalance the game, and Amiibo aside, there were no microtransactions to worry about.

These sometimes unorthodox choices have ensured that Splatoon still feels immediate and welcoming, and that isn’t always true of competitive multiplayer games. Even so, it’s a minor miracle that Splatoon has remained on trend for a year on such unfashionable hardware. A revival on NX seems assured. Next time, it may stay fresh for even longer. n 127

Dispatches perspective

James Leach

postcards From the clipping plane

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f I sometimes appear cynical it’s because the world is rubbish and always lets you down.

But, just occasionally, nice things happen. I was approached at a party recently by two trendy guys. They looked like they were in their 30s and also like they were in the ’30s, thanks to their hipster clothes. I was preparing to tell them I was not in a position to sell them any drugs when they mentioned that they recognised me as one of the people who worked on Lionhead (RIP)’s Black & White and Big Blue Box (Lest We Forget)’s Fable.

It’s one thing to have your name spotted.

This has happened before, because I was also a member of the US House Of Representatives from 1977 to 2007. Or someone with the same name was. That part of my life is a bit of a blur. But these guys at the party knew me as the game-writer dude, and it turns out they loved the games I’ve worked on.

Yes, I know this is all self-aggrandising showing off, but the guys actually said that these games changed their lives. This stopped me in my tracks because I’ve never considered the impact of videogames to be as big as that on the people we sell them to. For me, a few ZX Spectrum games really did change my life because I knew I wanted to play them for a living, and even one day be a part of the teams that wrote them. Up until then I was predestined to be a weapons instructor for the SAS in Hereford. And, as a teen, it’s clear that games delayed my introduction to female girls of the opposite sex. In fact even more recently, after I was involved in a road traffic collision near my home, which was entirely my fault, I had the presence of mind to drive rapidly offroad and park up in an abandoned mineshaft for three minutes to successfully avoid the police cars and helicopters that were instantly after me.

If, though, we as developers are changing young lives, it’s a responsibility we need to be aware of and to take with a degree of seriousness. Black & White pioneered, I believe, the notion that if you are powerful enough, being good or evil is a choice you

I haven’t met anyone in their mid-20s named Dhalsim or E Honda, but I like to think that they’re out there can make purely depending on the short-term gains you achieve from either path. You are not ultimately judged on your alignment, and thus you do not have to face sanctions from above at any time. It’s simply a decision you make to get what you want. As I chatted to the lads at the party, I learnt that one had devoted his life to volunteer work for the International Red Cross, and the other had a trident and a Transit van outside full of wailing orphans.

Both seemed equally happy with their lot. It seems Black & White was ahead of its time.

It’d be interesting to know the number of people who trade on the world’s stock markets

as a direct result of shipping slaves between planets in Elite. Or, in the future, whether the ranks of space agencies will be filled with bright young minds who actually understood what was going on in Kerbal Space Program.

Maybe, when the inevitable breakdown of society finally plays out and zombies come for us all, we’ll be fine because most of us know exactly where to camp and what weapons to use. Although equally, perhaps we’ll die out because instead of correctly treating the wounds we receive during this difficult and challenging time we’ll simply go and eat tiny roast chickens in an attempt to restore our health. I’ve talked before about how I cannot pass a crate in real life without hitting it with a sword in order to see what armour-based bonuses lie within.

Expensive public boarding schools saw an uptake in admissions while sales of owls similarly rocketed after the Harry Potter books came out, and I suspect that nowadays sniper schools everywhere have long lines of potential recruits. If that’s the case, their first mistake is standing still in an orderly queue, especially if they’re silhouetting.

I haven’t met anyone in their mid-20s named Dhalsim or E Honda, but I like to think that they’re out there. In fact, I know they are.

My neighbour is actually called Ken. He once told me that before he retired, he used to work for Unigate Dairies, just like his dad – who, I’m willing to bet, had a modded Super Famicom console in his parlour. Proof if proof were needed.

Burdened by the weight of my conscience, I have now vowed to work only on games that promote family values and peaceful discourse rather than violence. It’s blindingly obvious that the woes in the Middle East came about as a direct result of my work on Dungeon Keeper.

Oh, and the two hipsters did eventually say that they preferred Skyrim to the Fable series, so I had to kill them with a railgun.

James Leach is a BAFTA Award-winning freelance writer whose work features in games and on television and radio

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#299 October 13

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