The Future Of Halo 343 Industries Speaks
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Destiny 2
First details of Bungie’s massive sequel
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Monolith Grilled Incredible New Screens Nemesis System Explained highlights
Tacoma n splatoon 2 n lawbreakers n mass effect andromeda Battalion 1944 n Dirt 4 n Ghost Recon Wildlands n Agents Of Mayhem Persona 5 n Nier: Automata n Mario Sports Superstars n Lego Worlds
Issue 186
I don’t think we’ve seen the full impact of what Monolith managed to achieve with Shadow Of Mordor yet, but it must be coming. To my mind its introduction of the Nemesis system is up there with Batman: Arkham Asylum’s combat as a piece of action game design that should and will be imitated by other developers. So why the hesitancy? Well, for a start I think there was a lot of scepticism surrounding Warner Bros.’s latest Lord Of The Rings tie-in, much as there was when Arkham Asylum was about to release. We’ve been burned pretty frequently by licensed products and SOM looked a little too much like Assassin’s Creed for comfort at times. Once it landed and we could all see its final quality and competency it was clear that Monolith had hit upon a fresh new take on the sandbox action formula. The other issue is that something like the Nemesis system is likely to be far more complex than a parry fighting system. Tapping Triangle or Y to counter an attack and flow in and out of encounters is a simpler prospect than a procedural enemy generator that remembers your actions and attaches narrative beats to those enemies as a result. It’s a revelatory concept, bringing an emergent level of narrative to the open world, and it’s not likely to be easy. But it won’t be too much longer. An idea like this is too good to be seen in only one franchise. Perhaps it will never be done as well or maybe we’ll just get as tired of it as we are of climbing towers to unlock maps, but it’s an exciting new concept and one we get into again this issue as we look at Shadow Of War.
Jonathan Gordon Editor
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Contents www.gamestm.co.uk
186 | 17
18
Splatoon 2
PReviews 18 Splatoon 2 20 Agents Of Mayhem 22 Tekken 7 23 Battalion 1944 24 Dirt 4 25 Lawbreakers 26 Old Man’s Journey 26 Mayhem In Single Valley 26 Super Cloudbuilt 26 Songbringer 26 Wartile
Discuss
10 Activision goes to war for 2017 dominance
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94
FEATURES
favourites
Talking Chief
30 M iddle-earth: Shadow Of War
With the launch of the Path Finder update No Man’s Sky is fulfilling the promise that it showed at launch
14 Xbox goes back to school We take a closer look at the Xbox Live Creators Program and how it could spearhead a new generation of indie developers
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16 Why I Love… Deus Ex
Seth Shain, lead systems designer, Arkane Studios
How the power of the ring is going to help set a new bar for open-world action gaming and put Monolith at the top of the spire
84 Why I Love… Robotron
38 30 VR Games To Watch
110 The Vault
The upcoming titles for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, PSVR and Samsung Gear that we’re excited about
Ed Boon, creative director, NetherRealm
games™ sifts through the myriad accessories and add-ons the industry offers so you don’t have to
46 Talking Chief
343 Industries sits down to reflect on the past, discuss the present and ponder the future of Halo and Master Chief as the studio turns ten
54 PS Vita: Dead & Loving It
We take a closer look at Sony’s forgotten console, the community that still supports it and why we still love the underappreciated handheld
60 Tacoma
The Fullbright crew tell us more about how Gone Home in space turned into a project of huge storytelling innovation
104
Deus Ex
retro
88 The Retro Guide To Intellivision
We look at how the announcement of Destiny 2 and rumoured COD: WWII could effect the year
12 Good things come to those who wait
Fantasy World Dizzy
76
Persona 5
reviews 70 Mass Effect Andromeda 74 Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands 76 Persona 5 78 Styx: Shards Of Darkness 79 Mario Sports Superstars 79 Fast RMX 80 Nier: Automata 82 Lego Worlds
How many of the classic games from Mattel’s 1980 console have you managed to play? Take a look at our key picks as we walk through its catalogue of releases
94 Behind the scenes of Fantasy World Dizzy
Continuing our celebration of 30 years of Dizzy, one of the UK’s greatest gaming exports of the Eighties, we get into the making of one of the character’s best outings
100 Retro Interview: Rebecca Heineman
We catch up with one of gaming’s most famous programmers to talk about her role on The Bard’s Tale series and her impact on the industry
104 Game Changers: Deus Ex
It was part of a wave of more grown-up, thematically rich and technically challenging firstperson games that began in the late Nineties, but how has it changed gaming since?
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30 Feature
Middle-Earth:
Shadow Of War Monolith explains how it’s building on canon, expanding its Nemesis system and setting a new bar for open-world gaming
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Discuss
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C o mbat e v o lv ed
Activision goes to war for 2017 dominance Destiny 2, and a rumoured return to World War II for Call Of Duty, means that this could be a hugely successful year for the publisher. But what does it mean for us, the gamer? In many respects, Activision Blizzard has had something of a difficult year. Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare failed to attract the critical and commercial reception the publisher so clearly believed it deserved, while Destiny continued to fail in its attempts to maintain a consistent beat between launching new content, refreshing in-game events and cultivating a competitive culture. The counter to all of that, of course, is that the acquisition of King Digital continues to pay huge dividends, microtransactions for Black Ops III continue to be hugely profitable for the company, while the successful launch of Overwatch more than compensated for Infinite Warfare’s shortfall in sales. This has given the company some amount of room to breathe – a little leeway in an increasingly difficult development and marketing environment. Activision is coming into 2017 with the intention of refreshing its two biggest, most profitable, franchises, putting both Call Of Duty and Destiny through radical changes in an attempt to amend the mistakes of the past and establish a foothold to build from in the coming years. Say what you will of the game as it exists now, but the Destiny that launched in September 2014 is almost unrecognisable
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2 looks bold “andDestiny exciting, in a way its predecessor could never quite grasp
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in comparison. The launch day experience was soulless, a husk of big ideas burned out by troubled development; masterful FPS gameplay upended by callous world and system design, with the wider narrative and lore stuffed uncomfortably into a companion app experience; the voice acting became a point of consistent embarrassment, Peter Dinklage found himself the subject of meme-ship, for all the wrong reasons. It was nothing short of a mess. The same can’t be said for Destiny 2. It looks bold and exciting, in a way its predecessor could never quite grasp. Bungie is showing a commitment to answering the problems of Destiny in impressive fashion. It has already confirmed that gear and progression will not be making the leap to this September’s sequel, ensuring it can make a fresh break as it attempts to circumvent the problems of the past.
Brian Fargo has said he will retire after the release of Wasteland 3
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Above Destiny 2 is being presented as something of a clean start for all players, delivering a brand-new adventure for fresh and existing fans to enjoy with the spectre of the original’s problems following it.
It’s so simple, but Destiny 2 sounds fun. From the start, Activision and Bungie has been quick to position Nathan Fillion’s Cayde-6 character to the front and centre of the advertising campaign, and with it a pledge: it says ‘we’ve been listening’. Hearing Cayde-6 in cahoots with vanguard Ikora Rey, voiced by Firefly alumni Gina Torres, taking potshots at the original game and its overly serious tone is a massive statement of intent; Bungie is leaning on the chemistry of its characters, pushing to bring more charisma into its world. Guardians have, for the first time, faces and therefore perhaps an iota of personality with them. Of course, this could be a clever marketing ploy. Carrying this kind of irreverent tone to a final product is (as we’ve seen demonstrated time and time again in the past) no easy matter – although The Taken King expansion has arguably sown the seeds. But it demonstrates that the company is finally willing to give us a war we will be interested in fighting. These giant, sprawling, sci-fi MMO-lite experiences don’t need to be sombre lessons in obscurity; masterful lessons in how to induce boredom across familiar fetch quests. They should be confident to crack a smile, to acknowledge the ridiculousness of the endeavour and inject some brevity into a game that you’ll no doubt be submerged in for months to come. While we have had our first taste of Destiny 2, and we’re already big fans of the
Above Bungie is promising a huge suite of character customisation options, teasing “more options than ever before” to enhance your Guardian’s abilities and look.
Above Destiny 2 will be coming to PC for the first time, launching alongside the PS4, Xbox One and, we assume, Project Scorpio, editions later this year.
direction, Call Of Duty: WW II is still a number of weeks away from an official reveal. At the time of going to print, this is still a rumour at best, but it seems likely that this year will see Sledgehammer Games take Call Of Duty back to the World War II-era. Activision has already noted that “traditional combat will once again take centre stage,” and that the series will go ‘back to its roots’ with the Advanced Warfare developer entrusted to scale back the parkour, reign in the exosuit-assisted nonsense and bring back a more familiar, far more insular, ‘boots on the ground’ experience to one of the the industry’s biggest blockbusters. While this move can look cynical in and of itself, coming hot on the heels of EA’s massive success with Battlefield 1, Call Of Duty: WW II (as its rumoured to be called) will likely have been in development for two to three years. The reaction to Battlefield 1, not to mention Infinite Warfare’s toxic prerelease campaign, is nothing more than affirmation that Sledgehammer is heading in the right direction. “With any long-standing franchise like Call Of Duty, there’s a balancing act we need to strike between staying true to the things that people love about the franchise and also the need to never become complacent and to keep pushing for innovations to keep the franchise fresh and vital,” said Eric Hirshberg, Activision’s chief executive in a recent fourth quarter 2016 earnings call. “Last year, I don’t think we got that balance right.” That’s an incredibly honest statement from Activision and the results are already clear. But we’re confident. Activision Blizzard has been able to support Overwatch masterfully since its launch, offering a consistent slew of updates, content and promises for the future. It has already demonstrated a commitment to listening to fan feedback, taking Call Of Duty back to its roots in an effort to appease fans; and now, here is Destiny 2, a game that, seemingly, wants to hit the ground running and avoid the most glaring problems of its predecessor entirely.
Reclaiming its past What does Call Of Duty stand to gain by going back to World War II? Judging by the discontent online, it would seem that heading back to the Western Front would make a great deal of sense for Activision – but online chatter can be misleading. This is a bigger risk than it may seem on the surface; Call Of Duty only began positioning itself as the true market leader in 2007, as it abandoned the past and took a hold of Modern Warfare for the first time. So what is it about World War II that seems so appealing? Strip back the experience, remove opportunities to get your feet off the ground and place gunfights in a (perceived) sense of reality and suddenly the developer is faced with a very limited scope to work within. This, essentially, means that the focus can move away from Activision’s obsession with larger-than-life campaigns and back onto emulating the likes of Enemy At The Gates, Band Of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan. Resources can, in theory, be diverted from increasing verticality and building physics engines that can appropriately respond to doublejumping theatrics, and instead be used to increase the scale of battlefields and fields of vision. The graphical presentation and intensity of engagements should improve, as too could enemy AI and mission design. This kind of focus could be exactly what Call Of Duty needs, not to mention a revelation on the eSports scene, especially if Sledgehammer looks to bring back the arena combat focus of COD2 to the competitive environment. Bringing Call Of Duty to World War II ensures a smaller, tighter experience; Sledgehammer Games has already demonstrated its proficiency in delivering incredible single-player campaigns with Advanced Warfare, and it’s exciting to ponder what it will do in such an environment today, given the technology available and the expertise at the studio.
Nintendo has solved the joy-con desync issue, but only next switch batch will benefit 11
Discuss Inset Base building is a fantastic addition to No Man’s Sky. Now that you’ve found your way to the centre of the universe, it’s time to begin cultivating an existence. It’s incredibly intuitive to use, a far cry from the fiddly frustrations of Fallout 4’s similar system.
The Sky’s the limit
Good things come to those who wait
Release day isn’t what it used to be. Should developers be given more leeway when it comes to balancing initial quality against an experience that will eventually arrive? here’s a startling trend emerging in the modern industry. What – in 2017 – constitutes as a ‘finished game’? Venture a decade back and ‘Going Gold’ would have been the general adage, the moment that a game transitioned from active development to being printed and pressed. Now, the lines have become blurred, much to the detriment of the early adopter and to the benefit of those able to keep their preorders in their pants for a few extra weeks. Three ‘indie’ games stand above the rest in this respect, standing as a testament to the thought that good things come to those who wait: League Of Legends, Minecraft and, controversially, No Man’s Sky. While there are plenty of games, too many to list here, that have benefited greatly from
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the addition of DLC and regular patching (okay, we will name one, and it’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), there is a growing number that have improved massively over time, and everybody has benefited. Go back to early reviews of the three aforementioned titles and you’ll find games that barely resemble their current form, improved through continuous, dedicated improvements from an impassioned team of creatives. Of course, no game has encountered more furore from the community at large in recent memory than No Man’s Sky, Hello Games’ ambitious space survival simulator that was ultimately derided for numerous perceived misgivings. And yet, after four months of self-imposed silence from the studio, the game received a stunning update. Many will say that Foundation was
too little too late, but those people would be doing themselves a disservice. The free patch brought about significant changes to the way in which No Man’s Sky works, not to mention a host of tweaks and fixes that make the experience more enjoyable overall – closer to the original vision. While we are still without certain features, the source of much anger and upset (the understatement of the year) in the months that followed on from August – ringed planets and desert planets are still MIA, (as too is any sign of multiplayer or co-op, we suppose) – the overall product has improved massively. Miyamoto’s ancient saying, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad,” is becoming less and less relevant by the year. Developers now have the power to drastically alter releases after the fact. Whether you perceive that as a personal slight or as a genuine revelation to an industry too often stifled by indiscretion and arbitrary deadlines is your call, but we’re just happy to see developers pledging to continually improve releases in an effort
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Many will say that Foundation was too little too late, but those people would be doing themselves a disservice
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bloodstained will be coming to the Nintendo switch instead of the wii u