The essential guide to Xbox 360 and Xbox One Issue 121 February 2015
www.totalxbox.com
40
exclusive!
Halo 5 Why Xbox One was
made for Master Chief
tricks to unlock the power of xbox one!
Assassin’s creed invades london! Will you be able to jump off Big Ben?
wild hunt
Exclusive access to the RPG that makes Skyrim look like a walk in the park
Welcome…
TO A MAN WITH WEIRD MAGIC EYES For the record, it’s not me – the man with the weird glowing eyes, that is. That honour belongs to Geralt of Rivia, the star of this month’s cover. The Witcher has eluded me to date, with its story foundations buried deep in a PC, and the sequel showing little love for the uninitiated. Third time’s the charm, however, and chatting to PC Projekt RED about Wild Hunt has me convinced that it understands the shortcomings of previous console efforts and is ready to deliver the definitive chapter on Xbox One. Head to page 30 to discover 2015’s most ambitious game. The rest of the issue is more of an intake of breath before “YOU DON’T NEED MAGIC February’s reviews onslaught begins, EYES TO SEE THAT THIS MONTH’S ISSUE IS so what better time to get intimately RAMMED WITH TREATS” acquainted with Xbox One’s hidden features on page 88 and celebrate the best of the past 12 months in our OXM awards over on page 56. You don’t need magic eyes to see that this issue is rammed with good stuff. Enjoy! SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE! TURN TO PAGE 108 EMAIL matthew.castle@futurenet.com LIVE OXM Pesto TWITTER @mrbasil_pesto
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OXT121.welcome.indd 5
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GERALT’S FINAL FANTASY
CD Projekt Red welcomes back the hero that could eat the Dovahkiin for breakfast in our massive feature (p30)
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THE OXM AWARDS 2014
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
It’s gaming’s Oscars, only without the nine-hour telecast (p56)
Master Chief’s new boss lays out her plans for the next chapter (p64)
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GETTING TO KNOW YOU
ORI AND THE BLIND FOREST
Just got an Xbox One for Christmas? Let us show you how to use it (p88)
Not only tests your command of buttons – it’s cute as one, too (p38)
THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE / 5
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#121
contents DASHBOARD
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30
News and interviews curated for your easy digestion
10 Element of Surprise
We take a look at zombie shooter Human Element.
14 How to Scare Gamers
page
38
The man behind Grave talks creeps, frights and scares.
24 Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege The newest in a long list of Clancy games.
26 The Elder Scrolls Online
Still not out on Xbox One… but it will be. Eventually.
features
30 Geralt’s Final Fantasy Delving into Xbox One’s biggest RPG.
56 OXM Awards 2014
geralt’s final fantasy
page
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The Witcher is back and bigger than ever before.
All the best things, according to us. We’re always right.
64 Hail to the Chief
Part two of our sexy Halo interview feature.
88 Pandora’s Box
page
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Our top 40 tips for new and old Xbox One owners.
Reviews
70 The Crew 74 Threes! 75 Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions 76 Kalimba 78 Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris 79 Rabbids Invasion 79 Shape Up 80 Game of Thrones: Episode 1 – Iron From Ice 82 Limbo 83 Thomas Was Alone 83 Pure Pool 83 Tetris Ultimate 83 Boom Ball for Kinect 84 Online reviews
The crew
Transcontinental champion? page
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page
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page
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oxm extra
98 OXM Investigates: Project Spark 100 Now Playing: The Evil Within 104 Revisiting Wolfenstein 114 OXM’s Alternative Awards 6 / the official xbox magazine
now playing
How The Evil Within drags you through Shinji Mikami’s mind. www.totalxbox.com
Meet the…
oxm contributors
The people behind, and in some senses also under, the UK’s biggest games mag
Alex Dale
Kate Gray
Emma Davies
Paul Taylor
Tom Senior
Live ChocoboOfDoom
Live OXM Kate
Live OXM Emma
Live Paulus McT
Live Private
Twitter @SporadicDaler
Twitter @hownottodraw
Twitter @emcetera
Twitter @mynameispt
Twitter @PCGLudo
Alex was so won over by Geometry Wars’ spherical playing fields that he now won’t deal with anything in ‘tedious’ 2D. Production ed Emma had a fit when he submitted his MGS preview printed on a 3D pyramid.
We wonder if Dragon Age’s romances are taking their toll on Kate – the other day we saw her flirting with the office photocopier. Needless to say, that 10-foot man-bull picked a bad week to come in for work experience.
As OXM’s go-to gal for quality control, Emma made it her new year’s resolution not to allow a single mistake to pass her by. With seven peerless pages already under her belt, she is off to a storming stort. Oh dear.
Since exploring The Crew’s digital America, Paul is now petitioning Ubisoft to shrink Australia into a game world. We can’t wait to explore all those landmarks such as the Sydney Opera House or, er… is Middle-earth in Australia?
We chose Tom to cover The Witcher 3 for us as he once worked as a Witcher himself. He actually summoned the cover feature in an ancient ritual that involved chants, a selection of wild herbs and several trips to Wikipedia.
Deputy editor
Production editor
Staff writer
Editor, OXM AU
Contributor
OFFICE PLAYLIST > WHAT WE’VE SPENT OUR TIME ON THIS MONTH
Christmas parties When the drink tokens ran dry, team OXM raided the cheese table. Chaos/indigestion ensued.
Office secret Santa ’Tis the season… to give hated colleagues nasty gifts under the blanket of anonymity. Hooray?
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Downloading patches A technical goof gave Assassin’s Creed a 40GB patch. Still, worth it for an absence of flying Parisians.
The internet is quite literally a gigantic net*. And we’re using our portion of it to snare all the best Xbox One and Xbox 360 news, reviews and generally interesting gubbins. (*This is not actually literally the case.) Recent highlights: What on Earth is going with Tomb Raider? / Win an auction, become a Fable hero! / Xbox app for PC coming to Windows 10
Braving the backlog Ten days of holiday let us play all the great games we missed. Alien really ain’t very festive, is it?
oxm on iPad If you love reading OXM, but feel like all of those, pesky pages just get in the way, you might like to know that it’s also possible to get all of our Xbox-y goodness in sleek tablet form, thanks to our iPad edition. Don’t say we never give you anything! bit.ly/ipadoxm
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xbox news, anaylsis, culture, opinion & more
10 / the official xbox magazine
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Zero percent chance
Square Enix has confirmed that the Final Fantasy XV demo conveniently bundled with PSP remaster, Final Fantasy Type-0 HD will be the only way you’ll get to play the much-delayed new game before its official release next year. Cheeky.
Boxing clever
The newest free game to join EA Access – the giganto-publisher’s subscription service – is the much-patched, muchimproved EA Sports UFC. It joins the likes of Battlefield 4, Peggle 2, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare and FIFA 14.
//we decided to move away from free-to-play and make a premium experience that focused on the systems that were the most fun//
Motorbikes might be battered and rusty, but they’re an effective means of getting about.
undead cert
ELEMEnt of suRprise Alongside its creator, we take a fresh look at Human Element, the zombie shooter that’s risen from developmental death
A
s fans, we’ve never been more interested in games’ construction periods. We read dev blogs, scour Twitter feeds, search for LinkedIn posts, buy into Early Access betas. Where does the insanity end? At some point, a desperate NeoGAF-er will post the contents of Cliff Bleszinski’s bins and we’ll all have a bloody good go at working out whether a balanced breakfast means he’s making a MOBA. We’re now so used to knowing exactly what we’ll get at the end of development that playing games runs the risk of becoming more like fact-checking than an adventure – which is why it’s increasingly pleasant to see studios take long-held ideas and chuck them away wholesale in favour of something new and unexpected. Human Element has been in development for years by this point, but that didn’t stop director (and ex-Infinity Ward veteran) Robert Bowling and his studio, Robotoki, changing the game’s genre, look, format, even its commercial strategy in pursuit of something better. “When we first started out, we were creating a gritty, photo-realistic and very inaccessible experience, with little ‘hand holding’,” he explains. “It was also free-to-play on PC only and relied on
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in-game purchases. Ultimately, that monetisation got in the way of a lot of the systems that were making the game fun. We decided to move away from free-to-play and instead make a premium experience focused entirely on just the systems that were the most fun, such as vehicle combat, stealth, fortifications, fast zombie strategies and looting.” The result’s a five-on-five first-person shooter that combines tower defence, capture the flag and domination while playing out across massive maps peppered with AI bots. Alongside that comes a brand new art style, pitched up somewhere in the space between Mad Max fanart and the bright, bold cartoons of Overstrike (which went in an opposite direction by becoming the yawnsome Fuse). All of this from a title whose original ambition was, more or less, to be “a bit like Day Z”. That unusual setup comes from the purest kind of game design – playtesting. “When we moved away from free-to-play we decided to let the game tell us what it needed next,” explains Bowling. “Through daily playtests with the entire team, we would play and have meetings afterwards talking about the stories that happened. ‘Oh man, when I was having that firefight on the airfield, and you came through and took him out with the
the official xbox magazine / 11
Good as gold
Upcoming Xbox One faux-sport #IDARB is launching through Games with Gold in February, so you’ll get it free if you’re subscribed to the console’s online service.
bike, that was awesome!’ These stories really made it clear what features stood out and what was creating the most fun experiences. As we started focusing on polishing the features that made for the best stories the tone of the game really shifted away from the ‘walking simulator’ we’d had to a more fast-paced experience.” It’s a fast-thinking one, too. Both teams set out with the ambition of collecting five critical resources from the map, each of which, when taken back to their home base, gives the entire team various stat buffs. Collect all five of them and you win. Simple enough, until you take into account that once one resource is in your base, the other team can simply steal it from there. Which is where the AI component comes in. “There are definitely a lot of defensive strategies to how AI is used,” says Bowling. “While there are AI survivors who are constantly putting pressure on your outpost and defences, we also have more strategic static guards that you can place throughout the map. For example, when you first start a round, it’s smart to defend your first resource by placing guards on the walls of your outpost, which will engage any enemy trying to take your home outpost. As you’re out 12 / the official xbox magazine
Shortly after this picture was taken, Clive’s wandering attention caused him a nasty crash.
scavenging, you might find a really key location where it’d be great to have a sniper holding off enemies and create a little choke point.“ But even these circuit-brained guardians come with a twist, as the game’s most interesting mechanic makes them a legion of double-edged swords. As Bowling spells out, “In the universe of Human Element, everyone is already infected, meaning death brings with it a whole set of strategies that impact the game. Any character who is killed without a headshot will turn into an AI-controlled fast zombie, that will attack whatever is closest, regardless of team alliance. This creates chaos in a heavily guarded outpost – just take out a few guards and let them turn on their colleagues while you pick off survivors or sneak your way in. With a good sniper, turning a few guards creates the perfect diversion without having to spend all your ammo.” Seemingly unwilling to accept any limits, Bowling and co have added even more on top of this already expansive
base level. Base fortification lets you shore up defences or create ramps for a speedy exit from your bases. Roving hordes of ‘slow zombies’ can be lured to strategic (or just chaotic) locations. Various player-character factions act as the game’s classes, from out-and-out fighters to stealthy outpost thieves (“You can win an entire match without firing a shot if you’re good,” says Bowling). Most interesting is a particular focus on vehicle use – those carrying scavenged resources can’t ride the game’s rickety ratbikes, meaning you’ll need a getaway driver along, bringing to mind the glory days of Halo’s capture the flag escapades. It’s a cocktail of components, and a fine addition to a growing number of multiplayer games (Evolve, Rainbow Six: Siege) that prefer the intricacy of ideas to route-one firefights. “I see it as being about strategy and effectively getting into where the resources are and getting them back to your outpost,” enthuses Bowling. “I’m most excited for players to see just how many different ways there are to play
//those carrying resources can’t ride the rickety ratbikes, so you’ll need a getaway driver// www.TOTALXBOX.coM