Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2018 in Edge

When he unveiled LittleBigPlanet at GDC in 2007, Phil Harrison described it as being at the vanguard of a new movement called Game 3.0. Version 1.0, he said, was the PC floppy disk and console cartridge, and 2.0 added online play. Game 3.0 was about sharing. At the time, it felt like a buzzword. Looking back, however, it’s clear he was onto something. After all, this issue finally yields a review of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, a game that wouldn’t exist without the mod scene and whose success can be in large part attributed to its popularity among Twitch streamers. In Pushing Buttons, we speak to a new breed of developers and broadcasters who are subverting our expectations of how games are played, be it with a one-of-a-kind museum piece or a…

“Since I’ve been here, which is close to three years, Unity has gone from around 400 people to 1,500” Clive Downie is CMO of Unity, which retains a commanding position over the 3D game-engine market. It’s a go-to for hobbyist developers, indie studios and beyond, and its featureset continues to grow: additions last year included a shader editor, native photogrammetry support, built-in cinematic tools and multiplayer netcode and server tools. But Unreal Engine 4 has also risen, sporting a similar low-cost business model but backed by Epic’s technical reputation. Having previously worked at EA, Ngmoco, and Zynga, today Downie’s job is to bring Unity’s reputation up to match its capabilities and reach, while expanding its horizons beyond games. What’s it like working for a game-engine maker, having spent so long…

Stephen Bruner is an American multi-genre bass guitarist, producer and singer working under the alias Thundercat. An acclaimed collaborator and session musician, he has released three solo albums to date, most notably 2017’s acclaimed Drunk. Spanning 23 songs in just under an hour, it covers a whole range of themes, one of which is an obvious love of videogames Do you remember when you first got excited about videogames? It had to be between Nintendo and Sega Genesis, but I feel like the actual moment for me was Sonic The Hedgehog, because it was so fast and so fluid, and the music… yeah, Sonic The Hedgehog was definitely, like, the kick-off of videogames. So game music was an early influence for you? I grew up in a musical family, but…

STEVEN POOLE Illustration kaeru.com.ar When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and when you have a gun, everything looks like a target Observing moral progress in action is a fine thing indeed. Videogames used to be blamed for school shootings in America, with excitable news reports claiming that the perpetrator was an obsessive player of Doom; and Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant, based on the 1999 Columbine massacre, was filmed from a brutally elegant firstperson viewpoint. But now videogames are on the side of justice, at least if we take as representative the example of the latest official product of the state-sponsored military-entertainment complex. The US Army Research Laboratory, which works on such cool stuff as environmentally friendly red flares, 3D-printed drones, and super-lightweight ceramic armour,…

Explore the iPad edition of Edge for extra Hype content Play, unite, share Josef Fares’ A Way Out (p36) is certainly forward thinking, a game about two men on the lam after a prison break that tells its story from both men’s perspective simultaneously, and is playable only in split-screen multiplayer. Yet its greatest innovation is its Friends Pass feature, which allows the purchaser to invite an online accomplice to play through the game with them without paying a penny. It’s a system that’s been hinted at before – Far Cry 4, for instance, let you invite a freeloading partner for a set number of co-op sessions. It mirrors, too, the way many people buy and play games, exploiting system-software mechanisms designed for families; set your pal’s console as your…

Developer/publisher Subset Games Format PC Origin UK, US Release 2018 Most clichés have at least a little truth in them. ‘Difficult second album’ is one. How does a band follow up on a tremendously successful first release? What creative pressures does that bring? How are they overcome? How does that shape what comes next? Or, to put it another way, how does a developer like Subset Games follow up on a breakout smash hit such as FTL? The strategic spaceship sim has sold several million copies since its release on PC, its theme capturing the almost-universal appeal of being a starship captain, handling boardings and fires and prevailing against the odds with Kirkian guile. It’s won design awards and spearheaded a mini subgenre of realtime, Roguelike disaster-management games while also expanding expectations for the…

One of its party tricks is that it really does throw hordes of undead at the player Developer/publisher Numantian Games Format PC Origin Spain Release TBA What happens when you put zombies into an RTS? The answer almost writes itself. You get a defence-based survival game in which instead of a rival army, you face hordes of shambling walkers, something guaranteed to instantly capture the attention of hundreds of thousands of players. And that’s exactly what the histrionically titled They Are Billions has achieved in its opening weeks in Steam’s Early Access. One of the game’s great strengths is that it feels utterly familiar to anyone who’s commanded and conquered. You start the game with a command centre, from where you construct all other buildings. There’s a Protoss-style pylon system:…

Creator, The Witness The Witness uses music sparingly. What inspired the use of Edvard Grieg’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King? There was a game from the 1980s that I liked called Mountain King. You're searching for a flame: the flame is invisible, but you can hear where it is by listening to In The Hall Of The Mountain King. The closer you get, the louder the music is. For an '80s game, it was very interesting. That actually may be how I got inspired to think about any of this stuff: a lot of The Witness is about physical phenomena, like sound and light providing information. Did you think deeply about in-game rewards? I did. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, not chime in…

Great artists steal, they say – but game developers are magpies, pinching ideas from a variety of sources and using them as the seeds of something bigger. It’s a rare month indeed that yields a Play section whose formative influences aren’t immediately obvious. Even in that context, Lost Sphear (p114) is something of an outlier. The second game from Tokyo RPG Factory, a small Square Enix team tasked with revisiting the publisher’s 16bit glory days, the game’s inspirations are essentially its maker’s mission statement. But it takes the idea to new extremes, since the idea of forgotten memories being reborn also forms the basis of Lost Sphear’s narrative. Elsewhere, OK KO! Let’s Play Heroes (p110) is a work of brain-melting circularity, a tie-in game based on a TV show that…

Developer Capy Games Publisher Cartoon Network Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release Out now W e spend a good five hours waiting for an ‘All Your Base’ gag that never comes. The Cartoon Network animation on which Capy’s latest outing is based is clearly made by a team in love with videogames, but there’s little of the pandering nodding and winking you might expect here. Yes, there are references to games, such as the line about them being better than real life (“You get points!”), but OK KO! Let’s Play Heroes is cheeringly matter-of-fact about its inspirations, preferring to build its own world rather than remind you of someone else’s. Little wonder, really, given the set-up, which is arguably better suited to a game than a kids’ TV show. The…

Developer Timi Studio Group Publisher Tencent Format Android, iOS (tested) Release Out now Arena Of Valor succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is to make League Of Legends playable on your phone and tablet. Publisher Tencent has succeeded so completely, in fact, that it’s only the mobile-friendly user interface that reveals which game is which. From its map to its set of modes to its environment art and even the specific garb of its endless waves of minions, Arena Of Valor is an egregiously close match for Riot’s genre-defining free-to-play MOBA. The only reason this isn’t a matter for the courts is that Tencent has wholly owned Riot since 2015, and is very unlikely to take legal action against itself. Known as Kings Of Glory in China,…

Taught in universities and even schools, Unity is still many new developers’ first experience of 3D game development, but getting started is still a daunting prospect. Downie says that there are plans to provide more support to first-time users with tutorials, and clearer access to support services such as Unity Connect, where other Unity users offer help. “If you come into Unity on day one and are introduced to other people and have the tools to reach out to people in the community, that’s going to empower you as a creator. You want people to come from having a notion through to some success; getting something on screen that they feel good about, as quickly as possible.“…

WEBSITE Keiichi Tanaka’s Den-fami Nico webcomics bit.ly/tanakacomics Videogame and manga artist Keiichi Tanaka has an ingenious method of presenting his stories about, and interviews with, game designers: comic strips. From one on “the invaluable soul of Zoids”, another on Yakuza’s unlikely inception, and the moving series on Mother, each tale is richly illuminated via Tanaka’s pencils. Developers’ childhood anecdotes are charmingly realised: so too are Tanaka’s own reactions and interjections, lending conversations depth and realism. Visual representations of analogies entertain most – a depiction of Mother creator Shigesato Itoi as a salted snail is not to be missed – but Tanaka’s comics go beyond mere diversion, providing a uniquely intimate glimpse into games creators. Now, if only we could get him in Edge. VIDEO Resident Evil 7 Speedrun bit.ly/resi7run This…

NATHAN BROWN Illustration kaeru.com.ar Above all, please stop sharing things you hate, or think are bad. Why on Earth do people do that, anyway? One of the most frequently levelled accusations against game journalists (feel free to add your own sarcastic airquotes) is that we don’t do enough proper, long-form investigative work. I suppose that’s fair enough, but something I often think is overlooked is that, if you want the way games are covered to change, you, the reader or viewer, have to change in kind. In doing so you can make not only the game press better; you can make the Internet better too, and we could do with some of that right now. What follows is a set of recommended New Year’s Resolutions for how we all might…

There’s a universally popular appeal to somebody playing a videogame with an improbable device. It could be running Dark Souls with the Donkey Konga bongos, using a MIDI keyboard to grind XP in World Of Warcraft or piloting an interactive cardboard box by pressing hand-drawn buttons in Space Box – it is all but guaranteed to spawn news articles, clicks and views galore. It’s a watchable phenomenon, as Twitch streamers everywhere will attest, with curious viewers waiting to see whether their champion can really win a round of team deathmatch using only voice commands. It takes a certain kind of person to think beyond the standard input devices, and an even more determined one to engineer the feat. The question is – given the time, expense and technical frustrations –…

Founded 2008 (as Railsimulator.com Ltd) Employees 148 Key staff Paul Jackson (CEO), Jon Rissik (COO), Rob O’Farrell (senior director of development), Steve Hood (creative director) URL dovetailgames.com Selected softography Train Simulator, Euro Fishing, Flight School Current projects Flight Sim World, Train Sim World As far back as he can remember, Paul Jackson always wanted to be a train driver. Unfortunately for Dovetail Games’ co-founder and CEO, he’s colour blind – a test for which forms part of the medical – and it’s not exactly a well-paid gig. Timing, too, was an issue. “The locomotives that I want to drive – the steam engines from the 1950s – they’ve all gone. That’s not a viable career anymore,” he tells us. “So to live out my personal dream, I needed a hobby.” That hobby…

Developer PUBG Corporation Publisher PUBG Corporation, Microsoft Studios Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Perhaps, in retrospect, PUBG was always going to be a seismic industry event. The first game to successfully leverage all the component parts of survival gaming worth keeping and repackage them into a structured and finite experience? Come on. That was always going to be 20-million-player stuff. The droves of survivalists cruising through DayZ’s grim topography, the amoral nudists of Rust, even Minecraft’s Rube Goldberg machine builders – all could prove turncoats if offered an alternative to no-constraints survival sandboxing. Brendan Greene provided it. Rather than simply handing over a sprawling dystopian space and trusting the player base to find the potential within it by itself, PUBG strong-arms its population into a specific and…

Developer Matt Thorson, Noel Berry Publisher Matt Makes Games Format PC (tested), PS4, Switch, Xbox One Release Out now Partway through Celeste, our mountaineer protagonist Madeline suffers a panic attack. Luckily, her occasional climbing companion, the affable Theo, has a surefire method to calm her down. Visualise a feather, he says, and breathe in and out rhythmically – imagining that each breath out is keeping it airborne. Sure enough, it rises and falls as we push a button, and before long Madeline has regained her composure. That this comes after one of the game’s most frustrating sequences doesn’t appear to be accidental. The technique, it seems, is as much for the player’s benefit as for its hero’s. That’s because Celeste is one of those games: a pixelart platformer that constantly…

Is 256GB of hard drive space enough? While Shadow gives users access to a highspec PC, one aspect of Blade’s offering is notably lacking: available hard drive space. At only 256GB, a Shadow machine can hold far less software than an equivalent high-spec computer. Given that modern games can have a footprint in excess of 40 or 50GB, it’s likely that you’ll hit this limit quickly. The chief mitigating factor here is connection speed: Shadow’s data centres boast internet connections in excess of 600Mbps, meaning that large games can be re-downloaded faster than they could be over a home Internet connection. Even so, this will likely encourage users to make use of other cloud storage services.…

Game Pac In Town Manufacturer Bandai Namco With its VR Zone business proving a surprising success – expanding from the two-storey Shinjuku facility featured in E313 to London, Dubai and New York – Bandai Namco has a greater incentive than most to ensure there’s a steady flow of new virtual-reality attractions to keep paying punters coming back. Yet for its latest creation, the company has cast aside the bulk and thick cabling of HTC Vive, which powers the majority of experiences on offer at the Shinjuku VR Zone. Instead, it’s Microsoft’s mixed-reality HoloLens goggles that are the weapon of choice here for what is one of Namco’s silliest – yet also, weirdly, probably the most marketable – forays into the altered-reality space to date. It is, simply put, Pac-Man in…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins a year’s subscription to PlayStation Plus, courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment “As our joint relationship with games progressed, so did our lives in the real world” Immersion heater Breath Of The Wild and Super Mario Odyssey deserve their pride of place in your 2017 awards (E315). I write to offer, not a top ten rant or rave, but a perspective on Nintendo’s achievement. Much of my game time last year was spent catching up with the finest, most intricate immersive sims on PC: I played and re-played Dishonored 1 and 2 and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. These games offered me deep and lasting pleasures. Nothing I’ve experienced surpasses the brilliant, subtly deceptive…

ALEX HUTCHINSON Illustration kaeru.com.ar Doing more of something that’s partially working is often a better strategy than trying to fix something Mid-winter in Montreal gamedev is an interesting moment: it’s -38° outside with wind chill, there’s no Christmas to look forward to, and it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon. On one side, there’s a great incentive to stay indoors and work when going outside can be physically painful. But it can also be the moment where everyone looks most critically at what they’ve been doing the previous year without the benefits of vitamin D. For Typhoon, it’s a pivotal moment. We submitted our first major demo to our publisher at the end of the year, and are now in the process of waiting to see if they will…

Developer Villa Gorilla Publisher Team 17 Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin Sweden Release 2018 Pinball and exploration hardly seem the most natural bedfellows. Mind you, neither do pinball and military strategy, and that didn’t stop Yoot Saito making GameCube curio Odama. But having settled on its unusual combination – and an unlikely hero in Yoku, a dung beetle tethered to a ball – Swedish indie Villa Gorilla realised its debut was developing an identity crisis. “We did some focus testing and realised it was a very stressful game,” co-founder Jens Andersson admits. “Which is inherent to pinball, really: it’s focused for short bursts of time, and that didn’t mesh well with the exploration.” The solution wasn’t to lower the difficulty so much as reduce the punishment for missing…

Dreams, appropriately enough, is something of an abstract concept. So abstract, in fact, that even Media Molecule has had trouble communicating what exactly it is. First announced during Sony’s E3 2015 conference, a surreal trailer showed painterly visions of polar bears, aliens and pianos, preceded by a single sentence: “Everything you see in this teaser was created on a PS4 in Dreams”. Beautiful, but indistinct, it wasn’t an instant sell – and Media Molecule’s tentative explanations began, raising more questions than they answered. Was this a spiritual successor to the studio’s LittleBigPlanet titles, or something altogether different? A game, or a game engine? A set of tools capable of producing the next indie hit, or some sort of social experiment? The magic and, in some ways, the misfortune of Dreams…

STILL PLAYING Nier: Automata PS4 Judging by the feedback we’ve received, Automata was one of the most surprising omissions from E315’s The Edge Awards, so we dispatched an absolute Nier novice to the frontlines of Yoko Taro’s emotive action- RPG. And our embedded reporter believes, ten or so hours in, that we made the right decision. Automata’s story may be brilliant, but it takes a little too long to show its hand. We’ve insisted our correspondent continues, however, and we’ll keep you posted. Super Mario Odyssey Switch The longer you play Odyssey, the more you start to notice the seams; at some point you’ll wonder whether the similarity of your to-do list reflects a Nintendo running out of ideas in its desire to give you 999 things to do. Yet…

Early indications suggest that it’ll be trickier for rival developers to borrow liberally from the trailblazers O ne of the great certainties of the game industry is that breakthrough hits beget unapologetic copycats pretty quickly. In 2017 we witnessed the rapid rise of the battle royale, so one might reasonably expect to be packed tightly against the back wall of one’s living room by a deluge of them this year – after all, PUBG Corporation sold over 20 million copies during early access alone, and there’s not a developer or publisher on the planet that would say no to those numbers. But Battlegrounds is an outsider hit that didn’t come from the industry’s established players. There’s no intro cutscene, not a line of dialogue, and no collectables. It doesn’t look,…

Developer Tokyo RPG Factory Publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4 (tested), Switch Release Out now Centred on a plucky group seeking to revive lost places by summoning old memories, Lost Sphear’s story might seem a little on-the-nose coming from a studio whose raison d’etre seems to be just that. As with its wintry debut, I Am Setsuna, this is a consciously old-fashioned JRPG, designed to evoke fond feelings of a time before extravagant, fully voiced cutscenes and lavish presentation became the norm. It uses the same top-down camera as its predecessor, and also features a turn-based battle system with realtime elements. There’s some shared terminology, too, and a melancholic undercurrent to its narrative. Yet if this spiritual successor of sorts has been pressed into a similar mould, it’s not quite…