Table of contents for Xmas 2018 in Edge

This issue, as the enormous number five on the cover makes clear, is about longevity. In the fastest-moving form of entertainment on the planet, change is a necessity if you want to stick around. Yet it’s also essential to stay true to your roots. The aim of a sequel is twofold, after all: to give existing fans more of what they fell in love with, while adding something fresh in order to attract a wider audience of new players. In this issue’s cover story, Devil May Cry 5 director Hideaki Itsuno talks about what he calls the Plus Alpha element: the extra layer of mechanical complexity that fans expect from a sequel. Yet it is also a risky business, since making an already complex game such as Devil May Cry…

Michelle Zauner is a musician who writes and performs under the name Japanese Breakfast. With two albums under her belt, she’s now turning her talents to videogames, producing the soundtrack for forthcoming indie adventure Sable, which was announced on Microsoft’s stage at E3 in June. How did you first get into videogames? My dad had a Super Nintendo. It was a thing we did together, playing games in our den. I got really into Secret Of Mana; it’s still one of the only RPGs that’s twoplayer, and it was a big part of my relationship with my dad. It took months. After my dad got off work and I got off school, we’d play it for an hour or two. As I grew older and my dad got busier at…

As I stumble through the first half hour of Another World: Anniversary Edition, learning again to kick slugs to death and suffering repeated instadeaths from bad-tempered laser-wielding giant wombats, I feel a powerful nostalgia. Dim memories of playing the original on my little sister’s Atari ST; a whole early-1990s gestalt revived. And yet it’s not merely nostalgia. The enormous influence of Another World can still be felt in modern classics such as Inside. And our relationship to the past in videogaming has changed, for the better. For a start, Another World is still spectacularly beautiful: its flat pastels are a testament to the power of thoughtful artistry over mere virtual photography. A terrifying monster is conjured merely by a few red pixels blinking for eyes among a spiky blank expanse…

We’ve written a lot about the Yakuza series in Edge over the years. There is much to love about it: its personality, its whimsy, its seediness and human drama. Yet the key to the series’ success, and the core of our regard for it, is its stability. Every game in the series has featured the same core cast of characters, deepening our connection to the main players. Crucially, all have also been set in the same corner of Tokyo. You come to know the place like the back of your hand, and each new release feels oddly like a homecoming. This is a rare sensation in videogames – long-running series tend to owe their success to the ways in which they change, rather than how still they stand – and…

The newly agile Licker is the poster child for Capcom’s efforts to revive Resident Evil 2 without simply warming it over. In the original game, it’s introduced as a wall-crawler but only ever fights you on the ground. “We couldn’t implement an actual battle with it scurrying across the walls for technology and time reasons,” Kazunori Kadoi recalls. “It would have been too difficult to fight with the stop-and-shoot controls and too difficult to program.” Twenty years later, a junior programmer has taken it on himself to finish the job. “Maybe a veteran would never have had that idea,” Kadoi observes. “Because in their mind the Licker is what it was. It takes the ‘not knowing what you can’t do’ approach of the younger guys.”…

Nova’s story follows on from that of Dust, with the latter’s elite clone mercenaries resurrected to fight the old Eve faction Samsha’s Nation, a rogue religious state. Samsha’s Nation hasn’t been used as Eve content since 2013 – it represents one of many backstory elements CCP might return to through Nova. Seemingly told via intermission cutscenes, the game’s campaign will introduce a new corporation, Aegis, and may ultimately take players back to Eve planets, though this is strictly a possibility for after launch. While there’s little in-game storytelling, matches also follow a Titanfall-esque narrative structure, with players contesting points and holding them for a period before rushing to an exfiltration point.…

Developer/publisher Polyamorous Games Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Poland Release 2020 Paradise Lost is about loss at both the “micro and macro scale”, according to Polyamorous CEO and game director Greg Ciach. Set in a frozen, post-apocalyptic Poland, it explores civilisation’s aftermath through the eyes of two characters: a nameless boy combing the wilds for his mother, and a woman, Eve, who resides deep in an enormous, decrepit underground bunker. Eschewing combat and time-sensitive mechanics in general, it sees you manipulating objects using kinaesthetic gestures inspired by Frictional and Quantic Dream’s work – rotating the cursor across to crank a handle, for example. The first thing we do in our demo is tend to a poppy, adjusting a heating lamp and pumping water through a hose. The sequence takes…

The hit pause is one of videogaming’s greatest tricks. A brief, almost imperceptible freeze in the action when a blow hits home, it may have been invented primarily to help fighting-game players react to the hit and continue their combos, but its real magic is in the way it emphasises the impact of a successful attack. Devil May Cry 5 is full of them, naturally; this is a Capcom game of supremely fast, impeccably stylish action. Yet here it feels celebratory, reverential even, pulling in references from the wider Capcom universe and delivering them with, in the context of its publisher, an unprecedented visual sheen. Dante, Devil May Cry’s headline protagonist, has here been blessed with a Shoryuken. Its animation has three obvious, lengthy and quite beautiful hit pauses. Bang,…

STILL PLAYING Destiny 2: Forsaken PS4 We’ve had a quick crack at Last Wish – and we’d have cleared it were it not for the autumn review-code rush. But Forsaken’s appeal continues to lie in just how much there is to do, even if we’re starting to minmax a little and focus our efforts on the most rewarding activities when we log in. A couple of months after an expansion’s launch, Destiny is normally beginning to feel stale. It is still in the rudest of health. Dark Souls Remastered Switch At last. The name is a bit misleading, to be fair: this is more of a port of the 360-era original than the lavish rebuild available elsewhere. The audio’s a mess, and whoever remapped the button layout, and then refused…

The game may be swimming in systems, but it’s up to you how much you engage with them. You can use pelts and hides to craft bigger satchels, yes, but it’s a luxury rather than a necessity. You can craft more powerful ammo types at campfires, and improve weaponry at gunsmiths, but the carbine you found a couple of hours into the game will carry you all the way to the end. And the essentials happen naturally, with core stats for Morgan and his horse improving through regular use. We expect some of these systems to come into their own in Red Dead Online – indeed, a few feel designed for it, with some of the customisation options feeling a little silly. Did they really have horse dreadlocks in the…

Odyssey is the first Assassin’s Creed to let you seduce and sleep with NPCs, but don’t expect anything either as torrid or sentimental as in Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Mostly, the prospect is played for laughs, and while you can take certain partners with you on your voyages (as lieutenants aboard your ship, perhaps), there’s no real ongoing relationship to manage. Among the eligible sorts you’ll encounter (as either gender) are a hirsute healer who’ll ask you to murder his grandmother before falling in to your arms, and an energetic old lady whose husband is struggling to keep up with her appetites. The sex itself is decorously handled – think discreet fades to black, rather than Mass Effect’s vein of shampoo-commercial softcore.…

Ubisoft’s Nintendo connection has come up trumps again. It’s not quite accurate to call Fox McCloud’s Switch-exclusive Starlink appearance a cameo – he and the Star Fox crew have a mini-campaign all of their own. In it, you must chase down Wolf across the galaxy in a series of missions that frequently outclass those in the main story. Every character is faithfully written and acted, Fox’s interactions with the main cast provide a welcome bit of fun to a lacklustre script, and calling in backup for Fox’s super ability even plays the Corneria theme. All told, it’s one of the best Star Fox games in a long time, and makes Starlink well worth a punt for the superfans.…

A goggle-eyed chameleon is hidden within each stage: find it and you’ll unlock one of over two dozen challenges. Some are rudimentary ‘beat the boss without getting hit’ tasks, but others are more inventive. The very first gives you a minute to finish a stage by bouncing on trampolines to the finish. Later, you’ll be asked to negotiate a claustrophobic underwater gauntlet without touching the electrical hazards around the edges. Another sees you leaping between floating leaves to climb a tree, grabbing rings to beat a target score. Success earns you gold and silver robots to add to your crew, which you can find alongside a crane-grabber machine inside your ship. These gachapon contain parts of a series of themed 360-degree dioramas for Astro to romp around: essentially the most…

“Everybody is talking about battle royale, but there are 15 different companies making those games, and like mobile, only two will be successful. Many will be killed along the way.”Well yes, Ubisoft CCO Serge Hascoet, that’s kind of how battle royale works “We wouldn’t have enough to bring people all together in some location in North America. We don’t want to set our expectations high and not deliver on them.”PlayStation’s US chief Shawn Layden explains why there won’t be a PSX this year – without mentioning PS5 “We’ve successfully negotiated with Telltale Games… We can’t lose Andrew Lincoln and Clementine in the same year.”Remember, The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few Eggs “There is a sense of urgency. In big companies, we…

BOOK Japansoft: An Oral History bit.ly/japansoft Former Edge editor – and current Edge contributor – Alex Wiltshire is authoring yet another book. Japansoft: An Oral History charts the experiences of developers working at companies such as Sega, Capcom, Enix, Hudson Soft and Nihon Falcom, to name a few. It’s a combination of Wiltshire’s own interviews, and selections from the extensive transcripts from videogame writer John Szczepaniak’s 2013 research trip around Japan. Design agency Julia is on board: illustrations from Yu Nagaba will add anecdotal charm to the book, as will never-before-seen photographs and press adverts. Japansoft: An Oral History promises to be a rare and intimate look into some of the untold stories from Japan’s game development history – fingers crossed it reaches its £15,000 funding target. VIDEO Getting Into…

The rumour mill is spinning up again. I’ve never been one for industry gossip, to be honest. Don’t get me wrong: if you’ve got some scuttlebutt about a misbehaving PR rep, I will buy you a drink and you must tell me immediately. But I’ve spent my time in this profession studiously avoiding too much in the way of rumour. Mostly, to be honest, this is because I am at heart a great big fanboy, and I love to be surprised. One of the greatest moments of my career was being in the room for the Sony E3 conference a few years back when they showed off The Last Guardian, Shenmue III and the FFVII remake within minutes. Brit journos always feel a bit out of place at these things.…

Tetris Effect PS4, PSVR We could have snuck in a review of Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s synaesthetic spin on the world’s favourite puzzle game this issue, but doing so would have meant rattling through it in 48 hours. The Rez and Lumines creator’s games deserve better, and so do our readers. Next month, we promise. Katamari Damacy Reroll PC, Switch We’re a little wary of just how well it will handle on those teensy Joy-Con analogue sticks, but we’ll make it work. The thought of the game that made Keita Takahashi’s career on the commute is simply irresistible. Switch is the best thing ever, isn’t it? Anthem PC, PS4, Xbox One Our enthusiasm for BioWare’s take on the shared-world sci-fi FPS has dimmed slightly given Destiny 2’s turnaround, but we’re still keen…

Developer/publisher Sega (Yakuza Studio) Format PS4 Origin Japan Release December 13 (Japan), 2019 (worldwide) Any successful franchise is a double-edged sword for a developer. Sequels all but guarantee money in the bank, but can be creatively stifling. So it’s no great shock to learn that Toshihiro Nagoshi has been planning to do something different for a while. “I did aspire to propose a new type of game even during the various Yakuza title releases,” he admits. And yet there’s no denying that Nagoshi’s new game isn’t a major departure. For the development team, comprised primarily of the main staff behind Yakuza 0 (which, as that series’ peak, is a promising sign), Project Judge must seem like something of a busman’s holiday. Within seconds of its opening cutscene, we know exactly where we are,…

The intimacy of VR is well-suited to the RPG genre, it turns out. “A successful RPG often gives you the sense of closeness to your character,” Ge says. Nostos’ inventory system is an excellent interpretation of this: you access weapons, tools, crafting and building blueprints via a menu wheel situated on the back of your in-game hand. You select a sword or and axe to summon the object, then hang it on your belt once you’re done. “Being able to look down at your wrist computer, instead of going to a separate screen, or returning a weapon to your inventory by ‘holstering’ it – that’s a different feeling and it’s interesting to play with,” Ge says. It’s a very neat bit of design indeed, managing to feel as natural as…

The recipient of an Unreal dev grant, Polyamorous Games numbers just 14 people. Among its more seasoned staffers is art director Riana Moller, who cut her teeth at Io Interactive and went on to work on Crytek’s Ryse: Son Of Rome. The developer aims to “blur the line between art and entertainment”, and is keen that its work be accessible to people who don’t play games habitually – hence, Paradise Lost’s use of gestures that are easy to perform and (supposedly) less artificial than pushing buttons. “We loved them in Amnesia, Penumbra and Soma,” Greg Ciach says. “It gives you a feeling of great immersion when you do what your characters are doing.”…

Naoyuki Miyashita Lead game designer How have you maintained player interest in Shadowverse? We release an expansion every three months. This was a rule, or a pattern that we introduced at the very beginning, and we have stuck with it ever since. Recently we have been introducing cards in between the expansions, both to maintain interest and fix the balance. Regular expansions and the addition of new cards can threaten the game’s balance. How do you monitor this to ensure fairness? We have a team full of pro level analogue card gamers and esports athletes who continue to test the game on an ongoing basis. And since the game’s launch we have monitored actual play data assiduously. If we spot any problems we conduct card adjustments. Going forward we'll also…

They say big ships turn slow – and, similarly, we’ve learned not to expect established videogame series to change too much between instalments. This is quite the predicament, however, for some of the biggest and longest-running names in games. If all you ever do is offer more of the same, it stands to reason that your audience will only get smaller. Seek to reinvent the wheel, however, and you risk not only failing to draw in new players, but also alienating those you already have. Happily, this month, we find that change is still possible, even where you least expect it. Call Of Duty: Black Ops IIII (p114) is the first game in its series’ colossal history to ship without a singleplayer mode – its makers finally acknowledging that too…

We’ve come a long way since Niko Bellic uttered the immortal line, “Roman, I cannot go look at titties with you. I have to do something else.” Red Dead Redemption 2 is not the first Rockstar game to toy with the concept of family, but it is the first to treat it as anything other than a bind. Roman, cousin of GTAIV protagonist Bellic, was a quest-giver, a troublemaker, and a companion for off-mission minigames and seedy distractions. The latter felt, at first, like a revelation: an NPC, calling you up, just as a cousin might, and inviting you to do something fun with them, adding depth and flavour to the protagonist and the world around him. Forty hours of seemingly incessant phone calls later, though? If you want to…

Yakuza Studio’s finely honed knack for designing gently stressful, weirdly compulsive asides about drinking is in full evidence. When Kenshiro incurs a huge debt, he’s invited to start paying it off by working as the manager of a hostess bar. If you played Yakuza 0 you’ll have an idea of what to expect: sit the right girls next to the right punters and use their special techniques to keep your clients drinking (and thus paying out) for longer. A bartender job, meanwhile, requires you to variously hold the DualShock vertically and give it a hearty shake, circle your thumb over the face buttons to chip huge ice blocks into whiskey tumbler-sized balls, or to rapidly spin the right stick to mix one of several creatively named beverages. Inebriation Of Souls,…

It’s hard to fault World for its comparatively low number of monsters compared to that in Generations, since it had to entirely reskin, animate and fundamentally reinvent each beast. But the low count led to a small range of armour sets and weapons to craft, and that led to players tending to wear the same gear, limitations for strategies for armour bonuses, and a shortened endgame. To go on to play Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate, which has 93 monsters, is to see a multitude of different armour sets on other players, allowing for far broader fashion-minded play and the chance to explore a dizzying range of abilities and playstyles. And beyond that, it helps lend the sense that you’re one hunter among many others, reinforcing the sense of fellowship within a cadre that so…

Sega seems to be having trouble completing its Mega Drive Mini, its take on Nintendo’s Classic consoles. In September it announced that it was delaying launch to 2019, giving a chance to review its design so it better matches its source hardware. While it works, however, another challenger has emerged, offering a fundamentally perfect representation of Sega’s 16bit classic. The Mega Sg is the next console from Analogue, maker of the SNES-playing Super Nt (see E318). And when it’s released next year, it won’t just play Mega Drive games. It will also support Master System titles, Game Gear, SG-1000, Mark III, SC-3000, Sega MyCard and Sega CD, each from all regions. “All the more esoteric stuff for which, of course, there’s a limited demographic, the hardcore of hardcore,” Analogue founder…

In Edge 323’s Collected Works, Sega’s chief creative officer Toshihiro Nagoshi told us what it was like to work with Yu Suzuki during the company’s arcade heyday. Suzuki, Nagoshi explained, worked without design documents; he was, effectively, making it up as he went along. “He’s the kind of person that, if he wants to do more, cannot stop himself,” Nagoshi said of his work on Shenmue. “Someone must be there to do it for him.” Clearly Suzuki has no such calming influence these days. With a release date for Shenmue III now set in stone – stop laughing at the back – you might think Suzuki would be trying to avoid distractions. Instead, he’s making a VR game. Vrsus is Suzuki’s first arcade project since 2008’s Lindbergh-powered Sega Race TV,…

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 Afterword/rag Another year, another time for lists. While I must admit a strong compulsion towards them, I recognise their arbitrary nature. That said, on a forum I frequent, I post a thread every year for the worst game of that calendar year. This year has had me on a different slant, however. I feel I have had to rename the thread to “most disappointing” game due to what seems to have been a very strong year overall. At present, titles like Mario Tennis Aces and State Of Decay 2 seem to be dominating the debate, but it has had me thinking…

Google has finally announced its brand new game-streaming platform, cunningly titled Project Stream. It’s a slick and easy to use implementation of a cool idea: what if anyone who has access to a browser could just press a button and play any game they wanted, anywhere, at any time? But with everyone scrambling to become the ‘Netflix of games’, Google is about to confront the same problem Netflix already did: it doesn’t have any content. More challengingly, unlike Netflix, I don’t get the impression that Google particularly wants to make its own games, or even publish them. It needs other studios – ones like ours, in theory – to do it instead. Over the last few years I’ve had several meetings with Google’s outreach mob, from the early days when…

Developer/publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin Japan Release January 25 The Resident Evil 2 of 2019 may have traded static camera angles for an over-the-shoulder view, but it still knows the value of a fixed perspective. As we wander the Raccoon City Police Station in the shoes of a decidedly grimmer Leon Kennedy, we discover a CCTV montage of an officer battling zombies elsewhere in the building, firing his pistol wildly as he backs from one screen to the next. Whether intentional or not, it’s a reminder of what the series has sacrificed in handing you control of the camera: the stress of recalculating line of sight to a threat when moving between viewpoints, the paranoia stoked by high-angle shots of cramped environments and of course, the ubiquity of blind…

When we first see Yagami, he’s a cocksure lawyer, all sharp suits and slicked-back hair. Three years on, he’s a tousle-haired leather-jacketed private eye. So what drives him? “Well, I don’t want to spoil the game, but he has no interest in returning to his career as a lawyer,” Nagoshi tells us. “However, he has a powerful sense of justice, and while he doesn’t outright say it, he wants to help people.” Sounds like someone we know, though as Nagoshi elaborates, he’s less sure of himself than Kiryu. “The story starts at a point in his life where he has no strong ideas about what he should or wants to do. This is a bit unusual for a videogame protagonist, but this beginning makes his character arc all the more…

Over the past year, Vane’s heroine has transformed in yet another sense: once a scruffy urchin, she’s now almost regal, clad in flowing ribbons reminiscent of Journey’s travellers. “We had certain emotions that we wanted to portray,” Dahlberg says. “We were not really happy with how the previous one was hitting those, so we revised it. And we also incorporated some colour, which really helps in our darker environments.” Deguchi laughs: “It’s still mostly black on black, but we added some blue!” Even the bird form appears to sparkle more, we note, and the aesthetic feels more whimsical. “When we first had it on paper, I imagine if you saw the script you would have been like, ‘This is very much a fairytale’,” Smith says. “And now the whole game…

Founded 2010 Employees 200 Key staff Gavin Raeburn (studio director), Trevor Williams (chief operating officer), Ralph Fulton (chief creative officer) URL www.playground-games.com Selected softography Forza Horizon series Current projects Forza Horizon 4, unannounced open-world project From its drystone walls to its streaked autumn skies, Forza Horizon 4 is Playground’s most British project, and a timely assertion of cultural identity as the studio becomes part of the Microsoft empire. Playground has always had a special relationship with Microsoft, of course, having worked on Forza with franchise creator Turn 10 since its founding in 2010. But it wasn’t till the unexpectedly wild success of Forza Horizon 3 that the idea of an acquisition solidified. “There were conversations that we’d had from time to time, as kind of inevitably you do when you’re in a…

Developer/publisher Rockstar Games Format PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Our hat, you say? What, this old thing? We’re not sure where we got it, honestly. We don’t think it’s the one we bought at the general store in Strawberry, though we suppose it might be. Perhaps it’s the one we lifted from the corpse of that rancher who took exception to us taking a shortcut through his property, and picked his final fight. Most likely, though, we picked it up by accident, retrieving it at random after a dust-up in a bar or a shootout in the streets. We’ve grown rather fond of it, either way. Chances are you’ll get through a lot of hats in Red Dead Redemption 2, and not necessarily intentionally. The UI can be…

Where next for the FPS megabrand? You could be forgiven for taking Black Ops IIII as a statement of Activision’s intent to ape the multiplayer flavour of the month with each subsequent release, but in truth Sledgehammer and Infinity Ward may very well be hard at work on more traditional offerings. Treyarch told media in 2018 that it had “no idea” of its stablemates’ creative direction for future games, and that Blackout mode is “quintessentially Black Ops” and thus couldn’t have found a home in any other of COD’s progeny. The game’s commercial performance will be the biggest clue as to what next year’s COD comprises, as will the popularity of battle royales as a whole.…