Edgeの January 2018 の目次

In an ironic twist for a series best known for killing off a beloved character, we’re pretty sure Final Fantasy is going to still be around long after we’re gone. There’s just no stopping this series: it’s survived the potentially ruinous failure of a tie-in movie, and lived on after its creator moved on to pastures new. More recently, it has somehow stuck it out through the tortuous, decade-long development of Final Fantasy XV, and the near-total rebuild of the MMO Final Fantasy XIV. It is the videogame equivalent of the cockroach, if cockroaches were beautiful, and popular, and could summon Bahamut when things looked like going south. Edge has been around a while too, and we’ve been reinvented several times in our near-quarter-century on shelves. But nothing in games…

Onrush was up, running and playable internally at Codemasters within just three months We didn’t think this was supposed to happen anymore. It is barely 18 months since Codemasters announced it had given a new home to the team that made DriveClub at Evolution Studios, which had been shut down by parent company Sony. In just a year-and-a-half, this team has devised a new game concept, built a new engine to power it, and announced it on Sony’s stage at Paris Games Week. And not only that. Onrush was up, running and playable internally at Codemasters within just three months. “It’s about working smartly, more than anything else,” game director Paul Rustchynsky tells us. “We learned a lot from previous projects about how to do things in a much better…

Game Injustice Arcade Manufacturer Raw Thrills With a Justice League movie out, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that Raw Thrills is jumping on the batshaped bandwagon with the release of Injustice Arcade, built around the pre-existing mobile version of Netherrealm’s licensed fighting game. American arcade chain Dave & Buster’s has snagged a timed-exclusive release and cabinet (boasting a 55-inch bezel-free screen and a wider control panel), with a 43-inch version for general release expected in the next couple of months. Controls aren’t much more complex than the simplified mobile game, sadly. There are buttons for quick and strong hits, blocking, swapping out your three characters and executing special attacks. The real intrigue, however, lies in how the arcade version integrates its card system. An NFC reader lets players build their…

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 “Good on Blizzard for taking steps to establish a positive playing space” Toxic waste There’s been an increasingly heated debate across the gaming community whether it’s good (or even morally right) for game developers to moderate the social behaviours of their online community. Blizzard has recently received cries of dissent for its latest developer update, which focused on curbing the ‘toxic behaviour’ of some players in their shooter, Overwatch. Many players said that it infringed on personal freedoms, or that those players were somehow justified in their abusive behaviour by the mis-steps of fellow players. I think the greatest misunderstanding of…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar They started up with a clear and simple business plan. Along the way, they ended up changing the world Ten years ago, while I was still living in San Francisco, I heard a tale about one of the early investors in various Silicon Valley startups such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. He was frustrated, the story went, because all the modern pitches he sat through started with a description about how they were going to change the world: they didn’t have a plan, but they were going to ‘reinvent’ or ‘disrupt’ the act of making juice, or putting on your pants, or buying a pair of sunglasses. This was the opposite of all those companies he’d helped years earlier, which had started up with a clear and simple…

The star of the Paris Games Week demo, Kara, predates the game by some years. She was the focus of a tech demo shown by Quantic Dream at GDC in 2012, when the studio sought to show off what it had planned for thennext- gen platforms. Well, she looks even better now, perfect and gleaming in Todd’s tumbledown fleapit of a home. The advantage Cage’s tightly directed games have always had is their ability to devote all available processing power to a strictly controlled space; here, that means 4K, HDR and a welcome, if largely unnecessary, 60fps. Quantic Dream is an easy target for many reasons, but there’s no querying its technical chops.…

Florence is closer to being a visual novel than anything else. “One of the questions that we’ve had to field is, ‘Is it really a game?’” Wong says. “We don’t really care if people don’t think it’s a game. That comes back to why we perhaps haven’t tackled love and intimacy in games as much as other mediums. It’s that idea that a real game has to play a certain way – it has to resemble a board game, or a sport, or Star Wars.” In fact, even when and where you look is a kind of interactive element. Wong’s background as an illustrator has informed the way in which he controls the player’s gaze. “It’s all about visual language and readability. We direct people’s eyes around the page and…

“When the time came to pick which game to make, only three people voted for Final Fantasy” Hironobu Sakaguchi Amano grew up in Shizuoka in central Japan. When he was 14 years old a friend invited Amano to visit him in Tokyo. Amano went, but instead of seeing his friend, visited the animation company Tatsunoko Productions instead. Amano showed Yoshida Tatsuo, the head of the company, his portfolio and he was offered a job on the spot. Amano left school and, between 15 and 30, worked at the studio as a character designer and animator. After Tatsuo died, Amano struck out on his own, and began to take on commissions for books and magazines, which is how he came to the attention of Hironobu Sakaguchi. Sakaguchi After moving to the…

“I had a feeling that maybe we could make a film together” Hironobu Sakaguchi Hashimoto The trio of PlayStation games we made provided a high boost to the company. They enriched our lives: we moved to better offices in Meguro, we got new computers and lots more staff were joining. But Sakaguchi was always looking for what was going to be the next big thing. He came to strongly believe that an online revolution was coming. Because of that, we set up our PlayOnline project, a portal for online gaming. This was the impetus behind what would become the company’s first MMO, Final Fantasy XI. The actual development of Final Fantasy XI was handled in Honolulu in Sakaguchi’s studio there. I spent my time running around Japan brokering deals to…

Executive director, 8-4 Ltd How did you bring Undertale to PS4 and Vita? Initially, we weren’t thinking about consoles, but we’d invested a tremendous amount of love and effort in the Japanese localisation; the PC market in Japan isn’t that big comparatively, and we wanted to help the game reach a wider audience. That led to us pitching the idea of porting Undertale to PS4 and Vita for Japan. From there, it was like, ‘We may as well do it in North America and Europe, too.’ Next thing you know, we’re publishing and developing a game in three territories simultaneously. It was a busy summer. What were the biggest tests you faced? We had to do a ton of custom work to get the game working properly and looking good…

Publishers are terrified of you doing that these days, and so these finite games are fast becoming the exception, rather than the rule. Unfortunately, as is often the way, we’re getting thoroughly sick of the rule. If we have to play one more theoretically endless game with a loot-based progression system, we may actually lose our lunch. Oddly for a game whose singleplayer component begins with people’s legs being blown off, Call Of Duty: WWII (p112) sports a somewhat gentle, and largely ignorable, loot system that focuses on forgettable cosmetics, at least at launch. And we can’t complain about it having a progression system, since the series has had one for over a decade now, and Sledgehammer Games knows better than to mess with that formula. Elsewhere, though, it’s a…

Developer Monolith Soft Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now The combat, sporadically delightful in the opening chapters, grows more frequently so as you progress Around 30 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 2, we begin to wonder if the design document was simply a list of ideas with a tick next to every one. With a substantially shorter development cycle, it would be perfectly natural to assume Monolith Soft had forgone the series’ sprawling scope for something more compact and focused. Heavens, no. It’s positively bursting at the seams – but while it’s hard not to admire the mad, bug-eyed ambition of Tetsuya Takahashi and his team, it’s come at a cost. Once again, we have an adventure that’s been built for a console that can’t quite contain it, and a…

Developer Ghost Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now T here’s a moment quite early in this 23rd Need For Speed title in which the writing and racing meld together, and the promise of a narrative-focused driving game bears fruit. Struggling for employment after his crew disbands, Mac the drift racer earns a crust by taking people on ‘driving experiences’ in which he throws a car around some corners while they scream. One such client is a YouTube ‘influencer’ who speaks more to his viewers than he does to Mac, demands selfies every six seconds, and appears to be cosplaying as Kid Rock. So when our passenger begins to feel quite nauseous during the drift challenge, we suddenly feel a tremendous impetus to drive…

Developer The Pixel Hunt, Figs Publisher Ico Media Format Android, iOS (tested) Release Out now We haven’t had a text from our wife in three hours. Normally, we wouldn’t be too worried, but last we heard, she was about to cross the Evros river in an inflatable canoe. In Bury Me, My Love, we are Majd, whose wife, Nour, has left their war-torn homeland for the safety of Europe. It’s the story of a Syrian refugee, told not through newspaper articles, but through an interactive instant-messaging conversation: selfies, abbreviations, emojis and all. The use of the format is Bury Me, My Love’s masterstroke. It makes the faceless story of thousands suddenly intimate. This fictional relationship is implanted into your real digital life: the app sends push notifications to your phone,…

“As audiences get broader, the characters in games should get broader as well” IN REAL LIFE Nanjiani is married to Emily V Gordon, an author, comedy producer, and former couples and family therapist. Together, they hosted a videogame-themed podcast called The Indoor Kids until late 2015, when it went on indefinite hiatus owing to their busier schedules. In particular, it was because they spent the following year filming the romantic comedy they wrote together, The Big Sick, a film about their relationship and families, with Nanjiani starring as a version of himself. The film is one of the highestgrossing independent films of the year, and is now available on DVD and Blu-ray. Kumail Nanjiani is a Pakistani- American stand-up comedian, actor and writer. Featuring in television, film and also a…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar The game redefines World War II as a romp that existed mainly to demonstrate the moral fortitude of Americans Call Of Duty: WWII (pronounced “Whee!”, I think) is truly a videogame for our times. According to the publisher, it is “a breathtaking experience that redefines World War II for a new gaming generation”, and in a way that is true — the game ‘redefines’ World War II as a romp that existed mainly to demonstrate the moral fortitude of Americans. It is a blockbuster wargame as fake news. Perhaps I am nitpicking when I balk at the stirring speech of the colonel who tells his troops that “We are all that separates the world from darkness” – except, you know, for the millions of heroic troops of the…

‘Who dares, wins’ is fine if you’re in the SAS, but most of us are just trying to get through life unscathed. Developers aren’t in the business of jumping out of the proverbial plane to sell a videogame: one gamble too many can spell disaster for a studio. Indeed, many of the titles in this month’s Hype seem positioned to mitigate risk. You’ll probably like VR gangster caper Blood & Truth (p40), for instance, if you enjoyed PlayStation VR Worlds; Sony London Studios sold you the demo for it via The London Heist. Doubtless spurred on by the positive reception – you could waggle a revolver threateningly with one hand while huffing a Cuban with the other, for god’s sake – this is Heist cranked up several notches, with a…

Developer SIE London Studio Publisher SIE Format PSVR Origin UK Release 2018 P layStation VR Worlds served two very similar, but fundamentally different, purposes. For the early adopter of PSVR, Sony London Studio’s launch-day compendium of five shortform virtual-reality games was a generous, snackable spread that hinted at what an exciting new medium had to offer. For the studio, it meant getting a commercial return on a series of prototypes that it had devised while feeling around in the dark of a new, emerging technology. “It was about London Studio getting to grips with the platform,” Stuart Whyte, director of VR product development at the studio, tells us. “Trying DualShock 4, Move and head-only control systems; trying things like The Deep, which was almost a fairground ride, through to more…

Strictly speaking, fourplayer co-op isn’t completely new to Guacamelee: the option was retrofitted into the PC and PS4 versions of 2014’s Super Turbo Championship Edition. But the sequel has been built with local multiplayer in mind from the start. Smith admits accommodating a quartet of luchadores has brought its own challenges, namely with camera movement and readability. For the latter, small numbered triangles will allow players to keep better track of their character. Through extensive playtesting, Drinkbox has made a number of camera tweaks to ensure a smooth co-op experience, but Smith assures us solo players shouldn’t be concerned. “We’re addressing these multiplayer issues as we’re finding them,” he says, “but in ways that will not hurt the singleplayer experience in any way.”…

Developer Bulkhead Interactive Publisher Square Enix Collective Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin UK Release TBA “There’s no killstreaks, no perks – just you and your skill with a weapon” T here’s something about World War II that ignites FPS fans’ interest. When Bulkhead Interactive first announced Battalion 1944 in 2016, it was the setting that turned heads. The prospect of a modern shooter returning to the historical stomping ground of Call Of Duty and Medal Of Honor lit the touchpaper: in just under three days, Battalion reached its £100,000 Kickstarter goal. In 30 days, it more than tripled it. Then Activision unveiled Call Of Duty: WWII. Disaster? Not at all. In fact, Battalion’s executive producer Joe Brammer had been expecting it, having picked up on telling tweets from a…

In Final Fantasy, every world is born anew, a grand and continuous act of creation and reinvention On the last day of development of a new Final Fantasy game, Hironobu Sakaguchi, a man who looks like he would maintain his kindly half-smile even while asking you to clean out your desk and never come back, would gather the entire team into the office. Together, in a weary but exhilarated silence, everyone would sit and watch the ending to the game on which they had worked for the past weeks, months and, in the case of later entries to the series, years. Tears would fall. Champagne would flow. It was finally finished. Except, of course, Final Fantasy’s title has always been a winking misnomer. The morning after the night before, the…

“I heard later that the CEO of Square didn’t want to hire me” Yoshinori Kitase Uematsu At that time Square really didn’t feel like a proper company at all. It was more like a student project. People would finish school in the day then roll up in the evening to work. I think Sakaguchi realised he couldn’t do the job while studying. When Final Fantasy came out he was still at university, and I was engaged to be married and needed a stable job. I think we realised this could no longer be a student hobby for us all. We had to start making moves to become more professional. Sakaguchi I’m not sure when I realised that the company had been saved. I never saw the financial numbers, so I…

“I said, ‘Okay. Never talk to me about Final Fantasy XIV again’” Naoki Yoshida Naoki Yoshida joined Hudson Soft in 1993 where he worked on the Bomberman series. He joined Square Enix 11 years later to lead the Dragon Quest: Monster Battle Road series. An avid MMO fan, Yoshida was taken off Dragon Quest X to work as a consultant on the troubled Final Fantasy XIV. He saw that the root of the game’s issues lay in its team’s obsession with graphical fidelity. At a talk in 2014, Yoshida pointed out that, in the original Final Fantasy XIV, a single flowerpot contained around 1,000 polygons and 150 lines of shader code, “the same amount as the entire player-character model.” Naoki Yoshida When the merger between Square and Enix happened in…

“WE GET A LOT OF INFORMATION FROM THE DIFFERENT MOTORSPORTS, AND WEUSE IT TO TEACH PEOPLE” Founded 1996 Employees 200 Key staff Virgio Bixio, Luisa Bixio, Irvin Zonca, Ivan Del Duca URL milestone.it Selected softography MotoGP 17, Ride 2, Valentino Rossi: The Game, MXGP3, Sébastien Loeb Rally Evo Current projects Gravel, Monster Energy Supercross Milestone’s life began in 1994 as Graffiti, one of the first game development studios in Italy. After its first release, a SNES adaptation of the Atari puzzle game Loopz, the studio quickly established its precedence in the field of racing games. Starting with 1995’s Screamer as Graffiti and then Screamer 2, Screamer Rally and Superbike World Championship as Milestone, the company grew into one of Italy’s largest, and also most specialised, game developers. “We were a small team.…

Developer Criterion, DICE, EA Motive Publisher EA Format PC, PS4, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now With our objections to its premise put aside, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had out of Battlefront II’s campaign Well, we suppose it was never going to last. We came away from E3 having tried to take Star Wars Battlefront II’s marketing pitch at face value, and failing to buy the premise. How could we possibly be expected to spend the duration of its story campaign empathising with a card-carrying member of the Empire – the daughter of an Admiral, no less! – mowing down the light side of the Force as we helped evil incarnate conquer the galaxy? The answer, predictably, is that you don’t. The surprise is in just how…

Developer/publisher Nintendo (EPD) Format Android, iOS (tested) Release Out now W e shake the first tree and sigh. A tap of the trunk, and it relinquishes its fruit as expected, but this time its yield is replaced with a timer: 2hr 59min. It’s merely the first of many numbers you’ll see playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. The series’ peculiar spell has always been dependent on maintaining an illusion, a combination of smart engineering and excellent writing disguising the ones and zeroes that are invisibly determining the behaviour of your villagers and the rules of its world. Clarke’s third law is only true so long as the magician withholds his secrets; Pocket Camp doesn’t so much let you peek behind the curtain as forcefully tear the drapes down and show you…

Developer/publisher Onion Games KK Format Android, iOS (both tested) Release Out now Dispel any thoughts of Yoshiro Kimura tempering his more eccentric tendencies. If anything, Million Onion Hotel is even weirder than Dandy Dungeon, from the kazoo melodies and jazz-piano backing of its title screen theme to a climactic battle against a colossal, bubble-blowing fish. Again, however, it’s deceptively clever, a veneer of gaudy strangeness belying a puzzle game of quiet ingenuity that soon becomes captivating. Inside the eponymous establishment lies a 5x5 grid, from which onions steadily sprout, leaving behind a red square when tapped. Form a red line in any direction and a clock will drop, refilling the ticking timer at the top of the screen and advancing you one level. But, as you’ll soon discover, single lines…

After a quiet, rather safe E3, this was a Sony that once again seemed eager to please There is, in fairness, no way to perfectly time a live show when it’s being broadcast around the world. Yet that is no excuse for Sony’s Paris Games Week show – which kicked off at 5pm local time, and as such was always likely to be watched by school-age children in the event’s home region – being quite so extreme in its content. First, David Cage’s Detroit: Become Human was shown off, if you can call it that, in a scene depicting violent child abuse. Later, in the showclosing headline slot, a sequence from The Last Of Us II showed arms, heads and jaws split apart by hammers. Yes, the watershed means nothing…

WEBSITE Game Music Radio bit.ly/gamemusicradio It might look like a ten-yearold’s first homebrew website, but RPGamers’ 24-hour videogame music radio player is deceptively elegant. With a database of 4,276 tracks, it makes for no-fuss background listening. Really, though, it’s the clever and accessible ‘requests’ system that keeps you coming back. Add your song to the queue, and it’ll eventually be broadcast to listeners. There’s even a levelling system. All tracks have request timers to prevent repetition which correlate with a song’s ‘level’. Highly rated, popular songs have longer timers. There’s a social element to it all, too: it’s nice to see people upvoting your good taste, while the schadenfreude of seeing another request knocked down to 0 XP by disgruntled listeners is almost as delicious. Diablo II’s Deckard Cain Rap?…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar I had a thoroughly pleasant, if gently back-breaking, Sunday afternoon trip down memory lane Another child is on the way. Don’t worry: we’ve still a few months to go before I write up the no-brainer New Game+ column, and another few months after that before I sink into a profound despair for a couple of years. But Mrs Nathan, ever the eager planner, is already deep into the nesting process – and the looming prospect of more hellspawn made flesh means we need to clear some space. Okay, I need to clear some space. I am a terrible hoarder. The DVDs went to charity years ago; they were easy enough to get rid of, to be honest. I’ve had a couple of good prunes of the record collection,…

Shortly before our demo, Whyte showed a montage of box art from across London Studio’s back catalogue – a handy visual reminder that this is a developer which has always led the charge on Sony’s less-than-traditional gaming initiatives. While it’s perhaps best known for The Getaway, a cockney GTA-a-like that turns 15 this year, it’s also the studio behind the EyeToy and Singstar series, as well as PS4 launch freebie Playroom and the short-lived Wonderbook. “It’s a studio that’s supported lots of Sony hardware,” Whyte says. “And it’s a studio that has, with PSVR coming out a year ago, found a big opportunity to reinvent itself. That’s the exciting thing at the moment: there’s something there, and we’re right at the beginning of it.”…

Developer Mountains Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format iOS Origin Australia Release 2018 Relationships are hard. There’s no ‘win’ state for love: perhaps that’s why videogames tend to give the subject a wide berth. “Gamer culture is very traditional, very conservative,” says Ken Wong, creative director at Mountains. “Early games focused on things that early games did really well: racing, combat – construction, even. But not feelings. Feelings were a little harder to achieve.” Wong’s latest title, however, hopes to accomplish just that. An interactive graphic novel for smartphones, it tells the story of a young woman, Florence, falling in love for the first time. This isn’t Wong’s first foray into the world of mobile games: he was lead designer on smartphone puzzle hit Monument Valley. “It hit such a broad audience,”…

Battalion 1944 is definitely aimed at shooter enthusiasts, but that doesn’t mean Bulkhead isn’t trying to appeal to a wide range of skill levels. “With our matchmaking mode, we’re allowing you to play solo, but also as a team,” Philpott says. “When you play as a team, it doesn’t affect your solo rank. So if a friend who’s not played shooters before wants to play with you, you’re not going to sacrifice your skill ranking. You can play together and you’ll have a shared rank, which is a lot better for people trying to learn the game.” The team is also keeping an eye on recent hits: “We’re looking at stuff like how much of a big success Battlegrounds is… we are definitely looking at the market and seeing what…

“There were no seniors in the company. We were totally free” Hironobu Sakaguchi As a child Sakaguchi, who grew up in the rural district of Ibaraki, north of Tokyo, had planned to become a professional musician. He played in a host of different bands, showing an early entrepreneurial spirit by staging concerts in local halls, for which he sold tickets. His dreams changed, however, when he first saw the Apple 2 computer. At university, Sakaguchi saved up and bought a bootleg version of the machine, on which he designed and programmed a couple of basic RPGs for his own amusement. Before long his hobby became a profession when he joined Square, then a tiny firm staffed almost exclusively by university students. The job proved a massive distraction from his studies,…

“My job was to broker a lot of collaborations with other companies” Shinji Hashimoto Shinji Hashimoto grew up in Niigata, on the northern coast of Japan. When he was ten, the town became the centre of a scandal following the kidnapping of Megumi Yokota, a 13-year-old girl, who was abducted by North Korea – an outrage that is still discussed today. Following the kidnapping, Hashimoto and his parents moved to Tokyo. While he was at university, Hashimoto became a freelance writer on TV and anime, and became an expert in Gundam. This led to a job at the toy manufacturer Bandai, where he worked on the Gundam line of toys. Through his job he came to know Yuji Horii and Akira Toriyama, the creators of Dragon Quest. When Horii and…

STILL PLAYING The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim PSVR, Switch Stick your Rocket League: if ever there were a compelling case for cross-platform features it’s the release, on the same day, of two irresistible enhancements to Skyrim’s ageing, yet somehow endless, appeal. In VR, it’s a delight; in the work bag, it’s almost the game of our dreams. Yet time spent in one inevitably feels like time wasted in the other. Oh, for transferrable save files. Doom Switch Technically speaking, this is a marvel, an excellent conversion of an explosive game to Switch’s tighter constraints that survives the transition almost without compromise. Yet it’s not for us. This is a handheld game – if we want a big-screen Doom, we have other options – and those dinky Joy-Con sticks just don’t…

Loot crates, at first, felt like merely the latest attempt by the game industry to balance the books T he bitter irony here is that the three studios involved in this project fulfilled their brief to the letter. DICE made a bigger, more rounded multiplayer mode. New EA studio Motive delivered a beautiful, if predictable, singleplayer campaign filled to bursting with lavish fan service. Criterion put its Burnout and Need For Speed experience to fine use in its design of Battlefront II’s vehicles. This was a project doomed not on the shop floor but in the boardroom, and in an emerging discipline of data-driven, psychologically manipulative design, a game built in an engine and killed in a spreadsheet. It was born in the free-to-play space, where monetisation is the only…

Developer Sledgehammer Games Publisher Activision Format PC, PS4, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now Even away from War mode, this is the most fun we’ve had in a COD multiplayer in years War, it turns out, is actually heaven. Call Of Duty: WWII’s principal addition to its series’ timeworn multiplayer formula may not actually be all that new in a wider context, but it’s the most enjoyable time we’ve had with a COD online mode in many a year. War mode puts you on either the attacking or defending side, focusing on a series of shifting objectives. The action is bound to a timer; should it run out before the attacking side completes the current objective, it’s round over and a victory for the defending team. It’s nothing we haven’t…

Developer Supermassive Games Publisher SIE Format PS4 Release Out now N othing gets a party started like a rollicking tale of braindead coppers, grisly murders and child abuse, does it? We’d suggest turning down an invite to any soiree with a game of Hidden Agenda planned, as showing up means resigning yourself to two hours of teeth-gritting awkwardness. It’s a shame, because by all accounts, a party game made by the developers of campy schlock-horror Until Dawn should be a success. It was a singleplayer game, sure, but branching storylines and jumpscares made it an entertaining couchplay experience. Supermassive has doubled down on this by building thriller Hidden Agenda around Playlink, Sony’s multiplayer scheme which repurposes smartphones as controllers. Trite conversations progress at a languid pace, with players voting on…

Developer BioWare Publisher EA Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2014 Running a country is, we’re sure, a messy, awkward business and so, much of the time, is Dragon Age: Inquisition. Consider Skyhold, the game’s gradually restored mountaintop fortress that is the most obvious manifestation of your power as Inquisitor, but which often inspires a sense of helplessness, with companions, crafting stations, merchants, furnaces, wardrobes and gardens scattered throughout its courtyards and battlements. A hundred hours into the game, it is still possible to get lost while walking around your own seat of government – confusing the door to your quarters with the one to the war room, for example, or the stair to the great hall balcony with the one to your aviary. The perks of lording it over…