Table of contents for October 2017 in Edge

As our masthead makes clear, Edge is in the business of the future of interactive entertainment. It’s a lofty goal – and, as this issue shows, an increasingly wide-ranging one. This month we head, for the second time in as many issues, to China, where some of the biggest publishers in the west are trying to break into the most lucrative market on the planet, this time by setting up shop at ChinaJoy, the nation’s equivalent of E3. On the very next page, we hop halfway around the world to speak to Her Story creator Sam Barlow about his attempts to take interactive storytelling to the next level. Later, EA’s creative chief Patrick Söderlund explains how a publisher known for annual mega-franchises such as FIFA and Madden is, behind the…

SHUTTER SHAKE-UP Barlow is clearly enjoying the opportunity to disrupt established ideas of film and TV as he brings his experience in the interactive space to bear. “It’s cool to see the look on people’s faces,” he says. “The movie and TV industries are pretty solidified in the way they do things. The way a crew is organised, the way they break down a script – it’s a very well-oiled machine, and that’s how you can have hundreds of people running around and still manage to get the shot in the can. This complicated endeavour works because they’ve had 100 years of figuring out how this stuff works. So to come into that world and give them a script and experience that changes all those rules is really fun and…

LIFE LESSONS McGrath trained in IT at Thames Valley University in 1989, largely to appease her parents. After landing a job, she quickly realised that the profession wasn’t for her. “I didn’t really know the reality of the job,” she tells us. “It was only when I retrained to work in education that I realised I love entertaining people. But I didn’t grow up feeling that comedy was my calling. It happened by chance.” Her new show, Breaking Black, opened at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival on August 3. “You know, I think when you’re younger, you don’t actually see the violence in the videogame” Njambi McGrath is a Kenyan-born comedian and writer, performing her sharp, one-liner style of stand-up regularly on the London circuit. She attended university in both London…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar Most remarkably, some young male videogame aficionados are just not even trying to get jobs at all From Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days and beyond, science fiction has long warned about the dangerously seductive nature of virtual entertainment. If videogames (defined broadly) get too good, more and more people are going to be seriously tempted to sit indoors with a headset and escape into clean digital fantasies while the physical world crumbles around us all. This now appears to be actually happening, at least according to a new report from the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US. By 2015, men aged between 21 and 30 were working 203 hours per year less than the same age group had done in 2000.…

Developer/publisher Format Origin Release Capcom PC, PS4, Xbox One Japan 2018 Capcom may have rung the changes for Monster Hunter: World, but the biggest of all was the announcement itself. An E3 reveal, after all, says much about where the publisher’s priorities lie, as it looks for ways to match the series’ phenomenal Japanese success on foreign shores. What better way to prove your commitment to overseas players than by showing off your new game to the huge audience watching the west’s biggest videogame show? When series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto talks about “keeping an eye” on the reaction back in Japan, an acknowledgement that Capcom hasn’t yet had a chance to talk directly to its largest fanbase, it’s clear the company means business. Tsujimoto attributes its success at home to…

STILL PLAYING Ultra Street Fighter II Switch With the online playerbase dwindling, Ultra is now largely a singleplayer pursuit, and a quick blast through Arcade mode is now one of our favourite ways to wind down at the end of a long day. It’s as much of a puzzle game as it is a fighter, requiring knowledge of each opponent’s AI routines and how best to exploit them. These are lessons we first learned over 20 years ago, and still enjoy putting into practice today. Fire Emblem Heroes iOS It’s been a while, so we thought we’d check in on Intelligent Systems’ iOS debut. Heroes has come on a lot: it’s packed with things to do and generous to a fault with its various in-game currencies. But that four-character party…

In setting you quotas of golden eggs to be retrieved, it doesn’t allow you to simply dig in and play defensively Looking back, the release of Splatoon seems increasingly like one of the most significant milestones in Nintendo’s recent history. It was the first successful return from the company’s internal development program, Garage, the self-styled ‘afterschool club’ set up to allow younger developers the opportunity to brainstorm ideas under Miyamoto’s supervision. With hindsight, this was the start of Nintendo’s slow changing of the guard, which over the course of the last couple of years has seen older figures depart (one, of course, well before his time) and fresh faces taking their place – and, more significantly, shaping the company’s creative direction Since much of Splatoon 2 is familiar, it’s Salmon…

Here players are consenting to put themselves in a state of psychological distress FEATURE COMPLETE For all its flaws, Hellblade is undoubtedly well-researched – something that was made clear during the game’s very public development process, which has been condensed in an accompanying ‘making of’ feature. Edited by Ninja Theory video editor Melina Juergens – yes, Senua herself – it’s a deep dive into the process of making the final product. The historical context of the game is fascinating, as is the science behind Senua’s psychosis and how it is implemented in-game. Insight into the technology powering it all, too, is worth a watch. There’s no way to fastforward or rewind the feature, and it comes with a spoiler warning, so is definitely best viewed after a playthrough. Much has…

The challenge comes, if not necessarily from twitchy platforming, from simply figuring out your route LOOSE ENDS Nigh, indeed. As you might expect from a man with McMillen’s back catalogue, there are multiple endings to see, each more difficult to access than the last. While you can certainly consider yourself proficient by completing the main game and cobbling together your new best buddy, doing so unlocks a new set of even more hellish levels to run and a second ending. The third – accessible only by superhuman effort – follows an especially brutal gauntlet that ratchets up the tension in ways we’re loath to spoil. Mechanics remain largely unchanged, the difficulty inflated by admittedly quite artificial means, but persistent platformers will find that the lands beyond the world’s end hew…

Location: Zürich, Erlangen MARTIN RABL Giants Software marketing & PR manager mrabl@giants-software.com Job applications: hr_jobs@giants-software.com “ MANY CONSIDER FARMINGS IMULATORANICHE PRODUCT, BUT THE SALES TELL US IT ’ SAPRETTY BIGNICHE ” Founded in 2004, Giants Software is best known for the Farming Simulator series, which has sold over eight million copies across all platforms to date. A small independent studio with around 40 staff split between its two studios in Zürich and Erlangen, Giants gives most new starters the choice between working in Switzerland or Germany. It’s currently looking to fill two positions: a web developer and a gameplay programmer. What sets Giants Software apart from other developers? Our product, the Farming Simulator series, is unique. Many consider it a niche product, but the sales tell us it’s a pretty…

APP Nintendo Switch Online bit.ly/switchappiOS bit.ly/switchappandroid Splatoon 2’s launch also sees the arrival of Switch’s companion app, a free download that grants the user the ability to access voice chat and extra game features via Splatnet 2. Nintendo being Nintendo, it’s all a bit misguided. Inviting friends into voice-chat lounges takes more steps than is sensible, presumably in an effort to protect young’uns from toxic in-game chat. And while being able to check the Splatoon 2 stage schedule, comb through stats and order limited-edition gear is handy, the decision to pull these features out of the game and lock them off to non-smartphone users grates a little. Nevertheless, it could be a useful hub for Switch owners as more games are added, but for now it’s just an irritatingly essential…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar My home Internet’s been down all week, and boy does it hurt. It’s been a while, to be fair – we have the odd outage here and there, but as I write this I’m on day three of five, and it’s been brutal. It’s been especially tough on the kid, whose media consumption is almost entirely powered by remote servers, and you want to try explaining that to a three-year-old. There’s an episode of Peppa Pig where there’s a power cut, and she goes round the house suggesting all kinds of things they could do while they wait for the lights to go back on; everything, of course, requires electricity. The kid’s been a bit like that this week, reeling off a revolving carousel of his favourite TV…

F elling a beast the size of a modest skyscraper is a universal videogame fantasy – using its parts to fashion yourself a fancy new pair of kicks, perhaps even more so. Despite this, the Monster Hunter series has never really managed to win over the west. Capcom’s forthcoming Monster Hunter: World is looking to change this, of course, extending a friendly hand to all with a worldwide, multiplatform release. There’s nothing quite as accessible as ‘free’, though, is there? Canadian developer Phoenix Labs knows this. But then, Phoenix Labs knows a lot of things. Founded by a team of former Riot Games devs, and since bolstered by more hires from Blizzard, BioWare and Capcom, the developer is well-placed to snag a section of this genre’s territory. Dauntless is its…

There’s nothing quite like Destiny. But, like so many other games, it began life as a series of concepts: of keywords and phrases, setting high-level creative goals for the team at Bungie, that were laid out in 2009 by design director Jason Jones. Luke Smith – back then a mere designer, and today Destiny 2’s game director – remembers two in particular. ‘We want to make a game like golf’ was one; if you’ve been following Destiny 2’s development you may have heard Smith refer to the good walk spoiled, and the analogy fits. Golf, like Destiny, is a game you can play competitively, or for fun. You can watch it instead of playing it. You can be terrible at it, but still enjoy it. It is better played with…

Developer Respawn Entertainment Publisher EA Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin US Release 2016 “WE’D FINALLY CRACKED WHAT THE SPIRIT OF THE SINGLEPLAYER WAS FROM A DESIGN STANDPOINT” Steve Fukuda, game director of the Titanfall series, has worked on some of the biggest-hitting set-pieces in all games. Landing on Omaha Beach in Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault, reclaiming Stalingrad in Call Of Duty 2, a nuclear explosion in Call Of Duty 4, No Russian in Modern Warfare 2. “But, looking at Titanfall, we realised that we didn’t have what I call the ‘movie’ of the game.” Whether Black Hawk Down or Saving Private Ryan, Fukuda’s previous work was built on grand cinematic touchstones. Titanfall was instead founded on its multiplayer, which featured such novel ideas as AI mobs and the…

You’ll find few games more worthy of the term ‘sequel’ than Splatoon 2 (p104). This is simply more Splatoon – it looks better, it has more stuff in it, and some of the old bits have been made bigger. It’s vintage sequelmaking, in other words, and that’s no slur. Indeed, it’s probably the best thing Nintendo could have done for its unique take on the concept of the online shooter. Not enough people played the original on Wii U. So, make it again, and sell some more. Makes sense. Yet elsewhere this month are games from studios who could quite easily have done the same thing, but have chosen not to. Take Pyre (p108): few would have complained had Supergiant knocked out another isometric action-RPG in the vein of its…

You’ll want to win, since your opponents are often arrogant, nasty or malevolent IN ITS RITE PLACE Supergiant does its best to enforce tactical adjustments by varying the arena environments, and while you’ll mostly end up reverting to reliable fallbacks, the differences are just enough to keep you on your toes. One venue is pocked with mounds of stardust that can protect you from incoming auras; another features sliding stones which you can push around to stay in cover; a third has thick tangles of vines gradually encroach on the play area, giving you less room to outmanoeuvre your opponent. Later, you’ll play on a pitch patrolled by excitable imps, whom you’re encouraged to impress by performing certain feats during a match – like using a specific character to douse…

A nonlinear timeline means the action, if you can call it that, never builds as you’d like it to CHOPPED LOGS Gone Home’s atmosphere was in part driven by its level furniture, its hand-written VHS labels and old family photos making its world feel natural, rich and vivid, adding some nostalgic weight to its central tale. In Tacoma you’ll stumble across a heavily corrupted AR archive, typically showing a crewmate spending some time on their own: showering, drinking, playing a game. None tells you much about the character in question – we would, we expect, do all of those things if we spent a year on a space station. Elsewhere, while there’s plenty of stuff to pick up, it serves little purpose. Unless you’d be surprised to learn that long-life…

‘MIN-MAXING Any Pikmin you bring back can be pressed into service while you explore elsewhere. Areas around the crash site hold more Sparklium: send your recruits to unearth it and they’ll usually take a level or two to finish the job. Scan certain Amiibo, and they’ll appear as statues to be retrieved in rather basic, selfcontained puzzles. You’ll only get a meagre boost to your Sparklium tally, but it’s worth the effort for the amusing flavour text accompanying their entry in your ship’s database. O ur expectations were so low you’d have needed an army of Pikmin to excavate them. The past form of developer Arzest didn’t exactly augur well; an underwhelming reveal and mediocre demo hardly helped. But while this side-scrolling spin-off is certainly no classic, it does capture…

Illustration Box Kite Curve I can usually tell when dialogue has been written by someone for whom it isn’t a core skill, shall we say Often, I wonder if there’s a point where the entire game industry just jumps the shark. A moment where everything we do is self-referential and ironic and everybody, from developers to the gamesbuying public, knows it. If so, this might be the start. I was at a recording session recently for a game requiring several characters. One of the VO fellas, when thinking about how he’d approach one of the characters, asked me whether I wanted it in a standard videogame voice. Hold on, wait, what? This was a phrase I’d never heard before. And the ramifications, should it actually be a thing, are huge.…

“I think that, while I have my roots in hardcore games, the real opportunity is to go much wider” He worked as lead designer on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, was running the Evolution tournament before it even bore the name, and has placed in the top eight three times at the championships as a professional player: David Sirlin is serious about fighting games. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that the one he’s currently developing is aimed at a far more casual audience. Fantasy Strike is a 2D fighter with an extremely simple control scheme. There’s a button to walk left, another to walk right, a third to jump and a fourth to attack. Quarter-circles and multi-input combos are nowhere to be found: two more buttons trigger a special…

“It takes six months to create a single car. It’s over-specced for PS4 Pro. We are building for future versions of the console, [not] the one we see today.” Kazunori Yamauchi lays the groundwork for Gran Turismo Sport being delayed until PS6 “You know, sometimes life isn’t fair. Things are more interesting like that, with the blue shells of life.” Mario Kart 8 director Kosuke Yabuki puts a positive spin on the worst power-up in games “Players are very supportive of slavery, because there’s money to be made. People say, ‘Oh, it’s only a game.’ I’m sure in Roman times, people justified it a bit like that: ‘At least we’re looking after them.’” Is David Braben talking about Elite Dangerous, or a new Frontier overtime policy? “We’re driving more and…

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 “I’ve yearned for characters in games that were more than things to trade with or destroy” Silver screen (shower scene) It seems that games and gaming are finally being accepted as a staple of popular culture, achieving a level of ubiquity that means that, even if you aren’t playing them, you certainly can’t avoid them. E3 gets mentioned in mainstream media; games garner increasing column inches in newspapers, and gaming festivals are now a thing. So far, so good, for our favourite hobby. But there is something missing, so obviously and conspicuously absent. I am talking, of course, about games on…

As a famous saying (almost) goes, the bigger they are, the more fun it is to make them fall over. One of videogaming’s most enduring fantasies is the gigantic end-of-level boss, but these days the rank and file fodder are often the size of buildings, too. Indeed, that’s precisely the reason for Monster Hunter’s success, and it’s a concept that’s being taken to new heights in the series’ latest entry, Monster Hunter: World (p34). Yes, the world is bigger and more open. There are myriad quality-of-life improvements for series fans to chew over. And it marks the series’ return to powerful console hardware after a decade on portable devices. But the real hook here is the beasts – great wandering colossi which now, rather than kicking their heels and waiting…

Developer Publisher Format Origin Release Sloclap Devolver Digital PC, PS4, Xbox One France August 29 Mr Miyagi said it best: “No such thing as bad student; only bad teacher.” Granted, he was talking about karate, not videogames – but we’ve recalled his words during previous demos of Absolver. This online fighting-game RPG overwhelms. There are move timings to master, loadouts to optimise, a combat deck to build and opponents to worry about. We admire, perspire and listen as patient devs explain, but come away defeated. Perhaps, we decide, Absolver isn’t capable of teaching all that it needs to. But an extended play session at Sloclap’s tiny Parisian studio enlightens. Just like Miyagi, Absolver, in time, reveals its subtle discipline As with all martial arts, Absolver’s melee brawling is a test…

Developer Ben Esposito Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC Origin US Release TBA System shock There is, we note, the tiniest suggestion of Brenda Romero’s politically charged tabletop games in Donut County. Esposito is modest, but agrees. “It’s a good metaphor for capitalism, putting you in a game system. Here are the rules; when you get good you can figure out how to exploit it. But the thing that is not captured in the game system, or capitalism, are the externalities. Who’s taking the hit? Is it the environment? The people working for you? That’s why Brenda’s stuff is so interesting: there’s a real emotional and historical context for it. My game is not very serious, but I’m thinking about the same stuff, in terms of you actually have to answer…

Founded 2005 Employees 7 Key staff Ian Hardingham (co-founder, lead designer, programmer), Paul Kilduff-Taylor (co-founder, composer, writer)URL www.mode7games.com Selected softography (as developer) Determinance, Frozen Synapse, Frozen Cortex(as publisher) Tokyo 42, The Colonists Current projects Frozen Synapse 2 “ IT HOUGHT IT WAS ABSOLUTELY A MAZING THAT TWO PEOPLE COULD MAKE SOME THING THAT LOOKED LIKE THAT ” You can’t spell ‘publisher’ without ‘pub’, so it’s fitting that Mode 7’s most daring step in its 12 years of operation began with a discussion over drinks down its co-founders’ local. The studio’s most recent game at the time, Frozen Cortex, hadn’t been quite as successful as hoped, but it was still profitable. As such, Ian Hardingham (lead design, programming) and Paul Kilduff-Taylor (music, writing, “other stuff”) found themselves in a relatively stable…

It’s the kind of incremental sequel that could give incremental sequels a good name From ‘stay fresh’ to refresh in two years, then. Splatoon 2 is an unusually expeditious Nintendo sequel, but then it didn’t have much choice: the first game’s phenomenal success in Japan, despite being hamstrung by the poor sales of the platform, meant a swift follow-up wasn’t so much a likelihood as a castiron certainty. It’s no surprise, therefore, to discover that in real terms, not an awful lot has changed; the whiff of familiarity will be even stronger among those who tuned in for the climactic Splatfest a year ago. But that, you sense, is rather the point. There’s nothing here to upset established splatters, yet it retains the inclusiveness that first attracted so many players…

Each of our games on paper has been deeply ill-advised as a concept After more than a decade in games criticism, Greg Kasavin moved to EA and then 2K Games before joining Supergiant Games, where he has written and co-designed the studio’s three games, Bastion, Transistor and now Pyre. Here, he discusses critics, teamwork and why the studio’s latest game was the biggest challenge of his career. You seemed unsure about how Pyre would be received. Does your background in criticism make you more anxious about that critical response? If anything my background as a game critic makes me more resilient to criticism. I would be the worst kind of hypocrite if reviews upset me, having reviewed games for 12 years. I feel deeply at peace with what criticism is;…

Win a couple of referendums and you’ll unlock the ability to impose martial law; this isn’t brilliant for morale RESEARCH COMPONENT Aven Colony is patently a work of fantasy – it skims past the question of how exactly human beings have made it to Aven Prime – but it takes inspiration from the work of Professor Abel Mendez, who studies potentially habitable exoplanets at the University Of Puerto Rico. He suggested the use of giant crystals as a plausible terrain element and provided input on the choice of crops, which range from rice and melons to curious native plants. According to his NASA bio, Mendez’s research is motivated by the threat of global warming, a preoccupation that perhaps informs the emphasis on climate as a variable in the game, and…

VROOM ROOM While Tiny Trax underlines what VR can bring to thirdperson games, its menu offers a firstperson view of a charmingly cluttered den belonging, seemingly, to a young car enthusiast. Medals and trophies you earn by winning single races and cups – we got there eventually – are proudly displayed next to a large monitor. Vehicle selection, meanwhile, is pleasantly tactile, as you rotate a track that rises up in front of you to take your pick – though their differences are merely cosmetic. The pursuit of speed has consistently been at the heart of Futurlab’s output to date, so a slot-car racing game isn’t quite the digression it first seems. Nevertheless, the simplicity of the pastime and a more conventionally family-friendly aesthetic had us wondering if Futurlab had…