Table of contents for Xmas 2017 in Edge

We all hope to grow. Humanity thrives on forward momentum, on the sense that we are improving, and game makers are no exception. Any creator hopes that their next game will be better received, and more successful, than their previous one. That desire is the game industry in microcosm, a place where games get bigger, broader, deeper and theoretically better over time. There’s plenty of that on show this issue – no surprise given the time of year, now the clocks have gone back and the sequel season is in full swing. Assassin’s Creed is back after a year’s hiatus and continues to be the archetypal videogame series, its seemingly endless sprawl stretched still further, fresh ideas sprinkled in with the hoary old ones, a game that is huger than…

The consensus has it that augmented reality will have a more dramatic impact on the world than its virtual cousin. Freed from cumbersome headsets, and designed to ameliorate the real world instead of inviting users to step into an entirely different one, AR clearly has great potential – not just for games, but the world at large. Yet until very recently, the largest tech company on the planet appeared to have only limited interest in it. Yes, CEO Tim Cook said in 2016 that Apple was investing in AR, and acknowledged it could be “huge”. But it was only at this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this June that the company made its move. It announced ARKit, and made it available immediately in the SDK for its new mobile…

Nate Crowley is a sci-fi author who got his publishing career started after taking a Twitter joke with a best friend too far. His new book, 100 Best Video Games (That Never Existed), is based on a Twitter thread started late last year when he decided to create a fictional game for every like received. Here, he discusses how making up game names is, funnily enough, much easier than actually making the things. Where did you even begin to come up with so many game ideas? What’s really funny is my cat was just whining to get into the room and then immediately started whining to get out again, which was the inspiration for the first game in the book, Look, Are You Coming In Or Not? So there was…

The choice of enemy in a videogame is always a political decision. And it always reflects society’s contemporary fears. For a long time it was perfectly acceptable, of course, to gun down thousands of vaguely Middle Eastern brown people in the tentpole games of the military-entertainment complex, because the ‘war on terror’ had convinced us that such people were inherently bad and deserved to be shot in the face. Then, for a while, it was Russians, because everyone was having a moment of Cold War nostalgia and humming ‘99 Red Balloons’ gently to themselves. But gradually a majority consensus seemed to take hold that demonising actually existing cultural groups in videogames and representing them as nothing more than cannon fodder was, y’know, bad? Hence, perhaps, the glorious resurgence of the…

Time is a luxury most of us can ill afford. You’d think that the people with all the money, then, would be the ones under the least pressure to get a job done quickly. Not so. Bandai Namco is on a mission to turn around Code Vein (p38) in short order, having announced it back in April. For a title that hopes to fill the void left by FromSoftware’s wilful disinterest in making more Souls games, it’s an ambitious move. Fortunately, it’s shaping up to be as poised and polished as it is timely. Admirably, it’s the smaller teams that are bucking the trend in this month’s Hype, and setting their own pace. No doubt they’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed like the rest of us, but…

Developer Publisher Format Origin Release Tokyo RPG Factory Square Enix PC, PS4, Switch Japan January 23 The bitter winds of snow-driven JRPG I Am Setsuna were harsh; its battles, less so. Players quickly realised certain powerful skills and combos could drop enemies in mere moments. As a wistful nod to the good old days – Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI and so on – it made a case for itself through sheer charm. Tokyo RPG Factory’s follow-up pays similar homage to the greats, but is also freshly determined to set some ants among the nostalgic picnic. While I Am Setsuna subtly tweaked the Active Time Battle System made popular by Chrono Trigger, Lost Sphear has made a more drastic change, letting you freely move party members around the battlefield. The…

Developer/ publisher Finji Format PC, PS4, Vita Origin US Release TBA Occasionally, Overland has a bit of an interface problem. Our van is filled with fuel, our four party members hunting for supplies across a gridded area. Monsters slowly surround us. A huge one thumps our van, causing smoke to start pouring from it. No problem – we’ve stored a toolbox on top of it. But click, curse and try as we might, we can’t get Bennie to use it. The vehicle blows up, two of our party die, and the other two stagger on to their death in the next area. It hardly seems fair. Then again, the cruelty of it is fitting, given this turn-based survival strategy game’s premise. An unknown event has triggered a disaster, and neon-quilled…

Games are born in all sorts of ways and for all sorts of reasons, but it’s tempting to imagine Dragon Ball FighterZ’s genesis in very simplistic terms. A Bandai Namco executive sees footage of Arc System Works’ gorgeous Guilty Gear Xrd: Sign, until now the closest a game has got to the concept of a playable cartoon. He glances at the Dragon Ball artwork on the wall. A lightbulb comes on behind him, and his pupils turn into dollar signs. Dragon Ball FighterZ may seem like something of a no-brainer, but beneath the immediate, irresistible lure of its elevator pitch is a game of many layers. It is, as you’d expect from the maker of Guilty Gear and Blazblue, an enormously deep, monstrously technical fighting game. Yet it is also…

Ojiro Fumoto Designer/programmer/artist How far into development were you when Devolver contacted you? It was around three months into development, in September 2014. Back then I was planning to release it around December. I forget exactly what it was they said when I spoke to them, but basically they said, "This looks really cool. If you want help, we could definitely help you with publishing and stuff." I was already a huge fan of Devolver Digital, so I answered instantly saying, "Yeah, I’d love your help." When did you decide to release it on other platforms? Did Devolver suggest that? Yeah, it was something we talked about before [launch]. Initially, I was only going to release the game on mobile, and I had told them that. I would occasionally send…

See those pyramids? You can climb them. The view from the top of Giza’s wondrous monuments makes the ascent worthwhile – indeed, the setting is one thing Assassin’s Creed Origins gets wonderfully right. Weathered by age, they’re looking a little rough on the outside, though handily the cracks in the stone are arranged in such a way as to let you scamper up without much effort. Still, despite the superficial damage, it’s clear the foundations are still pretty solid. If only the same could be said for the game itself. Which isn’t to say that Ubisoft hasn’t tried to shake things up a bit. The last time this series took a gap year we got Assassin’s Creed II, a game which rewrote the rules and established a formula to which…

Well, that’s Shag The Corrupt off our to-do list. To clarify, that’s an enemy, not an instruction – he’s an orc captain, an Epic Cursed Mystic Assassin no less. He’s now on our side, in fact: we’ve delicately cajoled him into joining our army, and now he’s going to help us claim an enemy stronghold. And to think we knew him back when he was Shag The Gut-Ripper. They grow up so fast. In other words, the Nemesis system is back. Shadow Of Mordor’s ingenious central idea established a reactive hierarchy of orcs, lending thrilling dynamism to an otherwise serviceable open-world game. It’s at the heart of Shadow Of War, too, and delivers many of the game’s best moments: when you watch a persistent foe rise through the ranks, emboldened…

Gran Turismo wasn’t like other driving games. Its devotion to realism sent a shockwave across the industry in 1998, as did the unprecedented opportunity it offered to take a family saloon and replace its parts until it could smoke a TVR off the start line. Up in the rarefied air Polyphony Digital has occupied ever since, the studio has enjoyed the freedom to seemingly work at its own pace, and to take Sony’s blockbuster racing series in esoteric and, at times, frustrating directions. In that sense, GT Sport is the quintessential Gran Turismo game: a late arrival to PS4 defined by a collection of curious design decisions. A change of direction was to be expected after Gran Turismo 6’s puzzling appearance on PS3 in 2013. Its 1,197 cars formed a…

Everything is simpler when you’re a child. If somebody is hurting, something is wrong. So you try to make them feel better. Perhaps you even give them a hug. Funomena gives innocent compassion a virtual form with Luna, a short interactive fable that celebrates the physical language of VR, and its power to tap into our innate propensity for tenderness. One still night, an owl convinces our hero, a little red bird, to swallow the last piece of the moon. Nature is thrown into disarray: the only thing to be done is to physically set things right. Doing so is a tactile and therapeutic process. You tend to each of Luna’s tiny terrariums, and plant and manipulate various flora. The delicate tips of your talons prompt magical changes in behaviour:…

As E312’s interview with DJ/producer Ikonika showed, early videogame music is a recurring influence on contemporary electronic musicians. Further proof of that comes from a new compilation, Diggin’ In The Carts: A Collection Of Pioneering Japanese Electronic Music, that releases on Hyperdub on November 17. Building on the documentary series of the same name that Nick Dwyer wrote and co-directed for Red Bull Music Academy in 2014, this 34-track compilation shows how the importance of this vital time for games and their soundtracks grows more and more as time passes. Here, Dwyer and Hyperdub boss Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman reflect on the assembly of a very different kind of dance compilation. “When researching the era for the documentary series I realised just how much incredible music was there” How important is…

WEBSITE Stardew Valley Crop Planner bit.ly/cropplanner The farming sim’s recent arrival on Switch means there’s never been a better time to get serious about your parsnips. This crop-planning browser tool provides a simple way to map out your plans for your quarterly harvests: all you have to do is add which crop and how many of them you’ve planted to a particular day in the calendar, and the tool will automatically let you know when it’s time to reap what you’ve sown. It can even calculate your total expenditure and projected earnings based on the kind of fertiliser you’ve used and how high-quality your output is likely to be. It’s essential for making the most of the stressful summer berry season – and handy event flags make checking the town…

Politics, if you’ll permit me to utterly mangle a phrase, is the third rail of videogames these days. So it’s with some trepidation that I write this – not least because Steven Poole is the brainy one around these parts. Funnily enough, he didn’t go for my suggestion that I do the cleverclever stuff this month while he writes about how annoying his kids are while crowbarring in a load of dad jokes. Next issue, perhaps. Relax. I am not about to draw parallels between the current political climate and The Videogame Hate Movement Which Shall Not Be Named, because it’s already been done far better than I ever could do it. Nor am I about to pen some blog-style confessional about how, I dunno, Stardew Valley helped me feel…

Developer Buried Signal Publisher Annapurna Interactive Format PC, Mac, iOS, Android Origin US Release 2017 Jason Roberts’ puzzle game has been a long time in the making – six years, in fact. But nobody could accuse the developer of dragging his heels. From the design, to the programming, to the exquisite hand-drawn illustrations, everything is the work of Roberts himself. Such is his commitment to beauty and quality in Gorogoa that the player’s every click both looks and feels like artistry. Its density of quality suggests the magic won’t last more than a couple of hours Your view of Roberts’ watercolour world is provided via a picture window: a grid of four comic book-style panels. Through the panes, a dragon-like creature with colourful filigree fins winds through architecture, the obsession…

There’s no better example of the astonishing rise of Japan’s mobile-game industry in recent years than Tokyo’s Cygames. Set up in 2011 by web services company CyberAgent, the developer originally had a team of just 30 staff. Its debut release, card-battle game Rage Of Bahamut, was published by mobile giant DeNA (perhaps best-known in the west for its partnership with Nintendo) in early 2012. Today, a little more than five years on, Cygames boasts almost 60 times as many employees. Rage Of Bahamut is still popular in Japan; likewise, 2014’s free-to-play RPG Granblue Fantasy, which has since spawned an anime series and a film, while last year’s Shadowverse took $100m in revenue in its first six months. It now sponsors a Street Fighter team including the likes of Daigo Umehara…

R eally, it’s all Ezio’s fault. Once Signor Auditore Da Firenze swaggered onto the scene in Assassin’s Creed II, sweeping players off their feet with his roguish charm and swashbuckling swordsmanship, it was clear that boring old Desmond Miles stood no chance. Not even two games in, and Ubisoft’s attempt to meld present-day sci-fi mystery with historical conspiracy had been waylaid by a young Italian nobleman who single-handedly made the latter far more exciting than the former. Even the daring cliffhanger ending to the first game, with its arcane scribblings and portents of imminent catastrophe, couldn’t compete. Players lapped up Ezio’s adventure, and demanded more – and Ubisoft duly delivered, with two well-regarded sequels that saw the series start to spin off its original axis. Even so, Ubisoft was evidently…

The black bars are gone. For some, that’ll be good news: whether you believe it was an artistic choice or one enforced by technical limitations, the letterboxed presentation of The Evil Within left some players feeling caged. Enough demanded a fullscreen option that Bethesda subsequently patched it in, but we weren’t convinced the change was for the better, believing the 2:35:1 aspect ratio contributed to the game’s oppressively claustrophobic feel. This follow-up expands the game’s boundaries in another sense, too, incorporating large, open outdoor areas between the cramped, fright-filled corridors of its interiors. It’s a sequel that stretches out in every sense, then, but in doing so it ends up spreading itself thinner. At least it doesn’t start so sluggishly. After his ordeal in the first game, Sebastian Castellanos is…

An improbable union of vintage animation and arcade-era challenge, Cuphead’s art and design seem to be rather at odds with one another. It features some of the most astonishing hand-drawn animation you could wish to see, and places it within a game where being distracted by such antic detail leads to failure. It has the kind of immediate aesthetic appeal to attract a broad audience, yet it’s wedded to the kind of unflinching difficulty only a small niche of players will be able to fully appreciate. The result is an unmissable game that can’t be recommended without serious caveats. Yes, Cuphead is quite the paradox. The first rule of Cuphead is rather more relaxed than its Fight Club equivalent. You can certainly talk about it, but to discuss particulars is…

W ell, we weren’t exactly anticipating a walking simulator with rhythm-action sections. We’re kidding, of course: Fire Emblem Warriors is pretty much exactly the game we expected it to be from the moment it was announced. The established Warriors template hasn’t suited every franchise Omega Force has draped over it, but Fire Emblem slips on a treat here, the fiction of Intelligent Systems’ universe proving a fine partner for Musou mechanics. As lantern-jawed knight Frederick sweeps scores of terrified soldiers off their feet, snarling “pick a god and pray” before he launches them into oblivion, Awakening fans will be in raptures. Warriors fans, meanwhile, will be right at home. This is, as ever, a game about tidying up a battlefield, wiping all those unsightly red dots off the map and…

The console’s clearly a monster, but in CPU terms it’s not that much of an upgrade. What’s the reason for that? Our goal was 100 per cent compatibility, and taking the Xbox One engines that developers were already working on and getting them up and running in 4K. This is a significant performance upgrade over an Xbox One, but it is an Xbox One at its core. It starts with the fact that we wanted to be able to take existing games and run them in 4K, and every single decision we made about the product was based on that. So the CPU conversation becomes interesting. Generally speaking your GPU drives visuals, and your CPU drives framerate and AI. That’s a dramatic oversimplification, but there’s a belief that a new…

Ubisoft’s flagship series is as synonymous with history as it is with virtual murder. From sunny Renaissance Italy, to a pirate-infested 18th-century Caribbean, to Victorian England’s bustling streets, the worlds of Assassin’s Creed have offered players a taste of many different time periods – even if the factual accuracy of them has been questionable. The recently released Assassin’s Creed Origins is no different: it’s a lavish interpretation of Ancient Egypt, but a videogame nonetheless, with all the fantastical trimmings players enjoy. Yet a forthcoming free addition to the game may even trump some of Origins’ taller tales. Due next year, the Discovery Tour update turns Bayek’s adventure into an interactive museum, allowing players – hopefully, even history students – to dive deeper into Ancient Egyptian culture. “We were toying with…

Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene Name VR Zone Shinjuku Location Tokyo, Japan We’ve written plenty about the rapid impact of virtual reality on the Japanese arcade scene – so this issue’s trip to the Far East was an opportunity to see it for ourselves that we simply couldn’t miss. Bandai Namco’s VR Zone is tucked down a side street on the seedy, slightly faded eastern side of Shinjuku train station, but the interior screams of the future, from interactive wall art to a VR seaside and, everywhere else, VR attractions with lengthy queues. That’s definitely the word: these are experiences, rather than games per se, little rollercoasters that may have success and failure conditions, but whose playtime is fixed. That’s essential for a venue that is run…

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 Not broken, please fix Since the folks who made Metroid: Samus Returns apparently weren’t aware, I feel the need to let Edge and everybody else know: Super Metroid’s wall jump is the greatest powerup ever. Some folks might reply, “That’s not a real powerup, you have it from the start!” But it’s not a powerup for Samus – it’s one for the player. The wall jump, which most players will find out about halfway through the game, can be wonderfully abused the second time you go through planet Zebes. Once you’re ‘equipped’ with the wall jump, it’s no longer only about…

Hi there! I’m Alex, and just under seven months ago I quit the best and most successful job I’ve ever had in order to start a company with two friends in a repurposed motion-capture studio with padded black walls and no windows. We spent the next two days building IKEA furniture and discussing how long we had until we ran out of money. My business partners – Reid Schneider and Yassine Riahi – and I had been talking about it off and on for years, but it never seemed like the right time. Maybe one of us was finishing a game, or we weren’t financially stable enough to do something potentially financially disastrous while still feeding our kids, or the market in general just didn’t seem amenable to the kind…

Developer/publisher Format Origin Release PS4 Japan TBA Much like its development team, Vane holds its cards close to its chest. Some things are plain as day: the scope and mood of Friend & Foe’s forthcoming thirdperson puzzle-adventure is gently familiar, reminiscent of Tequila Works’ Rime, or Fumito Ueda classic Ico. But some things are less clear. Who is the child we’re playing? What is the substance that triggers their transformation into a raven? More to the point: what exactly is our goal in this game? After a long stretch of soaring through the sun-bleached desert, we’re left with more questions than answers. It’s not necessarily a negative impression. It’s definitely a powerful one: a deep, quiet, burning sense of curiosity. “We stumbled across this feeling as we were developing [the…

Developer/publisher House House Format PC Origin Australia Release 2018 The goose game started as a joke: a silly Slack conversation between House House’s development team. “I don’t think any of us took it seriously,” says Nico Disseldorp, developer. “But none of the other game ideas we were talking about had us as excited. We said, ‘Obviously we can’t make that one.’ But each time it came up, we’d make ourselves laugh. And now it turns out this weird joke that we thought only we would find funny has really resonated.” Blindsided by a huge reaction so soon after the game’s announcement, they haven’t even had a chance to decide on a final title, let alone most of the game’s content. Not that it matters, given its universally recognisable and hilarious…

Sometimes it’s hard not to think of the modern videogaming audience as a kind of bottomless maw. Nowadays, accustomed to the niceties of thumbsticks and min-maxing, we munch through content at an alarming rate. (Destiny 2 director Luke Smith rather hit the nail on the head in E312, comparing it to binge-eating a big bag of crisps.) Plenty of big studios have observed this behaviour and drawn an inevitable conclusion: the bigger, the better. New series entries must balloon in size, they figure, in order to fulfill the growing appetite for more. We see not a city, but an entire country, in Assassin’s Creed Origins (p100). A vast Egypt is teeming with life – and sidequests, collectibles and optional combat challenges, crafting materials and colour-coded gear. It’s as if Ubisoft…

T he New Colossus doesn’t have the challenge of reinventing Wolfenstein, as its predecessor once did. Instead, it has to build upon a surprising act of originality. Propelling BJ Blazkowicz into an alt-1960s where the Nazis won the war, The New Order was not simply a good shooter – it was an accomplished feat of writing and worldbuilding, managing to find a place for humanity alongside hyperviolent Nazi science-horror. This sequel begins at the moment that game ended, building out from BJ’s success against the Nazis in Europe to begin a new campaign in America. A recap of the events of The New Order gives way to an inventive opening, where a crippled Blazkowicz attempts to fight his way out of a submarine in a wheelchair. This setpiece level is…

D riving is theatre in Forza Motorsport 7, an orchestrated spectacle designed to be savoured from the best seat in the house: the driver’s. Few racing games achieve the sweeping breadth and fine tuned presentation of Turn 10’s latest. The globe-trot of historic circuits; the litany of incredible cars; and the conditions, too, from scorching sun, to monsoon rains, to floodlit nights. The combined package is a pristine, pacey and accessible racing game that perhaps delivers a more exhilarating drive than its more steadfast contemporaries, but isn’t without its problems. The number tells you everything – this is a familiar, gently iterative entry in a series that has learned from most of its prior mistakes, as well as taken lessons in personality from its livelier offshoot, Forza Horizon. Forza Motorsport…

Golf Story, in contrast to the traditional rags-toriches tale, is never better than it is at the very start of the game. A young lad, under tutelage from his father and under pressure from an increasingly numerous gaggle of geese, steels his nerve and sinks a tricky putt. “When you compete in real tournaments,” his father warns him, “there will be even more geese.” That hints at a surrealist riff on the underexplored golf-RPG genre, a concept mined by Camelot’s Mario Golf games and ignored by, well, everyone else. Soon enough, you’ll understand why: for all its whimsy, Golf Story struggles to break free from, or do enough with, the central mechanic of hitting a ball at a target. Yes, there will be holes on greens, with pins in them.…