EdgeMarch 2024的目錄

Why don’t we see more weather in games? The power of some teeming rain was obvious as far back as 1991, during the opening section of A Link To The Past, whose atmosphere still has lessons to teach developers working today. Perhaps weather just isn’t tangible enough for most game developers, who figure that it’s simply a lot easier to get players to care about an Apache attack helicopter or gurning zombie showing up. Or maybe it’s that it doesn’t guarantee a satisfactor y outcome when it’s at its most noticeable. The snow that arrives in GTA Online’s Los Santos ever y Christmas stirs the same sort of reactions we see in real-life places that don’t get much of the white stuff for most of the year. (Ever yone loves…

Question: is 35 years old too late to start playing Dungeons & Dragons in its traditional tabletop form? Very probably, but more and more it feels like a blindspot that needs addressing. For years I’ve nodded along quietly as videogame developers explain how in their work they’re just trying to capture the sensation of their regular D&D session, but in 2023 the game became an unavoidable part of mainstream pop culture. The film parlayed its setting into a surprisingly enjoyable romp. Baldur’s Gate 3 demonstrated the pleasures of its ruleset to those of us with no tolerance for watching or listening to other people play an RPG. D&D has even made its way into party small talk – the other kind of party. Over beers and loud pop music, an…

Developer Starry Studio Publisher NetEase Format Android, iOS, PC Origin China Release Q3 For a world sent into anarchy by extraterrestrial particles capable of F mutating people into cosmic monsters, the highways of this post-apocalypse aren’t half busy with tourists. Stepping into its introductory area, we see temporary camps and half-constructed player houses in every direction we look – in fact, we struggle to find a suitable patch of empty wilderness to mark out a territory of our own. A few hills over, and after a close encounter with a prehistoricsized crocodile, we stumble into an empty plot of land with a bounty of banana trees and exposed copper deposits. We call it home, but aren’t surprised when we return a couple of hours later to find a handful of…

Developer Puddle Publisher Creature Format PCVR, Quest, consoles TBA Origin US Release 2024 Seldom has a game been summarised as concisely as 2016’s Thumper, its two-word logline – ‘rhythm violence’ – setting out its oppressive agenda. As an iridescent beetle zips down winding tracks suspended in a void, every corner represents a threat, a single mistimed input enough to shatter your fragile carapace, leaving you one more hit from death. Despite some aesthetic similarities, the teaser for artist/composer Brian Gibson’s successor makes it clear that a similar name needn’t mean a similar game. Even so, the two-word phrase that stands out when we ask about Thrasher’s origins is one we’d never have guessed. “We had this selfie stick,” co-designer Mike Mandel begins, explaining that it emerged from a prototype he…

Located in an old warehouse in Tsukishima, a working-class neighbourhood of Tokyo, Unseen Inc makes for quite the contrast to the corporate offices where Ikumi Nakamura started her career. She joined Capcom in 2004 as an environment artist, before following two of the publisher’s brightest creative minds to their own videogame studios: first Hideki Kamiya’s PlatinumGames, then Shinji Mikami’s Tango Gameworks. It was at the latter company that she first caught the public’s attention, after taking to Bethesda’s E3 conference stage in 2019 to announce Ghostwire: Tokyo. However, she left the project and Tango later that year, due in part to health problems. Taking the opportunity to form her own game company, Nakamura’s aim – as she first told us in E371 – was to create a ‘borderless’ studio. In…

STILL PLAYING/ NEAR MISSES The Last Of Us Part II Remastered PS5 Having cancelled its live-service multiplayer game, Naughty Dog has now released just one new game in the past seven years: this one. Which partly explains why it’s returning to the well just three-and-a-half years later. As a cutting-edge late-era PS4 game, it hardly screamed for a visual upgrade – certainly, the average player would struggle to detect much difference in presentation. But there are worthwhile additions. Three playable deleted scenes are present in their pre-alpha form, with commentary from designers offering insight into the challenges of high-end game development. The major draw for most, however, will be Roguelike mode No Return. Here you’re asked to survive a string of short encounters set in repurposed campaign environments, restocking and…

Developer/publisher Ubisoft (Montpellier) Format PC, PS4, PS5 (tested), Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Release Out now With any series that has made the leap from two to three dimensions, a reversion to the former usually suggests a conservative throwback. Super Mario Bros Wonder bucked that trend, and now the same can be said for The Lost Crown. Neither a return to the unforgiving side-scrolling platforming and swordplay of Jordan Mechner’s original nor concerned with the past as per the troubled Sands Of Time remake, it instead reinvents Prince Of Persia as a Metroidvania. The series might have been missing in action for more than a decade (not counting a cynical licensed mobile runner), but here is an instalment that finds itself on an assured footing, with a contemporary feel to…

Developer Whale Peak Games Publisher Super Rare Originals Format PC (tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series   Release Out now Before setting up Whale Peak Games, Jakob Wahlberg cut his teeth as an artist on the SteamWorld games. Yet his studio’s debut release, a frenetic arcade-style Roguelike, could hardly be farther from the sedate likes of SteamWorld Heist or Quest. Go Mecha Ball is the twin-stick shooter as fairground ride, by way of the pinball table: your spherical mech is regularly propelled up vertical ramps and through chutes, unfurling its arms and legs to rain down laser destruction on robotic opponents. Those enemies have emerged from some manner of portal, revealed in simple title cards to have interrupted the blissful existence of protagonist Cat Rascal and her friends – whose response,…

The start of a new year is generally a time for optimism. But after 2023 brought unprecedented layoffs to the videogame industry, in spite of some huge commercial and critical successes, and with the release calendar looking a little bare, 2024 begins in more existential fashion. Clearly, something has gone wrong. Is it sustainable to keep making games the way they are today, or is a reckoning on the cards? It’s a question that feels pressing in light of triple-A development budgets. Last June, poorly redacted court documents revealed that Sony’s budgets for Horizon Forbidden West and The Last Of Us Part II were in the region of $212 million and $220 million respectively. Following a ransomware attack against Insomniac Games in December, meanwhile, an image of an internal document…

As this is my first column in Edge, I thought I should introduce myself. Hello! I’m Jon Ingold, and I’m narrative director and co-founder of , which means that among other things I wrote or co-wrote all of Inkle’s games. I’m also reasonably well known (amongst game writers, anyway) for a talk I gave about interactive dialogue, which suggested a way to use subtext when designing choices to make conversations more sparkly. As you might gather from all that, I consider myself more of a writer than a game designer, despite having (co-)designed a lot of games. So why don’t I just bog off and write a book, eh? Well, it’s a habit, I suppose. I wrote my first computer game in a notebook long before my family owned any…

Developer/publisher Don’t Nod Format PC, PS5, Xbox Series Origin Canada Release TBA 2024 Don’t Nod PC, PS5, Xbox Series Canada TBA 2024 Watching the reveal trailer for the debut release from Don’t Nod’s new Montréal studio, if you didn’t already know it came from several members of the core team behind the original Life Is Strange, you could take an educated guess. From its teenage leads to its colour palette (no one loves golden hour quite this much), its use of music and magic-realist style – with themes of time, memory, self-discovery and secrets in the mix – the game’s creative lineage is more than evident. But, as the action fast-forwards 27 years to the present day, it’s clear the team behind it has greater ambitions this time. That’s apparent…

Developer/publisher Strange Shift Studio Format PC Origin Canada Release March 7 Matthieu Fiorilli spent over a decade working on visual effects for companies such as Industrial Light & Magic and Rodeo FX. Most recently he was creature technical director at Weta Digital, on films such as Avatar: The Way Of Water and Suicide Squad. In 2021, he decided to try his hand at game development. His first title is a creature feature of sorts, although one that shuns Hollywood violence in favour of a more cerebral approach. “Shadow Of The Colossus left a big impression on me when I was young,” Fiorilli explains. Like Fumito Ueda’s classic, Chasing The Unseen introduces us to leviathans that inspire a sense of awe as they loom into view. It’s also possible to climb…

Developer/publisher Embark Studios Format PC (tested), PS5 (tested), Xbox Series Release Out now The thief sets down an auto-turret, a strobing protective eye cast over her partners-in-crime and their precious loot extractor, dinging like a slot machine about to pay out – yet it fails to catch the cloaked swordsman who drops out of invisibility just in time to swing at the thief’s head. A hulking body leaps into the air then drops into a ground-pound, tearing through multiple storeys of a building and the skull of an unfortunate soul on the ground floor. Three squadmates cower in the ruins of a tower block, sheltering from the UFOs that loom overhead, raining down fat green blocks of explosive energy. Almost every moment of The Finals feels like an action set-piece…

Developer/publisher Oculus Studios (Sanzaru Games) Format Quest 2, 3 (tested), Pro Release Out now Gods have taken many forms over the millennia: animal-headed, many-limbed, indistinguishable from one of us. Asgard’s Wrath 2 depicts them as simply massive. So as Thoth paces his observatory, a walking skyscraper lost in thought, each footstep rattles like thunder. He might be the Egyptian god of communication, but he’s not a great listener – to get his attention we need to reach eye level, scaling the rings of a tabletop astrolabe. Before we can even begin our climb, though, one colossal sandal comes down, its shadow filling the headset’s field of view. Splat. Occasionally, a metaphor is too big to ignore. The towering god of communication could stand in for Meta, which acquired Asgard’s Wrath…

Developer/publisher Night Signal Entertainment Format PC Release Out now Maybe it’s the shortcomings of older hardware that makes it such a potent setting for horror. Certainly, the noisy whirr of a ’90s PC on startup and the soft clicks and clunks as data slowly loads suggest some manner of ghost in this machine. The indistinct quality of the green-tinged images from our CRT monitor and the crackly sounds from its internal speakers have a similarly haunted quality. Meanwhile, the grainy sub-VHS-standard videos that mysteriously pop up on the desktop make a virtue of what our ears and eyes can’t quite make out. This absorbing entry into the burgeoning analoguehorror subgenre is likewise defined by its limitations. Your job is straightforward. At the beginning of each workday you double-click to clock…

Videogames based on TV shows don’t have a great track record, especially when the original property is a gameshow. When we put this to Scallywag Arcade’s Niall Taylor, currently responsible for making a videogame based on a TV gameshow, we’re surprised at how quickly he agrees. “Oh, a hundred per cent. I mean, just licensed videogames [as a whole], there are some fantastic ones now, but if you enter that realm, there’s generally a bias against you right from the start.” With Taskmaster VR, though, Taylor and team have the benefit of “unlimited access to the behind-the-scenes of the show”. They’ve visited on filming days, taken 3D scans of the Taskmaster House, and picked the brains of its production staff, including creator Alex Horne. But what really sets this project…

“Leaks impact us, force us to change plans, discard ideas, create assets for new beats or to answer concerns that shouldn’t exist. It impacts our health, our jobs.” “We’re thrilled to announce that Starfield has won Most Innovative Gameplay in the Steam Awards!” “I have absolutely nothing to announce, really. I’m just an unemployed person!”  “We also intend to be aggressive in applying AI and other cuttingedge technologies to both our content development and publishing functions.” ARCADE WATCH Keeping an eye on the coin-op gaming scene How is it possible that the movie that invented the concept of the summer blockbuster, with licensing extending to everything from lunchboxes to a theme-park attraction, never became a pinball table? It seems stranger still when you consider that Jaws arrived in 1975, before…

Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost sees the gatekeeper of Hell, named Sin, revealing to Satan that she is his daughter, and that their incestuous relationship resulted in their offspring, Death. When she finishes this revelation, Milton writes, “the subtle Fiend his lore / Soon learned, now milder, and thus answered smooth…”, promising to set her and all the other devils free from their “dark and dismal house of pain”. ‘Lore’, in this context, means ‘education’, ‘teaching’, or ‘lesson’, its original (often religious) sense from Old English ‘lare’, which in turn derived from the same Germanic root as ‘to learn’. Only in the 18th century did ‘lore’ come to mean something like “the body of traditional facts, anecdotes, or beliefs relating to some particular subject” (OED), as in “Grecian or…

Often, a player’s relationship with a game begins before they actually get their hands on it. In some cases, it can start several years before: publishers can use long hype cycles to nurture fanbases, subsections of which are eager to fervently defend those games against any perceived slight. Early Access periods and crowdfunding campaigns, meanwhile, encourage communities to build around games, giving players a vested interest in – and in some cases direct input toward – their subsequent development. But there’s no neat, one-size-fits-all approach for how best to announce a game, nor how to talk about it thereafter. Granted, two of the titles here adopted a similar tactic, both introduced via short trailers at The Game Awards. Don’t Nod Montreal isn’t yet prepared to reveal too much about Lost…

Developer/ publisher We Have Always Lived In The Forest Format PC Origin Australia Release TBA Stalkers, viruses, ghosting: you’re never more than a few clicks away from stumbling into a horror trope online. Yet Darkweb Streamer, a narrative Roguelike situated within a browser’s own digital shadow, began with a desire to create a “beautiful” Internet. Having spent her childhood as “one of the avant-garde designers” of MySpace and GeoCities pages, director Chantal Ryan is familiar with building off-kilter digital spaces. For this project, the challenge became one of creative reanimation. “I didn’t want to make a game about the Internet of today; it’s a horrible, empty space,” Ryan tells us. “If I want to make an Internet, it’s going to be that place charged with magic, potential, possibility, authenticity and…

With the unprecedented wave of layoffs the game industry faced in 2023, more developers than ever before are wondering whether they can make it on their own. Surely, the thinking goes, striking out alone must beat toiling away for an employer that might not even want you sticking around once your current project has shipped. But does the reality stand up? To find out, we talk to four solo developers to discover their experiences. Tomas Sala quit the company he founded to make The Falconeer; Lucy Blundell abandoned a career at Chillingo to create the acclaimed visual novels One Night Stand and Videoverse; Madison Karrh only found enough stability to leave her job making medical simulators with her third game, Birth; while Joe Richardson, creator of The Procession To Calvary,…

During the half-decade he worked at CD Projekt Red, Jakub Rokosz rose to the rank of senior quest designer and contributed to Geralt’s two most beloved adventures, Assassins Of Kings and Wild Hunt. Yet he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d arrived late. “It always bothered me that I missed the first [Witcher game],” he says. “I wanted a chance to give it the justice it deserved.” Several years later – and by then the CEO of his own studio – Rokosz met with a few former colleagues to reminisce about the fun they’d had developing The Witcher 3. And just a few weeks after that, CDPR studio head Adam Badowski called with a proposal: that Rokosz and his team tackle the remake of the very first Witcher game. The…

Levels, stages, maps: we have many ways of referring to the virtual spaces presented by videogames, each term loaded with connotations. Often, though, it feels like we might as well just borrow from the vocabulary of theatre and cinema, and call them ‘sets’: backdrops designed to support the story and bolster its illusion of reality, but not to be prodded at or even seen from any angle other than those chosen by the cinematographer or set designer. There are good practical and aesthetic reasons why technological advances might have prioritised visual fidelity over reactivity. Yet, on the occasions when we are presented with worlds that we can mould and reshape using our own hands, we can’t help but wonder if something might have been lost here. There’s the simple power-fantasy…

Developer Cing, Arc System Works Publisher Nintendo Format Switch Release Out now No better subtitle could have been chosen for a duology so sincerely invested in acts of remembrance. Nintendo is well practised in the art of repackaging nostalgia, but there is something especially fitting about this particular Recollection. It brings together 2005’s Another Code: Two Memories and 2009’s Another Code: R – A Journey Into Lost Memories in more ways than one, with both overhauled and given a consistent visual makeover – such that they now feel less like separate tales that share characters and thematic similarities and more two halves of a cohesive whole. For better and worse, they conjure fond reminiscences of the originals and the developer that made them. And those changes prove fascinating to consider…

Developer Room 909 Publisher Mediascape Co Format PC (tested), Switch Release Out now At the front end of this review section is a game that could only realistically have been made today. By contrast, here’s one that could potentially have existed 40 years ago. Raindrop Sprinters even has the livery of a vintage arcade game around its playspace: no need for a tutorial when you can have your instructions in their entirety on permanent display. The distinctions between the four game modes are detailed on the right, but until the remaining three are unlocked, all you need to know is contained on the left of the screen. Your goal, indeed, can be reduced to just ten words, displayed beneath the game’s logo: ‘Pouring raindrops… run through the passage and don’t…