Table of contents for January 2023 in Edge

Exclusive subscriber edition In this business, we see a lot of artwork. Not just the stuff on the screen during the playing of a game, of course, but also the visuals created often before there even is anything to play. It is one of the joys of working with videogames that we get to see behind the scenes, and also that we’re able to showcase the work of so many skilled people in these pages. We can’t help feeling, though, that concept artists are the unsung heroes of game development, grinding away in the background without the kind of recognition afforded to superstar designers and project leads. Because their work doesn’t get much of an airing once the game is in the player’s hands, the concept artist’s work is easily…

Few videogame pioneers have enjoyed as much ongoing relevance as Takashi Nishiyama. The inventor of the hadouken fireball first laid the foundations on which all fighting games are built at Capcom and SNK. Two decades later, he helped revitalise the genre with Street Fighter IV, a project co-developed by Dimps, the studio he co-founded in 2000. Since then, Dimps has become an outsourcing powerhouse in the Japanese industry, the rarely recognised talent behind many of the most successful fighting games on the market today. Now, with the rerelease of its 2005 arcade original IP, The Rumble Fish 2, Nishiyama reflects on a life spent at the bleeding edge of one-on-one fighters. You’ve helped define the evolution of fighting games since their inception in the 1980s through to the current…

“It’s almost like a new medium. If this succeeds, it’ll turn things around – not just in the game industr y, but in the movie industr y as well.” In discussing one of his forthcoming projects, Hideo Kojima reveals his true failing: he’s just too modest with his ambitions ”The Commission is working to ensure that you will still be able to play Call Of Duty on other consoles (including my PlayStation).” The European Commission’s Ricardo Cardaso’s bias may be showing just a little bit ”When the gamer identity is very core to who you are as a person, that seems to reflect what we call toxic gamer culture.” Can you imagine the horrors researcher Dr Rachel Kowert has waded through? Brrr “When we release new hardware in the future,…

W hat will life be like when we all live on cosmologist Joseph Silk, in his the Moon? According to the new book Back To The Moon: The Next Giant Leap For Humankind, it sounds a bit like living in a giant shopping mall, or an underground version of Center Parcs. “The workers live in lunar cities based in giant lunar lava tubes,” Silk explains. “Unlimited energy is available, sourced by solar power and thermonuclear reactors. Gleaming skyscrapers abound. […] Work is a short shuttle ride away from the residential developments. Food service is automated. Few need to cook. In the resorts, the guests have space for unlimited leisure and exercise. There are fine restaurants and theaters, coffee bars and night clubs, exercise facilities and sports stadiums.” But you will…

Developer/publisher Format Origin Release Sega (Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio) PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Japan February 21 G iven it has developed eight major games in the Yakuza series, you could be forgiven for assuming that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio harbours an obsession with Japan’s criminal underworld. While these games could never be mistaken for gritty documentaries – there are far too many spin kicks and rhythm-action disco minigames for that – any player will, from their time slinking around Kamurocho (the series’ approximation of Tokyo’s red-light district, Kabukicho) emerge with a greater understanding of the tone and texture of Japan’s tattooed underbelly. It’s an assumption Masayoshi Yokoyama, RGG Studio’s director, rejects. “Our studio’s main objective is not to depict Japanese yakuza,” he says. “It is to depict…

There’s a spot in Medborgarplatsen, the ‘citizen square’ at the centre of Stockholm, from which you can see the logos of Avalanche, DICE and Paradox all at once. This single office block represents perhaps the greatest concentration of power in triple-A game development, and serves as a reminder of the city’s outsized influence on the industry. Yet Christofer Sundberg, a co-founder of Avalanche and instigator of the open-world movement as director of Just Cause, remembers a far scrappier time. At the turn of the millennium, during the “happy dotcom days”, he became one of the first five employees at Paradox. “There didn’t seem to be any plan for what we were doing,” he says. “There were new things every day: today we’ll write the pitch for a new strategy game,…

Like its series-rebooting 2018 predecessor, God Of War Ragnarök is a ‘single-shot’ narrative, its camera never losing sight of the core cast as they rove the realms of Norse mythology, fighting through forests of cyclopean fungus, and braving the heights of Asgard. This no-cuts approach doesn’t add up in practice – while the in-game perspective and cinematic sequences flow together without seam, you’ll ‘cut’ between world and crafting or level-up screens as you explore – but that unblinking continuity isn’t just a bid for comparisons with prestige TV. It reflects a desire to capture characters, even deities, at their most intimate, with some of the most affecting writing couched as idle chatter while you fend off monsters or probe the workings of a magic door. Ragnarök preserves this conversational feel…

We previously spoke to Chris Olsen at the beginning of 2022, for E368’s cover feature. As the year draws to a close, we pick things up right on the eve of Somerville’s release. The passing of time quickly becomes a theme of the conversation, Olsen having started work on this project back in early 2014, when he was working as an animator in the film industry. After spending so many years developing it, he is now in the process of letting go, he confesses, and of anticipating the reaction to a game he fully expects to be “polarising”. After working on this game for so long, initially on your own and then with a growing team, how was the final stretch of development? It was really tough, the last year.…

War isn’t about friends,” scowls General Shepherd, Modern Warfare II’s returning villain. “It’s about enemies.” As a philosophy, it’s intended to counterpoint the ride-or-die attitude of Captain Price and Task Force 141, the scrappy special forces outfit that picks up allies in unusual places. But we can’t help but feel that 141 used to have better friends than these. At the centre of its inner circle are Kate Laswell, the CIA handler who takes ‘staying frosty’ to Himalayan heights; Ghost, a sentient skull mask in search of a personality; and Alejandro, a Mexican Tier 1 operator whose mouth opens only to deliver introductory explainers on his country. Despite ample downtime devoted to character development – sometimes in Firewatch-style moments of onscreen dialogue choice – none of this chorus comes close…

Ambition can be a double-edged sword. While on the one hand it has pushed Sonic Team to create its boldest departure to date from the series formula, it also explains the sorry state in which this ‘open zone’ effort arrives. For every moment you spend sprinting across lush fields, unbound from the strict level pathways that have defined Sonic’s previous outings, there are a dozen more when the struggle to build a compelling game within them is all too apparent. True, there are moments while exploring these five sprawling maps when Frontiers captures something of the ambience of Breath Of The Wild – tinkling piano and drizzling rain creating a sombre atmosphere unlike any other Sonic game. Otherwise, there’s a bizarre desperation to shove a series of gimmicks in your…

Given the presence of Captain America et al, you might reasonably expect the character cards to be, well, the heroes of Marvel Snap. They’re certainly treated well enough. The card art plunders decades of Marvel comics, including the typographic logos that would traditionally announce these heroes and villains in speech balloons, all decorated with upgradeable visual flourishes that allow upgraded characters to break free of their card’s borders. These are paired with characterful special abilities: Doctor Strange uses portals to summon his most powerful allies to his current location, while serial killer Carnage destroys any placed next to him, powering up in the process. The true stars of Marvel Snap, though, are its locations. The field of play is divided into three lanes, each representing a spot in the Marvel…

For a brief period, circa 2019, it looked as though Google might upend the world of videogames, just as Netflix had done for TV. So much so that it featured on the cover of E338, where we asked of Stadia’s server banks: “Is this your next console?” It didn’t seem too outrageous – Stadia’s promise, after all, was that it would negate the need for any expensive hardware, opening up a huge market of people who might not be willing to pay the upfront cost to play high-end console games. As we now know, it didn’t work out like that. The first crack to appear was Stadia’s pricing structure, asking customers to pay full whack for individual games or else stump up for Stadia Pro, which with its monthly price…

BOOK Dice Men: The Origin Story Of Games Workshop bit.ly/dicemen As his knighthood ‘for services to the online gaming industry’ will attest, Sir Ian Livingstone has had a major impact on videogames. But this account, written by Livingstone with contributions from longtime friend Steve Jackson, is focused on the tabletop, telling a story that wraps up in 1986 with the sale of Games Workshop. He writes briefly about the company’s early foray into digital gaming, which also nearly represented its end. The story really sparks into life, though, when recounting how the company became the British distributor for Dungeons & Dragons. “We were all roleplaying as businessmen,” Livingstone recalls, something that’s underlined with the photos and documents reproduced within, tributes to the firm’s scrappy beginnings. VIDEO Stray For Game Boy…

Back in October, an internal memo from Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, complained that the employees building the company’s flagship virtual reality social network, Horizon Worlds, weren’t using it enough. Shah’s memo, obtained by The Verge, asked plaintively, “Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?” Later, he commanded that “everyone in this organisation should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds”. The problem with Horizon Worlds is the same problem that bedevils all virtual reality games and applications: they’re too inconvenient to use. I’ve been meaning to write a column about VR for months, for which I…

Developer Parallel Studio Publisher Quantic Dream Format PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin France  Release 2023 At of the sea, and a desire to protect it from reckless human endeavour. These the core of Under The Waves is a love are feelings Ronan Coiffec, CEO of Parallel Studio, and the game’s director, has long nourished, and first tried to render digitally some 15 years ago. As a resident of Brittany he had seen the impact of oil spills in the Bay Of Biscay, so he wanted to create something that touched on the tragedy of the damage they caused. “I started a little project to learn game design, visual art, things like that,” Coiffec explains. “It was a 2D sort of platformer. You were able to pilot a…

Developer Necrosoft Games Publisher Ysbryd Games Format PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin US Release 2023 Sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to a single step. In these brisk, grid-based tactical battles, positioning is vital: as such, creative director Brandon Sheffield tells us, “sidesteps are very important”. This micro-adjustment won’t cost you any action points until you complete the movement, potentially putting you within reach of an enemy you otherwise couldn’t hit. One small step for man, in other words, can result in one giant problem for demonkind. This is a game, then, in which little things have a big impact. Necrosoft isn’t calling Demonschool a ‘tactics RPG’ but rather an ‘RPG with tactical battles’; that distinction, Sheffield says, is down to the fact…

For all the implications of the title, Ragnarök’s story puts the emphasis on rebuilding. As in Mass Effect, you’ll spend a lot of time in sidequests salvaging regions trashed by your Asgardian antagonists at the world-tree’s summit. In Svartalfheim, realm of the dwarves, you can take time out to shut down huge Aesir smelters at the behest of Mimir, Odin’s old fixer, nowadays reduced to a head bobbing around on your belt. In Alfheim, you’ll free huge jellyfish creatures trapped in dark elf nests, and probe the origins of the latter’s enmity with the light elves. In Vanaheim, you’ll help Freya dispel Odin’s curses and come to terms with her memories of their marriage, while cleansing toxic gardens and exorcising corrupted spirits. This theme of gradual repair and reparation carries…

What is history, the old saying goes, but a fable agreed upon? The irony of that quote bringing up a handful of variants on the same, and attributions to at least three different people, is not lost on us. But the truth of the matter is that history is defined by disagreements – and the fictional village of Tassing, tucked away beneath the Bavarian Alps, is no different. Nearby Kiersau Abbey, which, in an arrangement uncommon to the early modern era, hosts both monks and nuns (less unusually, they’re housed separately), is desperate for funds and keeps raising taxes, arousing the ire of the local peasants; meanwhile, godfearing townsfolk are torn between offering their support to the impending revolt or retaining an uneasy peace. No wonder cracks are appearing in…

Batman may have entered the world in 1939, but he’s been reborn many times since. It’s inevitable that creations of such ripe vintage will outlive their creators, and thus be passed down from one set of heads to the next. Each time, these ideas are reconstructed in a slightly different way, with some new style or status quo. The Court Of Owls, which provides Gotham Knights with its primary villain, is the result of just such a rebirth. The version of Batman Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo inherited in 2011 had spent several years battling with demons, ghosts and space gods across space and time under writer Grant Morrison. They wound him back to a more Gotham-based crimefighter, and in the process reinvented the city itself. Now, they told us,…

Husband-and-wife team Julian and Linda Treffler share a long-held ambition to make a Zelda game with do-it-yourself dungeon crafting. “Originally, the idea came from Julian, because when he was a child he thought that it would be super-cool to be able to just build your own dungeons in the Zelda games,” Linda explains. Julian’s first attempt came when he was aged 12 and tried making a Zelda game using RPG Maker. “But RPG Maker is more for classic JRPG-type combat stuff,” he says, and trying to force the program into making something in the Zelda mould never worked. “That made me frustrated back in the day, which was also kind of a reason why, in the future, I went into programming, so I could finally create the stuff I really…

Dialogue Send your views, using ‘Dialogue’ as the subject line, to edge@futurenet.com. Our letter of the month wins an exclusive Edge T-shirt. Chop assistants As a child, I watched my friend’s dad play Tomb Raider, a stack of A4 sheets perched on his knee – afull walkthrough printed out in Courier New. We ribbed him for cheating, of course, but years later I am playing Elden Ring looking down at my smartphone perched on my own knee – checking quest lines, getting tips for bosses, or comparing weapon stats to optimise my build. Adrian Hon wrote in E374 about this phenomenon and I enthusiastically nodded along reading about the collective play fostered by companion apps and websites. I enjoy this manner of ‘cheating’. It helps me clear objectives that might…

Developer/ publisher Aggro Crab Format PC, Switch Origin US Release 2023 N ick Kaman, studio head and art director at Aggro Crab, says that he’s had the concept for the studio’s second major release floating around in his head for six years. Indeed, the inability to make Another Crab’s Treasure when they started out in game development partly informed the team’s crustacean moniker. “I just really like crabs,” he offers by way of explanation. “There’s Seattle,” he says, referring to the studio’s home. “There’s the beach. There’s the Puget Sound. And when I was a kid, my mom would take me to the beach and we’d flip rocks and find crabs.” That sense of childlike discovery is at the heart of Another Crab’s Treasure, though since you’re cast as a…

The story of Tarsier’s beginnings could so easily have ended up a cautionary tale, a warning about learning to walk before you can run. Armed with an inspired concept, a group of nine students aimed high, without truly understanding the industry they were stepping into, or how to deliver on their promise. But while that first project never came to fruition, it would lead to a relationship that allowed the Swedish studio to make its name in secondparty development, until eventually it was ready to return to ideas of its own. Now, with a string of eclectic releases under its belt, Tarsier has no cause to curse that stumbling start. One of the founding group of nine was Andreas Johnsson, who remains the company’s CEO. He began his career as…

Less is more. It’s an old maxim that Jumpship seems to have taken as dogma. You can see it at work in the length of Somerville (six hours should see you through to the credits) and in its allusive approach to storytelling, which is handled without a single line of dialogue. But nowhere is this more apparent than what fills the screen as you play. It’s not uncommon for large areas to be cloaked in darkness, all the colour and light saved for a single focal point. Even its splashiest vistas are realised with a few broad brushstrokes: a block of murky brown here, another of drab green there, two grey lines enough to suggest fields bisected by a motorway. Which is not to say that the results aren’t beautiful.…

As is entirely proper, Pentiment will receive plenty of plaudits for the standard of its art and animation. What this small team led by art director Hannah Kennedy has produced is nothing short of remarkable: the wood-print character art and backdrops are richly drawn, while different period-appropriate styles are adopted from time to time. As characters chat about books, they’ll pop up within their pages; meanwhile, our protagonist’s dreams sometimes see him visit a sort of mind palace, which has a very different look to his waking surroundings. While dialogue exchanges tend to fix characters in place, there’s always something (or someone) moving in the background; when the camera zooms in for a one-on-one chat, subtle eye and mouth movements and head tilts reveal as much about the speaker’s feelings…

As soon as protagonist Jess changes from her travelling clothes into white commune overalls, you know it’s an impractical decision. Sure enough, a little later the pristine linen has been spattered with mud and blood stains that no detergent will shift, and she’s jogging barefoot through forests and mines doing who knows what damage to her soles. It’s hard not to feel her pain, or her shivering cold when a storm draws in. But you also can’t help wondering why she doesn’t return to her original outfit, or at least put her shoes on again, during the frequent visits to base camp. Such stretches of logic matter little in isolation, of course, but in The Chant they nag, compounding issues in an already unconvincing narrative. While the middling production values…