RPS Feature Who doesn't love grinding
Ark: Survival Evolved [official site] is currently the fifth most played game on Steam. It’s not the first early access survival game to reach such heights, but so far it’s one of the few to have maintained it. At this year’s Gamescom 2015 I spoke to co-creative director Jesse Rapczak about what he feels Ark is doing different, their release and expansion plans, how you foster a less sociopathic survival game playerbase, and why his game is so grindy.
RPS Feature Beyond Vents
At Gamescom 2015, I had the opportunity to talk to Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gameplay director Patrick Fortier. We talked about feeling a sense of ownership over Deus Ex at last, expanding the language of its level design beyond vents, and the politics of a “mechanical apartheid.” Before I asked him about the game’s ceilings.
This Just Cause 3 [official site] video from IGN is titled “Just Cause 3’s Challenge Mode Looks Insanely Fun.” Insanely fun. You might like to watch the video because it has pretty explosions and scenery, but scroll down below the video and I’ll explain why the challenge modes aren’t insanely fun at all.
I played Kathy Rain at Gamescom and now that the first trailer is here, I’m eager to share my thoughts. If I hadn’t known it wasn’t a Wadjet Eye game, I would have thought it was a Wadjet Eye game. That’s the greatest compliment I can give to a point and click adventure in this day and age, and Kathy Rain’s grounded small town setting and strongly written protagonist are splendid. Set in 1995, it’s a mystery thriller that is intended to work as a homage to the Lucasarts games of the era, as well as mid-nineties music and television.
RPS Feature Beautiful Bedlam
That’s a headline packed with good things, isn’t it? And here’s another good thing – even if you don’t like any of the games films and comics listed in that headline, there’s still a possibility that Skyshine’s Bedlam [official site] will have something for you. Maybe you liked The Banner Saga? Bedlam is built on the engine used in that game. Maybe you really like the idea of riding around a broken world within the guts of a giant mutation? Sure. You can do that.
RPS Feature Another Captain Smith
This is an embarrassing admission: when I first played the original Mount & Blade I spent twenty minutes walking around trying to find other players and confused by the mostly empty villages I found instead. I had thought it was an MMO.
This makes me the person in the world best equipped to write about its sequel, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord [official site], which is aiming to make many of the series’ systems easier to grasp for idiots like me.
RPS Feature The Rising Son
The Mafia 3 [official site] presentation at Gamescom felt very much like an attempt to hammer home several important changes to the series rather than an accurate representation of the minute-by-minute experience of playing. Given that this was the first public showing of the game, which probably won’t see release until the second half of 2016, that’s to be expected. The vertical slice shown had a lot to cover: a new city, a new time period, a new protagonist, and a new take on open world criminal conquest. Perhaps it’s understandable that the “new” was hammered home with all the subtlety of a blow from Mjolnir, but it’s fair to say that the road to New Orleans looks rather treacherous.
And that brings us to item number one…
“It’ll be over by Christmas,” Hearts of Iron IV [official site] thinks to itself as the engineers at Paradox fiddle with its guts. “They’ll send me home via Steam-tube, rather than back to the frontlines of testing and development.”
No such luck. The World War II grand strategy game is due to spend another Christmas in development. That’s good news for us though because it represents a commitment to the cause. Rather than dashing for release while the shells are still falling, Hearts of Iron is standing firm. The last time I played, in a huge multiplayer session, there were several interface and balance issues in need of attention. That’s exactly what they’re getting – I spoke to Paradox at Gamescom and they told me how things stand.
RPS Feature With A Spot Of Scribblenauts
Someone could create an incredible game within Planetoid Pioneers [official site], it’s just too early to tell whether that someone is its developers. My demo at Gamescom 2015 focuses mainly on the tools being used to make the game, and with good reason: they’re impressive, expansive, and they’ll ship with the game when it launches on Early Access this autumn.
RPS Feature Hands On
Dark Souls 3 [official site] is in the shadow of a giant. The giant probably has a wound for a face, not a single leg to stand on and spends his days dragging his torso around the ruins of a throne room. After one slightly uneven sequel, the Souls series has returned to the guidance of creator Hidetaka Miyazaki. Rather than replicating what worked so well four years ago, however, From Software are tweaking their design. The architecture of the world is immediately recognisable but combat is changing.
After half an hour with the game, I’m half-way convinced it might be able to step out of the shadow of its predecessors and find a new sun to praise.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution had the best ceilings of any game ever made. I’m not kidding. I’ve had screenshots of that game’s ceilings as desktop wallpapers and I know others who have done the same. Each one was a sculptural work designed to communicate the cyber renaissance setting. I spoke to gameplay director Patrick Fortier about this at Gamescom and unfortunately it sounds as if sequel Deus Ex: Mankind Divided [official site] won’t carry on the game’s ceiling-based legacy in quite the same way. “That dream is dying,” he said.
RPS Feature Right And Wrongs
I wouldn’t count myself as a fan of many things, but the derision and disinterest inspired by the first Mirror’s Edge makes me want to champion it. It was a game with terrible boss fights, flawed combat and a tedious story, but also one worth celebrating for the things it got right, such as its first-person movement and its beautiful, brilliant world.
Those same things also make me nervous about the sequel. When I went to see EA’s Mirror’s Edge Catalyst [official site] presentation at Gamescom, I wasn’t sure whether it would amplify the parts I liked or disliked.
RPS Feature Follow The Blood Money
Absolution might be a fitting tag for what looks like a return to form and a casting off of the sins of the past, but since that subtitle’s already taken, I’m hoping I’ll be able to justify referring to this one as Hitman: Redemption [official site]. So far, the signs are good. I spent some time in the company of IO Interactive’s studio head, Hannes Seifert, as he played through a mission set at a Paris fashion show. As he manipulated NPCs behaviour and demonstrated some emergent possibilities, Seifert said all the right things about recovering the best of the series’ past. The game – this portion of it at least – backs him up convincingly. It’s looking good.
Ubisoft have let loose a bit of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate [official site] in a nice 10-minute playthrough video taking a look at the game’s secondary protagonist Evie, twin to playable Dude Hero Jacob Frye and a sensibly dressed Master of Stealth in her own right, as she infiltrates the Tower of London. You can watch it all below.
I admire Euro Truck Simulator but, well, Europe’s a bit mundane. Give me endless skies, wild lands, Places From The Movies, big trees. Give me American Truck Simulator [official site]. SCS’s next trucking sim takes a whistlestop tour of the USA in a new trailer, and I dig it. Chills ran down my spine seeing a truck cross the Golden Gate Bridge out of that dreadful city and towards the trees, those beautiful trees I do so miss! It’s the landscape I most want to truck around.
Well, until SCS get the license for Mega-City One Truck Simulator.
RPS Feature Happy days
Note: this feature was written late last week, before Gamescom kicked off.
When I talk to fellow writers about the experience of Gamescom, they’re more likely to use the verb ‘survive’ than ‘enjoy’. While not considered as intimidating as E3, a show so large and unruly that Los Angeles is actually contained within its halls, Gamescom can be a difficult place to get work done but as I prepare to fly out for my fourth visit, I can’t think of any place I’d rather be.
Might & Magic Heroes VII [official site] is launching September 29th, so sayeth Ubisoft from on high. A second closed beta phase is scheduled to start August 26th in the interim period, running for about a week until September 2nd and letting players try out previously unavailable factions. These are the fan-voted factions, the Sylvan and Dungeon, the result of a voting session that began last year and perhaps a solid name for a pub.
RPS Feature They should have sent all of the poets
Paradox’s internal development studio, responsible for Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Victoria and Hearts of Iron, is deep into development on a space strategy game. We’ve already seen it, and picked the brains of CK II maestro and project lead Henrik Fåhraeus and EU IV designer Tomas Johansson about this giant leap for the studio. The project, which the company announced at their Gamescom fan gathering moments ago, goes by the name Stellaris and it’s shaping up to be one of the most exciting games in recent years.
Below, you’ll find everything we know, including how randomised alien species will ensure that each new galaxy is mysterious, and why the commitment to an intelligent and subversive end-game could make this one of the smartest interpretations of 4X strategy ever made.
Paradox have some announcements to make at this year’s Gamescom. They’re going to make them at their conference, at 7.30pm BST (8.30pm CEST), and you can jolly well watch it all happen right here. Just underneath. There… yes, just there.
Swedish Yarn golem Yarny (surname: Not Sackboy) is the kind of protagonist I can get behind. The sort of sugar-sweet hero that could make even this heart of ice and rock soften and beat once more. You first caught a glimpse of him a couple months back during E3 when developer ColdWood Interactive first announced it was working on a quaint little puzzle-platformer named Unravel [official site].
