Posts tagged “interview”

Remember that thing you like from 10 years ago? It’s probably getting a sequel. Shenmue 3. Evil Genius 2. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2. The calendar of upcoming games is packed with throwbacks that will revisit the worlds we left behind over a decade ago. Oddworld: Soulstorm is heading back to the strange homeland of Abe the skinny green freedom farter. Mechwarrior 5 is booting…

Tagged with Black Forest Games, Deep Silver, E3 2019, feature, Hardsuit Labs, interview, Paradox Interactive, rebellion, Ys Net, Destroy All Humans!, Evil Genius, Evil Genius 2, Shenmue I & II, Shenmue III, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

We hear a lot about level designers in games. Voice actors, concept artists, big directors. Kate Edwards is none of those things. She is a geographer. It seems like an odd job for the games industry, but the more you learn about her work, the more it feels essential. Edwards is hired by studios to cast her geo-eye over the shuffling NPCs of sci-fi space…

Tagged with feature, Gamelab Barcelona 2019, Geogrify, interview, Kate Edwards, Age of Empires, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfrare, Devotion, Halo, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands.

“I do remember there being some pretty bad cat puns that we all wish we could unhear," Marco Bombasi tells me. He’s the localisation director for Monster Hunter: World, the man in charge of translating the dinosaur-harvesting game from its original Japanese into other languages, including English. Every player in Monster Hunter gets a cat sidekick who says things like “Hello Meow-ster”, so I’ve asked…

Tagged with Capcom, feature, interview, Monster Hunter: World.

“Kids are not born toxic,” says Laura Higgins. “Adults generally are where most of the negative stuff is online. It's not kids doing it.” Higgins works for Roblox, a children’s game of blocky-armed figures and even blockier cars. Well technically, it’s not one game, but many. Roblox is a sort of pick-your-own-playground with a platter of multiplayer minigames made by other players. You could fly…

Tagged with feature, Gamelab Barcelona 2019, interview, Laura Higgins, Roblox Corporation, Roblox.

There was a nasty moment early on in my relationship with HMS when I thought me and Johan Nagel's latest weren't going to get on. In my first hour with the beta of this highly original turnless Hornblower-em-up I experienced five game-curtailing mutinies. Even on the lowest difficulty setting I couldn't make progress. Baffled disbelief was fast becoming sulky defeatism when the doubloon finally dropped. An…

Tagged with Every Single Soldier, HMS, interview, Johan Nagel, Steel Beasts, Steel Beasts Pro Personal Edition, The Flare Path, Wasteland Interactive.

You probably remember the reveal of Sea Of Solitude at E3 in 2018 because of CEO Cornelia Geppert’s excitement and sincerity when presenting the game. Geppert is self-effacing about it, and told me it was surprising to her that people responded that way. “The actual developers of course are always passionate about their project!” she said. “I think it's normal when you do your project…

Tagged with Cornelia Geppert, Electronic Arts, feature, interview, Jo-Mei Games, preview, Sea of Solitude.

Throughout my chat with Modern Storyteller's managing director Nick Pearce about his upcoming game The Forgotten City, there are two things conspicuously absent from our conversation: "Bethesda", and "Skyrim". Ever since Pearce announced he was re-imagining his popular time-looping murder mystery mod into a proper game last year, Bethesda has become the publisher that shall not be named. Not in a properly evil, Voldemort kind…

Tagged with feature, interview, Modern Storyteller, PAX East, preview, The Forgotten City.

When Sam Barlow released murder mystery game Her Story in 2015, he probably didn’t expect to get a two-page spread in Le Monde about this three-hour FMV game. Her Story worked because it was simple. You had a fictional desktop and a search engine that would bring up videos of an ongoing police interview. When you typed in “dead” or “argument”, you’d get a video…

Tagged with Annapurna Interactive, E3 2019, feature, Furious Bee Limited, interview, preview, Sam Barlow, Telling Lies.

We all remember A-day. The infamous day in US history when San Francisco came under attack by skull-faced bad dudes, and the Avengers showed up to stop them. The superheroes flew in to display their skills at bash ‘n’ dash combat (almost as if this was a demonstration for the press). There was Thor, Iron Man, and Black Widow, all fighting goons. It was exciting…

Tagged with Crystal Dynamics, E3 2019, feature, interview, Marvel Games, Square Enix, Marvel's Avengers.

Scroll right down to the bottom of the Epic Games Store, and you’ll find a forgotten and totally free, game. It’s existed since before Epic set about its masterplan to take over the PC games market, but now, buried beneath the exclusives and novelties, lies Unreal Tournament, the latest entry in the iconic shooter series, whose development was halted in 2018. The game disappeared quietly,…

Tagged with Epic Games, feature, interview, Unreal Tournament.

I sometimes announce, to rooms at large, that I wished Assassin’s Creed Odyssey wouldn’t tell me what to do as much, and let me just explore. Imagine my shock, therefore, at the reveal of The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian detective game releasing just the other side of E3, promising “zero hand holding”. No objective markers on the map, and no trails on the street to…

Tagged with Bigben Interactive, feature, Frogwares, GDC 2019, interview, The Sinking City.

They call it Ceremorphosis. The excruciating seven day process by which a humanoid might transform into a Mind Flayer. Stick one illithid tadpole in the brain and one week later you’ve got an octopus for a head and a craving for more grey matter. And what better visual metaphor for the return of Baldur’s Gate: the adventure that lodged in the hearts and minds of…

Tagged with feature, Google Stadia, interview, Larian Studios, Baldur's Gate, Divinity: Original Sin.

For small developers seeking a breakout hit in the increasingly hard to define simulation/management genre, one of the perennial silver bullet concepts is “Dwarf Fortress, but it looks nice, and people aren’t scared to play it”. Of everything on the market so far, it’s probably Rimworld that comes closest to this goal, but it had the crucial flaw of not including any dwarves. As such,…

Tagged with feature, interview, Linda Zetterman, Warpzone Studios, Dwarf Fortress, hammerting.

“I actually wish we had started with Malks," said Brian Mitsoda, "Because honestly the number one thing I think people ask is, 'Are malkavians in the game?'” I had a chat with Mitsoda, narrative lead on Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines 2 and lead designer on the original Bloodlines, for the new Clan reveal. Yup, the Malkavians are back, baby. There will be comments.

Tagged with brian mitsoda, feature, Hardsuit Labs, interview, Paradox Interactive, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2.

If you've ever been to a big, public gaming show, you'll know a large part of your day is often spent being bombarded by at least fifteen different loudspeakers all vying for you to come and sample the source of their whizz-pop sound effects and booming trailer videos. E-Line Media's booth for ocean explorathon Beyond Blue, however, was like a small oasis of calm when…

Tagged with BBC Studios, Blue Planet, E-Line Media, feature, interview, PAX East, s-s-s-shark!, Beyond Blue.

Noita is a very giffable game. The official Twitter account for developer Nolla Games has a lot of cool gifs. Explosions. Acid. Ice. Rats. Noita is that game where every pixel in the word is animated. You can explode, burn, melt everything you see, as a little witchy character exploring a procedurally generated dungeon. I was sitting around a laptop on the floor with the…

Tagged with feature, GDC 2019, interview, Nolla Games, Noita.

Space survival craft 'em ups can be pretty grim places, what with the lack of oxygen and constant threat of being eaten alive by the resident fauna and all that, but for some developers there's nowhere more hostile than the mothership from which they all originate. “Throw a dart on Steam,” says Joe Tirado, head communications honcho for Astroneer, “and you could probably hit a…

Tagged with feature, interview, PAX East, System Era Softworks, Astroneer.

If you’re tuning into the Overwatch League’s stage two playoffs this weekend, you might see a video featuring 14-year-old Danik Soudakoff. Soudakoff is an attendee of some of the games in the Burbank arena, a fan of the Los Angeles Valiant, and deaf. When attending games, he gets an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter to keep him informed, and he’s been a part of creating…

Tagged with accessibility, Blizzard Entertainment, esports, feature, interview, Overwatch League, Overwatch.

Update: We've now got the first video showing The Jovian Concord's changes to Gas City, with some before-and-after comparison footage. You can find it embedded below. While Warframe's next major expansion, Empyrean, is still a way off, players of the free-to-play space-ninja shooter won't have long to wait for new toys, as the Jovian Concord update hits "very soon", according to developers Digital Extremes. Much…

Tagged with Digital Extremes, feature, interview, Ron Davey, Warframe.

Letters - A Written Adventure is, say the developers, "a heart warming coming of age story about finding the right words." It's part puzzle game, part adventure game, part platformer, but all words. I got to play an early demo of it, and talk to the devs, and it made me think about the joy of writing a letter -- of physically putting pen to…

Tagged with 5am Games GmbH, feature, GDC 2019, interview, preview, #Selfie Tennis, Letters - A Written Adventure.