Dante Alighieri’s 14th century epic poem The Divine Comedy subdivides the expanse between the lowest level of Hell and the highest echelon of Heaven into a series of strata, or circles. Lordran is unique among open-world RPGs in that its progression shares Dante’s vertical journey, as opposed to being a mostly flat two-dimensional sprawl. But what if, instead of clawing your way towards the centre of the earth, you carve an ascending path? It follows that you should expect to arrive at something resembling Heaven. As it happens, this is precisely what you find when you dispatch the Iron Golem atop the roof of Sen’s Fortress. The cutscene that follows shows a pack of winged demons carrying you up the side of a sheer cliff face, over a wall, and then depositing you at the doorstep of the radiant city of Anor Londo.

The way you reach Anor Londo is a departure from the unbroken transitions that typically attend your passage between Lordran’s various provinces, since Dark Souls tends to forgo the expository crutch of cutscenes. In most adventure games, entering an area for the first time sees the camera pull back dramatically and pan across so you can take in your surroundings, similar to how a flyover camera shot might help a person watching a TV broadcast of golf to study the layout and hazards of a particular hole. Dark Souls’ designers understand that there’s more thrill and uncertainty when you’re made to undertake the burden of cartography yourself. Dark Souls never hands you a map, just a quill. There’s a vast emotional difference, after all, between exploring uncharted terrain on foot and by helicopter.

If Anor Londo functions as a kind of heavenly city, it makes sense that it’s the one area in the game you’re incapable of reaching by your own agency. Doesn’t Christianity teach that Heaven is in another dimension and requires the intervention of divine rapture? There’s a wonderful discordance in the fact that, in the place of beatific angels, you have demonic gargoyles hoisting you to Anor Londo’s impossible plateau. The sense of rapture is heightened by a moment in the cutscene where the camera loses sight of your avatar altogether for several moments, soaring up the side of the cliff and over Anor Londo’s battlement. You have the sensation of flight yourself for those moments, as if you’re no longer peering through a camera lens but through your own unblinking eyes.

Those first glimpses of Anor Londo are dazzling. It’s hard to believe how much sunlight there is flooding over the city’s ocean of cathedral spires. Dark Souls can be so bleak at times, so starved of warmth and light, that the beauty seems almost eye-shadingly pornographic – like the point in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road where the starving protagonists stumble upon the untouched bomb shelter with its gratuitous bounty of food and drink.

Dark Souls obsesses over its dualities. In the opening cinematic, the narrator relates Lordran’s genesis story and the point at which fire entered the world. “With fire came disparity,” she says. “Heat and cold, life and death, and of course, light and dark.” If the bonfire checkpoints dotting the world are tiny breadcrumbs of heat and light, the sun is the ultimate cosmic beacon, and Anor Londo seems to be the banquet table on which that feast has been most amply served.

Anor Londo is also one of the only areas of Lordran that doesn’t lie in ruin. It offers a rare peek at a world preserved, a vision that’s even more arresting since you’ve recently traversed the dismal crumbling grey bulwark of Sen’s Fortress. All Anor Londo’s buildings share a cream-coloured exterior, and the game compensates for such uniformity with a sun-baked warmth you can almost feel radiating off the stone’s surface. Interiors are more ornate, with floors covered in a handsome interplay of white and blue marble. There’s an austere quality to these spaces, with no cloth or cushioned furniture to soften the hard surfaces, or dampen the clatter of weapon on shield.

From your first glimpse of Anor Londo, there’s no doubt as to your ultimate destination. Just as a visitor to Disney World instinctively heads for Cinderella Castle, the huge cathedral at the city’s hub grabs your attention with its innumerable spires. Like the game’s boss creatures, its scale is one of the few facets of Dark Souls that betrays its Japanese origins – though perhaps not as much as its most prestigious resident, Gwynevere, Princess Of Sunlight, whose mammaries are large enough to sustain separate gravitational fields.

But you’ll never stand in her presence unless you best Executioner Smough and Dragon Slayer Ornstein. Anor Londo is where Dark Souls casts off restraint. The highest altitude. The brightest sun. The most exuberant architecture. The hardest boss battle. The most maternal figure. Enjoy your stay.

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Tim Willits and id CEO Todd Hollenshead have leapt, fiercely at times, to the defence of their studio’s biggest commercial hit. “There are three people on the internet that keep making these posts that Doom 3 was ‘bad’,” said Hollenshead in July, “and they get no credibility from any other people. There’s some mass misperception out there”. Then Willits, a month later: “Games that sell over three-and-a-half million copies are not bad games”.

They’re right, of course. Statistically, the three-million-and-rising club is something of a critical elite. And, yes, there are people out there who found the game difficult, whose opinions have since decayed into the kind of dismissive grunts Hollenshead describes. Doom 3 was a kludge, part FPS, part survival horror, part modern and part anachronism. As a rollercoaster, it was meticulously plotted, winching players to the precipice with a great opening act, then plunging them into cramp-inducing terror before retrieving them, often with as literal a device as a carriage on rails, back into their comfort zone. And as an environmental mind-game it was ruthless, able to regulate pressure as strictly as a Martian airlock to a point where you could almost feel its grip around the lungs. But somewhere in the mix, things got slightly messy – something often put down to a ‘funhouse’ approach that stems exclusively from 1993.

The analogy was, you suspect, never designed to make Doom 3 a better game so much as a compatible one – a rightful heir to the chainsaw, the fist and that hair-metal grimoire of zombies, Cacodemons and biomechanical titans. ‘Boo!’ was its motto – and what better template, it figured, than the dangling skeletons and Jack-in-the-boxes of a mechanical ghost house. Ask many what they remember of this Doom, though, and they’ll recall a game so spring-loaded you could almost hear it creak. They might even boil it down to one recurring scene. A pile of ammo sits in an alcove black with impenetrable shadow. Knowing the outcome, you reload what you can and prepare to jog the mouse wheel through an increasingly desperate arsenal. You grab the pickup, the place glows red with Satanic glyphs, and you backpedal through weapons and corridors until the ambushing creatures are well and truly dead. Then, somewhere around the next corner, the trap resets.

Fun? Many insist that it is. Some will even call you names – nasty internet names, no less – for not jumping on that trigger, diving into the shadows, chomping the ears off those commie bastards and spitting them into the sky. Those with a milder taste for red meat tend to sit on the fence, paying due respect to some very well-manufactured – but manufactured nonetheless – terror. Others, though, find the relentless, mathematical precision of the whole thing annoying, and eventually numbing. Hitchcock said something about anticipation being better than a bang. Whatever your opinion, you have to concede there’s bang by the truckload here.

If it isn’t in your face, throwing the camera every which way with claws or teeth, the game’s behind you, throwing the camera every which way with claws or teeth. Or it’s bowling fireballs, launching homing missiles and diving across the room in less time than it takes to pull the trigger. It has a casual disregard for the time between visual and physical contact – a time in which many of the best horrors enjoy so much of their action. It’s the time in which Resident Evil 4 teaches you to fear its enemies but also admire their cunning. Silent Hill has you marvel at the bizarre and despair at the tools you’ve been given. BioShock lets you watch its society tear itself apart before its eyes turn on you. And Dead Space, this unlikely genre star, makes you do the lot, mixing things up to make a copycat game unique. The biggest issue in Doom 3 isn’t that you’re given too little time to recover and reset before the next big scare – it’s that you’ve too little time to fight.

But consider the circumstances. This was, like id games often are, a leap into darkness in more ways than one. It was a launch title, effectively. John Carmack, who superstitiously clings to the role of deskbound engineer but is actually company president, can never quite know what id’s designers have in mind, just as his own thoughts are communicated largely through science. What emerges from that relationship is a congruence of art, design and technology far more volatile than developers further down the food chain experience. Here, it produced an extraordinary gamble: a lighting system so extreme that anything not immediately adjacent to a light source was plunged into total darkness.

Usually, it’s a modder’s job to do something as crazy as strip almost all the ambient lighting from a game, and at times Doom 3 feels more like an artistic statement than a functioning firstperson shooter. But returning to it after years of day/night cycles, incremental naturalism and hollow promises from DirectX 10 – and if Steam’s regular deals on id’s entire back catalogue don’t entice you, the upcoming open source version leaves little excuse – what shines in the dark is the game’s cinematography, a towering balancing act of vision and resources. Not one object has been placed randomly or in haste – because it couldn’t be. Every flickering lamp, touchscreen panel, muzzle-flash, fireball or sweep of the torch demands more triangles from graphics cards which, at the time, didn’t have triangles to spare. Before even a fart emerged from the bowels of Hell, the logistics must have been spine-chilling.

A shame, then, that so much of that intricacy was dismantled. There was the last-minute breakdown of id’s relationship with Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, due to deliver an ambitious ‘soundscape’ to rival Quake’s, not to mention a substantial body of sound effects. Replacing them was a bulimic, surreal array of gunshot noises and a single, lacklustre theme tune – problems compounded by the patent wrangle with Creative over the ‘Carmack’s Reverse’ stencil shadowing method, which cost the game (initial) support for the popular EAX audio system. Later would come the ‘no duct tape on Mars’ complaint, because you couldn’t dual-wield your one reliable light source: the torch. Within weeks there were mods for extra lights, effectively yanking out the game’s heart yet seen by many as essential given its constant, vicious combat.

It begs an awkward question: how good could Doom 3 have been had it not been Doom 3? Dismantle the booby-traps, close the portals and leave the chainsaw in the ’90s, and what kind of game could id Tech 4 have built? You don’t have to look far: it’s in there, interrupted and obscured by the action. Shortly after release, Hollenshead described the game’s four scares: tension, surprise, physical revulsion and atmosphere. But there’s a fifth it does best of all: captivity. Not as exultant as Rapture, as haunting as System Shock 2’s Von Braun or as lonely as Dead Space’s Ishimura, the UAC Mars facility is still one of the great pressure-cookers, with strengths beyond any Hell Knight or Arch-Vile.

Bringing to mind the movie Outland, in which another space-bound mining colony goes out of its mind (and the odd airlock), it proves that man is quite capable of making his own hell without some poxy artefact. Its rooms and corridors are an incomprehensible dungeon of machinery. Its windows, a potential form of mental escape, only serve to imprison you further with views of Martian rock, just as Rapture uses the ocean floor. Its PDAs, billboards and amusements pitch homeworld optimism against grim reality. And in one standout scene, you’re popped out of an airlock into the open ‘air’, only to find a quarry no larger than a sound stage, your oxygen tanks forcing you back inside. A game, you could say, of disastrous escapes.

For a society, such confinement unlocks greater scares than Hell can provide: madness, betrayal, murder and despair. The sense of it is palpable in id’s game, and you expect to shine torchlight upon it at every turn. But because this is Doom 3, home of the chainsaw and the BFG, the horrors always come from without, the madness through demonic possession. A few shades of grey, you feel, could have darkened its world even further. Instead, the real terror lies solely in videos, emails and maybe a game that could never have been. Not with that title, anyway.

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Still, what the Animus does isn’t as important to Assassin’s Creed as what it allows the series to do. Ubisoft’s games, insistent as they are on wrapping a present-day frame narrative around their adventures, needed a link between now and the past. A time machine would be problematic, raising insoluble questions and risking paradoxes, so the Animus is the perfect solution. It lets the present-day cast have intimate knowledge of the past but no way to influence it. It can even threaten game-ending desynchronisation should you try to, say, assassinate the wrong people to alter the outcome of the Third Crusade.

This is the Animus’s other handy function: it allows the impositions of the series’ video game nature to hide in plain sight, cheekily staring the player in the face even as it contextually excuses them. The real reason you can’t pick your own assassination targets is that Ubisoft hasn’t built an epic, branching narrative. You can’t massacre civilians on the streets either, because it doesn’t fit the story. Attempt to do so and the Animus will threaten to cut you off. The hero of Prince Of Persia’s 2003 incarnation chided players when he died as part of a plot device that saw him relate his own story. The Animus goes further and forbids you from going off script.

But while the Prince was merely storytelling, the Animus is simulating. It’s a computer program and makes no attempt to hide the fact. This is the irony of Assassin’s Creed: Ubisoft realises its historical settings with unrivalled attention to detail, and then constantly reminds you that they’re fakes. There’s that UI for a start, superimposing flickering wireframe glyphs upon interactive objects. More subtly, there’s the way the series never seeks to find narrative excuses for its limits. It’s practically traditional in Grand Theft Auto, for instance, that some sort of natural disaster or terrorist warning will shut off access to the full city in the early stages of a game. Assassin’s Creed doesn’t need to find organic reasons to prevent the player wandering off. Its walls aren’t even invisible – they’re crackling fissures that demonstrate the simulation’s opposition to your independent action.

There’s an upside to this, though, and it’s that Assassin’s Creed is supremely comfortable in its nature as a game. The Matrix might have beaten Ubisoft to dropping its hero into a pure white space, but that doesn’t change the elegance of the fact that Assassin’s Creed’s loading screens are just that. Its menus are the same. Similarly, when Desmond is reminded of the basics at the start of each instalment, he scales abstract, textureless geometry. Few games are so barefaced in showing you the building blocks from which their worlds are made, and even fewer have a means to do so.

For all the meta potential of the setup, however, Assassin’s Creed has always stopped short of something as obvious as putting a controller in Desmond’s hands. Indeed, as the series has progressed, it’s blurred the distinction between its simulated world and its ‘real’ one. The first game let you potter around Desmond’s laboratory prison at predetermined points. The controls were sluggish, interactivity was limited, and the tasks were dull. It was as boring, in other words, as doing chores having just switched off a video game. Later entries relied upon the so-called ‘Bleeding Effect’, an elegant means of transferring Animus gameplay into the real world, but one that has come at the expense of the contrast between the present day and virtual space.

One area where Assassin’s Creed has truly embraced the Animus’s role as a surrogate game console is the multiplayer, where Templar trainees engage in deathmatches in order to hone their skills. The great gimmick of the mode has always been that to blend into environments you must behave in the slightly stilted, prescriptive nature of an NPC. Matches often devolve into rooftop chases, of course, but as a concept it is massively daring. Most games want you to invest in their simulated worlds, but Ubisoft asks you to embrace the Animus’s artificiality and replicate it.

And there are hints this attitude is bleeding back into the main game. Complete AC3 and your after-credits task is a collect-a-thon that lets Connor unlock ‘Animus hacks’. These exploits turn you invincible or invisible, let you switch season from summer to winter, or change day to night. They’re cheats. But, intriguingly, they’re cheats integrated into the fiction of the game. They might be endgame toys, but there’s no reason why future games couldn’t let players tear at the fabric of this self-consciously virtual world in more subtle ways.

While the Animus is no longer quite as obvious in the more recent entries in the series, you’re pulled out into the real world far less often, it’s still always there in the background, justifying that futuristic glitches within its historic worlds. But as the series becomes increasingly more tired, does it need a frame narrative at all? Do its doggedly researched worlds have to be self-consciously fake? Is it time to retire the Animus, or to make better use of its unique, explicitly simulated space?

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Director Dr William Huber, who is better known to students as the head of Abertay’s Arts, Media And Computer Games division, is keen to sculpt a more curated experience for attendees. It’s an intention that’s immediately obvious in the careful use of space that characterises this year’s event. Whereas the majority of last year’s Dare – including talks, game exhibits, and other events – took place in a single large marquee, with Caird Hall’s main room reserved for the indie showcase, the August 2015 event sees the City Square play host to several smaller tents, while Caird Hall opens up more of its cavernous interior.

The event is a fantastic opportunity for the student teams to practice their patter as they explain their ideas and receive immediate feedback – both good and bad – throughout the week. And unlike last year, where all of the teams had to work on their games in Dundee, a change in the rules means this time around the majority of development took place in each team’s home university, which has led to greater differentiation between the projects.

The largest marquee is reserved for the 16 Dare To Be Digital projects, and proves remarkably busy throughout the week. The crowd here is markedly different to those of other videogame events, consisting of families with young children and curious members of the public who’ve wandered into the event from the busy high street.

This year, along with the regular Junior Judges initiative that gives a group of kids a clipboard, voting power and the opportunity to skip the lines, some of the event’s younger attendees also take advantage of the Dare ProtoPlay cardboard challenge. Taking place on the main stage, the idea is to highlight the conceptual stages of videogame design and give kids the opportunity to quickly prototype ideas into something playable. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the hall, volunteers talk parents and kids through game creation in Scratch alongside a perpetually busy run of Johann Sebastian Joust games. In the room beyond, sessions of Killer Queen Arcade Field Game, which takes the titular arcade game’s rules and transposes them into reality with buckets, balls and swords, run throughout the Friday and Saturday.

More advanced interrogation of the creation process is provided this year by the Edinburgh Game Symposium: ProtoPlay Edition – a series of talks and panels primarily focused on game audio, as well as tips on starting your own indie studio – and a keynote on Intersubjective Intimacy within games. The independent exhibitors, meanwhile, include Get Into Games Challenge winner Jon Caplin and the runner-up Abertay students of Glyph Games, who are displaying their games Icarus.1 and Penny Pursuit respectively.

Dare ProtoPlay continues to be an invaluable event for aspiring game designers and even younger enthusiasts who might eventually decide to go down that career route themselves, providing a mix of inspiring role models and fun, hands-on learning opportunities. But while this year’s curation delivers a more varied schedule and begins the process of expanding the event’s remit, it feels like the first steps towards something much bigger. There’s a noticeable absence of established developers in the indie showcase, for example, the presence of whom would significantly elevate an already appealing proposition. However the festival develops in the coming years, though, just a couple of days spent among its crowds demonstrates the clear impact it’s already having on everyone who attends.

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Don’t worry, Wattam is still delightfully odd. It follows a little cuboid mayor and his efforts to repopulate a town in the aftermath of a surreal cataclysm. You’ll frolic and clamber about, experimenting with each new resident’s abilities to create ever-larger people explosions (not a metaphor: characters soar into the air and go bang), which bring joy to potential residents and Funomena’s curious sandbox to life. It sounds, and looks, bizarre, but it’s an instantly arresting and entirely charming proposition once you get your hands on the controller. And Takahashi’s right: it really does feel like a happy mix of the best elements of his best-known games.

“You have that really structured time-based gameplay with Katamari, which I think Keita felt was a bit too [constrained]; then there’s the open-ended playspace of Noby Noby Boy, which is kind of Keita’s dream, but for me felt a little unstructured,” Funomena CEO Robin Hunicke explains. “You can play Wattam in the way you would play Noby Noby Boy, or if you want to play it as you would play something more directed, you can. Then in the middle of those two styles is a game where you sometimes play the story, and then sometimes take a break and experiment with the characters… It’s a conscious decision.”

Ironically, that conscious decision has resulted in something that feels dreamlike, though surreal, disparate elements somehow fuse into a whole that makes sense within the context of play. For example, explosions are triggered by a bomb stored under the mayor’s bowler hat, but first you must stack a certain number of characters on top of each other, switching control between those you’d like in the detonation until the swaying tower reaches the requisite number of bodies. Hold down the bomb button at this point and the group will take off in a swirling formation, leaving trails behind them as the skies light up, which encourages yet more residents to move into your town. It’s a manifestation of unrestrained joy – the satisfying culmination of each delightful experiment that preceded it. It feels apt for a game with only a passing interest in traditional design principles.

“I think at the very beginning, we bit off more than we could chew,” Hunicke says. “We tried to write a physical solver that would allow us to have stretchy, bendy attachments between characters, so all the stacks could be really wobbly, because we wanted to get that sensation of Jenga-esque teeter-totting. Then as we iterated on it, and we realised we didn’t need all that power. We just needed to make the characters appealing and childlike. So instead of spending a significant period of time developing that physics system, we invested more time in AI behaviour and animation that allows us to put a lot of character into each person that’s in Wattam.”

They’re a memorable lot. Take the coffee bean: he can run really fast, but also wake up dozing characters who succumb to the Midas-like curse of a lonely pillow who puts to sleep those he touches. The cloud can float around and rain on grass to grow flowers, a bunch of which can be plucked and added to your character list. Then there’s the piece of sushi with the jetpack and the turntable who can start a party anywhere. Mucking about and seeing how each person’s abilities affect those around them is an amusing, open-ended distraction, and some add a puzzle element to creating stacks once you choose to press on with the game’s loose objectives.

There’s still plenty to firm up, but while Funomena is allowing the game the space it needs to evolve naturally, the ideas at the centre of it have remained core to Takahashi’s vision, inspired by watching his children play. “[It’s been] two years, and it’s not finished yet,” he says, “but my concept, my idea, hasn’t changed. It’s very clear, I guess. Maybe [it’s because] it’s so crazy…”

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“The lock screen on my phone right now is Keita and his son playing the game!” says Hunicke. “When he was two years old, they were stacking stuff and playing with wooden blocks, and Keita started doing stuff that was pretty crazy with them, and the kid was laughing and responding really positively. Now he’s four, and he can play this game! So when we finish, he’ll be five, and Keita can say, ‘Hey, I made this for you!’ I think that’s the best thing a parent can give to a child – something that’s really inspired by them.”

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There are times when Konami and Kojima Productions seem to acknowledge that Codec scenes and their radio ancestors are a bore. MGS2 lets players subvert the seriousness of these dialogues by pressing buttons to zoom in on faces, or wiggle analogue sticks to move them. It’s a typical bit of silliness, but it did turn MGS into what its detractors glibly described as the series that encourages players to listen to endless conversations while twiddling their thumbs.

Still, as tempting as it is to dismiss the Codec, MGS’s radio conversations are – alongside cardboard boxes, exclamation points and giant robots – a crucial part of the series’ identity. More importantly, they’re the means by which the series comes closest to reconciling its love of scripted dialogue with its interactive nature. At least that’s true for the optional ones. Players keen to get on with the action may rarely bother with its extra functions, but the Codec can make calls as well as receive them. Snake was running about Shadow Moses with access to a set of contacts long before Rockstar handed Niko Bellic a mobile.

There are scores of games in which the protagonist embarks on a mission aided by a support team delivering context and instruction into his or her earpiece, but MGS lets you actively choose to call on that support, and even provides a basic logic to what you’ll hear and when you’ll hear it. Equip a gun and ring weapons specialist Sigint in MGS3 to hear an exhaustive rundown of its technical specifications as well as some more practical information. Enter a new location for the first time and you’ll be given a briefing on what to expect if you call your CO. Call up anyone during a boss fight and you’ll get relevant tactical tips or well wishes. There’s a kind of contextual dialogue system at play in MGS; it may have a mountain of script to scale, but it also weaves player-influenced and -instigated conversations into an action game without resorting to dialogue trees.

The Codec allows players to tailor their experience, choosing how much background information they want to embellish the story with, and how much help they receive. One character in the first Metal Gear Solid, Ukrainian weapons analyst Nastasha Romanenko, is entirely optional: Snake need never hear an accented word from her unless you decide to seek out more background info on nuclear armaments or want operational tips for your FAMAS assault rifle. Mass Effect’s extensive Codex arguably performs much the same expository role as the Codec, but the latter ensures that Snake, Big Boss or Raiden functions as the vehicle for your curiosity, and keeps information seeking hemmed inside the game’s present tense.

Kojima knew players would visit the Codec regularly, though, because it also functions as a save screen. Calling Mei Ling, Rosemary or Para-Medic to save your progress applies vast quantities of C4 to the fourth wall, but just stops short of detonating it. There’s something so reassuringly straight-faced about the way all three characters discuss the ‘mission data’ you’re storing that the act of saving progress becomes, thanks to the Codec, a simple bit of military protocol.

Unless, of course, you keep calling Mei Ling and refusing to save until she gets fed up and sticks her tongue out at you. That probably breaks protocol. But it wouldn’t be MGS unless the Codec was used for occasional levity, whether that’s Easter Eggs like Mei Ling’s anger, or overt digressions such as Para-Medic’s long-winded chats about movies. Yet the latter serve a thematic function, firmly establishing Snake Eater’s ‘60s setting despite the game’s jungle environment leaving Snake cut off from the prevailing culture.

Of course, the funniest Codec dialogues are the ones you have to work hardest to uncover: the throwaway conversations that occur when you push behavioural limits within the game, such as when you murder too many Huskies in Shadow Moses and get told off by your comrades. For a linear action series, MGS has always offered densely simulated environments, packing them with optional interactions and opportunities for mischief, and the Codec is an easy way for the game to acknowledge that, yes, it has taken notice of your attempts to break it.

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It’s these silly, extraneous conversations that frequently feature the series’ best writing. Freed from explaining torturous double-crosses and convoluted plans, the Codec lets moments of human warmth and character seep into what are supposed to be lone-wolf sneaking missions. The Codec and the radio aren’t just MGS at its most indulgent, they’re its lifeblood-pumping heart.

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Of the two vessels to bear the Normandy name, both are remarkable. The first, the SR-1, is presented in the game’s fiction as a prototype stealth vessel made with help from the once-hostile Turians. As such, it symbolises an uneasy truce between these aliens and the relatively new-on-the-galactic-scene human race, an alliance enshrined in sleek black and silvery grey. And in a series that’s all about choice, asking how you’ll respond to being the newcomer has become a key theme. What’s your take on this weird assortment of often anthropomorphous aliens, with their tentacle hair, dinosaur-like builds and frog eyes? Do you trust them enough to sacrifice ‘real’ humans for them?

Ironically, giving players a ship is the very thing that grounds BioWare’s foray into new sci-fi IP space. In one stroke, it provides you with a home, a mission hub, and, most importantly, time to get to know your squadmates. It’s a soaring master class in how to create effective hub worlds, with both a sense of place and purpose that compels you to look past its host games’ failings.

In some ways, the facade is obvious: step onto the platform before the galaxy map to hop about the Milky Way, or head to the hold to tweak your squad’s equipment. And if the Normandy held these things alone, she’d be little more than a strip-lit level select and menu system. Her power lies in meshing mechanics with what the Mass Effect series does best: building characters.

Interactions aboard the Normandy SR-1 are mostly optional, though, allowing you to explore its pristine halls without feeling burdened by the need to tick conversational boxes before your next adventure. It’s a subtle point, but a crucial one when the whole premise is built on choice. If you do pick up the threads of backstory and plot development with your squad, your reward is the chance to gain insight into their lives, loves and problems. It encourages you to invest in these people, both emotionally and via the kit and stat management systems, adding potency when you are forced to make hard choices about their lives.

Giving you command of them pins the epaulet of responsibility to your shoulders, too, which you can carry through to interactions elsewhere. And the quality time you spend with them means the game’s controversy-baiting sexual relationships have the potential to hold real emotional weight, elevating them beyond mere carnal titillation (although the series does offer this in its club dancers and flirtatious supporting cast).

The SR-1 wasn’t perfect, though: while your squad was often well fleshed out, repeat conversations with some crew members revealed them for the dialogue-spewing answering machines they were, breaking your suspension of disbelief. Take into account the game’s other flaws – repetitive missions, overly complex kit management and more – and you can hardly blame BioWare for wanting to spruce the place up when the time for a sequel rolled around.

But it did considerably more than that. Mass Effect 2 kicks off with a mini-mission that sees the SR-1 torn to shreds in a dramatic space battle and soon replaced by a successor, the SR-2. The signal is clear: this is intended to be an altogether more action-orientated game, and the writers are prepared to turn their world (and yours) upside down in the name of spectacle.

Larger than her predecessor, slicker and shiner, but broken up by flow-halting loading screens, the SR-2 is again a clear mirror to the structure of the games it traverses. Her flaws have been buffed to a space-age sheen; her halls are aglow with bloom. Mechanically, character management is more immediate, with an optional auto-levelling system, and upgrade terminals on the SR-2 replacing tedious side-by-side item comparisons.

But the ship’s VI, EDI, illustrates a shift in BioWare’s expectations of players. While Mass Effect casts the Normandy’s character as a subtle combination of the various personalities aboard her, BioWare’s designers felt the need to go one step further and humanise that entity, first in a glowing sphere, and then even more obviously for Mass Effect 3. It’s a move endemic to a pair of games that are more tightly designed, often more fun and definitely more ‘gamey’ than their point of inception, but that also distance themselves from requiring a commitment to the same levels of depth. For Mass Effect 2, BioWare happily rounds off its series’ RPG edges in favour of getting bums – often belonging to gamers now smitten with the Gears Of War format – on seats.

But what seats they were, bolted firmly to a rollercoaster ride full of mechs, menace and biotic-based mayhem. You may have been served more compulsory discussions and lost the room to potter, but reduced freedom came alongside a sense of pace, and of an idea reaching maturation.

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Mass Effect 3 retains the SR-2, and continues to chart a course toward immediacy at the cost of agency. For instance, a war room has been tucked into the SR-2’s bowels, providing an excuse to funnel mission-focused conversations at you. But perhaps this suits its story. After all, there are more serious things to talk about than childhood dreams in a galaxy on the brink of extinction.

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What a contrast with all those locked doors inside. Super Mario 64 didn’t feature the first platform game hub level but certainly codified the form, since other aspects of its design meant the between-levels part of the game had to shoulder much more responsibility than before. A map screen is great when you’ve got the best part of 100 levels to lay out, but Super Mario 64 only had 15. They were bigger than anything players had ever seen, designed for repeat visits and full of diversions, but the game needed a different means of tying the courses together.

From a functional perspective, then, Princess Peach’s royal abode is pure padding – it takes Super Mario 64’s 15 stages and sprinkles them over four subdivided floors. Despite the gating it does so nonlinearly, a subtle clue that things had changed from the days when Mario’s adventures were nothing but an epic journey towards the right of the screen. This was a space to be explored, with multiple entrances, exits and rooms you were meant to return to. Still, it’s a relatively compact, tidy and efficient environment compared with the bloated hubs it would inspire: you could fit Peach’s Castle many times over into Donkey Kong 64’s DK Island or Banjo-Tooie’s sprawling Isle O’ Hags.

There was a weird, voyeuristic novelty in walking around the nearly abandoned dwelling. We’d visited the Mushroom Kingdom plenty of times, after all, but never been invited to potter about the royal residence before. So it was a surprise to discover Princess Peach was an avid art collector. Given Mario’s three-dimensional transition, there’s something wonderfully symbolic about jumping into 2D paintings that then reveal themselves to be 3D worlds; it’s easy to miss the simple trick they pull off. The painting gimmick doubles up as an economical piece of level design: Mario 64 doesn’t need to integrate its environments into its hub zone or provide plausible transitions between the hub and the courses – it just hangs them, like exhibits, on the wall. They’re still logically placed, though: the entrance to the watery Jolly Roger Bay awaits beside schools of fish in the coolly lit aquarium; Super Mario 64’s final courses – the vertiginous Tick Tock Clock and sky-high Rainbow Ride – await in the castle’s summits.

The strangest thing of all about Peach’s Castle, however, is that it feels like a real place, an actual home to contrast with all the themed gauntlets hidden inside it. Peach’s fondness for landscape paintings has an obvious design-related purpose, but there’s no denying that by modelling and filling her castle with such curios Nintendo had made the Mushroom Kingdom more grounded than ever before. The brightly coloured, prehistoric charms of Super Mario World’s Dinosaur Island had been reined in favour of a blander, fairytale aesthetic and a castle that, frankly, would slot neatly into Disneyland.

Meanwhile, the layout of the castle was oddly plausible – the courses might be stuffed with enemies and tricky platforming gauntlets, but Peach’s home was made up of nothing but long corridors and echoing rooms (there’s a Boo-infested courtyard, but this is the otherworldly exception to the rule). Even a puzzle in which Mario must ground-pound two pillars to drain the moat outside was unusual – it loosely paralleled finding alternate course exits in Super Mario World to unlock new levels of the map, but its focus on the castle’s mechanical workings was more akin to a Zelda temple than anything we’d seen in a Mario game.

A common criticism of Super Mario Sunshine is that the GameCube title’s preoccupation with turning Isle Delfino into a consistent, unified place held back its level design – a misstep that it took Galaxy’s abstract droplets of play to correct. If that’s true, then perhaps the first inklings of the impulse to make 3D spaces believable and consistent can be spotted here. As the Galaxy games managed to increasingly capture the purity of 2D Mario in 3D space, they whittled away at the hub until it was once again a map screen.

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But they lost something in doing so. Before Peach’s Castle, games like Mario were all about the rush to the level exit, the leap to the flag. But 3D worlds dangled the possibility of more immersive spaces: places we could pause, dawdle in and explore. Peach’s Castle was one of the first. It showed us a Mario who existed beyond the end of the level, a Mario without any immediate task. A Mario free to spend afternoons outside, somersaulting from tree to tree.

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Take, for example, the ever-popular business track. This year, Google’s Ross Brockman will wade into the murky waters of monetisation, discussing how to make the most of in-app purchases and advertisements to keep the money rolling in. On the other hand, design and production consultant (and UKIE board member) Ella Romanos will deliver a talk with a different focus: how to get funding to make your game in the first place.

Google is represented elsewhere, too, as part of the event’s opening Evolve day, which is, as ever, centred on the technological frontier of game development. The company’s internal startup, Niantic Labs – responsible for a series of augmented reality games, including Ingress – will explore how to blend virtual experiences with real-world activities ahead of the release of its ambitious Endgame: Proving Ground. And what could be more pertinent to the future of games than their youngest players? The University Of West England’s Esther MacCallum-Stewart will discuss taking design cues from feedback provided by children.

After a successful launch at last year’s event, the Indie Boot Camp returns, with Dan Da Rocha from Mudvark and Toxic Games (Hue, Qube) outlining his years as an independent developer, while Total Monkery’s Andrea Chandler will explain why making a game is the easy part and selling it is the challenge. Machine Studios’ Simon Roth, meanwhile, is keen to dispel the myth of the ‘lucky indie’, explaining the hard work that goes into building a sustainable micro-studio.

If there’s a recurring theme among this year’s tracks, it’s how to stay profitable in an unpredictable marketplace – and, perhaps, that it’s not enough to simply make a great game, but equally crucial to ensure that word gets around. To which end, the marketing track will discuss crowdsourced promotion, while former game journalist Mike Rose, now of TinyBuild Games, will examine the influence of Twitch, YouTube and

Attracting an audience is one matter, but for an increasing number of publishers, player retention is even more vital. Mediatonic’s Ed Fear will be asking whether narrative can be a significant hook – a key concern, particularly as more games move away from the traditional retail model and towards service-led entertainment.

Away from the business and marketing spheres, developers from award-winning studios will be discussing their artistic achievements. State Of Play’s talk should be a popular draw, the London-based indie set to detail the making of the gorgeous, BAFTA-winning Lumino City. And as the bonds between games, films and graphic novels grow stronger, attendees will hear insights into the creative process from Ron Ashtiani of Atomhawk, which was responsible for concept art for the likes of Guardians Of The Galaxy, Thor: The Dark World, Ryse: Son Of Rome and Enslaved.

There’s plenty of experience behind the audio track, too, a new addition to this year’s event. Side has been supplying casting services to the game industry for some time now, working on a range of projects, including the likes of Dragon Age: Inquisition and Alien: Isolation; company co-founder Phil Evans will detail the lessons he and his team have learned from 15 years of directing, voice production and performance capture. Alongside Evans, Ciaran Walsh from Hornet Sound and SoundCuts’ BAFTA award-winning Adele Cutting will discuss the changes in the freelance audio game.

Develop’s coding track will include a talk from Perforce Software’s Tulin Green, who will discuss the merits (or otherwise) of trunk-based development. Meanwhile, the production side will be led by two postmortems. Industry veteran Jamie Firth asks ‘Whither the middleman?’, delivering an epitaph for external producers, while Hendrik Lesser, from Remote Control Productions, will take a look at the lessons learned during production of Rovio’s well-received RPG spinoff, Angry Birds Epic.

With a headline keynote from Vlambeer’s seemingly ubiquitous Rami Ismail, it’s an event clearly keen not to rest on its laurels as it enters a milestone year. The third day’s activities, focused on smaller studios and including opportunities to network alongside a product showcase, are testament to Develop’s commitment to the developers looking to shape gaming’s immediate future. It’s heartening to see the UK’s premier industry event working so hard to remain relevant in the face of a constantly shifting landscape, ensuring this tenth anniversary will be one to celebrate.

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The mandate presented to Nintendo’s elite development team was clear. Its aim, according to Miyamoto, was “to make a 3D home console Super Mario game that people who like the New Super Mario games can also enjoy”. In other words, to forge a stronger link between Mario’s two-dimensional obstacle courses and his more expansive 3D adventures. And not only in design terms, you suspect, but also to bridge the sales gap between the two.

Plans were set in motion after Super Mario Galaxy 2 was completed. “We decided we should make an entirely new title, rather than another in the Galaxy series,” co-director Koichi Hayashida says. “Up until that point, we had only been working on games for the home console, so you might expect that we’d go on to develop a game for Wii U. In fact, we got really interested in creating a 3D Mario game that could be played with the 3D effect of 3DS. That’s why we chose to develop for the handheld system instead. Saying that, though, at that same point we also planned on making a version for Wii U. So, in that sense, you could say the game was in development for over three years.”

Hayashida admits that Nintendo may have had to reconsider its approach had Super Mario 3D Land been a failure. But the critical and commercial success of Mario’s 3DS debut encouraged the company to stay its course. With the help of Nintendo subsidiary 1-Up Studio (formerly known as Brownie Brown, which worked on the likes of Mother 3 and Heroes Of Mana), the largest development team in EAD Tokyo’s history began work on its Wii U spiritual sequel. And with the core concept established at a very early stage, there was plenty of time for experimentation.

Indeed, the finished product bears the hallmarks of an eclectic approach to game design, one actively encouraged by the policies of co-director and team leader Kenta Motokura. Over 100 staff members were asked to come up with ideas, from throwaway gimmicks to entire level concepts, which were then displayed across dozens of Post-it notes stuck to the studio’s walls. So perhaps it’s little wonder 3D World sometimes feels generous to a fault, introducing ideas before throwing them away minutes later. “We discussed and discarded a huge number of ideas during development,” Motokura says. “Sometimes you just can’t tell if an idea is good or bad by looking at it on the drawing board; when this happens, we try it out in-game. If we don’t find the idea fun, it won’t make it into the final product. There was a lot of back and forth on the course designs due to this.”

That sense of restlessness is pronounced in 3D World with its myriad asides, which range from the rapid-fire thrill of the Mystery Houses to the puzzle-led Adventures Of Captain Toad levels, the latter having been particularly warmly received. “We thought they were a lot of fun, so we’re really glad everyone likes them too,” says Hayashida. “If enough fans express such enthusiasm, we’d consider doing something with this feature in future.” It’s tempting to suggest that the rise in popularity of the quick-fix gaming offered by smartphones may have been an inspiration, but it’s a comparison that Motokura is quick to dismiss. “They weren’t inspired by smartphone games. The idea was to design a game that would become even more fun as you play through it, and this influenced the pace of the game, effectively increasing the rhythm. We felt that a short challenge with quick results would be a good motivation for players to advance onto the next course.”

Producer Yoshiaki Koizumi chips in: “We do feel a need to keep delivering games that will surpass our audience’s expectations. As creators, we try to fill our games with as many unique elements as possible. Moving into the future, we want to continue to deliver even more surprises as fast as we can so that it never feels like there aren’t enough.”

Despite having such a vast pool of ideas to draw from, one of 3D World’s very best notions came about by happy accident. The Double Cherry power-up was conceived when one of the level designers accidentally added an extra character model into one of the courses. “We ended up with a single player being able to control two versions of Mario at the same time!” Motokura recalls. “We all tried it and it was really amusing, so we scrambled to readjust the game so that this feature would make it into the final product. If the game had locked up with two identical characters on the level, I don’t think we would have the double Mario feature we have now!”

While the Double Cherry was a latecomer, the Super Bell that allows Mario and company to adopt feline form was introduced nearer the start of development, becoming the signature feature of a game overloaded with playful touches. As with many of the best Nintendo designs, it was simply the most elegant solution to an existing problem, or in this case two: the director’s desire to allow Mario to climb walls, and to provide a way to help novices clear high obstacles. “We wanted Mario to make use of not only the ground but other surfaces, which is what led us to this idea,” Motokura says. “At roughly the same time, we were looking at ideas for more exciting ways for players to run around the courses. One of the things we investigated was having characters scamper around on [all fours]. For both movement styles, the test characters were either a normal-looking Mario or a version with a slight difference in colour. In finally putting all this together into a new Mario ability, we felt that a cat ticked all the boxes… For the final design, we strove to make it as cat-like as possible, while keeping it clearly distinct from [3D Land’s] Tanooki Mario.”

Cat Mario also represented another answer to an ancient problem – that of combat within the context of a 3D platform game. Leaping onto enemies’ heads in two dimensions might not be a issue for most players, but that doesn’t hold true for 3D. It’s a balance that Nintendo has wrestled with for some time, as Hayashida explains: “[This] is why you had the punch in Super Mario 64 and the 360-degree spin attack in Super Mario Galaxy. Since Super Mario 3D Land, though, with the 3D effect, jumping on enemies has become a lot easier, but we still decided to add in the claw attack to give Cat Mario an advantage. Then, of course, there’s Rosalina, the unlockable character for this game, who can perform a spin attack without needing a transformation. I think, when playing as her, you’re really able to feel the difference in playstyles.”

Yet if the five playable characters offer a range of abilities – Toad’s running speed makes him ideal for time attacks, while Peach’s floaty jump acts as a built-in difficulty modulator – the stages were seemingly designed with only one skillset in mind. “If a course is fun to play as Mario, then generally speaking it will also be fun to play using the other characters as well,” Hayashida says.

But the plumber handles differently from his other home console incarnations, the absence of a triple jump being a notable omission. Its exclusion stemmed from a desire to hark back to the simplicity of older Mario games. “Back when we were discussing the character abilities for Super Mario 3D Land,” Motokura says, “we thought about what was the simplest bit of fun that could be had using Mario’s regular abilities. We decided it was jumping across a series of platforms without falling – think back to the doughnut blocks and rotating platform courses in previous games. This decision helped us make comparatively intricate courses for Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World. In contrast, in a game like Super Mario 64, I think the fun needs to be on a slightly larger scale, hence why the triple jump worked so well there. It’s not that one ability is better than the other, it’s just that we use ones that best fit the design of the game.”

Losing 3DS’s stereoscopic effect and its aid to depth perception proved challenging, though, despite Hayashida’s admissions that it was also the root of the biggest hurdles during development of the 3DS title. “With Super Mario 3D Land, we developed the game with the premise of having the 3D effect, but we also had to make sure the game was still fun to play when this effect was turned off; that made things much more difficult. Through a lot of tweaking, I think we managed to make a game that’s also fun to play even without using the 3D feature. We took the lessons we learned here and used them in making Super Mario 3D World.”

Further complicating matters, Nintendo’s team wanted to accommodate four players simultaneously for 3D World. “We had to make sure none of the players would feel left out, even if all four players are moving in different directions,” Hayashida says. “We combined multiple types of camera movements that would adjust to the layout or a given feature in the courses. It was a lot of work setting all this up!”

Miyamoto’s presence was felt at a macro level, but even so he directed the 3D Land and World team to tackle problems it might rather have skipped. “We used the Goal Pole in Super Mario 3D Land, but it was quite a challenge for us,” Hayashida says. “We tentatively asked Mr Miyamoto if we could change this, but he was pretty sure that the Goal Pole is a staple of Mario games. It’s definitely a clear marker, and is easily visible even from afar.”

Its blend of old and new earned Super Mario 3D World universal acclaim, even if it was criticised for being a poor showcase of its host console’s features. “We always try to keep our 3D Mario games both highly intuitive and readily accessible,” Motokura says. “We designed this game so that the players could really sink into it and clear all the courses without having to read lots of text or deal with difficult controls, whether playing by themselves or with others. However, if we were to make another game then we might need to make even more use of the GamePad.”

“For Super Mario 3D Land, we strove to integrate the best elements of 2D Mario games into a 3D Mario game,” Koizumi says. “In a sense, you can also say that we created Super Mario 3D World by rethinking traditional Mario game ideas. In addition to doing this, we went all out inserting elements [that allow] players to further enjoy the sprawling environments. There’s still a lot more room for discovery and invention, and we’ll continue to propose new and exciting game mechanics going into the future.”

Whether that will involve Toad, Luigi and company remains to be seen, but it may have to. After all, now we’ve had a home console 3D Mario with fourplayer co-op, it could be hard to justify a singleplayer-only outing. But will the team’s adventures continue on 3DS or Wii U? “That’s still a secret!” Koizumi laughs. “I can tell you, though, that we’ve already started approaching our next challenge.”

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