However, Resident Evil Village – whose core story mode can be completed within 10 to 12 hours – makes the case against the ‘more is more’ theory of value using deeper gameplay systems and reward items to transform the experience. Smashed that first play-through? Now try speed-running the game in under three hours for the elusive Dashing Dad silver trophy. It’s a completely different challenge, requiring a fresh approach to your map navigation and weapon usage. Thought the last boss was a breeze? Try completing the entire game using only melee weapons. We know that Resident Evil Village DLC (opens in new tab) is coming… but the New Game Plus mode makes a compelling argument that value-for-money rests in multiple replays.

Adrift on a sea of content

As great a time as we have with open-world epics like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Just Cause or Spider-Man, something can grate about the way they’re stuffed with content. A huge, beautiful world can turn to white noise as we traipse across it for the thousandth time to reach a new objective, almost like it’s become a glorified loading screen. We begin to realise that many outposts repeat similar content; and we enter a zen-like state of opening chests without caring what’s inside, just delighting in the serotonin buzz that comes from another task done.

Repetition is at the core of almost all video-games, of course. Tetris Effect is one of the most repetitive games on the planet, but the core of the series is so strong that we could play it forever. We’d like to see more games that test – and deepen – your understanding of a game’s core mechanics, rather than your ability to listen to podcasts / stare out of the window / tape your controller in a fixed position, while you traipse across a broadly tedious archipelago of content.

Village gets closer to home

Resident Evil Village is a fantastic game. Its RRP is a slightly more reasonable $59.99, but it also takes a darn sight less time to hit the credits in it than in a huge open-world game. But you can put just as many joyous hours into Capcom’s latest action-focused survival horror as you can an Assassin’s Creed game. Once finished, you can play Resident Evil Village through again and keep things like weapon upgrades, as well as unlock new special items (like infinite ammo) that make subsequent playthroughs more interesting, or even significantly harder.

In earlier eras of gaming, when many of us were dependent on pocket money, we had to make do with a smaller selection of games, and we didn’t have sprawling open worlds to occupy our time. Metal Gear Solid on PS1 had a similar system of unlocks and replays, and the original Resident Evil was great to revisit to see if you could get a faster time. You don’t always need fresh material to enjoy returning to a game either. You don’t want to know how many times I’ve collected all the dragon eggs in Spyro: Year Of The Dragon.

In fact, for as long as it might take you to complete them to the last mission and collectible, huge open-world games can actually feel less encouraging to revisit. Every time I think about going back to Egypt to enjoy Bayek’s story in Assassin’s Creed Origins once again, I remember just how spread-apart the interesting bits are, and wish I had a mission select to get straight to the good bits. In fact, you could make the case for earlier open-world titles – like the smaller, more compact Assassin’s Creed 2 – feeling more welcoming to returning players.

Hopefully the likes of Resident Evil Village prove that games can offer better value for money – and provide a better investment for our time – using a lick of jam, not a tub of butter. A truly great game will always entice us back for another taste, no matter how long the first play-through.

For more exclusive interviews, previews, and deep-dives, you can subscribe to Official PlayStation magazine right here (opens in new tab). 

The post Resident Evil Village proves that replayability offers better value for money than endless extra content appeared first on Game News.

Three, four, five plays later this exhilarating fusion of scripting and player-prompted mayhem still has the capacity to unsettle, from a glimpse of the immolated corpse of the policeman who drove you here to that first yelp of “un forastero”, through to the insistent revving of a chainsaw motor to the pealing bells that cause los ganados to (quite literally) down tools and trudge off to their place of worship. And then, of course, that wonderfully absurd wisecrack – “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?” – invites you at last to take a breath. Such is the intensity of the ordeal that it’s a shock to discover that it’s only about five minutes of game time. It feels like a landmark moment, and it is. So why, then, given the advancements in technology and game design since, have we seen nothing to match it?

Often copied, but impossible to repeat

The legacy of Shinji Mikami’s opus is reported as a simple matter of fact. Its status as a game of magnitude and influence is never really questioned, but in truth it’s not quite the pioneer it’s often made out to be. Which isn’t to say it hasn’t had an impact: its over-the-shoulder camera was imitated by a number of thirdperson shooters during the following console generation, with Dead Space in particular owing Capcom a fairly substantial debt. But it was most vocally acknowledged by Cliff Bleszinski during development of Gears Of War, and it was Epic’s game that would go on to become the established genre template. 

While the two games share a similar perspective, their approach to combat is markedly different. In Resident Evil 4 you’re rarely given the luxury of hunkering down behind conveniently placed waist-high barriers; rather, you’re expected to either provide your own cover or fire from an exposed position, planting your feet to commit to every shot, rather than cowering and sporadically popping up to let off a few rounds before roadie-running to the next position of relative safety. Rarely are you left feeling quite as vulnerable as Mikami insists you should be – even when Leon S. Kennedy hoiks a rocket launcher onto his shoulder and takes aim.

Play it again now and it takes some time to reacclimatise; we’re accustomed to being able to move and fire simultaneously these days, after all. Resident Evil 4’s controls were described as a step forward for the series but, in actuality, little had changed beyond the camera. Leon still moves like a tank, turning on the spot and only stepping forward when you nudge the analogue stick upward. Raising your weapon, meanwhile, gives you no choice but to literally stand your ground, ensuring you’ve created enough space between you and the enemy to sit through those elaborate (and heart-stoppingly tense) reload animations. 

If it seems to throw out much of what people loved about its predecessors, its combat still creates a similar sense of throat-tightening claustrophobia. You may find yourself in more open environments than before, but your field of vision – and thus your aim – is still limited. It’s an approach modern players, accustomed to greater freedoms in control, will often react angrily against – tellingly, the letterbox presentation and narrow FOV of Mikami’s The Evil Within, designed to evoke a similarly oppressive ambiance, was divisive enough to prompt calls for a border-free option, subsequently patched in by Bethesda.  

The style is the substance

This isn’t simply a case of changing tastes or emerging trends in game design, however. It’s also a matter of thematic differences. Mainstream audiences have a greater appetite for realism, which now extends to fantasy: the success of Game Of Thrones, for example, says much about our desire for any piece of fiction that dabbles in the supernatural or otherworldly to somehow reflect real-world concerns. 

Pulpy pop entertainment like Resident Evil 4 is no longer appreciated by the world’s tastemakers, while the horror genre has changed, too – irrevocably influenced by the rise of found-footage and torture porn that’s since generated a very different brand of shocker. In the current climate, something as campy and silly as this is the kind of passé that has financiers sweating. 

All of which would matter little if it was still commercially viable. But part of the reason Resident Evil 4 occupies a unique place in the medium’s history is it’s now financially prohibitive to make a 20-hour singleplayer game with so many bespoke elements. During the sixth console generation, Capcom was in a position where it could not only indulge Mikami’s wishes to incorporate hundreds of individual assets and systems in a campaign of unrivalled pacing and variety, but also scrap two years of development on a very different version of the game to facilitate this new vision. Now, the market has no place for such whims. 

Complete guide

Charting the complete history of the Resident Evil games – from the evolution of the mainline games to the weird and wonderful spin-offs

The rise of the open-world game is a testament not just to player perception of value but to publisher perception of efficiency: if sandbox games often bear the hallmarks of copy-pasting, that’s because procedural design and other contemporary techniques allow developers to fill larger spaces with repurposed content. If a core mechanic is satisfying enough, most players will be happy to deal with it being repeated ad infinitum. 

While these games invite us to embrace the comfort and familiarity of routine, the beauty of Resident Evil 4 is that it never once allows you to. Sniping sequences segue into puzzle interludes, with the briefest of lulls before a blistering siege or a boss battle. Not all of these are made equal, but each is unique: the first three alone see you harpooning a serpent on a murky lake, ducking the powerful attacks of a towering brute, and tackling an agile mutant that hangs from the rafters of a burning barn. 

It’s hard to think of a single game released since that so often seeks to shift its tempo, to surprise the player with something new and exciting, whether it’s a terrifying, rasping wheeze heralding the imminent arrival of a creature that can only be conquered with the help of thermal vision, or one-off shocks like the sudden lunge of the enemy affectionately known as Oven Man. 

Too weird to live again, too rare to ever die 

Even during its less celebrated sequences, it belligerently refuses to let its players settle, exemplified in the moment a headshot fails to halt an advancing villager, instead prompting the emergence of a writhing parasite from his neck. It’s a startling subversion of a series staple; that aiming for the skull is an essential way to conserve ammo. Here, you’re never in quite such short supply, though more daring players can save time and rounds by targeting limbs, leaving enemies vulnerable to a kick or suplex – though kneecapping a cultist is a challenge when he’s clutching a wooden shield. You might prefer to stick with one or two favourites from a varied arsenal, but the encounter design will regularly force you to refresh your tactics.

Capcom itself has tried in vain to recapture the magic. President’s daughter Ashley proved not to be the hindrance many had feared; when she isn’t a resourceful ally, she’s smart enough to get out of harm’s way by hiding in a dumpster. By contrast, Resident Evil 5’s Sheva Alomar can’t help but frequently step into partner Chris Redfield’s line of sight, or blunder into the arms of an infected opponent. Resident Evil 6 brought back Leon, but limited his role in a campaign that suggested Capcom had only handed a third of it to its quality assurance department. Spinoff Umbrella Corps, meanwhile, suggests the publisher simply doesn’t understand what made the village so iconic, repurposing it as a map in a generic online shooter.

Our expectations may be unfair. As time passes, it increasingly feels as if Resident Evil 4 might’ve been bottled lightning: a perfect confluence of timing and talent never to be recreated. A director at the peak of his creative powers, helming a team with meaningful design experience and genre expertise. A publisher in a position to take risks and spend big on experiments with existing formulae. A playerbase willing to embrace a linear game that offers enough space for them to improvise. Maybe this wasn’t actually everything games could be, but everything games were, and could never be again. At that time, few could’ve foreseen that the end of the PS2 era would represent the beginning of an era of western dominance; that Japan’s status as the gaming superpower would soon be over.  

Perhaps, then, this wasn’t the shape of things to come so much as the final flourish at the end of an era: a game that said “top that!” in the knowledge no one else had the competence nor the resources to do so. And part of what makes Resident Evil 4 so exciting to this day is the knowledge no one has quite been able to follow in its footsteps. You can see something of its playfulness, its intricacies, and its hunter/hunted dynamic in the work of FromSoftware, but the likes of Bloodborne and Dark Souls are ultimately very different games in tone and tenor. So many years on, maybe it’s time to come to terms with the fact that we might never see anything quite like Resident Evil 4 again. But that’s OK. We still have Resident Evil 4. 

This feature first appeared in Edge magazine. For more like it, subscribe to Edge (opens in new tab) and get the magazine delivered straight to your door or to a digital device.

The post Resident Evil 4 retrospective: Why Capcoms 2005 action masterpiece is still without peer appeared first on Game News.

It turns out that Takashi Tezuka and Shigefumi Hino didn’t think so. They were two of the directors of Yoshi’s Island, alongside fellow directors Toshihiko Nakago and Hideki Konno, with Shigeru Miyamoto acting as producer. Working together at Nintendo EAD, this team wanted to take a different approach instead. “We felt we’d done everything we wanted to for side-scrolling with Super Mario World, and so wanted to try creating a platformer with a different angle to it,” the developers explain. “Before Yoshi’s Island, we’d only created games with Mario as the lead character. We felt that changing the lead character would give us a different perspective and different gameplay possibilities, and so we started thinking up a game with Yoshi as the lead.”

Subscribe to Retro Gamer

Love retro gaming? From SNES to Mega Drive, PSOne to Xbox, and Spectrum to C64, Retro Gamer magazine delivers amazing features and developer interviews about history’s best games every month, and you can save up to 57% on a print and digital subscription (opens in new tab) right now.

That makes sense – but the Mushroom Kingdom is home to many interesting characters, many of whom have also starred in spin-offs. What made Yoshi the character of choice over the likes of Wario, Luigi or Peach? This goes back to the creation of the character for Super Mario World, as we discover. “The idea for Yoshi came about because Mr Miyamoto wanted to have Mario ride a horse. We thought it would be better to have a new character rather than a horse, so Mr Hino and I went about creating one,” Tezuka tells us. “Yoshi turned into quite the cute character, and we were very interested in creating some kind of spin-off with him; that’s where it all began.”

This wasn’t Yoshi’s first starring role in a game, of course. Mario’s trusty steed had previously headlined three games, the puzzle games Mario & Yoshi and Yoshi’s Cookie, and the Super Scope blaster Yoshi’s Safari. But none of these were platform games, and Yoshi’s only appearance in a platform game so far had been as a sub-character. So while Yoshi had certain established abilities such as his ability to grab enemies with his tongue and eat them, the team had a great deal of freedom to decide on new abilities and a new style of play that would provide a clear break from traditional Mario games.

A new way to play

That said, it wasn’t easy for the team to come up with these new and interesting ideas – according to Hino, such things were quickly seized upon when they did arrive. “I remember Mr Tezuka coming in suddenly one morning and dropping an idea on us,” he says. “The development team were hungry for the seeds of an idea and so we ran with it; we discussed them over and over and polished them into something we could implement in game.” Abilities that Yoshi gained in Yoshi’s Island include the ‘flutter jump’ – an extended jump where the dinosaur struggles against gravity in a cartoonish fashion – as well as the ‘ground pound’ jumping attack that could be used to smash stakes into the floor, something Mario would later adopt. Yoshi also gained a variety of possible vehicle transformations including helicopters, cars and submarines, but these could only be used in certain places.

However, the ability that most closely tied into Yoshi’s existing skillset was his unique capability to create eggs. As in Super Mario World, Yoshi could use his tongue to eat enemies and then spit them back out at other enemies as an attack. However, by pushing the down button with an enemy in Yoshi’s mouth, the player could have Yoshi lay an egg. Instead of containing items or more Yoshis, as they did in the likes of Super Mario World, eggs could be thrown, rebounding off walls, breaking through barriers, collecting objects and smashing enemies. 

“We wanted to include egg-throwing as throwing actions weren’t something that had appeared much in Mario games,” Tezuka tells us. “Having said that, though, giving users the ability to simultaneously control both Yoshi’s movement and the direction they throw eggs in proved challenging and gave us quite the headache!” However, it proved to be a crucial element of the game. “Having said that, though, fusing this egg-throwing mechanic into a platformer helped us invent ideas that hadn’t been possible until that point,” Hino points out. “It was a real boon for ideas for the game!”

While the egg-throwing mechanic would be easy to implement in modern games thanks to the prevalence of dual analogue sticks, achieving it in Yoshi’s Island required some ingenuity. The development team managed to hit upon an elegant solution that managed to squeeze the whole process into two button presses. By hitting the A button, the player would reveal an aiming reticule that moved back and forth along an arc in front of Yoshi – while still allowing him to run and jump freely. Hitting the A button again would cause Yoshi to throw an egg in the direction he was currently aiming for. It was the trickiest of Yoshi’s skills to get to grips with as a player, but it gave the game a unique feeling amongst platform games.

One of the other things the new star allowed the Nintendo EAD team to do was make an adjustment to the difficulty of the game. “Unlike the Mario series, we tried to give the gameplay a more gentle and relaxed pacing, as opposed to turning it into a platformer that requires players to master tricky techniques,” explains Tezuka. “So, for example, there’s no time limit on the stages, and it’s a little easier to control Yoshi’s jumps as he flutter jumps unlike Mario. As we were adding in these little adjustments, we came up with the idea of having some exploration elements as part of the gameplay and slowly the game took shape. 

Exploring new opportunities

Sometimes the desire to provide exploration elements and a relaxed game experience were conflicting goals, as was the case when deciding on a progression system. Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario World had both used maps that allowed the player to select the next stage. Why did the team choose to return to linear progression for Yoshi’s Island? “We looked at many different map styles for this game. Seeing as we had already used a board game-style map system in Super Mario World, we settled on a linear path as a way of returning to our beginnings,” Tezuka replies. “The map used in Super Mario World and other titles gives users the option to choose the level of difficulty when there’s a branch in the path,” adds Hino. “With Yoshi’s Island, we designed the game so that players can play the courses over again with different objectives so they can get better. So, with that in mind, rather than users going through the game selecting what level of difficulty they want to play, as done with the board game-style maps, our intention was to make it possible for users to progress through the game by setting their own goals.”

As well as the ability to set your own level of challenge, one of the key aspects of the game’s gentle pacing was the ability for the player to get hit without being in too much danger. In the Mario games, the player was only ever a couple of hits away from losing a life, with finite opportunities to grab power-ups in order to prevent that outcome. In Yoshi’s Island, getting hit would cause Yoshi to lose his cargo, and the player had a short amount of time to recover it – but if they did so successfully that time limit would reset, meaning that it was possible to take an unlimited number of hits per stage. And in a surprising role reversal, that cargo was Baby Mario.

“I don’t think we started out with the intention of having the roles reversed,” reveals Hino. “Once we decided to make Yoshi the lead, we thought he could have something ride on his back and so decided Yoshi’s mission would be to carry something through the game. We wanted to add something extra to the traditional side- scrolling gameplay of having players just proceed to the right to reach a goal, and so having Yoshi need to carry something across the map was a good fit.” That makes sense given Yoshi’s original role as a mount for a certain plucky plumber, but why did Mario need to be a baby? “We decided to have Yoshi carry Mario because that’s what he’s always done, but we made Mario into a baby as it wouldn’t make sense for the game if Mario could walk around by himself,” Hino explains. “This setup was also a big help for writing the story for the game.”

That story started with a stork attempting to deliver Baby Mario and Luigi to their parents, only to be attacked by Bowser’s henchman Kamek, a Magikoopa who could foresee the great problems that these brothers would cause for his boss. While he succeeded in kidnapping the Baby Luigi, Baby Mario was lost in the confusion and fell to Yoshi’s Island. With the instinctive bond that brothers have, Baby Mario could sense his brother’s location, and the Yoshis decided to take him to rescue Baby Luigi and reunite them both with their parents. And for those of you unfamiliar with the game, that plural is no type. “One of the ideas that came out while we were creating the story, and which I’m particularly taken with, is that there are many different Yoshis in the game,” says Tezuka. “Normally, the lead character is a singular character in the game world, so personally I thought the idea of having different Yoshis working together and taking turns to carry Baby Mario through the game was really interesting.”

This storybook presentation plays well with the game’s aesthetic – it sports a hand-drawn, colouring book style with crayon backgrounds. While this wasn’t the plan from the start, the idea of being visually unique was one of the team’s aims. “We spent a lot of time trying to come up with a new and different look for the game. We tried out many ideas and the most interesting was one I drew as a last-ditch attempt: a cloud that had this very rough scribbled look to it,” explains Hino. “Everyone agreed is was perfect and so we decided to go ahead with giving the game a hand-drawn look. At the time, there were a lot of other beautiful graphics out there, and we wanted to differentiate our title from these. I also watched a lot of children’s TV shows as well for inspiration.” 

That wasn’t the only reason that the Nintendo EAD team ultimately chose to use a deliberately low-tech look.  “At the time, our company was abuzz with talk of the graphics used in Rare’s Donkey Kong Country. There was definitely a feeling that those sorts of visuals might go on to become the mainstream. I wanted us to come at things from a different angle,” says Tezuka. “Although there were some people in the company who were expecting us to follow Donkey Kong Country, a decision was taken that we should put our weight behind a completely different sort of visual look,” adds Hino. “It was around about the time that we decided on that direction that Mr Hisashi Nogami joined the company as a designer. As we were competing together and having fun coming up with different designs, we slowly settled on the feel we wanted the visuals to have.” In a 2018 interview with Kotaku, Nogami mentioned the game’s hand-drawn look was actually achieved quite literally – images were drawn by hand, scanned, and recreated as pixel art. 

Pushing the SNES

Of course, the ironic thing is that despite that rejection of Donkey Kong Country’s look, Yoshi’s Island was a game that did things that few other SNES games could. It’s something that isn’t lost on the developers. “Yoshi’s Island has this very warm and friendly feel to it, but a lot of technical effort went into making the game,” they note. “It’s actually one of the later SNES games, so [it] makes use of all the developmental know-how we’d built up to that point, as well as what was considered the latest in technology with the Super FX 2 chip.”

The use of the enhancement chip is a curious one, and we were interested to know where the decision to use it came about. “In principle, we look at what the software and hardware can do and look at what sorts of visuals or gameplay we can create with that technology. It was mentioned one day that the Super FX 2 technology was available, and a suggestion was made about using it,” explain the developers. “We were very excited and decided to make use of it for two reasons: the first was that as software developers we wanted to use all new technology we could, and the other point was that this technology offered further gameplay and visual possibilities (eg, object (sprite) rotation and a large increase in the number of screen colours possible).”

What was so interesting about the use of the Super FX 2 chip? That would be the way it was deployed – the original chip, designed by the UK team at Argonaut, had been used to power the polygonal graphics of Starwing. All of the subsequent Super FX games, like Stunt Race FX and Vortex, had been 3D games too. Few gamers would have guessed that the first outing of the updated version would be in a 2D game, but it proved key to some of the most impressive visual effects in Yoshi’s Island. Some of those were actually polygonal special effects, such as falling walls and rolling platforms. But the Super FX 2 was primarily used here for manipulating 2D sprites, a technique that Nintendo called ‘Morphmation’ in advertising. As well as adding extra layers of parallax scrolling, the chip allowed the console to handle multiple rotating sprites on the screen, perform some psychedelic background warping and even squash and stretch sprites. These were most frequently used in the game’s boss battles, which routinely featured some absolutely colossal sprites.

Koji Kondo was behind the game’s sound and music, and delivered another set of memorable themes. Although still present, there was less focus on the bongos and other additional percussion that had marked Yoshi’s presence in Super Mario World, and there were some pretty bold musical choices – most notably the music box tune that played during the game’s intro sequence. Of course, the most memorable sound in the game was that of the crying Baby Mario, which triggered whenever he was separated from his dinosaur guardian – we’d avoid getting hit just to make sure that we didn’t hear it. The Japan-only official soundtrack CD is now a prized item in its own right, with used copies selling for extraordinary prices.

25 years of excellence and innovation 

Yoshi’s Island was released in August 1995 in Japan, and releases in North America and Europe followed in October 1995. The game received universal acclaim upon its release. Nintendo Magazine System gave it 97%, with Simon Clays commenting that it was “about the best game I’ve ever had the pleasure to play,” with his only complaint being that the graphics were “slightly immature”. Tony Mott awarded the game 94% for Super Play and praised it for its variety, noting that “You never know what’s just around each corner, but you know that it’ll be something worth seeing.” However, he felt that the game’s linear progression was disappointing by comparison to Super Mario World’s wealth of secret exits and stages. Edge’s review scored the game 9/10, crediting the Super FX2 chip with “some wonderfully inventive touches which make each new level a reward to the player.”

The game was later converted to Game Boy Advance as Super Mario Advance 3: Yoshi’s Island, and that version has since been made available for 3DS and Wii U. Of course, despite Yoshi’s solo success Mario was soon back on top. Although the developers felt that they’d pushed Mario to his 2D limit, new hardware meant that Nintendo had already figured out what to do with its headline star. Less than a year later, Mario returned in the groundbreaking Super Mario 64, which many of the Yoshi’s Island staff also worked on. But as a swan song for an era in which 2D gaming was still the primary concern of the world’s most prominent game developers, you couldn’t ask for much better than Yoshi’s Island. The game established Yoshi as a platform star in his own right and is still considered to be one of the greatest of all time, frequently showing up in lists of the best games ever – including our own readers’ top 150 in 2015.

With that in mind, we’ll leave the last word to the developers – why do they think that the game is still so beloved by players? “I think maybe it has something to do with the appeal of the gameplay; Yoshi offers this unique ability to gobble up enemies, turn them into eggs, and then throw those eggs,” says Tezuka. “For the Yoshi series, we wanted to convey Yoshi’s warmth of character. The adorable voice and our leaning towards hand-made visuals has all added up to create the character’s uniqueness, and I think it’s maybe these things that players are drawn to.”

“It wasn’t easy creating Yoshi or Yoshi’s Island,” says Hino. “We competed in the team to see what were the most amusing or fun things we could draw, and laughed together as we thought up strange enemies and level features, knowing we had a bit more freedom to do so because it wasn’t a Mario game. Even the programmers jumped on board and worked really hard to achieve our ideas. I think the fondness people have for the character and the game is because we managed to give form to all this passion we had. A long time has passed since then, but even now designers continue to develop Yoshi with all kinds of different interpretations, such as handicrafts, worlds made of yarn and so on. I’m really happy to see people still continuing to enjoy playing with Yoshi. 

Save up to 57% on a Retro Gamer magazine subscription bundle (opens in new tab) and have the best retro gaming features and interviews delivered to your door each month.

The post The making of Yoshis Island – How Nintendo delivered a sensational successor to Super Mario World appeared first on Game News.

“It set a new standard for cinematic storytelling at the time. It made quite a statement about the kinds of stories that can be told in games,” says Alex Cox, game director at Hangar 13. The 1930s prohibition-era city was a backdrop to an engaging filmic flow as we followed the rise and fall of Thomas ‘Tommy’ Angelo from taxi driver to mobster. The open world setting was “an advanced roleplaying feature,” says Cox.

The freedom to explore enabled us to feel like we were living in the moment. It led to some unusual design choices – for example, there was no minimap (you needed to hold a map and drive). “You have to look around and learn the city […] you as the player weren’t given much assistance,” says Cox. Revisiting the original “was a really interesting journey back into a different era of gaming and put into perspective how some of those things have changed.”

The gamefather

Read more

“Bad games don’t go to the Baftas”: Looking back at the highs and lows of Mafia 3 with Hangar 13 (opens in new tab)

This ground-up remake, from many of the original Mafia team, isn’t altering the classic formula. The goal is still to scratch beneath the surface of the American Dream and offer some of the sharpest third-person shooting on PlayStation. But taking inspiration from the remake of Resident Evil 2, the developer is refining, adding to, and enhancing the original game and its systems.

As we chat to Cox he describes how everything was on the whiteboard at one time, including making protagonist Tommy’s girlfriend Maggie a playable character. “To see the story from a different perspective,” he qualifies. The team even considered using this remake to introduce co-op and multiplayer. But anything that threatened the core experience of the game, or could derail returning fans’ enjoyment, was left behind, and this includes online modes. “There’s no multiplayer,” confirms Cox.

“What we want to do is rejuvenate the game, make it relevant to modern players, but keep the spirit of the original. We have made changes, it’s not a one-to-one copy of the original game,” explains Cox, revealing new collectibles, for example, will be in the remake. “Anything which we could add in to expand the game outside of the regular design [has been done]. We’ve done everything we can to embellish, enlarge, and enhance [the game].”

An example offered by Cox is the moments when we drive between missions. In the original game these were, ironically given the 1930s setting, completely silent. The banter we expect, a standard feature of open-world storytelling, a sophistication of modern gaming, wasn’t in the original Mafia, but it is now. “So we’ve enhanced the story, we’ve added new experiences that weren’t there before.”

This attention to detail, and adding new context to events, stretches into missions which are being refreshed to include visual and gameplay refinements and new pacing. An early mission where you need to walk Tommy’s girlfriend home safely has a new melee fighting system. The route you take has been embellished with incidental events happening around the characters to bring the world to life. “Fundamentally, it’s the same mission. You escort her home, you get accosted by some thugs, you have a cinematic melee encounter with them, and she takes you home to tend to Angelo’s wounds,” says Cox.

Likewise the shooting mechanics are being completely overhauled, meaning there’s no noughties squatting and crabbing behind cover. As Cox explains, Mafia: Definitive Edition (opens in new tab) offers an “evolution of the systems used in Mafia 3 (opens in new tab) – it’s a cover shooter and it’s got significantly cinematic experiences to shoot through.”

Re-made man

Comical shooting aside, the original Mafia was a technical marvel when it released in 2002. The physics and car handling in particular felt realistic, ensuring some cars such as the Ford Model T were snail-like but others speedier, and heavy cars hitting lighter vehicles would do more damage. It’s a part of Mafia’s history Cox is proud of.

“The driving system in Mafia is one of the features that has carried through. It has been reworked and it’s been iterated on in Mafia 2 and Mafia 3, but fundamentally, I mean it’s not like it’s the same code, it has been reworked because we’re using a different engine now, but it’s similar developers, similar philosophy, similar outcome – so we’ve still got quite a realistic driving model.”

There are options to tweak the driving handling, so you can play with the default, accessible, arcade-style handling or embrace the simulation mode and choose to have manual gear shifting, fuel economy, and various other realistic settings. Such simulation extends to the cars; we remember the Model T being slow and you don’t want to go near a hill in this classic. Cox reveals the narrative’s Golden Path always gives you good cars to drive, but in the heat of a chase you may need to find alternate wheels, and knowing the world and its vehicles, hijacking the wrong getaway vehicle can lead to comical failure.

“We’ve expanded the list slightly in some areas, we’ve taken some of those original models and updated them,” explains Cox. “We’ve added a few more where we feel that there’s some reason to add some extra variety or interests or extra utility vehicles. We’ve added new vehicle types; you drive motorcycles now which were not in the original game […] That’s actually new to the franchise.”

The addition of motorbikes isn’t just a fun gimmick, it taps into the developer’s desire to enhance the original experience. One of the Resident Evil 2-scale changes Cox shares is that in one mission the original car has been replaced with a motorbike, and Tommy must speed through the city in hot pursuit of a rival mobster.

Cox says: “It’s an example of how we’ve tweaked the content to include some new mechanics. It’s the same story intro, the same story outro, but the gameplay in the middle is that you’re chasing the guy on a motorcycle; guys are shooting Tommy guns out of the back window [of the rival car] and you’re having to dodge around to avoid the bullets. The whole thing is just an entirely different experience.”

Likewise Mission 5’s notoriously difficult grand prix race event has been reworked to be more playable, but to also ooze 1930s glamour and spectacle. “Our target for this was the pod racer scene from Star Wars: Episode I, to try and make you feel like you’re at a 1930s race event,” says Cox.

That desire to craft a new more believable world that can help tell Mafia’s story is one of the main new changes Hangar 13 is proud of achieving. The game spans eight years, beginning during Prohibition in the early 1930s and ending in 1938 with the threat of World War 2 hanging over the city. Each mission has been embellished and tailored to depict the events of the narrative in more thoughtful ways. This, says Cox, has meant changing the time of day a mission is set, using new weather effects to build an emotional resonance to what’s happening on screen, and using newly recorded dialogue to create a patchwork of audio atmosphere to enhance the visuals.

Cox explains: “Most of the missions in the original Mafia begin and end at the Salieri bar hideout. In the original it was pretty much the same every time you went there. So now we evolve it over the course of time. You feel that time is moving forward, you can interact with the other story characters, they’re commenting on the meta stories, you’re hearing little anecdotes and seeing moments of the gang’s life.”

We can talk and interact with these characters now, and they’ll comment on events in the world and the story. We can hear about their lives and it all aids the idea that this is a living place and we’re roleplaying the life of a gangster.

Bases loaded

Reflecting on Tommy’s girlfriend, Cox reveals how this character has been fleshed out in a similar way in Mafia: Definitive Edition. She’s an undeveloped character in the original, despite being a motivation for many of the things you do, so the team now wants to give their relationship more weight.

“We see her interacting with Tommy more,” reflects Cox. “We see their romances, how they cross paths and they’re flirtatious interactions […] She is much more frequently in the game and you’re aware of the character the way you weren’t in the original game. You get more insight into that character and actually, hopefully, as a player, you’re going to feel more strongly about her and you’re going to understand Tommy’s motivations.”

Every mission has got a distinctive look and feel “much more so than in the original,” says Cox, as he explains how one mission set around a baseball game has been reworked to include more atmosphere and narrative details. “The mission is made distinctive because everybody’s talking about the big game and you’re hearing it on the radio and it’s in the incidental detail in the background. You’re picking up newspapers and reading about it. These are all things that weren’t in the original; this expanded narrative design. These are areas where we expand the story without changing it.”

We’ve been discussing planned changes, but remaking Mafia in a new game engine on PS4 (and, yes, PS4 Pro will receive enhanced features) has resulted in some accidental wonders. Cox explains how the original game suffered from fogging to hide the draw distance, which even on a PC in 2002 felt like the world was kept at a social distance, but on PS4 that’s been jettisoned. 

The city of Lost Heaven has never looked like it does now – for one thing you can actually see all of it from afar. “We’ve based the city on the original and it has revealed a whole new vista on the game’s world that no one has ever seen before. I’m driving over this bridge and I’m seeing a skyline I never knew existed, because you just couldn’t see it,” laughs Cox.

The upshot is the new engine grants Mafia’s cinematic spectacle a new lease of life. When we ask which missions Cox is particularly fond of, he mentions A Trip To The Country, in which Tommy and his gang head to a barn outside of the city in the middle of the night for a whisky deal. It’s pure prohibition gangster fantasy. It’s The Untouchables and Miller’s Crossing; everyone’s dressed in trench coats on a stormy night.

“It has a horror-movie vibe, [Tommy] is looking for his injured friends lost in this deserted, ramshackle farm and enemies are popping out from the windows above you and around you,” says Cox. “We’ve recreated this mission in a way that I think, again, is taking it to a new level in terms of presentation quality, but it’s still kept that very memorable vibe, you know. Sneaking around this farm with lightning striking and the storm swirling, it’s super, super-cool.”

Stay up to date with all of the latest releases with our upcoming games 2020 (opens in new tab) list, or watch the video below for our latest episode of Dialogue Options. 

(opens in new tab)

The post Mafia: Definitive Edition is shaping up to be a stunning remake of a game thought lost to time appeared first on Game News.

Despite their differences, the series’ new lead has plenty in common with his predecessor. Both are orphans, raised by surrogate father figures in high-ranking positions within the yakuza. And both are incarcerated for crimes they didn’t commit: in this case, Kasuga takes the fall for Masumi Arakawa as a way of repaying his debt to the man who took him under his wing as a wayward teen. 

He emerges after an 18-year stretch to find the Omi Alliance has taken over Kamurocho from the Tojo Clan, while worse is to come when he confronts Arakawa, who seems to have abandoned his former protégé. Shot and left for dead, he wakes up surrounded by garbage bags in Yokohama. It might sound like a depressing start, but it’s leavened by a familiar streak of fish-out-of- water comedy: echoing Kiryu’s struggles with modern technology, Kasuga seems similarly baffled by this new world of smartphones, vapes and selfie sticks. Yet thanks to the help of a kindly homeless man, disgraced former doctor Namba, he’s soon back on his feet. 

Life after Kiryu

It helps that Kasuga is seemingly more outgoing than the taciturn Kiryu. He’s positively garrulous, in fact: charismatic and bristling with wide-eyed enthusiasm, he seems to make friends easily. Before long, he’s formed a party of three alongside Namba and ex-cop Koichi Adachi, a bear of a man who has his own motives for staying friendly with Kasuga. They’re later joined by hostess Saeko Mukouda, after a tragedy involving the owner of the club she helps to run, and that’s your classic JRPG party of four. If Kasuga is the de facto lead, his companions get plenty of character development of their own: it makes for almost certainly the most dialogue-heavy Yakuza to date, but also a genuine ensemble piece. 

But the biggest change comes when you engage a group of enemies. The new battle system suits Kasuga, whose affection for JRPGs bleeds not just into the turn-based combat itself but in the way enemies and allies transform in front of his eyes. It feels almost like an elaborate delusion, or perhaps the result of an overactive imagination, prompted by the moment he pulls a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire from the ground as if it were Excalibur. Low-ranking yakuza and street thugs look normal from a distance, but adopt ever more outlandish guises when you engage them – from weirdos wearing bin bags and seemingly nothing else to creeps with flasher macs that attack by thrusting their bottoms at you. 

There’s much more to the combat than simply selecting moves from a menu and watching animations play out. With active elements on top, its dynamism is reminiscent of the Persona series, but with a few recognisably Yakuza twists. Launch a standard attack, and if an object is in Kasuga’s path as he jogs over to his target, he’ll either kick it towards them or, if it’s large enough, pick it up and swing it for extra damage.

Support long-form games journalism

This feature first appeared in Edge Magazine. If you want more great long-form games journalism like this every month, delivered straight to your doorstop or your inbox, why not subscribe to Edge here. (opens in new tab)

Special attacks (essentially Heat moves, in old money) that consume MP can be boosted by mashing Square or tapping Triangle at the right time. You can defend for a turn to lower damage, and minimise it further by hitting Circle as an attack lands – though the timing window is surprisingly narrow, and for some multi- hit moves you’ll need to keep pressing it. Though, particularly if you’ve equipped some gear to increase your evasion stat, you’ll occasionally see them dash back out of harm’s way. 

As a result, fights still have the sense of thrilling energy and spontaneity we’ve come to expect. Though you can’t move characters directly, they’ll naturally shuffle around, bringing extra tactical wrinkles into play. Positioning becomes key – you can wait until your chosen target wanders next to a couple of others before launching an AOE attack, whether it’s Namba breathing fire or Adachi swinging a goon around by their feet. Then again, it sometimes pays to act quickly – when an enemy is grounded, a regular attack from the next character in line will deal extra damage. 

Before it all kicks off, you can attract the attention of a group on the street and kite them into the road. Approaching cars will come to a standstill, honking their horns, but with luck, you might be able to knock an enemy into a stationary vehicle for a massive chunk of bonus damage. The slapstick doesn’t end there – sledgehammer- wielding enemies will occasionally lean too far on the backswing and topple over, while oiled-up sunbathers carrying airbeds sometimes slip and fall flat on their faces as they sprint to attack you. 

Kamurocho calling

Alternatively, like Ichiban during that eye-opener of a cutscene, you can beat a tactical retreat. There’s much more reason to do so than in previous Yakuzas, whether you’ve inadvertently stumbled into a gang of high-level enemies – or if you’re simply low on HP and MP, having exhausted all your recovery items. Then again, perhaps that’s because we’re slowly adjusting to a game where, at least in the early stages, the restorative items we’ve come to rely on are too expensive for a man with a much smaller wallet. Still, if Staminan Royales are out of reach, we’ve always got rice balls to scarf down in a pinch. And once we switch things up a bit and start using Namba’s healing powers – and equipping new gear that recovers MP after each turn – we’re no longer having to stop by a Poppo every few battles. 

Namba can still heal when you’ve recast him as a musician, strumming uplifting tunes to boost stats and turning CDs into deadly projectiles. These role changes are part of a job system, a well-worn JRPG idea that feels refreshed by its contemporary setting. Adachi, for example, becomes a tanky riot cop with a powerful shield bash and an elbow-drop finisher. After a brief flirtation with a B-boy outfit for Kasuga – giving him a move set that riffs on Majima’s Breaker style from Yakuza 0 – we turn him into a gaudily suited, champagne-swilling host who sprays jets of bubbly over foes to leave them drunk and disorientated. 

Idol- class Mukouda’s most costly attack sees her call upon a trio of angry fans, who’ll repeatedly whack her assailants with neon glow sticks. There are summons, too, accumulated by completing sub-stories, though most require a fairly hefty payment, and there’s a cooldown on each of them. As such, you can only realistically rely on them as a last resort – at least for a while. Though we hesitate to give any of them away, we’ll just suggest you complete the sub-story involving a belligerent crayfish.

Sega has dialled up the silliness, then, but Yaluza 7: Like A Dragon is grounded by its setting. After a brief glimpse at Kamurocho through new eyes, the district of Isezaki Ijincho is – despite its evident waste-disposal problem – a breath of fresh air. It’s also much larger, and starts out as an unknown quantity (much as it would be to Kasuga) requiring you to fill in the map by exploring. At first you’ll want to walk everywhere, and not just to take in the new scenery – in the early game, Kasuga is flat broke, and actively invited to forage around vending machines for loose change. After a while, you’’l be able to take the game at your own pace – if you need to grind a few job ranks against relative lightweights, then it makes sense to walk everywhere. But if you’re in a hurry to get to the next story mission, or simply fancy a shortcut to the weapon crafter, say, then a cab makes for a reasonably-priced fast-travel option.

Though the city is a little sparser, it’s still dense with enjoyably distracting side- activities. The slow-burn plot presents plenty of moments of natural downtime, while you’ll probably feel the need to take a load off after a boss fight or a lengthy trek through a labyrinth below Yokohama’s streets – because yes, this is a Yakuza with dungeons, after a fashion. 

The need to recover HP and MP between fights, meanwhile, gives you all the more reason to visit the district’s various eateries, with set meals boosting your affinity with your fellow party members. Once that’s reached a certain threshold, you’ll open up conversation options at a local bar, your choices here boosting Kasuga’s stats, while taking your friendship to the next level – in turn increasing the chance of automatic follow-up attacks in battle. And of course you can also indulge in a spot of karaoke. 

There’s enough of the old to allay the shock of the new, in other words. But so far it’s those differences that help make Yaluza 7: Like A Dragon the most purely enjoyable entry in this series since Yakuza 0. Perhaps the best thing we can say about it is that we don’t miss Kiryu nearly as much as we imagined we would. It might be a while before we can say the same for Kamurocho, but there are signs already that, just maybe, we’ll come to love Yokohama as the new home for this weird and wonderful new breed of Yakuza.

Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon is one of the upcoming Xbox Series X games (opens in new tab),  arriving in the West for Holiday 2020. 

The post Hands-on with Yakuza 7: Like a Dragon, the wildest and riskiest Yakuza game yet appeared first on Game News.

• You can pre-order your copy of Edge Magazine’s Valve special edition (opens in new tab) for delivery to your door. Hurry, while stocks last.

In Edge 344, we review Half-Life: Alyx (opens in new tab), and tell the fascinating story of the game’s creation. But to focus solely on Half-Life is to ignore everything else Valve represents. Originally merely a brilliant game developer, the Valve of today is also shopkeeper of the industry’s biggest download store, owner of some of the most popular games on the planet, and has moved from software to services into hardware, making the most powerful VR headset available.

As such this isn’t merely an issue about Half-Life: Alyx. It’s also a chance to check in on one of the most secretive companies in the industry, to talk not only about its new VR game but also the headset around which it is built, the platform through which it will be sold, and the games and initiatives whose success have helped fund it. And yes, to get Gabe Newell on tape, because it’s been far too long.

Edge 344 goes on sale in print on Thursday, March 26 through all major newsagents, featuring this beautiful wraparound cover, custom-designed for us by Valve’s artists: 

Subscriber copies will begin arriving in the coming days, and feature an exclusive cover design we’re not revealing yet, in order to preserve the surprise for our subscribers. To guarantee delivery of future issues, check the latest Edge magazine subscription offers (opens in new tab).

• Is Valve making Half-Life 3? Gabe Newell hints at the future of single-player games in Edge magazine (opens in new tab)

We’re mindful that many readers, and potential readers, are stuck at home and unable to head to the shops to get their issue. As such, for the first time – of many, we hope – we’re offering a limited number of pre-orders of our print edition through our online store. 

Get five issues of Edge for only £5 / $5

We’re also launching our digital edition earlier than the planned street date of March 26; it’ll be live at 5pm GMT next Monday, March 23. Our latest subscriber offer gets you your first five digital issues for just £5/ $5 (opens in new tab) – and if you sign up now, your subscription will begin with our Valve special edition.

Here’s a glimpse at what else awaits inside.

Valve Time

With a photographer in tow, we conducted more than 20 interviews with Valve staff in a bid to paint a picture of where the company stands in 2020. We tell the story of how Half-Life: Alyx was made, then look into the past, present, and future of everything else that defines this remarkable studio: from games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota Underlords, and Artifact – yes, it has a future – to its plans for Steam and its hardware business. 

An Audience With… Gabe Newell

What happens when you sit down for an hour with one of the industry’s finest, and most forward-thinking minds? Quite a lot, as it happens, from how we’ll be controlling games with our brains – and vice versa – within the next few years, to how single-player games will soon be powered by virtual people that live in our computers. In rare, wide-ranging conversation, Newell reflects on the milestone moments that have taken Valve to where it is today, and offers some tantalising hints at where it’s headed next.

Half-Life: Alyx reviewed

Valve is one of only a handful of development studios to have multiple Edge 10s under its belt. Can a game built from the ground up around a proprietary VR headset deliver the studio its third? Our review investigates, and in our Post Script we examine whether Alyx is the proof of concept for consumer VR in general.

Subscribe today

For more industry-beating access to the very best that the videogame industry has to offer, why not subscribe to Edge? You’ll save on the cover price and have your copy delivered to your door (or device) each month, complete with exclusive subscriber covers.

You can subscribe to the print edition (opens in new tab), digital version (opens in new tab), or save even more with the print/digital bundle (opens in new tab) – whatever you choose, you can rest easy in the knowledge you’re getting the full story before anyone else. 

The post Edge magazine goes inside Valve Software for an exclusive 34-page feature covering Half-Life: Alyx, Steam and more appeared first on Game News.

This article is taken from Official Xbox Magazine, your guide to Xbox One and with the inside track on Xbox One Series X. Subscribe now for as little as $9 for three digital issues (opens in new tab).

I normally hate those T-shirts with iconic collections of folk on them. You know the sort… ‘John, Paul, George & Ringo’. ‘Ross, Rachel, Monica, Joey, Chandler & Phoebe’. ‘Frank, Pat, Bianca & RIIICKY’. Alright, ‘iconic’ might be a bit of a stretch with that last one. The point is, thanks to my continuing, seven- year-long obsession with GTA 5, I’m seriously considering having a ‘Michael, Trevor, Franklin, & Dave Meikleheim’ tee made up. 

Almost a decade on, I’m still utterly besotted with Grand Theft Auto 5. Rockstar’s open-world masterpiece recently hit Xbox Game Pass, and seeing as I’ve previously only ever played the Los Santos epic on PC and a certain rival console – naughty, I know – that’s all the excuse I need to dive back into what may well be my favourite video game of all time. 

GTA 5’s story missions are still the best in the biz. Not a single sandbox competitor can match the drum-tight pacing, inventiveness or murdery spectacle the Blaine County adventure produces again and again over its 69 missions. But the real X factor separating GTA 5 from the rest of the open-world pack? Its trio of criminal chums, that’s what. 

God, I love switching between them. The first mission that lets you swap out Michael, Trevor and Franklin is ‘Three’s Company’; a daring daytime caper that sees the felons attempting to pluck a witness straight out of the IAA’s headquarters. The first part of the audacious kidnap requires Trevor’s mad whirlybird skills to land on the roof of The agency’s cloud- scraping office. 

Next up it’s Michael’s chance to hog the homicidal limelight as he abseils down the building, smashes through a window to grab the target, then busts out his best Max Payne impression during a suspended slow-mo shootout. To assist with the IAA slaughter, you can also switch to Franklin who’s squatting on the roof of the adjacent FIB headquarters armed with a sniper rifle and one seriously itchy trigger finger. Faced with such unblinking teamwork, those snivelling government cronies never had a hope. 

Of heists and men

As the story stakes escalate the criminal-swapping escapades become more and more elaborate. Just take ‘The Paleto Score’. One of GTA 5’s headline-hogging heists, this multitiered mission has the Los Santos cohorts ripping off a bank in a backwater town filled with corrupt cops. Cue a frankly insane job involving full body armour suits, a minigun spree that obliterates several police cars before downing a copper chopper, an escape in a bulldozer of all things, before a final shootout in where else? Why, a Cluckin’ Bell chicken factory. Naturally. Nail Trevor’s, Franklin’s and Michael’s individual roles and a cool $8,016,020 take swells your criminal coffers. It’s a mission of absurd spectacle that I bloody adore. 

There’s something inherently freeing in being able to chop and change between three very different characters. Not only does each of the trio’s special abilities increase your tactical options when you’re causing mayhem on the streets of LS, but it feeds into a quasi role-playing mechanic that allows you to take control of these crooks in a way that reflects their personalities. 

I’ve played through GTA 5’s story at least five times – yes, I’ve clearly lost the run of myself… for the umpteenth time – and every time the faeces hits the fan in these multi-man missions, it’s Trevor I switch to when death needs dishing out. Sure, his health- boosting ‘rampage’ power isn’t as useful in a pinch as Michael’s slow-mo shooting, but then again, I just don’t see De Santa having that kind of consistent carnage in him. Thanks to GTA 5’s criminal-swapping capers, I’m given the freedom to roleplay Franklin as the cool-headed getaway driver, Michael as the ice-veined cover-fire enforcer and Trevor as the unapologetic psycho who tips his cap to earlier entries’ thirst for cop- swatting rampages. 

Shortly after Red Dead Redemption 2 (opens in new tab) was announced, I hoped its debut trailer hinted that we’d get to play as the entire Van Der Linde gang. As it turned out, Rockstar’s epic Western settled on just two characters, and such focus was ultimately to its story’s benefit. More introspective than GTA 5, Arthur Morgan’s frontier tale wouldn’t have meshed well with chop-and-swap firefights. Still, all these years later, I can’t get enough of the trio. Keep the Magnificent Seven; I’ve got the Los Santos Three.

Save up to 54% on an Official Xbox Magazine print and digital subscription today (opens in new tab)

The post GTA 5s swappable triad is still the smartest idea Rockstar has contributed to video games appeared first on Game News.

Save up to 49% on Official PlayStation Magazine subscriptions

This feature first appeared in Official PlayStation Magazine. Get the latest in PlayStation on doorstep early and for a better price! Subscribe to OPM here (opens in new tab).

The veteran developer continues, “[That’s] not just represented in your disciplines but [also] your speed in combat [and] your ability to scale buildings this time and using heights for getting the drop on an enemy or a target that you want to feed on.” 

Pacifism isn’t an option for your fledgling vampire. “Dale is what happens if you’re a vampire that doesn’t want to really do much in the political realm and really wants to just sit and feed on rats or blood bags,” Mitsoda tells us, referring to your fledgling’s bathrobe-clad floormate. “It wouldn’t be that exciting to play as Dale because sitting in your bathroom watching TV is great in real life, but you probably wouldn’t want to play a game of doing that.” 

When it comes to vampire politics, a good scrap is inevitable as senior narrative designer Cara Ellison explains: “Unfortunately, it is quite a violent world [so] you’ll get attacked at some point.” 

There’s plenty to entice you to explore the new setting of Seattle. Referred to as a character in its own right, in this fictional version of Hardsuit’s home city each district is shaped by whoever holds power there, and your dirty deeds can make the headlines. Your actions can also annoy other factions so much that they refuse to work with you. 

Thankfully you’re not stuck with the first faction that offers you a toothy grin. “You might get a better opportunity if you switch,” Mitsoda explains. “[…] It’s [hugely] personality-driven, like, what personalities do you feel strongly aligned to? Or have you learned something about them by allying with them that you’re like, ‘[…] I just found out this person is not the vampire I thought they were, so I’m done here.'” 

Ellison tells us she and Mitsoda drew heavily on pulp fiction and noir when crafting the game’s narrative, so it’s no wonder your allegiances can get complicated.

Velvet Underground

Each clan and faction has worked out how best to use their power to protect themselves, Mitsoda explains. “Essentially power is anonymity […] You can work through people doing your bidding […] or just by virtue of having so much money that you can hide […] or you’re part of the criminal underworld that already has a kind of code of silence. So, vampires use the fabric of society and they use these entrenched kinds of political structures [that] they manipulate for their own benefit.”

This is something Ellison echoes when we ask why she thinks we’re so obsessed with vampires: “Because of the 1%. […] The most important vampire metaphor is that they’re old money, and there’s [a] secret society kind of thing going on, [as in they take] the resources and then stockpile them for themselves. […] I think vampires to us are like a kind of relic from the past that seem to be like parasitic and leeching from us. And I think that’s [one reason] why we’re interested in them.”

Mitsoda’s answer is on similar lines. “Vampires are the perfect monster for [acting as a metaphor for] whatever’s going on in society right now. […] So we always find ways to reinvent the vampire as like an embodiment of aspects of society that we don’t appreciate.”

So which groups do the pair identify with? Ellison tells us Mitsoda has a fondness for The Pioneers, or the old money in Seattle, as he appreciates the city’s history. “I get the privilege of writing the Nosferatu,” Ellison tells us. She says that technically the Nosferatu are both a clan and a faction as The Unseen and adds, “They’re kind of like these weird shut-ins. […] They have to find something to do in the dark […] The Nosferatu are just really interesting because they’re […] like information brokers of the city.” She later says, “I think I’m just a Nosferatu […] I like sitting in the dark [and] I like that they’re really good at hacking.”

The game has been delayed from its Q1 release date but we can’t wait to make our own allegiances when Bloodlines 2 ventures out of its haven later in 2020.

(opens in new tab)

To read more about PS5 and the hottest upcoming PS4 games, check out the latest Official PlayStation Magazine subscription offers.

The post Live out your perfect monster mash in Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, and prepare to get bloody appeared first on Game News.

“It helps if you don’t have expectations that might make it hard to hear the reactions you are getting,” says Gabe Newell, Valve’s co-founder and figurehead, when we ask if and when he knew the company had created something special. Such evasion would normally strike you as false modesty, but Valve is a company of unorthodox methods – a company without job titles run like a school for the gifted, a company with such a close commitment to its community that it reads every email, a company that, with the slow gestation of Steam, has become something of a saviour of PC gaming with seeming reluctance. 

Its decisions are often unfathomable, veering from The Orange Box’s incredible value, through the endless care and attention given to the Team Fortress 2 community, to the more difficult proposition of selling two Left 4 Dead games in quick succession. Valve is outspoken and perhaps even eccentric, Newell’s own proclamations on the “total disaster” of PS3 or on Microsoft’s indolent support of PC gaming provoking headlines. Externally, its catalogue may appear near-infallible – but these triumphs have been hard won. The original Half-Life was scrapped and revised over a period of 12 months before release. With its publisher threatening to drop marketing support shortly after the game hit shelves, Valve was not guaranteed to even recoup its investment until it persuaded Sierra to release a Game Of The Year edition. 

Subscribe to Edge

This feature first appeared in Edge Magazine #216. If you want more like it every month, delivered straight to your doorstop or your inbox, why not subscribe to Edge here (opens in new tab).

Half-Life 2’s development was similarly rocky, most frequently waylaid by Valve’s own towering aspirations – and perhaps this is why Newell is reluctant to sing its praises, even after the fact. Nothing is certain in game development, not even at Valve. Newell himself nixed the scheduled appearance of the game at E3 2002 when the proof-of-concept reel failed to blow him away (he had consciously distanced himself from the project in order to maintain an unbiased first viewing of it). Then the game missed its much-trumpeted September 30, 2003 ship date – a debacle which saw the company lose internal momentum as well as public face, and has solidified Newell’s commitment to avoiding specific dates whenever possible. The disaster was shortly followed by a security scandal in which a German hacker leaked the not-even-nearly finished code, causing further dismay at a studio already spending $1 million per month to complete the game. 

Even as the final pieces fell into place, a legal battle with publisher Vivendi Universal Games threatened to scupper Valve’s efforts. Originally, Valve had sued Vivendi, claiming the publisher had illegally distributed Counter-Strike licences to internet cafés. Vivendi’s counter-suit was the thing of nightmares: Valve had not, Vivendi alleged, been diligent in finishing Half-Life 2; it felt that the creation of Steam undermined its right to publish Valve’s games. 

There were worries that Vivendi would refuse to release Half-Life 2 until six months after it had gone gold. Vivendi relented and the courts ruled in the studio’s favour – but it’s proof that Valve’s alchemical triumphs are the result of a little serendipity as well as perseverance and talent. It may have had the benefit of self-funding, its founders’ ample reserves accumulated during the ascendency of Microsoft, but it took brass balls to see the making of Half-Life 2 through without compromise. Perhaps this is also why so few games have managed to surpass Half-Life 2’s achievements. As Newell says, “Making games is hard, and every team has to pick their battles carefully.” 

Creating one of the greats

Valve’s chosen battle was simply to make the greatest PC game of all time. Its vectors of attack were multiple: skirmishes which saw the medium as a whole gain ground in the implementation of physics, develop new ways of telling stories in interactive spaces and, most fundamentally, aspire to a higher level of maturity. 

Half-Life 2’s characters are engaging both dramatically and in action: they are a tangible presence in the world which help or hinder the player directly. And the world itself, with its Eastern Bloc urban austerity and sense of abandon in its rural desolation, is a fictional construct considerably evolved from the first game’s satirical shlock – a coherent place which, regardless of the player’s narrow corridor of progress through it, never once fails to convince. “There was a period when the first-person genre was relegating the experience to that of a shooting gallery,” Newell says. “There have been plenty of games that point to a much broader range of options – environment and character development, storytelling, gameplay, tone – and Half-Life 2 was part of that.”

That part being the vanguard, presumably. But it wasn’t that it got there first – Half-Life 2 isn’t just an important iteration in the onward progress of the first-person shooter, it remains a high-water mark in many respects. At the time, the presence of the handheld physics toy, the gravity gun, was thought to be the most significant addition, but, even though Valve’s brilliantly playful implementation was a great differentiator from games past, the physical manipulation of the environment was an inevitability in the industry, an advance born of the unstoppable sweep of technology. The game’s aspiration of communicating a grown-up narrative, through engaging with its characters and setting, was as much a product of imagination as it was technology, and it is this credential which has proved much harder for other games to match. Even BioShock, with its smart meta-commentary on the freedom of the player, follows a little meekly in the footsteps of Half-Life 2, in which your nemesis mocks your popular calling as “The Free Man” and asks if you can really do anything but destroy. 

It is still, of course, a story about alien invasion, largely articulated through the exchange of gunfire. But Half-Life 2 showed, more profoundly than other shooters of its decade, that narrative wasn’t just the backdrop to action, but spawned by a constant interplay with the 3D interactive space. The germ of this sophistication was evident in the game’s predecessor, from its ostentatious scene-setting on the Black Mesa transit system, to Barney the security guard offering to buy you a beer after work. Although the scientists and guards were little more than props to be sucked into air vents or diced by haywire lasers, it was easy to anthropomorphise them. 

The game’s laboratory environments, too, despite the occasional pools of glowing green gloop and whirling hi-tech gizmos, were conceived with the trappings of credible working places. Nonetheless, the earlier game underwent a more organic process of development than its sequel, as Valve found its feet as a developer and grew its team. This did not always create the kind of wholly coherent world that would be necessary for its sequel, particularly evident in the disparity between Chuck Jones’ tendrils-and-talons monster design and Ted Backman’s more adult, eerie creatures. Half Life 2 sees Backman’s sense of uncanniness now pervading the entire project – an aesthetic unity that grew out of a new approach to production. 

“There was a large-scale difference between the two projects,” Newell explains. “That meant there were organisational and process changes we had to make to accommodate that. Trees are organic, but there are reasons why they don’t grow to be as tall as skyscrapers.” 

The team was broken up into cabals, each working on separate areas – but this time art was applied to the levels after their essential geometry had been laid out, with the game’s writer, Marc Laidlaw, ducking between groups to ensure everything fitted into the overall fiction. The result was the more cohesive sense of place and tone, which was vital to the projection of Half-Life 2’s narrative, and which took a much darker turn than that of the original game. 

“This came naturally out of the design of the world,” Laidlaw says. “There was no point at which we didn’t see the universe as being essentially dark. As long as we were trapped in the confines of Black Mesa, we didn’t have to deal with the world beyond those walls, but that didn’t mean we pictured a positive, nurturing environment. When the world of Half-Life 2 started coming into focus, we tried to be consistent in tone – but this wasn’t a matter of being selectively darker or more sophisticated. It simply meant we had to be vigilant about introducing elements that might inadvertently break the spell we were trying to cast.” 

There were tonal aspects of Half-Life’s world that needed to be reset, however. Although Dr Kleiner and his pet headcrab provide comic relief, HL2 is a much more consistently grim fiction, avoiding the more obvious satirical elements of Half-Life’s sci-fi. “We found that satire or parody was too limiting as a fundamental principle for creating a universe rich with possibilities,” Laidlaw says. 

Half-Life: Alyx

The first Half-Life: Alyx trailer (opens in new tab) is the closest we’re gonna get to Half-Life 3

Dr Breen, the human stooge of the oppressive Combine, could easily have been a caricatured tyrant, all monocles and Gestapo gloves – but instead his snake oil philosophy is presented in unsettlingly reasonable, measured terms. Even as Breen persuades the occupants of City 17 to reject their base instinct for procreation, his creed is never presented with tongue overtly in cheek. Equally, the casual black humour with which scientists were reduced to offal in the first game is replaced with a much sadder sense of macabre – there is little humour to be found in the cremated corpses lying in gnarled heaps beside derelict coastal buildings. The many and grisly ways in which the player is encouraged to dispatch zombies allows for grim amusement, but elsewhere the humble headcrab is used to tell poignant stories of failed resistance – and the demented wail of a zombie carrying a payload of poison headcrabs is surely one of the most chilling noises in video games. 

Did Valve always intend its sequels to mature with the game’s audience? Surprisingly not, according to Newell. “That isn’t something we think about except as part of each project needing to respect the fact that simply repeating the past isn’t going to have the same impact now as it did then,” he says. “I feel like we’ve gotten away from genuinely scaring the player more than I’d like, and it’s something we need to think about, in addition to broadening the emotional palette we can draw on.” And now, as the future players of Episode Three start having families and hitting middle age, what horrifies them more than anything else? “The death of their children,” says Newell. “The fading of their own abilities.”

Avoiding cliché

The maturity with which Valve approached its world can be seen not so much in the broad strokes of its plot but in the credible drawing of its environments – instilling a strong sense of place while compounding the game’s bleak tone. Though the moonlit zombie-filled Ravenholm makes plenty of knowing nods to the horror genre, Half-Life 2 largely resists the more obvious opportunities to deploy cliché. The bold decision to scrub early ideas for a globe-trotting plot and concentrate the action in a nonspecific eastern European country provided Valve with a fresh and idiosyncratic palette. Nonetheless, the first designs for City 17 and the surrounding wasteland saw them endure the stormy night skies of Gothic horror. The former then had the air of Blade Runner – nocturnal, rain-swept and with the dense entanglement of old and new accelerating decay. Yet the crisp sallow daylight of the final game transforms the environments into something unlike any of its inspirations. The stately plazas of the eastern European city are beset by technology which seeks to order the world as it consumes it, quite apart from Blade Runner’s depiction of entropy under flickering neon lights. The towering, angular Combine structures themselves have a fascistic flavour to them – but their alarming asymmetry, impossible distribution of mass and unknowable materials, dark and iridescent, mark them out as something entirely Other. 

The wasteland, too, sidestepped scorched-earth cliché and instead opted for a melancholic emptiness. The quiet wood buildings of the coast, like so many of the environments in Half-Life 2, hold stories that unravel as you explore, their hastily assembled possessions and broken makeshift barricades telling of the panic of the occupants’ final few minutes. In cooperation with the player, the architecture of the levels themselves becomes narrator, guiding the player through little dramas that expand upon the world’s fiction in bullet holes and spraypaint. Prior to Half-Life 2, environments had largely served as prettified backdrops: Quake 2’s imposing metal halls and gantries had unsurprisingly little to say about life on Stroggos. Half-Life 2 championed a form of efficient, wordless storytelling that could only work in video games – a medium allowing for that explorative interaction with a 3D space. 

It’s another boon of this mode of storytelling through the level’s physical structure that you need never notice it. Though the coastal sections invite you to stop and wonder at the desolation, it’s quite possible to screech through them in your buggy, bouncing from battle to battle. This is necessarily so: the game’s successes elsewhere would have been for naught if it was a limp shooter. 

Half-Life 2’s mechanics may feel out of place among the more weighty, embodied shooters of more recent times, but the actual pace of the game and structure of the firefights is still brilliantly conceived. Scripting describes many of these encounters, enemies popping up to harry you during your flight to Black Mesa East, but as the tables turn the player often finds himself engaging the enemy on his own terms. These are fascinating AI encounters: the Combine soldiers flank and probe your defences in ways that are credible yet defeatable. The tripodal Striders hunker down to peer under your cover and, in later episodes, acid-spitting antlions constantly shift their position around, just out of range – AI behaviour which is predictable enough to be countered by a little thought, but organic enough to never feel prescriptive or obvious, dangerous enough that each battle teeters on the limits of your control. 

Half-Life 2 manages a sense of ever-increasing empowerment by creating a constant see-saw between threat and your ability to overcome it: mounting the pulse cannon on to the airboat allows you to finally deal – violently, cathartically – with the chopper that has harassed you through City 17’s canals; the gravity gun transforms the zombie menace into a grisly playground full of physics-enabled buzz saws and petrol canisters; the antlions go from being a lethal nuisance to your willing minions; and, of course, just when you think the game has stripped you of all your weaponry, it turns the gravity gun into a device of awesome power, able to rip the Combine consoles depicting Breen’s face straight from the walls and toss them into a unit of soldiers. 

The dynamism of these battles has increased as the episodes have gone on, escalating through the frantic scraps with the dog-like Hunters to the climactic defence of White Forest at the end of Episode Two. But Valve has always been able to manipulate the width of the linear path the player takes. Along with the convincing world-building, it’s that balance of moment-to-moment freedom with the urgent motivation to keep moving that prevents it from feeling as confined and claustrophobic as other corridor shooters. Momentum is driven either from behind, by pursuing forces, or by hanging eventual goals on the horizon – making your arrival there that much more significant.

The creation of Alyx

Valve’s creatives are masters of understanding how drama can work in an interactive world, in a navigable 3D environment, from seeding narrative into the architecture to carefully guiding the player’s eye towards details of significance. But Valve was also among the first developers to breathe life into the people who occupy the place. “We wanted to try our hand at adding real characters to the story, rather than caricatures,” Laidlaw says. “Advances in animation, and the people we were luring in from the film industry, spurred us to try for a broader emotional range.” Admittedly, Valve’s approach to cutscenes has become more obtrusive as the drama it wishes to convey has grown more complex – players can opt out to a degree (Dr Kleiner’s laboratory provides many distractions for those uninterested in the plight of Lamarr), but by and large you are confined while the dialogue plays out. Yet it’s in your companionship with the characters outside these scenes that they grow on you the most – becoming active participants in the action. 

The technical advances have continued, but still only a small handful of video game buddies are as good company as Alyx; an even smaller number of female characters in games have been as appealing (and an even smaller number aren’t Caucasian). Alyx is something of a video game Suffragette, to whose efforts the Elena Fishers of the world owe a debt. Certainly, there’s a palpable frisson of love interest, but the highly capable, geeky Alyx is speaking to an entirely different audience – one for whom romantic aspirations have evolved beyond locating dad’s Playboy stash. Was there ever any doubt at Valve about whether the audience was ready for a female role as something other than pixellated titillation?

“We never argued about Alyx,” says Laidlaw. “In a lot of ways, the personality of the character in the game is just a refined version of our initial vision. Every discussion was about giving her more depth, more believability; we were all moving in the same direction from the start. Just as we wanted Gordon to be easily distinguishable from the typical video game heroes of the day, we wanted Alyx to stand apart from the video-babe clichés.” 

While Alyx and the supporting cast have aged well, going back to Half-Life 2 now, one of the few things that feels a little quaint is Freeman’s inability to speak. Latter-day games, even shooters, either tend to impose vocalisations upon the protagonist or give the player some options for expression. But would Valve ever want Half-Life 2’s hero to speak? “Gordon Freeman, whatever his strengths and weaknesses, is defined entirely by his design constraints,” Laidlaw says. “Silence is the keystone of his character. I know it doesn’t work for everyone, but fortunately there are plenty of games with talking protagonists. We don’t have to turn Half-Life into one of those. 

That said, the ‘strong, silent type’ jokes are way past their expiration date. Even the very first and freshest one was slightly curdled.” Newell seems more open to the idea. “We’re not philosophically opposed to this,” he says, “but we don’t have good reasons to do it. Right now making your companions more interesting and compelling seems a more fruitful avenue to explore.” But Newell’s less enamoured by our suggestion that Gordon might one day get a greater sense of embodiment – to become more than a floating hand and crowbar: “We haven’t had a reason to change that. Most of what I’ve seen to date has been gimmicky and is entertaining for just a minute or so.” 

Despite such assurances to the contrary, we wonder if Valve’s dogmatic insistence on producing episodes, rather than an outright sequel, has left it strapped to conventions that it would rather leave behind. But even if it resists any mechanical change for the upcoming Episode Three, the series will still stand as the high point of what the first-person shooter has achieved in terms of narrative and world-building, its aftershocks still rattling through any game that attempts to tell a story within a 3D space. But it’s more than understanding how to use the medium: when we look back and smirk at how gaming’s early days were bootstrapped by puerile fantasy and thoughtless violence, when the first-person shooter finally involves considerably more than just shooting, it will be Half-Life 2 to which everyone owes the debt.

This feature first appeared in EDGE (opens in new tab). For more excellent articles like the one you’ve just read, why not subscribe to the print or digital edition of EDGE Magazine at MyFavouriteMagazines (opens in new tab). 

The post The making of Half-Life 2: Valve takes us behind the scenes of its narrative masterpiece appeared first on Game News.

Edge issue 339 (opens in new tab), which goes on sale in print and digital forms Thursday, November 7, crowns the dozen games that we believe define gaming’s most transformative decade to date. This is not a ‘best of’ list; it celebrates the games which have impacted the industry in ways that go far beyond their mere quality. Spelunky, for instance, is here not just for being brilliant, but also for birthing the Roguelike. Amnesia: The Dark Descent didn’t just redefine video game horror; it also gave us the Let’s Play. 

A 12-cover split run means each title is given the prominence it deserves; inside, in-depth analysis gives (we hope) proper context to each inclusion. Here’s all 12 covers, which have been randomly sorted at newsagents’ and in subscriber letterboxes up and down the land.

Limited-edition ‘Games of the Decade’ box set

For collectors, we’ve produced a limited-edition box set containing all 12 covers, available from Thursday, November 7. You can get your hands on that here (opens in new tab), although you should act fast before it sells out. 

For more industry-beating access to the very best that the video game industry has to offer, why not subscribe to Edge? You’ll save on the cover price and have your copy delivered to your door (or device) each month, complete with exclusive subscriber covers.

You can subscribe to the print edition (opens in new tab), digital version, or save even more with the print/digital bundle – whatever you choose, you can rest easy in the knowledge you’re getting the full story before anyone else.

The post Edge magazine issue 339 celebrates the defining games of the decade across 12 collectors edition covers appeared first on Game News.