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That’s because Street Fighter II redefined the genre in 1991, setting the standard for 2D fighting games for decades to come and kicking off a craze that revitalised the arcade market. Via Street Fighter, Capcom stood atop the 2D fighting pile for the remainder of the Nineties with the popular Street Fighter Alpha series and hardcore-friendly Street Fighter III series. Then in 2008, Street Fighter IV (opens in new tab) revived the series and ushered in a fighting game renaissance, drawing mainstream attention back to the genre. Street Fighter 5 (opens in new tab) attracted record- breaking numbers of competitors to the prestigious Evolution Championship Series fighting game tournament in 2016. 

Over the years, Street Fighter has busted out of the arcades and into the modern esports scene, and has transcended videogames to become a part of broader pop culture. There aren’t many games that would be instantly recognisable when referenced in a Jackie Chan film or an episode of Family Guy, but Street Fighter shout-outs made it into those and more besides. The series has inspired comics, animated movies, card games and even a major Hollywood film starring Jean Claude Van Damme, Ming-Na Wen and Raul Julia. Of course, what goes into the creation of a good Street Fighter game hasn’t changed much over the years. 

Building the bruisers

Every Street Fighter player has a preferred strategy – and in the game, those strategies are represented by their characters. As a result, character design is of utmost importance to the series. Whether you want to get in close and deal lots of damage, play keep-away and punish mistakes, or even play a deliberately weak character as a handicap, Capcom provides a character with the attributes and move set to let you play your game. So with decades of hindsight, it’s strange to think that the original Street Fighter game’s characters represented obstacles to overcome. To do that, you had a generic martial artist with a single skillset: Ryu. 

This need to combat fighters of all types ultimately ended up informing the character’s abilities. “In terms of gameplay, he’s a great all-rounder and easy to use,” says Yoshinori Ono, a series veteran and the executive producer of Street Fighter V. In Street Fighter II, the number of playable characters was increased to eight. This meant that for the first time, the developers had to design a multitude of characters to play both with and against, and could explore the aforementioned offensive and defensive extremes. 

We’ve often wondered what the starting point is, so we call Street Fighter V chief director Takayuki Nakayama into the ring; do the designers come up with character designs to fit certain fighting styles, or design cool-looking people and then decide how they’ll fight? “Both of those approaches have been used but we actually mostly come up with them at the same time,” he explains. “We think about what kinds of moves would be fun at the same time as we’re thinking about what kind of design would best show off their moves.” 

Character design has always been a difficult process, with many ideas trialled and dropped along the way – rejected Street Fighter II designs include a bullfighter and an American amateur wrestler. According to Nakayama, it remains difficult to nail down. “We go through at least 100 versions when we are designing a brand- new character, going through many iterations of their appearance, storyline and moves,” he explains. Such a process must surely take a long time? 

“It obviously depends on the specific character but I’d say, broadly, it takes five people three months to design one character,” he confirms. “And then it’s a further six months to finalise their moves and animations.” Something that has always been a part of Street Fighter is its international flavour – the original game featured fighters from the USA, Japan, China and the UK. 

“The fact that the original Street Fighter II had The World Warrior as its subtitle tells you that fighters from around the globe coming together to compete is not just a natural part of Street Fighter but an essential part,” says Ono. “I think that it also lets players feel more connected to the game when they see a character from their part of the world in it, and maybe it’s a hook for them to get into the game in the first place.” 

However, new characters are only one part of the story. While Street Fighter’s cast and the bulk of the characters in Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III had to be designed from scratch, the Street Fighter Alpha series provided a mixture of new and returning characters that has become the model for new instalments to the series going forward. How does the team go about bringing these older characters back after long absences? 

“The first step is researching how the character was played in the games they previously appeared in. We play those games and watch videos, and even reread the old design documents to work out what the original intent behind the character was,” says Nakayama. “Combined with our estimation of what players want from the character and how they like to play as them, we recreate them and then work on eliminating the aspects that aren’t in line with our vision.” 

For Ono, it’s hard to pick a favourite. “Hmm… I get asked this a lot. The characters are like my children – I don’t like to engage in favouritism,” he hesitates. “I love R Mika a lot, and used my position at Capcom to bring her back in Street Fighter V,” he explains with a chuckle. ”But then again, I joined the company in the Street Fighter II era and worked on the sound team, I do have a special place in my heart for Cammy, since she was part of my work back then.” 

But what of the Blanka toy that Ono is often seen with? ”Well, he’s been my travel buddy around the world for over ten years now, so he’s beyond the level of like or dislike.” But despite all of the new characters over the years, none has displaced Ryu as the face of the series. “I think it’s his personality that makes him resonate so much,” says Ono. “He doesn’t stand out, he values effort, he’s a man of few words, he’s kind of mysterious, and there’s no one who you could say he’s similar to. I think that’s what has kept him popular over the long history of the series.” It doesn’t take much to convey that either, as occasional post-match win quotes will suffice. “He also has the ‘Perfect Attendance Award’ for the series and that is something that I think shows his dedication,” Ono laughs.

The sweet science

If you’ve ever wondered why some people passionately prefer Street Fighter Alpha 3 to its predecessor, or why players of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike didn’t necessarily get on well with Street Fighter IV to start with, it’s usually because of the fighting mechanics. As a basic example, consider throw attacks. Introduced in Street Fighter II, they allowed a player to inflict a damaging attack on blocking player – thus reducing the viability of defending your way to a time out victory. But from Street Fighter III onwards it’s possible to ‘tech’ throws, reducing damage or even cancelling the throw entirely with an appropriately timed input – thus limiting the usefulness of such moves.

By tweaking the abilities and options available to players in this way, Capcom can dramatically change the way games feel. “It changes a lot just because it makes the meta different,” explains Justin Wong, a professional fighting game player. “If there was parry, you have to think twice in using long-range normals, if there is focus attack you have to think about how to break the opponent’s focus attack since it can absorb one hit. Each different game mechanic changes the meta and also changes the tier list as well.” 

Of course, Street Fighter II’s defining mechanic famously originated as an unintended side effect of another system. The ability to cancel the animation of a normal attack into a special move, creating a combo, was accidentally added when the developers were making special moves easier to pull off but was considered interesting enough to include in the final game. Landing combos has become key to maximising your offensive opportunities over the years, and those simple origins are far behind us. 

“Street Fighter’s combo system evolved a lot,” says Justin. “Back in the day there was no combo count but now there is, so people can see what is a combo and what is not a combo. It also changed a lot with juggles, using the game mechanics to extend combos to make them longer.” Street Fighter Alpha introduced a mixture of mechanics that enhanced both offensive and defensive options. The one that symbolises this balance most effectively is the air guard – although it’s an extra blocking option, it’s one that makes aggressive moves like jumping towards the opponent much safer. 

Likewise, the Alpha Counter allowed players to turn defence into attack, burning one segment of your super meter to hit an opponent in response to a blocked attack. Escape rolls also ensured that your opponent couldn’t always predict where you’d be standing when you got up from being knocked down. Street Fighter Alpha 2 added the devastating Custom Combo, a DIY super move that could inflict huge damage, and Street Fighter Alpha 3 allowed you to use Guard Crush to punish players that blocked too much. 

Street Fighter III: The New Generation added a variety of new movement options that significantly increased the scope for aggressive play. For the first time, a double tap of the joystick forwards or backwards allowed the player to dash in the appropriate direction, closing distance quickly. By flicking the stick downwards prior to jumping, you can perform a super jump, covering additional distance. Hitting down when knocked down would also cause a quick stand, throwing off your opponent’s attack timing and allowing you to get straight back into the fray. 

And then there’s the parry – a curiously aggressive defensive move. By pushing the stick towards the opponent in time with their strike, you can nullify damage and recover before them to launch your own attack. 2nd Impact introduced EX moves, powerful variants of certain regular special moves that cost super meter to use. If all that aggression rubbed you up the wrong way, the Street Fighter IV series was probably more to your taste. The Focus Attack was a powerful new ability that allowed players to absorb an attack and deliver a devastating strike in response – one which would induce the new ‘crumple’ state, in which the enemy is falling but still vulnerable to attack.

The Ultra Combo was also introduced – a secondary super gauge which charged only upon receiving damage, allowing for some extraordinary comebacks. The pendulum has swung back, with Street Fighter V adding V Triggers and V Skills, character-specific abilities that skew towards aggressive play, as well as Crush Counters that allow players to carry on combos after countering a weaker attack with a strong attack. However, defensive characters aren’t as disadvantaged in competition as players initially believed, and that’s the beauty of Street Fighter’s mechanical depth – it can take years to fully work out what’s going on and how best to work within a given game’s rules.

Something special

There are many things that go into making your favourite Street Fighter character play in their own unique fashion, but arguably the most important is special moves. Don’t take that from us, though – take it from multiple time Evolution championship winner Justin Wong. 

“Special moves are always important throughout the years because they are what makes the character who he/she is,” says Justin. “Ryu would not be Ryu without the Hadoken and seeing the evolution of it being better/worse has always been a treat.” As compared to normal attacks, special moves are a little more difficult to perform in that they require a combination of joystick movements and button presses. 

The trade-off is that these attacks typically have properties that aren’t found in other moves. Some might hit multiple times or send you to the other side of the screen in the blink of an eye. Others launch projectiles, others still nullify and repel those projectiles. In any case, they have a huge impact on the way you play. 

When creating special moves for characters, three key considerations are taken into account: “Individuality, coolness, and accessibility,” according to Street Fighter V’s chief director Takayuki Nakayama. But one thing that Capcom tries to steer away from is introducing more powerful moves in exchange for more difficult inputs. “We try not to have any moves that are really hard to pull off. The strength and difficulty of a move should not be in its input command but in the strategy of deciding when to use it – the timing and the frames, and how to work out the risks and rewards,” Nakayama explains.

Does the team ever come up with moves that end up suiting another character better? “Not often, but it has happened,” confirms Nakayama. “We also sometimes reuse ideas that were cut from games that didn’t come out.” 

Between games, a set of special moves is what keeps a character familiar. If you know how to pull off a character’s moves in an older game, the chances are high that you’d be able to jump straight back into playing with them in Street Fighter IV or Street Fighter V. Of course, there are exceptions – Chun-Li, for example, has had her Kikoken fireball changed from a charge motion (holding back, then forward) to a half-circular motion and back again. 

“I feel that the reception has been positive,” says Nakayama when asked about such changes. “We only make changes in order to bring the inputs in line with the character’s fighting style, or when two moves have similar inputs which can cause players to do the wrong move at critical moments.” One function that special moves perform particularly well is differentiating characters that are otherwise quite similar, such as the trio of Ryu, Ken and Akuma. 

“Each character has to have their own concept defined. Ryu has weight in each attack, and is very defensive. Ken is better at combo attacks and has a certain fl ashiness, so when he starts attacking he keeps going. And Akuma has the best parts of both but takes more technical mastery to use well,” Nakayama explains. “Based on these concepts, we separate out the abilities of their moves. Ken is a character where you want to rush your opponent, so he has lots of hits, and his fi sts brush up against the ground so friction causes them to go on fire – that kind of thinking is how we distinguish each character.” 

The natural culmination of the special move has been the rise of the Super and Ultra attacks. When introduced in Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Super moves were just more powerful variants of special moves. But in recent years, the gameplay function has remained the same while the graphical presentation has turned them into miniature cinematic attack sequences, with dynamic camera angles and detailed facial expressions making them into much more of a spectacle. 

“This trend started in Street Fighter III and was firmly established in Street Fighter IV,” says Nakayama. “I think they simply came from wanting to show powered-up versions of special moves in really creative and cinematic ways.” Land a couple of Supers and you’ll agree that they combine flash and function into something incredibly satisfying.

This article originally appeared in Retro Gamer magazine. For more great gaming coverage, you can subscribe to Retro Gamer here (opens in new tab).

The post “These characters are like my children”: Street Fighters community players, creators, and fans on what makes the series so special appeared first on Game News.

In this article, we’re going to explore some of the myths around game engines (and how complaints about ‘lazy developers’ are, well, lazy), why studios invest so much resource creating their own tools, and outline the most popular software tools in use today. “A game engine is a platform for your game to run on; to load the world, place you in it, and accommodate your stay,” explains CD Projekt Red’s tech team. “There are many kinds of engines. Depending on your game’s requirements, each one will differ in how much work it actually does. They render (display) the world, calculate physics, play sounds and more. Engines are all the code that is not specific to your game and can potentially be reused in a different title.”

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By having an engine that already has ways of handling things like rendering, physics, lighting and artificial intelligence straight out of the box, it makes creating character models and having them behave in a given way quickly achievable. Such game engines allow development teams to focus on actually making their games rather than having to essentially reinvent the wheel every time they wish to do so. It’s also one of the main reasons why new developers will opt for using engines that are readily available for free, such as Unity or the Unreal Engine. 

They’re also designed to have a modular nature so that it makes it possible to improve or adjust an engine’s functionality by employing additional software, referred to as ‘middleware’. This type of software is designed to deal with specific tasks – such as Audiokinetic’s audio engine, Wwise, or Nvidia’s PhysX engine, which handles physics – that the original engine might not be able to perform quite as well. There are even some software companies that will provide an engine’s entire source code so that more advanced developers can directly manipulate it to fit their needs. 

Why do developers build their own game engines?

But sometimes, despite all the availability and flexibility of these engines, developers will need to spend the extra time and money in designing their own, like CD Projekt Red did for their REDengine. “Each game engine is tailored for a specific experience,” explains the CD Projekt Red Tech team. “Our games focus on creative storytelling in a living and breathing world, so we required an engine and tools suited for these particular experiences. After careful consideration, we arrived at the conclusion that third-party software wouldn’t cut it. It would probably take longer to adjust a commercial engine to our needs than just make our own from scratch. So that’s what we did.” Having an engine specifically tailored to suit their games allows CDPR to have an unprecedented level of control over every aspect of development so that they could accomplish any goal they set. And having their designers in constant cooperation with the programmers meant they were able to adapt the engine to better suit their needs. 

However, as you can imagine, this isn’t a task for the faint-hearted. “Creating your own engine requires a lot of work and a dedicated team of professionals,” says CDPR. “A modern open-world engine is a big and complicated beast. Taming it requires a lot of knowledge and experience. Moreover, before the core of your engine is ready, gameplay systems cannot be built on top. So there’s a lot of pressure and little luxury to polish one small element of the engine for an extended period of time. Also, when we encounter an obstacle, we have no other option than to rely on ourselves and fix it. No outside support is possible, whereas for the commercially available engines out there it’s sometimes offered.” 

Even those that have any idea of what a game engine is tend to oversimplify their role, thinking they’re responsible for just one aspect of a game, like graphics
or performance. This results in many misconceptions. “I think the biggest misconception about game engines is that they are some sort of magical piece of software powered by the blood of unicorns that can make any game into a reality with just a few mouse clicks,” explains senior developer relations technical artist, Zak Parrish. “The truth is that there’s no ‘Make Game’ button in Unreal Engine and you will still have a lot of work to do to make your game into a playable experience. Making games is a profession for the passionate.” But the biggest misconception of all seems to be the belief that problems within a game, like performance, frame rate and crashing, are the fault of the game engine, when in fact this is almost never the case and is more likely a programming problem. 

How the Unreal engine was pivotal to Fortnite’s success

Possibly the most well known of all game engines is Epic Game’s Unreal Engine, which was used to develop the immensely popular Fortnite and was apparently pivotal to its success. “Fortnite has been a labour of love at Epic,” says Parrish. “We’ve worked on it for a long time to turn it into the game it is today. Every part of that process – every refactor, every overhaul of a major system, every outright replacement of a series of game mechanics – was only possible due to the flexibility afforded by Unreal Engine. 

“The result is a game that serves as a solid platform upon which we can continuously expand and build,” continues Parrish. “Every key aspect that is Fortnite: the robust and evolving Save the World experience, new game modes such as battle royale that didn’t exist at early access launch, the release of the game on every conceivable platform from high-end PC to console all the way to mobile devices, even the ability to keep new content rolling for players at a virtually constant pace, every part of that development process has been powered and streamlined by Unreal Engine.” 

Can game engines allow anyone to make a game?

There are now plenty of game engines available for free, some of which you’ll see on the next page in our rundown of some of the most popular developer software, so if you’re interested in venturing into the world of game development and creating your very own Fortnite, here’s some parting advice: “Don’t wait, don’t make excuses; just go make a game,” says Parrish. “Honestly, my first bit of advice for aspiring devs right now is to fully grasp that there has never been a better time to learn game development. If you’re new to the game dev world, you probably have no idea that you’re in a real golden age right now. You have so much technology and opportunity at your fingertips: free game engines like Unreal, free 3D apps, free 2D apps, tons of free training on how to do things… I look back at when I was first learning this stuff and I’m floored. 

“There’s really nothing stopping an aspiring developer right now from just making a game and shipping it,” Parrish continues. “Sure, if you’re by yourself you have to limit your scope a bit, but if you want shipping experience – the exact experience studios care about – you can build a game and launch it on just about any platform these days, all without much, or any, money out of your own pocket. And from tools to source code to tons of training content, Epic Games and Unreal Engine are behind you all the way. 

Which game engines powered the biggest games of 2018? We’ve got all the answers on the next page.

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What are video game engines and what do they do?

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The post What are video game engines and what do they do? appeared first on Game News.

“It’s been 10 years since the end of the first movie where the breach was closed, and there hasn’t been a peep out of the Precursors, the aliens on the other side of the breach, or the Kaiju,” confirms Uprising writer/director Steven S DeKnight. “Humanity has been preparing for another attack by rebuilding the Jaeger programme from the ground up as everybody believes that more than likely there will be another attack – it’s just nothing’s happened yet…” 

“The challenge is that the Precursors didn’t stop brainstorming, even though they were defeated in the first film,” adds John Boyega, the franchise’s new star. “They’ve come up with another way [to attack]. 

“Most people live and survive day-by-day with no thought of where the Kaiju come from or if they’re going to come back. The shadow of the past is still apparently there, but if you have enough money and opportunity, you have the chance to live away from that. So cities have been rebuilt, a system has come back. You find the world in a state of comfort. But of course that all changes…”

Monster mash

Change was also afoot behind the camera, where scheduling conflicts meant that Pacific Rim creator and director Guillermo del Toro opted to go off and direct awards darling The Shape of Water (opens in new tab) instead.

“I’m grateful purely from a fan point of view that he didn’t postpone The Shape Of Water,” DeKnight laughs, “because it’s such a gorgeous movie.”

That left the shot-calling vacancy that DeKnight subsequently filled. While Uprising marks his debut as a movie director, he has plenty of experience in TV, as a regular writer in the Whedonverse, and showrunner of both Spartacus and the brilliant first season of Daredevil. And of course, he had the producing del Toro on speed dial if he needed him.

“He’s just the sweetest guy in the world, and he was 110% supportive,” says DeKnight. “He told me early on, ‘Look, if you ever need me, call me. Otherwise take the movie, make it your own, I’m going to stay out of your hair.’ And he’s a man true to his word.”

DeKnight realised his follow-up required three key elements to work. Bringing back Jaegers and Kaiju was effectively a no-brainer, as was the “drift”, the psychological connection shared between two or more Jaeger co-pilots – essential because mental stress of driving one would be too much for a single brain to handle. 

“The other thing for me was really this whole concept of the world coming together, putting their differences aside, where it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter who your parents are,” DeKnight adds. “It just matters that we’re working together, that we’re stronger together. I think that in these turbulent times it’s a message that really resonates. 

“I approached it very much in breaking a story the way we do it in television,” he continues. “I put together a team of writers for two weeks, and I came into it knowing a basic layout. When I was first approached about doing this movie, I went back, I watched the first one, I listened to everything the executives had to say about what they were looking for in this next chapter and it fell together pretty quickly. The idea was always to take the first movie as a jumping-off point, and expand the mythology and the universe with the idea that if enough people show up for this one, we have a firm idea of what the next one will be.” 

Then, another of those pesky “scheduling conflicts” struck the film. Charlie Hunnam, who played lead Jaeger pilot Raleigh Becket in Pacific Rim, was all set to reprise the role. But within 48 hours of DeKnight finishing the script – before Hunnam had even had the chance to read it, in fact – the star was out, opting instead to make his own passion project, a remake of Papillon. 

While DeKnight says “the big stuff, the action was all working”, it meant a major retooling of the human side of the story. It was producer/Legendary Pictures exec Mary Parent who suggested focusing on the son of Stacker Pentecost, the brave (but late) commanding officer of the PPDC played by Idris Elba in the first movie. One minor problem: Pentecost Jr hadn’t even been mentioned before…

“What his father didn’t see in Jake, Stacker saw in Mako, so there was much more of emphasis on her and her journey through the PPDC. Jake and Mako always had a cool relationship but I think when Stacker had more vision and dreams for her future within the PPDC, Jake fell away. I think Jake interpreted that as Stacker not loving him enough.”

“I found that very intriguing and terrifying!” DeKnight recalls. “I had to figure out why he wasn’t in the first movie. But I loved the idea of that connection, so then the question became, ‘Who do you get to play the son of Idris Elba?’” 

The answer was a man with a fair bit of experience with big-budget sci-fi franchises featuring state-of-the-art hardware. “I love movies about larger-than-life tech, and I love movies that are fun,” says Boyega, the Star Wars (opens in new tab) actor hanging up his blaster for a moment to take the lead in Uprising. “When I watched the first Pacific Rim I was looking forward to a sequel, and hearing the ideas Steve had, and seeing the pictures, got me excited.” 

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The best upcoming movies (opens in new tab) of 2018

As for why we’re only learning about Jake Pentecost’s existence now… “He’s purposefully stayed away from the PPDC, and we find him in the movie just stealing Jaeger tech and being a crook, to be honest. Jake’s a bit of an arsehole, and he’s a bit egotistical, because he’s always been by himself and everything goes on his terms. The film’s about him learning how to get a bit of humility in him and learning how he can be the best he can be to lead others.”

It didn’t help that Stacker had such a strong relationship with his adopted daughter Mako – Rinko Kikuchi reprises her role in the sequel (where Mako’s now running the PPDC), as do Charlie Day and Burn Gorman as scientists Newton and Hermann. 

“What his father didn’t see in Jake, Stacker saw in Mako, so there was much more of emphasis on her and her journey through the PPDC. Jake and Mako always had a cool relationship but I think when Stacker had more vision and dreams for her future within the PPDC, Jake fell away. I think Jake interpreted that as Stacker not loving him enough.”

Robot wars 

When we put it to Boyega that it must be a big step up from the Star Wars ensemble to leading man duties on Pacific Rim, he’s magnanimous enough to admit it’s a group effort. “I definitely do feel a sense of being at the forefront of this project, but I’m not alone. As much as Jake is the character [we follow], I’m backed up by some really great performances. And there’s big robots in it, so you can’t take all the credit!”

And that hits the nail on the head, because – like Transformers – Pacific Rim: Uprising will live or die on the strength of its mecha. “I was heavily involved as a producer in many aspects of the film, and I was conscious of all the Jaegers,” Boyega explains. 

“Sometimes with robots you can’t tell which one is which, and in the craziness of the battle and visual effects, you always want the audience to have the information as to who’s fighting who. I think just making them look different as a starter was a great way to go. We said at the beginning of the process that each robot must have a special power or move that makes them specific.” 

“What we didn’t want to do was just present the same thing again,” adds DeKnight. “That’s the reason most of our action scenes take place during the day rather than at night. Guillermo del Toro did such an amazing job with the action in the night in the rain and underwater, it felt like if we went down that path again it would just be a pale imitation. With the Jaegers the design is so important, we sweated over every decision, because we wanted each one to be cool and unique.”

“With the Kaiju it’s the same idea. The Precursors have also had 10 years to reconsider, rethink and redesign their biological weapons, their Kaiju, so we wanted each one again to be very distinct with distinct abilities. They actually turned out to be harder than the Jaegers, because you see a lot of really out-there designs, and my comment was always, ‘It’s cool, but when I see it I don’t know what it is.’ 

I didn’t want the audience to have to try to figure out what it is. You want them to be unique but not too unique. But the team had some very interesting updated Kaiju that tip their hat to the first movie, but also push it forward.”

This feature originally appeared in GamesRadar+’s sister magazine SFX, issue 298. Pick up a copy now or subscribe (opens in new tab) so you never miss an issue. 

The post Ready to rumble – The cast and director of Pacific Rim: Uprising on making a monster-sized sequel appeared first on Game News.

Burnout Paradise was the first game I ever lovingly shoved into my first console’s disc slot. And in many ways, Burnout Paradise and I are actually very similar. We’re both handsome, challenging, possess bizarre tastes in music, occasionally crash, get very frustrating to interact with and are terrible in bed. Actually, I quite enjoy playing Burnout Paradise in bed. I guess we’re not very similar at all then.

Nevertheless! Taking the opportunity on the anniversary of its release, I couldn’t wait to drive back into Criterion’s open-world. It makes a delightful first impression, too, with the opening bars of Guns N’ Roses’ Paradise City welcoming you in, promising a racing game that prioritises high-speed fun and destructive action. I get behind the wheel, slam down the accelerator, marvel at how nice Paradise City still looks and hum happily along. The handling on the cars, the thrill of hitting the boost and satisfaction of crunching another vehicle off the road still feels wonderful.

But Guns N’ Roses is almost too perfect a band to open with. Because just like waiting two hours for a fat Axl Rose to bother getting on stage and hopefully play nothing from Chinese Democracy, the full Burnout Paradise experience can be disappointing. Burnouts 1–4 had great split-screen multiplayer – gone here. DJ Atomika, the nails on a chalkboard of video game narrators, never seems to shut up, and sometimes even pauses the game to talk over it. As if that isn’t sinful enough, Girlfriend by Avril Lavigne is on the soundtrack.

Other flaws are less immediately irritating, but eventually sour the overall experience. The titular city looks gorgeous during the day, but gets tough to navigate at night. It’s even worse whenever the weather turns misty. Suddenly a game all about preparing for corners and keeping an eye out for shortcuts is set in a city drowning in fog. This is presumably why Konami isn’t making Silent Hill Kart. (At time of writing.)

The city is full of opportunities to unlock new cars but there’s no quick select option or fast travel. You have to search the city yourself, ‘helped’ by a mini-map so cramped you’ll need a 50-inch TV and designated cartographer handy to get much out of it. This seems like a (semi) deliberate move to get you to learn the layout of the city. After all, having to drive repeatedly over its turf subtly trains you, reinforcing the best routes.

And it works! After an hour of ‘this-ain’t-as-good-as-I-remember-you’re-an-idiot-Tom-of-the-past’ grumbling, I feel old haunts and tactics bleeding back into my internal sat-nav. I start a stunt run, where you have to score thousands of points through ramp leaps, smashing billboards, drifts and barrel rolls. I struggle, until I remember to make a beeline for the bridge next to the Lone Stallion Ranch, which has three consecutive ramps and billboards begging for my car to be smashed through them.

I start a race to the Country Club and then ignore the suggested route in favour of one I’ve made up, because I knew it would get me there quicker if executed perfectly. (Burnout Paradise’s often frustrating lack of guidance sings in moments like these.) Later I start a race to the Crystal Summit observatory and remember to cancel all my plans for the afternoon because it takes about three bloody years to get there. It’s all worth it though, for the brilliant drifting opportunities. The racing, once the difficulty ramps up, still holds up today, even if some odd design decisions don’t.

But I can forgive inane narrators and misty streets when the game introduced so many ideas we take for granted now. An open-world driving game sounded ridiculous in 2008. Now it’s the standard. Playing online used to involve watching a menu screen until the race started. Criterion envisioned a model where joining an online game was all of three D-pad taps away. Suddenly you’re in the same spot but now there are up to seven other players zooming around to take you down, all without breaking the action.

Going online also makes every individual road of Paradise City a competition. Get the best time on a road and you’ll earn yourself a silver number plate. But ‘best times’ belong in more serious, boring driving games. The real mark of Burnout brilliance is getting the best ‘Showtime’. Squeezing both of the triggers simultaneously turns your car into essentially a sentient wrecking ball, one you can bounce along the road, destroying as many neighbouring vehicles as possible.

Each car you smash pours a few thousand more dollars onto your score and smashing a bus earns you a score multiplier. As someone who once had to take a bus to work, I wholeheartedly support Burnout Paradise’s message of contempt for the smelliest, least reliable, most crazy person-stuffed form of public transport. Each car you hit injects you with more boost and you keep smashing your way down the roads until you run out. Get good and you’ll be able to bounce your way across the entire city in no time.

Get the best time and showtime on a road and you’ll ‘rule’ it, until someone beats your scores. At first I try ruling as many roads as possible. It’s fun, but somewhat isolating for a multiplayer experience. Hundreds of completable challenges were more up my alley. These range from the straightforward (boost for more than 60 seconds!) to the silly (everyone barrel-roll over each other!). I enjoy ticking them off. But as a fan of this series since my first taste of Road Rage in Burnout 3, something felt odd. Was Burnout all about camaraderie and working together now?

Then, on the way to another challenge, one of the other players takes me down. The game suddenly informs me that this monster is now my new ‘rival’. Oh, it is on. The challenge is forgotten. All I care about is taking down Judas McTraitorchops (real Gamertag hidden to protect his identity), the scum who’d HUMILIATED me in front of the entire internet.

I bash through other, weaker cars, determined to right this injustice. I slam down the accelerator and the boost, refusing to let up until the body of my nemesis’ car is scrap. I even start rehearsing his eulogy and practising how I’d boot his vehicular corpse into one of those machines that turns cars into cubes. I’ve never hated someone more in my entire life. Not since some other rando had beaten me at Rocket League about 20 minutes earlier, anyway.

That’s Burnout Paradise at its best. It’s a great many positions away from perfect but its innovations were plundered by other developers to great effect. Driver: San Francisco would take the open-world racing game and give it a crazy plot, with the best script to ever feature in a driving game (that’s barely a compliment, so I’ll be more explicit – Driver: San Francisco is one of the best-written games I’ve ever played). Sometimes it just takes one magical mess of a game to bring innovation to a stale genre, laying the groundwork for other developers to build upon. If there’s one thing I learnt, it’s that the next innovative game is never too far away.

The original version of this article appeared in Xbox: The Official Magazine. For more great Xbox coverage, you can subscribe here (opens in new tab).

The post Ten years on, Burnout Paradise is an imperfect, but still thrilling and mega fun, open-world racer appeared first on Game News.

Thwack, thwack, thwack.

You round a corner and see a worker of the ship, banging his head on the steel wall. He’s bleeding, his skull is broken, and yet he carries on. It’s here you know that whatever’s got a hold of the USG Ishimura crew is unstoppable, insidious, and that Dead Space is going to be a really dark game.

Dead Space is one of the most highly-rated horror franchises of all time. That’s no mean feat when you’re sharing space with Resident Evil, Silent Hill and System Shock. Something about Dead Space resonated with players, however. It offered something different to the predictable, stock formula horror games were subscribing to by 2008 and drew in an absolutely incredible team of experts in every field to collaboratively make one of the strongest horror experiences gaming has ever seen.

The main draw of Dead Space was its combat: as previews started to go live, it was becoming clear this wasn’t playing by the usual rules. Press would go to preview events, see that industrial-gothic, sci-fi setting and try to play it like any other shooter – bodyshot, bodyshot, headshot – rinse and repeat. But something terrible happened to those early players, unprepared for Dead Space nifty twist, and the devs stood at the sidelines and grinned – their gamble had paid off.

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Dead Space relied on what the development team perfectly dubbed ‘tactical dismemberment’

Taking on one of the corpse-inhabiting, parasitic Necromorphs in Dead Space was quite unlike anything you’d have seen in a survival-horror game until that point. The enemies were so wholly different, so totally other, that your tried-and-tested techniques wouldn’t work. No, shooting a Necromorph in its warping, mutating head or chest would only aggravate it. In some cases, approaching your enemy in this way would accelerate the creature, bringing you to an even swifter death.

Dead Space relied on what the development team so perfectly dubbed ‘tactical dismemberment’. Game designer Glen Schofield (whose name you might recognise from his later ventures at Sledgehammer Studios, creating Call Of Duty games) stated during development that this was the “primary theme of Dead Space”. And you can tell – of the myriad different enemy types in the title, none of them feel repetitive to fight: taking off a limb from each enemy type has different effects.

Early on, the game teaches you that slicing off an opponent’s legs with your plasma cutter is the best tactic – it’ll slow them down and stunt their mobility. Later in the game more complex enemy types start to crawl out of Dead Space’s body horror-fuelled depths. You try the same thing again only to find the enemy is quicker, leaner, more agile. You find yourself on the business end of sharpened bits of its alien cartilage or bone or whatever awful thing it’s wielding as it barrels down the corridor to impale you and infest your warm, twitching body.

The Necromorphs were actually conceived relatively early in the game’s life, thanks to production designer Ben Wanat. Wanat wanted the alien enemies to feel relatable. The production team deeply believed that aliens in games often felt too ‘other’, away from humans, and that encountering them, therefore, lost any sense of real threat or weight.

By making the main enemies of the game come from humans they became repulsive, they became alarming, they became relatable

There’s a real sense of horror and pathos to the Necromorphs, though, and that came with this horrible foreshadowing, too: by making the main enemies of the game come from humans, by making them readable in that way, they became repulsive, they became alarming, they became relatable. They’re evocative in a way that some space bug just isn’t – if one of those things managed to get you, you could see what would become of you – as twisted and broken as the very ship you’re trying to save.

The setting of the game has also become remarkably iconic. The USG Ishimura managed to merge the gothic claustrophobia of traditional, almost medieval-inspired horror games with the grounded industrial sci-fi that gaming hadn’t really explored before. The design philosophy behind the USG Ishimura was both technical and artistic: EA had given Redwood Shores the freedom to heavily invest in ‘constantly alive lighting’ (something we were all very excited about last gen, and which has become almost a standard now).

Art director Ian Milham therefore opted for this gothic look – it turns out that ‘ribs’ in architecture really show off the shadows and lighting that the studio wanted, and with this in mind, Milham began to craft the masterpiece that is the Ishimura. The result was this gothic, rusted leviathan of a ship that sat dark and still in the orbit of a distant planet, silent and brooding, brimming with threat and malice. It was sci-fi that felt real and readable – far more grounded than some of the more ethereal space shooters out there.

It’s amazing to think Dead Space ran on the same engine as Redwood Shores’ engine from the Godfather game – the two couldn’t look more dissimilar. But turning up the contrast in the engine gave Dead Space its now-iconic visual flavour: dark, deep, and illuminated by scanning flashes of light that have the player inventing new terrors for themselves thanks to the uncertainty these flashes of light create. It’s a technique that’d later be used by Creative Assembly on Alien: Isolation (opens in new tab) to equally unsettling effect.

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The development team’s construction of the Ishimura went deeper than just making it visually imposing. If you play the game again, you’ll notice just how little room you’re given to manoeuvre when you’re exploring the bowels of the ship. This was intentional – the developers wanted you to really feel the pressure every time a new enemy was introduced, every time you were foolish enough to disturb one of their ‘nests’.

Unlike most horror games, where enemies are made ostensibly readable to prevent player frustration, Dead Space wanted to trick you. Milham has stated that he wanted players to see something and not know what kind of range it had straight away. It was this focus on what makes horror actually horrible over sticking to the tropes that made Dead Space feel so fresh.

Isaac Clarke – your surly, objective-driven protagonist – was another way Redwood Shores flew in the face of convention. He wasn’t some noisy, cocksure young lad hired as part of a counter-zombie unit or some nonsense like that, no, he was just an engineer. And the game really didn’t let you forget that.

Every weapon Clarke could equip wasn’t really built for combat – you equipped tools typically found in engineering garages, surgical chambers, workshop floors. It gave the feeling of rooting around for scrap a real, in-world feeling of authenticity: you weren’t just scavenging resources, you weren’t just collecting ammo in boxes in bedrooms for no reason… you were finding tools and weapons that fit the world. Thinking back on it, Dead Space was one of the most immersive games of the last generation, simply because the mechanics and fiction of its lonely universe worked so incredibly well together.

It also helps that the game’s UI was so unintrusive, too: Dead Space introduced the genius idea of giving you all the vital on-screen information you needed without resorting to a HUD. Your health was shown as a series of lights tracing your spine, your inventory was projected from a projector in your mask (in real-time, no less) and your objective marker could be seen by a light that emitted from your palm at the press of a button. No messy systems, no over-wrought menu design. It’s like the clean, easily navigable UI was designed to contrast directly the enemies you were fighting and the design of the Ishimura itself.

Dead Space was the first game from the studio that would go on to become Visceral Games. Previously, it had been a runner of EA’s licensed catalogue – James Bond, The Lord Of The Rings, Tiger Woods, The Godfather and more made up its portfolio until then. By the time the studio had managed to prove itself worthy of creating its own IP, it had already become masterful at game design from practically every angle, and that artisanal craft was shown off sublimely in Dead Space.

The series arguably peaked with its Dead Space 2 (opens in new tab) – it just perfected the experimental formula Dead Space set out – but unfortunately dipped with Dead Space 3 (opens in new tab). The games never lost their core focus, though: they always played around with the inherent darkness of man, always pushed industrial weaponry to its core, always gave you enemies that surprised and challenged you, no matter how many times you faced them.

None of this would have existed without Dead Space. The game came out of nowhere and was offered as a fantastic one-two punch from EA in the winter of 2008 along with Mirror’s Edge, almost making a statement for the publisher: “this is what we can do”, it proclaimed, “and this is what we can do with single-player games”. It set the precedent for one of the most well-rounded and satisfying generations in gaming, and as such Dead Space should be remembered as a game that celebrates how personal, how masterful, how terrifying a good horror game should be.

This article originally appeared in Xbox: The Official Magazine. For more great Xbox coverage, you can subscribe to OXM here (opens in new tab).

The post How Dead Spaces innovative ideas and design created one of the most innovative and distinctive horror games of recent times appeared first on Game News.

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However, we sat down with producer Yuji Korekado, a man who’s been with the game from the very beginning, to talk about this new chapter in the series.

“The story begins from the fall of Mother Base at the end of Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes (opens in new tab),” explains Yuji Korekado, “but from that point on, the plot is unrelated to the saga of the series.” As Mother Base collapses at the end of that game, a wormhole opens and sucks in debris, corpses and even a few unlucky soldiers that were still alive. Your character avoids this fate by clinging heroically onto some scaffolding but, six months later, you are sent through the wormhole by a mysterious organisation.

You land near a wrecked Mother Base in the middle of a desert, and discover a base camp set up next to your old home. Here, you will need to find food and water if you want to survive; a small number of animals can be found (and mercilessly slaughtered) here, including sheep, vultures and bears. As you explore the surrounding area you’ll also need to grab as many resources as you can to sure up your flimsy defences, because you aren’t alone in this world…

“We wanted to take what players enjoyed about [MGS] and come up with a new way to experience those elements”

Yuji Korekado on Survive

What would you like to say to the fans that responded negatively to Survive back when the game was first announced in 2016?

At the time, fans of the series and gamers in general seemed to take Metal Gear Survive to be a continuation of the Metal Gear series saga, so I regret that we caused that confusion. But after the title was announced at Gamescom in 2016, we gathered a group of hardcore gamers in Canada and did some focus- testing of a prototype of Metal Gear Survive. The results were really positive. We were actually taken aback by how well it was received by those players.

Are there any aspects of the game you are particularly proud of?
The game retains the stealth action that has made the series such a success and adds new gameplay elements – including survival. The result is a Metal Gear title unlike any before.

What do you think players will be most surprised by when they get their hands on Metal Gear Survive?

A core concept of Metal Gear Survive is being able to place Interceptor and Defense units wherever you like. This allows for all kinds of strategies, and I think utilising these while fighting alongside teammates is going to be unlike anything players have encountered before.

This is where the stealth elements of the series come into play. You’ll encounter ‘Wanderers’ as you traverse the area to find resources, and taking them out quietly is certainly the safest option. Creep up behind them, or deliver a swift arrow to their crystalline neck stump, and they’ll go down silently, but start beating on them with a baseball bat and they’ll call for assistance – not a situation you want to find yourself in.

“In addition to Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (opens in new tab)’s story, a lot of players enjoyed its systems and action elements as well,” says Mr Korekado. “We wanted to take what players enjoyed about its gameplay and come up with a new way to experience those elements. So Metal Gear Survive started as a project to adapt TPP’s gameplay.” The result is a combination of sneaking, action and base-building that feels like MGS5 crossed with Fortnite (opens in new tab)’s ‘Save The World’ mode.

The main game is made up of missions, such as placing a beacon to send a distress signal back through the wormhole, or finding specific resources to expand your crafting capabilities. First, though, you’ll need to find the resources needed to craft an oxygen tank, as a wall of poisonous mist surrounds your home base. Once you’ve got an oxygen tank you can travel into the mist and explore the world beyond it. Just stay on top of your oxygen level – when it hits 0% you’re as good as dead. Thankfully, a polite American lady will tell you when you’re dangerously low.

Beyond the wall of mist you’ll find new resources, tougher enemies, and you might even find the odd survivor. Bring these all back to your base (even enemies can be used as resources when they’re dead) and you can upgrade your home, your gear, or even build new weapons and tools… if you know the recipes. You can make up recipes yourself when it comes to cooking simply by combining obvious ingredients. When it comes to more powerful tools and weapons, however, you’ll need to learn the recipes as a reward in multiplayer.

Co-op is obviously a massive part of Survive, as demonstrated by the betas – jump into a game with up to three friends and you can explore the world as a foursome to tackle missions specially designed for more players. You may encounter stronger enemies or hordes that cannot be defeated alone in these cases, so working together will be essential to success.

Don’t worry about having to tailor loadouts for playing with friends, though – all the weapons and items in the game appear in single player and co-op. The two are designed to work in sync, so players can use materials gathered during the campaign and rewards earned in co-op to further develop base camp, reinforce weapons and items, and beat the hardest missions.

You’ll have plenty of toys to help you, too. Melee weapons will be your most common form of attack, at least early in the game, and the selection is huge, including pokey sticks, enormous hammers and giant blades. Each one has unique characteristics, so whether you choose a specific weapon for a job, or just stick with your favourite (a flaming baseball bat, say) will be up to you.

Of course, there are more traditional MGS weapons in there as well. You’ll be able to find or craft guns, but ammunition is limited. You can build complex defences later in the game, including large gun turrets, to defend your home base from attacks. And then there are the other tools from MGS5 that have made their way to this title, including a robot that looks very similar to D-Walker. That should come in handy during those multiplayer hordes, at least.

“In the past, as with Metal Gear Online, we tried to give the player a fresh experience that was based on the latest title released at that time,” says Korekado. “Metal Gear Survive makes use of the beloved game system and action gameplay, and adds survival elements and co-op to it, making a new and fun experience that we hope everyone will enjoy.” The team has clearly worked hard to bring as much over from MGS5 as they could, but will it be enough to convince fans of the series?

“Survive makes use of beloved gameplay, and adds survival elements and co-op to it, making a new and fun experience that we hope everyone will enjoy”

One big change comes in the form of wormholes that will randomly drop materials, items and even people from different times and places into your world. We know what you’re thinking – yes we did say people. Does this mean we might see some familiar faces appearing as we explore the world? We asked Mr Korekado, and his answer was just vague enough to give us some hope… “Some familiar faces from the series appear in the MGS5: GZ scene at the start of the game,” he said, “but they don’t play a role in the plot this time around.”

Hmm, maybe they won’t be involved in the main plotline, but could we see Snake, Silent or D-Dog (good boy!) dropping in through a wormhole? Only time will tell. What we do know is that these random drops will allow you to expand your base using items and materials that you might not normally find, so scouting them out and grabbing them when you see them will be vital. Vehicles will help you travel around the world more quickly to make that easier.

It’s not all about defence, though. Inside home base you can build all kinds of things, from workbenches to more homely choices. Kitchenette, anyone? A grid-like system allows you to manage how your areas are set up – yes, part of the game is all about building the perfect home. Metal Gear Solid meets The Sims? We didn’t see that one coming.

The crafting will also change the way you move around the game world, and interact with areas around you. You can place items anywhere you want, allowing you to build defences on the fly. Alternatively, you can craft larger objects like crates and place them near walls to help you reach higher areas that would otherwise be inaccessible. The point is to make you think differently about how you approach situations – it’s not all about sneaking this time.

The question now is whether that’s going to sit well with the longtime fans of the series. Will this spin-off bring new players to the series, or just alienate those that just want to play through the next chapter in Snake’s story? We don’t have long to wait to find out, and Mr Korekado’s fingers are crossed. “I really hope that players give Metal Gear Survive a try.”

This article originally appeared in Xbox: The Official Magazine. For more great Xbox coverage, you can subscribe to OXM here (opens in new tab).

The post Metal Gear Survives Yuji Korekado talks about “taking what players enjoyed” and creating a new MGS experience appeared first on Game News.

“I think it’s rewarding, that’s the whole point of it,” he says as we sit down to chat. “These things take so long and so much of our lives that I felt like it had to mean something to me. I had to feel like I was digging a little deeper into this character and this world.

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Everything you need to know about God of War (opens in new tab)

“For this one, it’s more like instead of babysitting it’s my own kid – meaning when I go home from work my worry never stops… at all. I am constantly thinking about this, because I think it’s such a big place for this franchise, this idea of saying, ‘Let’s take a really bold move.’ Right from the beginning I kind of had this direction I wanted to go in but trying to realise that I think every day the scale of it grows larger and larger to the point where you just can’t get your head or your hands around it.”

It’s certainly a larger game, in both ambition and team size. But Barlog is a different man from the one who hunkered down to make a Lethal Weapon/Gladiator mashup work back on PS2. In the time between God Of War releases Barlog has dabbled in film VFX and even spent time working with his idol George Miller on the Mad Max universe. It’s all fed back into how he approaches creating this new God Of War on PlayStation 4.

“I went to work with George Miller on game stuff, but to also learn every possible thing I could from somebody I admire so much. He was really very open and generous, and kind of invited me in on a lot of the steps on a lot of the projects he was working on at the time,” says Barlog.

At the time, Miller was working on the Happy Feet movies, but he was also working with Weta artists on the Avatar mocap stage. “He let me hang out and talk to them about their process,” says Barlog. “I got to work with Weta and got to dig in and learn how they approach problems. You know there was a little bit of the technical that I was able to absorb but mostly, for me, what I walked away with was this understanding of character development and drama that I did not have before working with him.

“We spent about two years in a conference room, we’d go out there for weeks at a time and we would just hang out in the conference room all day writing and attacking different problems and trying to work out this overall plan for the video game that would eventually tie in with other properties that he was working on.

“That was instrumental, as it was a childhood dream to be creating characters in the Mad Max universe with the guy who created Mad Max. But he surrounds himself with really smart people, with some incredibly gifted storytellers, and it honestly opened my eyes to how little I truly understood characterisation. I still feel like I’m still scratching the surface, but it definitely put me on a path to endeavouring to learn a lot more, and everything I did learn I try to bring back.”

A change of direction

There’s no better character to dig into than Kratos, and bringing this somewhat one-dimensional ball of balding rage up to date, to fit a culture now used to the introspection of The Last Of Us, demands all of Barlog’s learned Miller-isms.

“Kratos is kind of this interesting, I hope, sign of the times,” injects Barlog. “When we first came out with the games he was the antihero when there weren’t a lot of antiheroes around. It was kind of like that unbridled rage. Every time we did a playtest we always got this interesting feedback from people that had said, ‘You know, I’ve just had a bad day, I got in a fight with my boss or I just got a parking ticket, but I came to this playtest and it felt good to let it all out and dice up monsters with these really cool blades’.

“So that at the time he was this conduit for people to let out this rage, and it was fresh and it was new, like they didn’t say they were angry characters out of the game world but this one was definitely, unflinchingly angry. He just sort of dove into it, and leaned into it with all of his might. And through the iterations I think we failed to grow with the audience and the world, because Kratos was known.”

Barlog describes a development spiral where the more an audience wants something, the more the creative minds behind the game go out of their way to deliver it. As the budgets get bigger and the games become more ambitious, being able to double down on ideas that work is the easy route to take.

“Eventually you get to a point where I think people are ready for a change, they just don’t know how that change is going to manifest,” says Barlog, as he brings us up to date with PS4’s God Of War. “I think Kratos’ change, his evolution, is not a wholehearted, ‘Oh this isn’t Kratos any more’, a lot of people’s reactions are, ‘This is not my Kratos, this is not Kratos, he’s totally different’, but I guess I challenge that with the idea most of these people are not the same as they were when they were 15 or 16 years old. Think about the views you had of the world when you were that age, and think about how those views have changed through time, and magnify that by a thousand to have Kratos’ journey as a god who’s never going to die.

“He’s a guy who’s done some horrible things in his past and he’s had an infinite amount of time to cope with that, and for me he is kind of in recovery, if you will, he’s accepting this rage he has is never going to go away so he has to figure out how to control it. And that external source, that motivation of, ‘I want to make tomorrow better because I want to show this kid that there is a better way’, that doesn’t mean he’s going to go out and ride the horse and valiantly save the kingdom or anything like that, it just means that every day is a struggle and a war with tiny victories that to the outside observer may not mean anything, but to the person struggling with the problem it means a great deal.

“I think his evolution is, to me, the most interesting part of all this. Instead of just starting fresh with a new character I have this character who has eight games of backstory and you get to see how he will evolve and change, and as ridiculous as it sounds it’s almost hopeful to people that change is possible, but it takes so much work and perhaps it doesn’t look as if you’ve made a course correction, but when charted over time a tiny correction can manifest as a massive downturn.”

Son of war

We now know that big change was to give Kratos a son, and make their relationship and the theme of divided families a pivot on which to balance the new game. The idea grew from a short story Barlog had written. It was simple and effective: Kratos and his son go hunting. But teaming them up has meant marked changes to how we’ll play God Of War. For starters, there are no more Quick Time Events (QTEs).

“Without the son I would still want to move away from QTEs. I think some people are nostalgic for that, but for me I feel like there’s just so much more we can do, so many other ways we can endear. But definitely Atreus is a way for us to create a connection to a character that is always present,” says Barlog.

In game this means the pair can combine to devastating effect. Press the face buttons, such as Square, and Atreus will perform an attack, such as firing an arrow or leaping onto an enemy’s back, while Kratos lands an axe hit. We get the emotional connection of a QTE but with greater freedom.

Barlog explains: “I think the thing that is always so fascinating about games is this idea that you kind of hand over this tremendous amount of power and tools to a player and kind of let them do what they want, that instead of saying you have to hit this button and then this button and that button to achieve what we’re trying to show you, we’re sort of just saying, ‘Here’s 20 different things you can do, and you can mix and match them in any order you want,’ so that each time you approach a situation you’re kind of creating the outcome, or at least the flow towards the outcome.”

Thank FIFA for the combat 

Barlog goes on to compare the combat to FIFA. “It’s the same game every time you play but it’s extremely sort of non-deterministic. Every game is different, despite every game being the same; there’s this drama that exists in every single match, even when you’re playing the same teams. There’s a magic to videogames encapsulated in the idea that I don’t ever want to lose even if I am making something that’s trying to tell a story, and we develop these characters to allow you to feel like there’s freedom here, and that is the joy of games.”

When it comes to how we’ll relate to the pair, Barlog points to cinema’s ability to imbue gestures with meaning – how a subtle glance can reveal a missed opportunity. Barlog sees Atreus in a similar vein; he’ll react to your behaviour, and how you treat him in return can affect the game in real ways.

“As you move through the game you make choices about what you, or Kratos, wants for Atreus, about how you’re going to develop each of these characters,” says Barlog, explaining: “When you really extrapolate, it’s like this is about sort of putting outfits and loadouts on characters, but when you divorce it from that, and you’re in the moment, you start to realise it’s very similar to that moment in Mad Max when he’s got the can of dog food and he’s determining whether he’s going to eat all of it and get the energy, or if he’s going to give some of it to the dog, and he’s going to do that because he wants to be able to sleep, and if he has the dog and he’s well fed he can sleep and the dog will warn him if danger approaches. It’s kind of like, you know, it’s sort of, again, like parenting. This idea of making choices for yourself and making choices for your kid, how you’re going to sort of load balance.”

Meet Brokk and Sindri 

Barlog also reveals Atreus won’t be the only regular character to influence how you play the game, and how Kratos behaves. The dwarven duo Brokk and Sindri are along for the ride and play a crucial role in the game.

In Norse myth, Brokk and Sindri forged both Thor’s hammer and a gold ring that replicates itself, and they are the ones who made the Leviathan axe and the shield Kratos wields in combat.

“They are interesting because we wanted to introduce a new way of developing the character [Kratos], and the whole idea of the orbs and just going into the menu any time you wanted for an upgrade path was something we wanted to leave behind,” explains Barlog. “So we looked at a way to contextualise it more in the world. A challenge I thought would be fun would be to have these two characters, who also actually have their own story arc, who are there to help you upgrade as well as develop your combat perspective [new moves and specials] for the two main characters, but then also that they themselves tie into the overarching theme. That these two characters basically are in a feud, a family feud, that neither of them has talked to each other in 50 years and they just complain about each other and blame each other for the loss of their ‘talent’ and their abilities.

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Here’s how to play God of War early (in official text adventure form) (opens in new tab)

“As you go through the game, as you interact with them, you will discover more of the story and more of the different layers, and through the interactions between them you are able to fully understand and actually help change the arc for each of these characters.

Menus at work 

The use of the dwarves as an upgrade tool, and the introduction of Atreus as a moral compass and combo string, point to a game in which context is king. Barlog wants us to be immersed in these Nordic realms, where the act of upgrading an axe is done contextually inside the game world and not in a menu system. To an extent, the idea was inspired by something very simple: the old God Of War menu screens.

“The thing I really liked about the early God Of War games was the idea that from the menu screen it felt like you went right into the game,” explains Barlog. “You’d hit Start and the camera would zoom out and it was like you were already in the game, and I wanted to take that as far as we possibly could – this idea that once you hit Start on the menu screen you never look away, you’re constantly with Kratos, you are on this journey that you have a more personal stake in than ever before.”

It’s meant we get the new, close-in camera system and a sparse UI. But it wasn’t easy getting to this point. The closer, third-person camera introduced new problems, but also some unique benefits, which was a steep learning curve.

“Even now we just got through a playtest that taught us a tremendous amount about the player’s awareness in the world, about how they orientate themselves, how they are actually navigating and determining where they want to go and where they are. I think that’s something that, no matter how many games you make, you are constantly adjusting because it is very, very nuanced.”

A whole new world 

It naturally affects how the designers create the game’s levels, and in fact God Of War has gone through many iterations, including one version that avoided cutscenes altogether. “Many years ago we had what we called our first playable, and we had the aspirations of making everything completely freeform,” remembers Barlog. “I had started out with this idea of no camera cuts, that was something I was going to stand pretty firm on, but I started thinking I want to tell a story in a non-stopping method, so you would always be in motion, you would always have total control, so a little bit like what Half-Life had done, where they would lock you in a room but you still have total control. But as we developed further on that one we decided we still wanted to direct them [the player] a little bit.

“We want to create this single seamless experience, but we don’t want to have so much freedom that they end up missing the point. It had all of these great little details and secrets in it, and if they are paying attention they’ll find those, and they helped us to home in a little bit closer.”

Barlog also drew on his knowledge of past God Of War games, combining camera systems, pointing players to key areas of the level and guiding their hand. But these didn’t always work, as the power of PS4 meant the new, highly detailed levels confused players during testing… because there was more to look at.

“At any given moment the player could look wherever they wanted, and we knew we needed to account for that and speak to them as to what is important, what is fun to look at, and what is not important but guiding you towards the main goal. That was a very interesting ride, because we wanted to keep that balance of the investigation and discovery of the world along with the puzzling cerebral elements, and the combat, and the story. It’s very fun and very difficult.”

You’ll notice Barlog dropped the p-word there, and puzzles are back in PS4’s God Of War. But like much of the game they’re being treated contextually. There will be a reason for puzzles, and uniquely Atreus – and how you treat him – will affect how puzzles are solved.

“Any game makers really struggle with context, because context works to a certain degree before you kind of look at it and go, ‘Okay, ancient civilisations, why did they create all of these challenges?’ unless you say, ‘everything is all about challenges’. But I think the context of the world and grounding it all in a sense of reality is always important, and I think with this game reading the old Norse language is quite important.

“Atreus is the only one who can read the local language, and throughout the game he learns to read in many of the realm’s languages. He’s kind of the conduit for Kratos and the player into this world, so he is sometimes the one who has a little bit more power in some situations [those puzzles] and a bit more knowledge about what other characters are saying.”

Barlog acknowledges that past games in the series had puzzles that felt pad-crushingly hard, sudden difficulty spikes that sent many DualShocks to their doom.

Brains over brawn

“For some people these two puzzles are hard, and for another these other puzzles are hard; so I think it’s this balancing act of like, ‘We want to give people the right sort of guidance’, and occasionally we want some people to be stumped, but very rarely do we want them to get frustrated to the point where they’re going to throw the controller down – you never want them to get to that point. There’s a sense of accomplishment [to puzzles], because I think if you were just always hitting things you’d sort of get bored – I thought the cool mixture of God Of War was the idea that you were thinking as much as tense and sweaty palms, you were trying to win the fight.

“Puzzles are always a difficult thing, I don’t think I’ve played any games where the puzzles are perfectly contextualised, unless the entire game is a puzzle game built upon that concept.”

With so much change happening to a familiar and beloved series, it’s no surprise to learn that Barlog has had to fight for the right to make God Of War his way. He does so from a position of experience, confident his version of Kratos is the right fit for what we expect from PlayStation 4 – subtle, real, and reflective.

“There’s still always that sense that at the end of the day you have to make the decision whether you’re right or wrong,” admits a stoic Barlog, who says he had people pulling him aside at E3 2016 saying: “This is not God Of War, this is going to fall flat, this is really bad”. They had doubts over the tone, many didn’t like Atreus shooting Kratos with an arrow, others felt it should have ended on a giant boss. “Just a lot of people were very doubtful of what we were going to do,” he reflects.

Barlog admits he doubted himself in 2016 as people lined up to criticise, but he used the moment to steer people towards his vision, saying to his detractors: “Look, I believe in this and if it falls flat, it falls flat, I’m just going to be fully leaping off the cliff”.

Demolicious

Of course, in hindsight Barlog was proved right. The 2016 demo was a success, everyone clamoured for this new, mature Kratos. “It’s not like I begrudge them for having that fear because they are very worried that no-one’s going to get this and everyone is going to think that this was just ill-advised,” considers Barlog. “But I think that [2016 demo] bolstered everybody and ignited their spirit and enthusiasm.”

Healthy criticism is a good thing, and, in fact, Barlog has drafted in people he trusts who worked on the original God Of War to advise, and when needed, chastise him. “I just needed people to give me the straight information, but even then they’ll say, ‘You’re dumb, why are you doing this?’ I ignore them because perhaps I am dumb, because you’ve got to go with your gut.”

To an extent it all comes full circle for Barlog, hiring old hands to steer the good ship Kratos, and even tapping into memories of George Miller for support in the hard times for guidance.

“If something evokes a strong emotional reaction in me, I need to push myself in that direction,” says Barlog, adding: “I learned a lot of that from George, and I feel like there are a lot of situations he was probably in, that I even witnessed while I was there, that somebody was like ‘what are you doing?’ and he was like, ‘Trust me, I believe in this’.

“In the end, I think, more often than not it pays off, but that doesn’t mean you succeed every time.”

But Barlog is a man who can’t help himself. To all those critics who felt the 2016 demo needed to end on a bang with a boss fight, Barlog delivered for them earlier this summer. The 2017 E3 demo came to a jaw-dropping climax as the massive World Serpent broke the surface.

“I watched some reaction videos and a lot of people had the reaction I was hoping for, which was like: ‘Oh my god, that’s such an amazing boss and… oh wait, that guy’s going to help you… what?’ What I find fascinating about all of this is really not just playing to what’s expected, but to always give everybody something to think about while they’re walking away.”

This article originally appeared in Official PlayStation Magazine. For more great PlayStation coverage, you can subscribe here (opens in new tab).

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We sat down to chat with Jerk Gustafsson, executive producer at MachineGames, about how far it’s come from the first game and the challenges that emerge when developing a highly anticipated, blockbuster game. They might make it look easy, but there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make sure the game turns out great when it reaches players’ hands.

OXM: How does it feel now that the game is in people’s hands?

Jerk Gustafsson: It’s a bit scary of course – it always is, when you have been working on something for a few years. You have invested a lot of time in it, so you’re always nervous about it. But I really do feel that we have a very strong and a very good game.

OXM: What kind of reaction did you think you’d get?

JG: Over our entire careers, ever since Enclave and Riddick and all those games, we have focused a lot on the narrative and also the first-person experience, and I think that in particular will be what people highlight now as well. The storytelling, of course, that is a big, big issue and the other thing is the shooting aspect – the way it feels when you move around with a weapon in your hand. I think we have made a lot of great improvements to that since our previous game and within that field, so I at least hope they will be the talking points.

OXM: What is it that makes it feel significantly different to the first one?

JG: I think the big step for us is to use the full body for the player. For The New Order – and what many games do – is have a floating model that you play with. But for this game, we moved over to a full body, similar to what we had in the Riddick games, so you’re always physically present in the world, which I feel makes it a lot more fluent and seamless. When you are going to perform certain tasks, certain actions, whether you fall down, you climb a ladder, whatever it is, it’s always the full body that is part of the experience. So it feels a little bit more integrated and seamless, and I think that’s a big step for us.

On the gameplay side that’s more noticeable too – we allow players now to dual-wield different weapons in each hand. In the previous game we’d only allow weapons of a similar type, but as an example, now you can sneak around with a silenced handgun in one hand and a fully auto shotgun in the other. So for those type of things, we have put a lot of focus on it to make sure that selection and movement with those two weapons are fluid.

OXM: Is there anything that didn’t quite make it into the game because you were forced to tone it down?

JG: Not really. I mean it’s always been somewhat controversial since we are fighting against the Nazis, but we really haven’t… The storytelling and the way we are writing stories, that doesn’t differ in any way from what we did with The New Order. People seemed to really like the story, so we have turned it up a little bit, I think it is a little bit more crazy and maybe a little bit more controversial but in that way we give ourselves freedom in how we tell the story. And of course, the entire story’s about going back to the home country, back to the United States and liberating it, like you say, from the Nazis, so of course that contributes as well to the controversy.

OXM: How did you go about getting that balance between fantasy and history to make it feel real?

JG: The main reason that we took it in this direction with alternative history is that it would give us a little bit more freedom in terms of storytelling, but also in terms of what type of gameplay elements we added. We could be a little bit more free when it comes to using sci-fi and enemies and weapons, and introducing robots as an example. For us that was the main reason for moving over to the alternative history – to give us a little bit more freedom in what we could do in terms of technology and those types of elements.

OXM: The series is known for being quite OTT. How did you go about topping the previous one?

JG: We haven’t really held back anything, so in terms of storytelling we’ve been pushing it in a way that we feel really dials it up.

OXM: What have been your greatest challenges making this game?

JG: When you develop games nowadays, the time it takes… the development periods are so long, so we are very careful that when we lay the foundations, we stick to them. But you always have to be flexible – over two-and-a-half to three years, a lot of things change, not only on the technical side but also in a lot of other respects. New people are coming in, some people may leave – there’s always those types of challenges, there’s so many things that change when you’re in development.

And since we are using an updated version of id Tech 6 we have encountered a lot of challenges in terms of tech in general; the new animation pipeline and the new script system. All of those things have been providing lots of extra challenges, but also fun challenges because they allow us to make the game that we really want to make, and make sure that we can meet our ambitions from where we start.

OXM: What’s your proudest moment?

JG: I think that usually is at the end. Also, [I’m really proud of] the team we have, since we have a core group that we have been working with for so long. We have always been good at making sure things get together in the end, and we’ve seen a lot of progress here in the last month.

And when you see all of that coming together, even though it’s a hectic and stressful period with a lot of work, it’s also the most fun and rewarding time, because when you see all these things coming together, you feel great. You get that extra motivation and that extra push to finish the game, and of course you’re also very proud not only of the work you have done and the product that has come together, but also you become very proud of the team and all the effort that the team puts into it. Yeah – this one especially has been extremely rewarding.

OXM: Now that the game is out, what’s your next move? Is it time for a little break?

JG: I think when you put the pen down on something, then at that moment you’re at your most eager to get started on something new, because you have so many new ideas and new things you want to do. Of course, people will have some rest and the team will have well-deserved time off, but we are also eager to get started on something new and continue to work on this Wolfenstein IP that we have come to love so much. Then what we’re doing now is some DLC work.

OXM: What are your plans for the rest of the Wolfenstein series? How far along is Wolfenstein 3?

JG: Even from the very beginning – when we set out to start work on The New Order – we had always planned this as a trilogy, and this is the second game. Whatever happens in the future we will have to see; it depends on how well the game does – but we have always planned for a trilogy and we as a team would love to continue to work with Wolfenstein. Still, you never know what will happen.

OXM: So we guess the third game is already in some form of planning stage?

JG: No – we have focused on this game and there are always ideas you have floating around and there are things that you want to do but nothing really concrete. The focus has been this, and now we are focused on the Xbox One X (opens in new tab) release as well, and then we will go onto some DLC stuff from there, and then we’ll see.

OXM: How have you found working with the Xbox One X?

JG: It’s a super powerful machine and the game runs really, really well – it looks fantastic on the Xbox One X. The focus has been to make sure that we can present the game in the best possible way and use the console and the power that the new console provides. And of course, everything from lighting and graphics overall – in terms of visual quality it will be a lot closer to the high-end PCs than the regular consoles.

OXM: Do you think the Xbox One X will change the gaming industry?

JG: Yeah – I hope so at least. If you have the possibility to develop and deliver games that run in 4K resolution and look that fantastic, of course you want to take that opportunity. It will set a new standard for games moving forward.

This article originally appeared in Xbox: The Official Magazine. For more great Xbox coverage, you can subscribe here (opens in new tab).

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I was destined never to like it, of course. There’s something in my brain that flips an irreversible ‘I hate it’ switch whenever people effuse about the Next Big Thing, because I’m a broken, pathetic man. Nevertheless I did play it in situ, and my thoughts at the time could be summarised as follows: Jonathan Blow is cleverer than me, and he’s reminding me of it with each of these dastardly little puzzles. I don’t like this so I’m going to give up.

But time matures the human condition, and almost a decade after it first bewitched the gaming masses, I thought it might be nice to travel back in time, if you will, to Braid. Hungry for humble pie, ready to admit that my contrarian hard-wiring got in the way of my enjoying an obvious classic. My thoughts upon returning to Braid? Balls. Jonathan Blow is still cleverer than me.

Braid is still a fundamentally challenging game, and I can respect both the intention and the experience of that challenge. It’s difficult by its very nature, because its time-moulding mechanics are intended to deconstruct game design and smash preconceptions, like a watercolour-painted punk rock song about the Mario establishment. That’s how Blow characterised it at the time, actually: a challenge to the status quo.

That’s intrinsically interesting. Sometimes you have to see the status quo challenged in order to really see what it was in the first place, so Blow’s endeavour is a worthy one. And on a level, there’s a perverse enjoyment in pushing and pulling the same kind of pattern-led platform game enemies this way and that with the flow of time, subverting their behaviour for your own advantage. It’s a bit like bringing the console commands up, only more enjoyable. And as mechanics and narrative progress, in admirable harmony, Braid reveals further subversions of the norm: the role of the protagonist, the damsel in distress, and player agency.

But I’m meeting Blow more than halfway there. With all the will in the world, it’d be very hard to argue that the side-scrolling foes and ‘The Princess is in another castle’ damsel-saving actually represented the status quo in 2008, whether you’re talking about gameplay systems or narratives. If Braid had been released in 1992 it’d be a different matter, but this was a post-Gravity Gun age in which Half-Life 2’s devs had empowered us to subvert the shooter norm and use enemies, alive or dead, as ammunition against their colleagues. Post-“would you kindly” too, with Bioshock having thoroughly deconstructed player agency in its narrative the previous year. The biggest games in 2008 were Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, GTA 4 et al – does Braid really have anything to say about those titles?

I digress. What stands out now in 2017 more than any high-mindedness is how well the art direction and the nuts and bolts of movement and interaction have aged. It’s in that way, with the surrounding hype now long quietened, that Braid is really enjoyable. Tim the time-traveller is still visually distinct, iconic even, and nothing in the intervening years has managed to outdo Braid’s own painterly vision of platforming. Above all, what stands out is the clarity of one creator’s vision, and how uncompromisingly they pursued it. Can’t knock that.

This article originally appeared in Xbox: The Official Magazine. For more great Xbox coverage, you can subscribe here (opens in new tab).

The post Why Braid, the indie poster boy’s magnum opus, doesn’t Blow us away nearly a decade later appeared first on Game News.

1. Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone

While the West fears robots going Skynet, Japan embraces them in all walks of life, from services to entertainment – even pop stardom. How else to explain the success of virtual idol Hatsune Miku? And you can experience the best of her world in this package of vocaloid rhythm heaven.

2. Final Fantasy 15

It looks like a road trip through Americana, but at heart this is still a Japanese RPG: favouring teamwork through party-based combat, check. Impossibly spiky hair, check. Inappropriately dressed female mechanic, check. The standout feature is dinner time, when Ignus demonstrates the Japanese art of food presentation. Itadakimasu indeed!

3. Okami

It plays like a masterpiece as much as it looks like one, the traditional Japanese art visuals not aging a day. You’re the sun goddess Amaterasu in wolf form, but your sidekick is a thumb-sized wiseguy who treats you as a ‘furball’ while ogling all the ‘stacked’ female spirits, and the legendary hero Susano is a drunk. A bawdy good time through Shinto mythology.

Read more: Okami is now re-released for PS4, Xbox One, and PC – here’s why you should get it this time (opens in new tab)

4. Persona 5

Living the Japanese life is one of Persona’s greatest draws, especially now you can hang out in Tokyo. Explore busy Shibuya, the seedier sides of Shinjuku or play your Confidant cards right for some romance at Odaiba. Even in class, you can swot up on Japanese trivia, including just why the shape of Morgana’s head is so flippin’ cute.

5. Nioh

You may be a gaijin in this story, but you still get to tour both Japan’s mythology and its bloody Sengoku period, rubbing butting heads with historical figures like Hattori Hanzo and the ruthless Oda Nobunaga. While many demonic yokai are out to kill you, there are still friendly faces in the form of kodama to lighten the gruelling challenge.

6. Parappa The Rapper

It’s generalising to say that the Japanese prefer following instructions, but it’s good to be a follower when you’re Parappa. It’s hip-hop given a sunnyside twist as you button-rap your way through an onion dojo to the front of the toilet queue. If only life were as easy.

Read more: The 25 best PS4 games (opens in new tab)

7. Dragon Quest Builders

You could call it the Japanisation of Minecraft – take all the open creative elements from Mojang’s game and add a proper story and quest-based structure. Being based on one of Japan’s most successful RPG franchises of all time also helps.

8. Undertale

Okay, Toby Fox is American, but his indie masterpiece is a beautiful distillation of classic Japanese games, from 16-bit JRPGs to dating sims to bullet-hell, not to mention that distinct community and collective spirit that you build along the way with the Underworld’s denizens. And the brilliant PlayStation version even has a Japanese localisation!

9. Yakuza 0

Forget the convoluted crime soap and instead experience the ultimate Japan simulator: belt out karaoke tunes, pig out on a wide range of cuisine, and work your charms on a club hostess.

Read more: Scared to start the brilliant Yakuza 0? Here are 10 tips to make it easy (opens in new tab)

This article originally appeared in Official PlayStation Magazine. For more great PlayStation coverage, you can subscribe here (opens in new tab).

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