Middle-Earth: Shadow of War

Talion sprints towards the walls of Seregost Castle, undaunted by the glittering volley of flaming arrows streaking towards him and his loyal Uruk army. Nearby, a deluge of crude orcish artillery lands, exploding into a fireball that blooms and dissipates, leaving only a shower of wet earth and green bodies tumbling in its wake.

Talion charges on. This haggard ranger of Gondor is technically a dead man – given life only by the elven wraith Celebrimbor that resides within his undying frame – but he is feared and despised by Sauron’s forces nonetheless, who trade foul stories of the Gravewalker’s unnatural abilities and martial might.

During his first tour of duty, Talion spent most of his time engaged in a scrappy guerrilla war, shanking the odd captain here and beheading the occasional warlord there. But this time, Talion’s mounting a siege on Sauron’s fortresses across Mordor and beyond – and he’s building an army to dismantle the Dark Lord’s forces.

Born To Be Wild

Breath Of The Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi tells us how Link embraced the open world

Under ordinary circumstances, Hidemaro Fujibayashi could be considered something of an industry veteran. He has, after all, been making games since 1995, when he joined Capcom – and he’s been a level designer, after a fashion, for even longer, having previously been responsible for planning the layouts of haunted houses for theme parks in Japan. Indeed, his ties to The Legend Of Zelda alone stretch back 16 years, to the two Oracle games for Game Boy Color.

Rime

The light at the and of the tunnel. After years in the shadows, Rime finally reveals its true nature.

“When you are responsible for other people – for the wellbeing of their families – sometimes you can get a lot of vertigo. But the sooner you get used to the feeling of always falling the better, because in life you often find yourself falling forever.”

Tequila Works’ CEO Raúl Rubio knows that the development of Rime is like no other. For the better part of four years, his studio has been home to one of the most anticipated independent adventure games of recent memory. But for the longest time it has also existed only on the periphery, as a project that found itself plunged into darkness as quickly as it was pushed into the light.

Heavy Metal

GUERRILLA GAMES IS ABOUT TO EMBARK ON ITS RISKIEST PROJECT EVER. THIS IS HORIZON: ZERO DAWN, THE MOST AMBITIOUS PS4 GAME YET

There’s a small herd of deer grazing in a field. It is a quiet field, enclosed by towering trees and bronze autumn leaves that gingerly fall from their branches, floating carelessly in the wind. This enclosure ensures the docile creatures have just enough cover to let them stand idly by as a breeze rustles softly through the undergrowth, they are blind to the hostility of the world around them. Like clockwork they come here, the herd, simply content to brush through the lush green foliage undeterred, occasionally peeking their antlers towards the Dreamcast-blue sky that stirs above them; mountain ranges and wooden huts can be seen sat atop a distant horizon. But somewhere closer is a predator; the fleeting glimpse of a fiery red mane cutting through the grass is the only hint that this serenity is about to be shattered. It’s a natural, idyllic scene that you’d likely find broadcast in 4K on a new season of Planet Earth, narrated by the docile tones of David Attenborough. But reality this is not, for something far stranger than nature lurks in plain sight.

Watch This Space

Your destination: the Andromeda galaxy.

Your mission: find humanity a new home.

Welcome to Mass Effect: Andromeda. Bring guns.

Talk about a big bang. When word spread that Mass Effect’s long-awaited fourth instalment was to be set in a new corner of the universe, within a different stretch of time, light years removed from the scores of characters we’ve come to know and love, it sounded as though Bioware was boldly going, well, a bit too far. But the more we learn about Mass Effect: Andromeda, the more certain we are it’s blasting off in the smartest possible direction. Much like its heroes, the Ryders.

Steam Alternatives

Steam is the biggest digital storefront for games, but it's not the only option. We look at the alternatives

Valve is undoubtedly the major proponent of digital game delivery for PC and certainly the most successful. Its Steam platform was the first digital gaming distribution services, starting out life with the launch of Half-Life 2 in 2003. Over the last decade or so it's been around, Steam has revolutionised PC gaming and has had a huge impact on gaming as a whole, giving users an easier and more convenient way to grab their games. As it matured as a service. Steam began to offer more and more content and expanded into other areas, embracing more than just mainstream games.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

Chloe and Nadine are doing it for themselves in this story expansion

Seeing an Uncharted game without Nathan Drake at the helm is like witnessing a Call Of Duty game without guns. It shouldn’t feel right. After all, his rakish style is a big part of what makes the whole series work. Turns out it might not be essential to it, though, as after the reveal of this long-gestating expansion, any doubts we have over his absence disappear faster than Rafe Adler’s inheritance funds.

Little Nightmares

After eight years working on LittleBigPlanet, Tarsier is exchanging dreams for nightmares

Tarsier’s brightly coloured, playfully decorated premises are exactly what you’d expect the home of a studio that’s spent the past eight years working closely with Media Molecule, on its LittleBigPlanet series, to look like. A hotchpotch of lampshades and rugs, a familial collection of framed photos of the team, and a range of stately looking furniture – we’re given the rundown of which chairs are the most comfy during our tour – make the space feel welcoming and homely. There’s fresh fruit in the kitchen, naturally, and not a single employee appears to be wearing shoes. Underneath this small company’s friendly exterior, however, something darker has been fermenting, waiting for an opportunity to bubble to the surface.

Vampyr

Dontnod’s first open-world game is more Dishonored than Dracula

Among the things we disliked about our first glimpse of Vampyr, Dontnod’s tale of occult predation in wartime London, was its combat – a graceless third-person mishmash of three-hit combos and pistol exchanges, peppered with crowdcontrol spells and teleport dashes. It was a shaky advert for a developer now wandering back into action-adventure territory after the success of episodic adventure Life Is Strange, but the addition of Teppei Takehana to Dontnod’s ranks goes some way towards addressing our misgivings. Hired as animation director in June 2016, he brings ten years of experience as an animator at Kojima Productions and Quantic Dream, whose games tread a similar line between motioncaptured plausibility and outright fantasy. While Dontnod doesn’t have any new combat footage to show during our visit to the studio’s Parisian HQ, Takehana’s matter-offactness is reassuring. “To make a responsive action game is really easy,” he notes. “To have a responsive action game that looks realistic is more difficult. This is our challenge.”

Prey

Arkane Austin is crafting a sci-fi yarn that wants to say yes

Hanging on the walls of Arkane Austin’s studio are reminders of Prey’s core design tenets. Styled like motivational posters, each features a game, and details the laudable qualities Arkane intends to learn from it. One, titled ‘Say yes to the player’, shows Just Cause 2’s Rico straddling an airliner. “It’s an instinct we try to cultivate, which is an instinct almost any gamer has anyway,” Ricardo Bare, lead designer on Prey, tells us. “When you’re playing a game and you hit an obstacle, you’re just naturally like, ‘I’m gonna try this, I’m gonna try this,’ and we try to, as developers, remember that instinct and say yes to it.”

Mini Doom

A tiny version of a much loved classic this week

Doom is quite possibly one of the most infamous games in the PC's history. When it was released, it took the world by storm and generated both controversial news pieces as well as scores of pages of hints, tips, secrets.

The game catapulted the PC into the mainstream gaming market, where once the PC was a niche gaming platform, post-Doom found a PC in nigh-on every bedroom in the connected world.

The making of Firewatch

How a pioneering team broke all the rules to tell a new kind of adventure story

Back in 1999, Cabel Sasser and Steven Frank, founders of Portland-based Mac software developer Panic Inc, decided they could do a much better job of designing the Mac’s interface than Apple had managed thus far. As part of their grand vision, the pair created Audion, a tool for playing CDs and MP3s that was originally intended to be just one component of a suite of focused apps, but which ended up being released in standalone form. The app took off and attracted developers keen to customise it, one going on to create skins that caught the attention of the Panic team. After reaching out, Sasser discovered that he and this accomplished designer shared other common interests – including an obsession with LucasArts adventure games – and through infrequent contact watched as his career developed. Fourteen years later, Sasser found himself listening to a videogame pitch from the guy whose Audion skins had triggered their friendship. The man was Jake Rodkin, and the game was Firewatch.

Watch Dogs 2: Renegade Master

Ubisoft Montreal calls on the power of the crowd as Watch Dogs 2 heads out west to San Francisco

Ubisoft is rarely topical. This is a company that prefers to safeguard its future by borrowing from the past, be it the historical tourism of an Assassin’s Creed or the prehistoric stylings of Far Cry Primal. Where it does dip a toe in more modern waters, it either does so by escaping the trappings of 21st-century civilisation, as in Far Cry 3 and 4, or by simply destroying it, as in The Division. Yet in 2014’s Watch Dogs the company was almost achingly current, its tale of surveillance paranoia launching mere months after Edward Snowden had laid bare the shocking extent to which modern governments spy on their citizens. The intervening two years have  yielded the Panama Papers, the mass sharing of celebrity photos that were meant to remain private, and the rebirth of the Snooper’s Charter. Drone warfare is ever more prevalent, while the rise of the Internet Of Things means that everything from smartcars to children’s toys are susceptible to attack. As our relationship with technology becomes ever closer and more complex, so too grows the likelihood of it being exploited. The more connected we are, the more vulnerable.

LawBreakers

The legendary developer talks to us about his new outlook, as we take his gravity-defying shooter LawBreakers for a spin

Cliff Bleszinski is as close to a game development rockstar as this industry has ever known. Like many of the great pop stars there have been nicknames, personas, and a sense of a creative evolution that has inspired and driven the industry he contributes to. He was of course originally Clifford Michael Bleszinski, a native of North Andover, Massachusetts, creator of The Palace of Deceit: Dragon’s Plight when he was just 17 years old and later Jazz Jackrabbit. He would go on to became the face of Gears Of War, perhaps more so than its lead character Marcus Fenix. The man we sit with now is the head of his own studio in Raleigh, North Carolina, making a brand new FPS, LawBreakers, and is referred to by his colleagues as simply Cliff.

Dishonored 2: Like Father, Like Daughter

Dishonored 2 returns with double the trouble for those who threaten the throne at Dunwall Tower

When Arkane Studios unleashed Dishonored into the world in 2012, everything about its creation defied expectations. Conventional wisdom said if a publisher is debuting a new title in the summer, it should make the announcement at E3. Instead, Bethesda revealed Dishonored to the world a month after the yearly showcase on the cover of Game Informer. Conventional wisdom argued making a single-player focused game was madness in an age where multiplayer was taking over. But Dishonored shunned competitive and cooperative play altogether to focus on a simulation-driven, emergent fantasy of playing a supernatural assassin who, unconventionally, doesn’t need to kiljl to complete his missions. Conventional wisdom also claimed releasing a new intellectual property late in the console cycle was a death sentence - how can you stand a chance when you’re standing toe-to-toe with a field of well-seasoned sequels? Dishonored came out seven years after the debut of the Xbox 360 and more than stood its ground. It thrived.

Return Of The Obra Dinn

Lucas Pope’s obsession with antiaspirational vocations continues with Return Of The Obra Dinn, a game in which you play as a 19th-century insurance loss adjuster. Unlike the designer’s previous game, Papers, Please, which placed you in the musty environs of a fictional yet grimly recognisable Eastern European border checkpoint in the 1980s, here the location is somewhat more exotic, even if the work itself is just as monotonously gruelling. The Obra Dinn is an East Indian merchant ship which was lost at sea, somewhere around the Cape of Good Hope, while en route to the Orient. One October morning in 1808, the forsaken vessel drifts into port. The return is marked, not with rejoicing, but with red tape. As a trusty red-blooded insurance adjuster for the East India Company’s London Office, you embark on the ship and, against a soundtrack of creak and slop, you begin to figure out what happened to the 60-odd crew members (a number scaled back from Pope’s original, ambitious crew of 86), many of whose bodies litter its decks and nooks.

Gears 4: The Wind of Change

We speak exclusively with The Coalition’s Rod Fergusson and Chuck Osleja as the Gears Of War 4 beta rolls out on Xbox One

“When we first came in, we talked about the Tim Burton Batman and the Christopher Nolan Batman,” Rod Fergusson tells us as we talk ahead of the launch of the Gears Of War 4 beta. “When I first came in that was one of our things: ‘We’re going to be Christopher Nolan’s Batman’. But as we started doing it we realised ‘This just isn’t Gears. This is something else’. So we’re trying to find this middle ground when you hear the banter, even in our tease at E3, with Kait and JD talking to each other. I don’t want to make a humourless game.”

Convoy

When a friend described Convoy to me as “Mad Max meets FTL” it was, obviously, a must play. Somehow, the 2015 release, after a successful Kickstarter campaign, had passed me by unnoticed. Generally, despite the recommendation, I wouldn’t hold a game to another game (or film’s) standards, but Convoy’s Steam page does cite these two greats as influences and I got over-excited. I wish I’d played it with no expectations.

Shardlight

I didn’t want Shardlight to end. I played it over three nights and I missed it profusely when it was over. Why? I wanted more of just being there, which is an odd thing to say about most post-apocalyptic settings. Twenty years after Blast Day, people are lean and ravaged by Green Lung. As well as accepting dangerous work for tickets in the vaccine lottery, however, they make pottery, restore cars and genuinely band together as a community of friends.

The Slaughter: Act One

It wasn’t until I was the guy reluctantly in a dress, ready to break a barstool over another guy who had made a racist slur about a third guy, that I truly had a sense of all the narrative threads converging in The Slaughter: Act One. It’s a Jack the Ripper story, but one told in a way that is completely unexpected. I came to care immensely about everyone and their imperfect contexts. The humiliation I felt as my character vomited, publicly, was real.