Paradox Development Studio

How a team of Swedish programmers redefined ‘niche’

Paradox’s position as standard bearer on the field of grand strategy is fitting, given it claims to have invented the genre. It’s near impossible to discuss games of invasion and diplomacy on a global scale without some reference to its dogged, 20-year effort to simulate and pervert the past, from the Middle Ages through to the end of WWII. Titles such as Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis and Hearts Of Iron have become a convenient shorthand for the complex histories that play out upon the signature map and oh-so-many menus of the in-house Clausewitz Engine. You can spot a Paradox game at a glance, in the same way that a surfeit of vantage points and a map to fill by activating them announces a Ubisoft open world.

XCOM 2: Resistance isn't futile

We play alien invasion sequel XCOM 2, the most exciting strategy game of 2016

I’m in trouble. I need to put a soldier on the back of a flatbed truck, so I can hack the device it’s carrying and abscond with the alien secrets inside. As it happens, the truck is on fire. It shouldn’t be, but I used a grenade to take out the Advent trooper standing next to it and things sort of got out of hand. I’ve got three soldiers left – the fourth having died earlier – and I don’t want to lose another to a fire I’ve made them stand in. Sadly, I can’t see an alternative, so I pick the XCOM agent with the most health and tell them to burn themselves alive. That’s when the Sectoid shows up.

The Making Of Until Dawn

How a late twist changed the fate of this gripping teen horror game

Most of us are familiar with the ingredients by now. It all begins calmly enough, a happy group laughing and joking before the screw steadily, inexorably begins to tighten. There’s an agonisingly slow build, a gradual sense of creeping dread, and that awful sinking feeling as plans go horribly awry. Along the way, there are unexpected twists and turns, the odd jolting shock, desperate races against time and a final, frenzied climax. Developing a game, it turns out, has plenty in common with the established structure of horror cinema.

Access all areas

How stripping Hitman to its core opens up more options than ever for Agent 47

Agent 47, with his shaved dome, funerary suit and pitiless eyes, has never been what you’d call a reassuring presence, but in this incarnation his steely demeanour is magnified into something alarming. Perhaps Io Interactive’s in-house cloth physics are responsible for 47’s startling physicality, or maybe it’s the new line of his jawbone, which the team continues to tweak and obsess over. Certainly David Bateson’s assured voice work, rich with sly quips from writer Michael Vogt, leaves no doubt about who the dominant force in the room is. Yet that’s not enough to account for this newfound sense of lethality. Rather, it’s the simplicity of 47’s objectives and the terrible efficiency with which he achieves them that tells you that this game belongs in a different genre to 2012’s Hitman: Absolution. In Hitman, Agent 47 exists only to kill with precision.

Superhot

Cinematic gunfighting as an artform

Games don’t often feature real gunfights. The few that do – the ArmA series of military simulators, for example – make a commitment to verisimilitude that comes at the expense of accessibility, readability and fairness. This is because real gunfights aren’t easy, clear or fair. They’re confusing and lethal, and push into emotional spectra far beyond what’s appropriate for entertainment. Military simulators are rendered niche by their commitment to getting it ‘right’, while the rest of the industry assembles something resembling gun combat out of ideas that originate entirely with the videogame and not at all with reality: health bars, damage values and so on. These ideas reintroduce accessibility and fairness into the equation, enabling you to enjoy the drama of a gunfight without the mess.