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Semantics! So goes the old dismissal, but semantics can be everything. They seem pretty important to Resident Evil originator Shinji Mikami, who has spent his career trying to distinguish his style from some of his genre peers.
“In games in Japan, a typical horror game is something like Clock Tower or Silent Hill,” he explains. “But survival horror, the kind of game I like to create, is also entertainment. The horror aspect of the game and the entertainment aspect of the game have to mix together.”
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It’s easy to forget that The Division isn’t just another open world game from Ubisoft, most of the publisher’s major franchises are - Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs. Instead, The Division is an MMO.
Ubisoft have dodged the tropes of the genre by setting their MMO in near-future New York instead of a generic fantasy world. But Ryan Barnard, the game’s director, makes clear “If you’ve played other MMOs or RPGs, the power curve, will be present in our game as well.”
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Sure, you’re trapped aboard a space station with an alien that can gut you with every one of its extremities (+ tongue) but that’s no reason to avoid taking part in a good old fashioned foot race. Creative Assembly have revealed Alien: Isolation’s challenge mode.
Just how quickly can you make it to the exit without being cut in two.
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Rainbow Six: Siege has been the best surprise of E3 so far - and from a technical standpoint, the biggest surprise in its demo was the moment a counter-terrorist decided he needn't bother to lean around a bedroom wall. He could just punch bulletholes through it instead.
Five minutes of flying plaster later, the demo culminated in a multi-floor gym assault that saw ceiling and floors exploding inwards simultaneously. Breach and, a-thank-you, clear.
Here’s how it works.
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“I didn’t realise when I first played Journey that the other people turning up in the game were other players,” Dead Island’s game director, Bernd Diemer, told GameTrailers. “The elegance of that stuck with me. The first game was really good, you just pressed a button and someone would join you but we wanted to get rid of even that.
“Internally we call it the world’s smallest MMO.”
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Braid was really good at puzzles. Its genius was twofold: in allowing you to miss out the jigsaw pieces you found most difficult and chew them over while working on the next; and in having puzzles build on previous solutions, such that you eventually found yourself bending your brain into shapes it wasn’t used to.
All signs point to The Witness managing the same: not least Jon Blow’s definition of a bad puzzle, which goes some way to showing he’s still got it.
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12 June 2014 • 23 hours 35 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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Criterion are in a weird place right now. They shed the vast majority of their staff during the development of Need for Speed Rivals, their founders soon after, and at last count numbered less than 20.
But that’s put them in a position where they can take their time on something new - a vehicular something we saw a little of during EA’s pre-E3 show. Though it doesn’t have a name yet, we know Criterion’s current project is a first-person thrill-seeker inspired by deathwish Youtubers. Basically, it’s Battlefield’s best bits minus the hassle of having to shoot people.
Apparently, Criterion were never going to settle for just being the Burnout gang.
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“Below is very unforgiving, you’re basically one hit from death,” Capybara Games’ creative director Kris Piotrowski explains. “We want to make a game where players tippy-toe through the darkness. Knowing that you’re one hit from death prevents players from running into the world and just getting killed.”
This is a step away from Swords & Sworcery, in that game Capybara let players explore the world with little fear of combat - there were battles but they were forgiving.
In Below, death sends you back to the beginning.
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Elite: Dangerous’ David Braben was at E3 to show off Frontier Development’s increasingly excellent space sim in a new demo. Some of the content will be familiar to those of you in the premium beta, but Braben punctuates the 15 minute space adventure with news of planned content. There’s even a quick look at a new type of gargantuan space station due out in an upcoming update.
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Studio MDHR’s run and gun platformer, Cuphead, was pushed back to 2015 a wee while ago - which is rather unfortunate - but you can maybe find comfort in the E3 trailer.
Eerie, anthropomorphic cup solace.
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If you’re even remotely interested in getting off this blue marble and exploring the galaxy, or are perhaps simply a big fan of Star Trek, then there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Harold White. He’s a physicist over at NASA, and he and his team have been exploring faster-than-light travel for the last couple of years.
This week, White revealed a ship design created with artist Mark Rademaker. The theoretical ship would be able to reach our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in around two weeks.
It’s only taken a few days for someone to recreate the IXS Enterprise in Kerbal Space Program.
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Football is a sport that seems to be rather popular. If you’re an American reader, you’ll inexplicably know it as soccer. I’m constantly being informed that the World Cup is a thing, and is also a rather big deal. Which is a shame, because it’s also run by FIFA, which is essentially a super villain group.
It might already be clear that I don’t care much for the sport (and it has nothing to do with Scotland being terrible at it). But I have been known to dabble in tank warfare. What do the two have in common? In a sane universe, not very much. But nobody has accused Wargaming of being sane. They’ve only gone and added a new football mode to World of Tanks.
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Wargaming isn’t the only developer doing something a wee bit special for the World Cup. Riot’s celebrating countries coming together to kick a ball around in the Brazilian heat by releasing five new skins, a ward skin and a summoner icon for League of Legends.
And these skins aren’t going anywhere once the World Cup is concluded. They’ll be available all year round.
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Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was one of the best of the modern Tomb Raider games - despite being an isometric puzzle game spin-off - before the reboot last year. Not just refreshing, it was also a fun co-op experience that had a hint of competitiveness about it. Temple of Osiris looks to be much of the same, but building on those solid foundations by ramping up, well… everything.
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13 June 2014 • 6 hours 25 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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Hosts of popular Minecraft servers have been in uproar this past week over a proposed change to the game’s EULA, to the effect that nobody can make money from Minecraft without Mojang’s express permission. Voices in various corners of the community worried aloud that they’d no longer be able to afford to maintain their services, and wasted no time giving Mojang lengthy and colourful explanations of their concerns.
The developers have responded with what was missing: a clear breakdown of what is and isn’t an acceptable way to make money in Minecraft. While stricter measures are to be enforced, they’re not so broad or un-nuanced as first feared.
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13 June 2014 • 5 hours 33 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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“Why are so many people demanding AAA titles to be all feminist and stuff when women don't even buy those games?”
That’s the question one anonymous user took to the Ask A Game Dev Blog - and which prompted a lengthy response from Dragon Age: Inquisition writer David Gaider. Gaider pointed out that with AAA costs rising every year, the question should be why fewer women buy those games.
“Hint: the answer may require more self-examination than you are, strictly speaking, comfortable with,” Gaider told the anonymous asker.
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13 June 2014 • 4 hours 19 min ago •
Story by PCGamesN
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The nostalgists at Green Man Gaming are taking a misty-eyed look back over their last week of summer sales today. Remember Tuesday, when XCOM was just over a tenner? The heady days when all three BioShocks totalled even less than that? Perhaps with a little prompting you’ll even begin to recall the weekend’s disregard for the RRP of Company of Heroes 2. What a time.
All of those deals and more have returned for a 24-hour, sepia-tinged encore sale.
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13 June 2014 • 3 hours 31 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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Visceral’s Steve Papoutsis announced from an E3 stage on Monday that the Battlefield Hardline beta would be open effective immediately. He said that doing so was new and exciting, and it felt like it - at least until we remembered that Hardline is out in October, and really ought to be getting on with its beta if it’s to have any chance of expunging its bugs before then.
But earlier access to Battlefield is something DICE are considering very seriously after Battlefield 4’s launch cock up late last year.
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13 June 2014 • 1 hour 35 min ago •
Story by Jeremy Peel
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A month ago, the best you could do for dogfighting in PC games was a tussle with one of Wolfenstein’s metallic hounds. Now look at us: Elite: Dangerous’ premium beta on one shoulder, Star Citizen’s Arena Commander module on the other, and a headset-full of Eve: Valkyrie on the horizon. We’ve more space than we know what to do with.
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Far Cry 4 might well be about false passports and terrible public transport and “tearing shit up”, but it’s also still very much about stumbling into a fortress that isn’t yours and deading every last mother’s son inside.
The way you go about that is up to you. Two methods are on show in this playthrough: there’s your traditional stealth approach, which involves alternately offing very nearby and very far away enemies with knives and sniper rifles. And then there’s the elephant.
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Want to hear something reassuring? No major games publisher can ever truly die - just be gutted, sold off, and puppeteered by a new owner. Hrrm, that doesn’t sound so good now I’ve written it down.
Expect to see the THQ splash screen pop up in a near-future videogame or three. Nordic Games picked up the lion’s share of THQ’s back catalogue rights - and now the small Austrian outfit plans to tackle its awareness problem using the old publisher’s name.
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