作者彙整: Javy Gwaltney

Planet Zoo is an upcoming management sim by Frontier Developments, the company behind Planet Coaster. We recently got to watch a 15 minute demo of the game in action and came away rather impressed by Frontier’s ambitions and the promise of their take on running a zoo and caring for its animals.

Here’s why we’re excited to play the game when it releases this Fall.

The Developer Knows The Genre Well

If you haven’t played Planet Coaster, but loved management sims like Rollercoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon, you should give it a go. Frontier Developments showcased the it knows how to bring the park sim into the next generation by striking a fine balance between meticulous management and wacky shenanigans, and we look forward to seeing the result with Planet Zoo.

The Animals Are Impressive

The occupants of your zoo are more than just units you have to care for. Frontier is working hard to make sure each individual animal stands out, with genomes affecting major things like behavior to small details such as coat patterns. Every species of animal reacts realistically to their real-world counterpart, with wolves following a pack mentality while other species might just go off and do their own thing.

Click here to watch embedded media

The Management Side Of The Game Is Strong

You’ll need to do more than feed your animals to take care of them. Every animal has different needs you’ll need to respond to in some fashion. Do you have a zoo in the desert? You’ll need to build cooling pads beneath the floor of your timberwolves’ den (not to mention power generators) to accommodate them as well as shelters for your lions to hide in during storms. Hippos will need deeper ponds than other species so they can swim and bathe, and so on. There’s more than enough here to keep nitty gritty management fanatics excited.

The Game Looks Beautiful

Whether you’re watching everyone explore your park from a distance or you’re zoomed into a patch of fur on one of your lions, everything looks realistic and colorfully vibrant. The visuals here really pop everywhere you look.

A Story Mode

One of the biggest criticisms directed at Planet Coaster was the lack of a substantial campaign or story mode. Frontier Developments wouldn’t go into details about what Planet Zoo’s story mode is about but the developer did say there would be one, which will hopefully delight those in search of a narrative reason to become the best zookeeper possible.

Click image thumbnails to view larger version

                                                                                                             閱讀全文 →

Introduction

During our visit to Media Molecule’s offices last year for our November cover story, the developer stood firmly behind its intentions with Dreams: Create the most accessible and deepest video game creation tool available to a mainstream audience. It was a bold statement, but one that the various demos (and later, closed beta) showed that maybe the developer of LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway could pull off its wild ambitions.

The creation suite of Dreams is now out in Early Access, meaning anyone who pays $30 while spaces are still open for the game can get their hands on the full toolset. For the next week, I’m going to be taking Dreams for a spin, work diligently with the tools to see what I can create in that period of time. The goal here isn’t necessarily to create something amazing (wouldn’t that be swell!) but instead to see what someone with little-to-no game creation experience can do with those tools if they’re willing to put in the work.

Just so you have an idea of where I’m coming from experience-wise: I’ve created and released a few text adventures and a visual novel for commercial purposes. I understand a little bit of Python and have experience creating word-heavy games based on choice and consequence. However, I have never created art assets, have never made music, haven’t experimented with artificial intelligence, and have never dabbled in Unity, the Epic engine, or anything similar. I imagine I’m likely going to be stumbling a lot and will be writing frankly about my follies (hopefully my screw-ups prove amusing). At the end, what I hope emerges is a fairly accurate portrait of what one can expect if they take the deep dive into Media Molecule’s Dreams.

With that in mind: it’s showtime, folks.

Day 1: The Land Of Tutorials

As soon as Dreams’ cutesy introduction sequence, letting you name your imp (the cute little cursor you’ll be using to manipulate the world) and teaching you the basics of moving the camera, I make a beeline for the creation toolset. My logic is that I already saw the ins and outs of how to move and manipulate objects in Dreams’ creation space during a few preview sessions at Media Molecule and thus should be fine learning on the go while messing with the tools.

I quickly pay the price for my arrogance.

Plucking a humanoid sculpture from the game’s huge collection of objects (both those made by Media Molecule and those crafted by Dreams users), I plant the body on top of the creation space’s huge tile of space. From there, I try to create shapes and shrink them down by manipulating the controller. However, this goes awry quickly for two reasons.

The first: Dreams’ shortcut interface is complicated, with you having to combine buttons like L1 with another to do certain things to objects (like shrinking them or spinning them in a space), so it’s easy to lose track of all the commands at your disposal. The second reason is that I’m just not used to literally moving around the screen yet. Unlike most games, Dreams requires you to navigate around the world using the motion control in your Dualshock controller. This makes sense because you’ll eventually be brushing objects, stretching them out, and manipulating them in other ways that are more suited to motion control than analog . However, my hands still get caught up in the unique scheme, my thumbs often pushing on a camera-controlling analog stick when what I want to do is move my cursor.

There’s really no way of getting around the motion control part except for getting used to it over time. However, Dreams’ commands and toolsets are so numerous and complicated that I quickly own up to the truth: there is no way I can skip the tutorials. I’m going to have to eat some vegetables before I get to the fun stuff. C’est la vie.

Heading over to the tutorial section, I see Dreams’ tutorials aren’t your bog standard tips or even quickplay videos showing you how to do whatever you want to do. Instead, Dreams’ presents its playable tutorials like a full on class for operating the game. There are several modules, filled with multiple lessons that average around 3-5 minutes, for basic things like manipulating the camera, sculpting objects, and creating artificial intelligence for your puppets (characters that you can fill your world with to either control or serve as NPCs).

It soon becomes clear that tutorials are going to be the rest of my night. However, the tutorials aren’t so bad. All of them are interactive, with you essentially watching a quickplay video that shows you how to do something and then following through on it yourself. Once you finish a lesson, it’s checked off, and you move on to the next one. And they are genuinely helpful too. Within the first four movement lessons, I learn shortcuts for zooming and manipulating objects that will make moving across the creation space less of a hassle.

As the lessons go on, I find myself less annoyed that I have take tackle these tutorials and more with the fact that I thought I could just bypass it all and learn on my own. Dreams’ toolset is ultimately generous in terms of how much it offers and how quickly it is to learn the ropes compared to taking several months or even years to learn C++, BASIC, Java, or an engine like Unity. Dreams is literally its own language: a set of procedures and elements that you can bend to express yourself in an exciting way. Of course there would be a learning curve.

My only concern now is that I hope that partaking in all of these tutorials pays off, especially when it comes to helping me commit maneuverability and manipulation functions to muscle memory, and that I can stumble just a bit less when I return to the creation space tomorrow, my head sloshing around with lesson after lesson on how to make the game of my dreams.

Day 2: A Musical Escape

Reader,  the mind boggles at the amount of tutorials in Dreams. I feel like all I’ve really done since starting the game is watch tutorial after tutorial on modeling, movement, and logic.  I think I’ve had enough for a bit, so let’s get to creating and start with something pretty simple.

Let’s make some music.

As our time during our trip to Media Molecule attested, Dreams’ music creator is vast and filled with options within options. However, it’s probably the most accessible part of the toolset in that you can just fiddle around with and not have to dive into several lessons on how to use the tools at hand.

Loading into the music creation suite, we start with a mostly blank screen accompanied by a toolbar that shows us directors to all the stuff we can do. I immediately get to work in the usual, very coordinated method of how I approach all work-related endeavors: by randomly pushing buttons and hoping for the best. Surprisingly, it gets me pretty far!

I first plot down a timeline on the middle of the screen so I have a place to stick all the sounds I’m going to be mixing together.

Then I dive into Dreams’ collection of prebaked tunes to grab some stuff to mix together. I select, at random, a number of Media Molecule created instrument effects. The options available are kind of amazing, encompassing synthwave sound effects, drums, emulated vocals, strings, chimes, and more. If you can think of an instrument, chances are, it’s here in some way. I plop down my selections on the creation screen.

From here, I start playing around with each instrument I’ve selected. These aren’t just sounds that you insert into the timeline to stitch together in the hopes of randomly creating a beat. You actually have to play them to create the tracks you’ll put in the timeline. Here’s an example of what I mean, from selecting an instrument in the Dreamiverse to actually playing it:

Click here to watch embedded media

I spend the next 15 minutes playing around with various instruments and turning the sounds into tracks with a handy record feature. After that, I’m ready to stick them in the timeline, modifying when each track begins and ends, when they overlap, when they fade out, and so on. After a few minutes of fiddling around, I arrive at this little (creepy) ditty.

Click here to watch embedded media

The result isn’t going to set the world on fire. However: it’s something that has a beginning and an end, which I made in about half an hour. I can save this song, pop it into anything else I make to play (maybe a creepy horror game at some point), or give it to anyone else who wants it. Moreover, I can refine it by getting lost in all of the music maker’s options for each instrument. Check this one out for vocals alone.

Tempo, pitch, offset, bass, and reverb are just the tip of the iceberg. I could easily lose countless hours (if I had the talent) to customizing the finest details of each instrument and the composition of the song I’m making. Maybe one day in the distant future, that will be me! However, we’ve only got a week here for the purposes of this exercise so for now, I’ll have to make due with this little number.

Day 3: Gizmorama

Dreams has a lot of special things humming under its hood. To me, I think the most miraculous part of the toolset are all the logic options at your disposal. In Dreams, this is  your shortcut to programming. All the tools in that toolbar (which include things like triggers, health bar managers, textbox pop ups, teleporters) are visual equivalents to commands in programming languages like Python.

Today, I want show you the versatility of the trigger field. It’s quite possibly my favorite tool I’ve encountered in the creative suite so far. In programming languages, you have something called conditional statements. A conditional statement is a command in a program that executes the following: If [insert condition is met], then [make this action happen].  The trigger field creates a 3D representation of that notion.

In Dreams, if you lay down a trigger field, you can connect it to another tool in the game to create an effect. Here’s a  simple example: by tethering a sound track imported or created in your Dreamspace to the trigger field, you can make it so your player character (or an NPC) activates that song when they pass through the field, causing it to play.  The customization option to determine fadeout/in for said song and if it keeps playing on loop.

Click here to watch embedded media

Here’s another one. Want an NPC to perform a series of animations? A simple way of doing this by taking control of the NPC, recording you possessing the NPC and making them doing those animations (which you can configure into the character but we’ll get to that later), and then tethering that recording to the field so the NPC will perform that animation when you step into it. Like this:

Click here to watch embedded media

Want another party trick? Check this out. If you want to create a sequence where you’re looking at ongoing events through the lens of a security camera (or just create a cool Uncharted-like transition), you can do that with a trigger field + keyframe combo, like so:

Click here to watch embedded media

There’s a lot of combinations you can do with just the trigger field and the gadgets at your disposal and I can’t wait to continue to tinker with them (as well as the other tools of the trade) well into the night, each new discovery opening up a world of possibilities for creation.

Day 4: The Fine Art Of Remixing

One of Dreams’ central tenets is the idea of remixing. An entire social structure emulating Twitter and Youtube exists within Dreams, letting players create and share content. If a player creates a sculpture, a level, a movie, or environmental object, they have the option of opening that object up to share with the rest of the creators in the Dreamiverse. This is a godsend for those (like yours truly) who lack the artistic skill and experience to sculpt the models they wish to.

Today, I decided to create an entire level out of elements uploaded by other users. Now, that doesn’t mean I just pluck them from the Dreamiverse, stitch them together, and that’s the end of the day. There’s a little bit more finesse to it than just a copy and paste job but we’ll get to that in a second.

I open up a blank screen in the creator, with no idea of what I’m going to make. Initially, I start out with a patch of grass and then randomly scroll through the Dreamiverse collection of remixable objects. I come across a mountain and decide I like the look of it. I plant it down behind the grassy field I’ve created and then stretch it to 200% its original size, making it look like an actual mountain in my world. OK, a lawn, a mountain, what next? Why not a beach?

I grab some realistic ocean textures from a handy-dandy collection of water textures some nice soul in the Dreamiverse put together and slap it down at the edges of my world, expanding their size and connecting the various pieces to make them look as uniformed as possible. Then I grab some palm trees, a sand bar, and a sun and decorate my world with them as well.

The real artistry here is remembering that your goal is to create an illusion. Everything doesn’t have to stitch together just perfectly (especially with the controller’s habit of shaking and moving your cursor — a steady hand is nearly impossible with the Dualshock). Instead, you’ve got to get clever.  For example: to connect my grassy beach to my mountain in a convincing way, I dig up a single rock object from the Dreamiverse, plant about 20 of them down using the clone tool to create an obvious gate between the grass and the mountain. Then, and this is important, I make it look somewhat convincing by grabbing individual rocks and manipulating their size and rotation, so they some jut out, some are bigger than others, and so on and so forth. What I end up with is a convincing, natural-looking placement of rocks you might find at the bottom of a cliff. All of this, from blank screen to a mountain with a fully formed beach, takes about 20 minutes.

Click image thumbnails to view larger version

And then I decide to get weird. I plant a skull on top of my rock gate, but that’s not quite weird enough is it? Let’s go full hog weird. I quickly do a search for a UFO and lo behold, there are multiple UFO sculptures in the Dreamiverse. Grabbing one, I pull it into my world, expand it to 150% its size, and then stick into the mountainside to make it look like it’s crash-landed. Doubling down on that notion, I grab some convincing-looking fire and smoke effects from the Dreamiverse and plant them around the UFO, mountain, and even on the beach and the sea.

Remember what I said about the illusion stuff?  After I plant all of the fires, I try to find some wreckage rubble in the Dreamiverse but there’s nothing. There is some building rubble, so I grab that, and plant it just beneath the fires in the sea so you can see some kind of rubble but you can’t really make out it’s bricks and rods. So, basically, the building rubble will work in a jiffy if you can hide it a little bit. So much of creation in Dreams, just like real-world game development, is about smoke and mirrors.

Click here to watch embedded media

After the fires are planted, I decide to grab an alien-looking fellow (luckily there are a bunch of characters that fit the build in the Dreamiverse) to serve as the protagonist of this little level. I plant him down, enter play mode, and presto: I have a goofy looking island that an alien has crash-landed into. There are no objectives, no bad guys to fight, no goals. It’s just a set piece right now but maybe later on I can turn it into a level, using logic gadgets and such.  Already I’m wondering about what I want to do with these assets. What game could this be? An adventure? A shooter? A puzzler? What’s the goal? Getting off the island? Sending an SOS?

I’m going to need to think about this.

Special thanks to
Brantore (UFO, Realistic Waters assets)
dsgrue3 (Alien assets)
Espn_tf (Skull asset)
Lidas (Mountain asset)
Sackchief (Sun asset)

Day 5: The Wall

Eventually, in all sorts of creation, you reach a point where you can’t take shortcuts. I think I finally hit that wall in Dreams today. The plan I started out since yesterday was that I wanted to spawn a foe for my alien to evade. The idea is that you’d have to reach a point on the island while a scary enemy chased you.

I chose a clown naturally. And then I had him threaten you, by planting a dialog box that popped up whenever you triggered the field in front of him, like so:

However, things began to fall apart shortly after that. I rigged a boat I planted earlier with a possession record tool and zoomed it across the speed. In theory: stapling a trigger to the boat and connecting it to that animation recording should make it carry the player across the sea to the edge of the screen (and away from our nefarious clown). However, in practice what happened is that trigger switches fell through the boat because the boat isn’t actually a physical object.

When that happened, I twiddled with the properties to make it one. I ran the scenario again. However, when my character boarded the boat, it would not move. What would move was the oars attached to the boat or, sometimes, the boat would serve as a catapult, launching my hero across the sea, which is technically an escape but not the one I want. Loading back into edit mode, I see that for some reason I haven’t figured out, that the triggers were thrown from the boat onto the beach. I try stamping them in the hull of the vessel. They still get thrown.

Oh well. In the end, I decide that it’s probably time to go back to the tutorial section in Dreams (and maybe even visit some detailed tutorials on YouTube about logic). However, I don’t really feel defeated or anything. In fact, I feel spurred on to figure out how to do all the things that I want to do with the creation suite: A.I. mapping, configuring animations, and making music that doesn’t suck. It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to do any of those things in a week but even the frustrating lows of Dreams play out in such a way that I feel compelled to soldier on and figure out solutions rather than hang up my tools.

Tomorrow, we continue to push through the frustration in search of practical inspiration.

閱讀全文 →

This article originally appeared in the November 2018 issue of Game Informer.

Have you ever dreamed of making a first-person shooter or RPG? Maybe a racing game? Many of us have yearned to try our hands at game creation but for various reasons we’re never quite able to do more than fantasize. Learning how to develop games is time-consuming and expensive, often requiring years of study, not to mention tracking down collaborators to help create the parts of the project you can’t. But what if you could create that amazing game nestled in the back of your mind not in a matter of years, but days? For the past seven years, LittleBigPlanet creator Media Molecule has toiled to design a creative suite both accessible and ridiculously deep, capable of letting users who have never programmed or illustrated in their lives make almost any game in any genre they can imagine – and do it with style.

The ambitions of this team of England-based developers’ sounds like an impossible fantasy. You know whats even wilder?

They might just pull it off. Read more…

Click image thumbnails to view larger version

                                                                                                            閱讀全文 →

In the past decade, video games have gone from being an ostracized hobby for “nerds” to being the fastest growing entertainment medium on the planet. Everywhere you look, people are playing Fortnite (or watching others play Fortnite), counting down the days until popular releases, and lambasting terrible Saturday Night Live skits about games.

Video games have made it, baby. With that in mind, I’ve been curious lately about what it’s like to be a gamer who has a kid growing up in the current gaming-crazy landscape. Luckily, the offices of Game Informer are filled with people with children! So, for this week, I’ve decided to harass my coworker Kyle Hilliard into a discussion about the exciting highs and fraught dangers of being a gaming parent in the year 2019.

Javy Gwaltney : Hi Kyle! I don’t want you to be alarmed but there’s a rumor going around the office that you are in fact a parent.

Kyle Hilliard: Yeah, I won’t shut up about it! You haven’t truly lived until a miniature version of yourself relies on you entirely, or something like that.

How long have you been a parent now? How old is your kid?

Those two questions have the same answer, Javy. About eight years.

Does she play games with you at all? Or games by herself?

She does a little bit. I would not consider her a big gamer, honestly, but there are a handful of games she likes and she always likes to take the controller from me for a few minutes at least when I start something new. I have tried a handful of co-op games, but once she gets the basics, she usually asks me to leave so she can play by herself. The Lego games are the ones she typically genuinely gets into. I try to play co-op with her, but she doesn’t like when the game goes split-screen and asks me to go away.

What’s it like being someone who plays games and writes about games and makes a ton of content about games but is also a parent at the same time? Is that weird to her? That Dad’s job involves a lot of playing video games? Does it ever come up?

I think for kids in general, everything is weird and new, and as a result, everything is normal, and that goes for Dad’s job. Sometimes, grown-ups have to play a video game at home for work. I think it just annoys her more than anything else. I have explained to her what I do a few times and have shown her the magazine, but she could not be less interested or impressed. I imagine she will reach an age soon where she recognizes it’s actually kind of a weird job (which I recognize it absolutely is), but for now she just knows her dad likes video games a lot, and his job is related to that somehow.

Games are everywhere now. They’re a big thing, especially after the battle royale boom. And they’re also changing thanks to YouTube and streamers and such. Are you ever hands-on with that sort of content, like monitoring what she watches on YouTube? Are you worried about the sort of content she could be exposed to that’s gaming-related?

Oh god, yeah. YouTube is terrifying. It’s honestly one of the few things my wife and I are pretty restrictive about. Even the YouTube Kids stuff is a minefield of potentially inappropriate content (here’s a great episode of “Reply All” that goes into detail about why YouTube can be scary!). When it comes to paid streaming services like Netflix or comparable platforms, I am pretty relaxed and let her choose whatever she wants (within reason), but when it comes to YouTube, I am always over her shoulder. She has yet to gravitate toward specific streamers, but when that inevitably happens, I will be watching carefully for sure. I recognize it’s her generation’s chosen entertainment medium and I try to be self-reflective and not be an old man yelling at a cloud, but I don’t know that there has ever been a platform where anyone can post anything they want, whenever they want, as much as they want, anonymously. So yeah, to answer your question, yeah, I worry. But I also recognize that outright forbidding things also makes them more attractive, so I am just cautious.

Did you ever play games with your mom or dad growing up?

No, not at all. It was the biggest hurdle in my household to acquire a video game system. I got my dad, who spent a portion of his life as a professional bluegrass musician and has seemingly conquered every instrument with strings on it, to play Rock Band once and he thought it was clever. My mom watched me play Goldeneye for a few minutes once and was understandably aghast when she realized you “just walk around and shoot people”. They recognized it was something my siblings and I enjoyed and allowed us to play, but they were uninterested.

Do you think that’ll change for the future, in general? Like, my dad is a HUGE nerd. We were a very gamey, sci-fi focused household in a way that I don’t think is common, so playing games wasn’t really that rare of a thing. However, I understand that it is unusual. Do you think you and your family will play video games as a regular family activity as your kid gets older?

Well, it depends on her. I honestly don’t know if she is going to be into games in the same way her mother and I are – and that’s totally okay. I can’t imagine a future where I am not still playing games in my free time, and I hope she wants to play with me, but it is certainly not something I would ever force her to do. I think it will be a normalized entertainment activity, though. In the same way my parents watched TV, my kid’s parents will play games. I think it’s already just seen as another avenue of entertainment, as opposed to a personality-defining trait.

Any advice for soon-to-be/freshly minted parents who are also gamers?

You trying to make an announcement here, Javy? If you love games, don’t be scared that becoming a parent means you will never get to play games again. Infants are pretty boring. They just kind of lay around and sleep a lot, so you will still be able to make time to play – it just takes some planning. I don’t think I am qualified to give parenting advice, personally, just because being a parent is so much about going with your gut and trying to do the best for your kid and every kid is different. Yours might be super into games. Or they might think games are super dumb. Whatever they’re personal feelings on games end up being, they will be correct, so just roll with it.

Oh! It may seem excessive, but make sure you buy a wipe warmer. I didn’t think I would use it, but it makes changing diapers way easier. That’s the only advice I will offer.

閱讀全文 →

I like open-world games a lot. The Witcher, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto, and Breath Of The Wild all rank among my favorite games of all time. However, there’s a pretty common problem among the vast majority of open-world games. Let’s call it the parking lot issue. And what the parking lot issue pans out to is that the vast majority of these sorts of spaces are often given over to wilderness. It’s wilderness that sporadically populated by clusters of civilization like villages or cities, but it’s basically just a vast playspace in which to drop quests, enemies, and dungeons.  So there’s the part of the game where you’re out in the open world, and then there’s part of the game where you’re in one of its dungeons or mission-related locations. It’s rare that these two flow into one another with a natural transition.

Enter The Division 2. I did not care for the original game. I thought the shooting was bleh, couldn’t get past unarmored plumbers somehow still standing after four shots from an assault rifle, and I’ve never really jived with the writing that accompanies the Tom Clancy brand of games. However, within a couple of hours of playing The Division 2, it became apparent that this game was pretty special and not because of its main, co-op focused selling point. I mean, make no mistake. I enjoyed coordinating attacks with my fellow editors, overpowering legions of foes with carefully placed turrets and Hail Mary grenade throws. However, what I actually love about the game can be enjoyed (arguably more so) in solo play.

The Division 2 excellently endows a sense of place in the player. Not just because its rendition of Washington D.C. is accurateish, but because it has a great connective tissue that makes the world feel like it functions as one. An example: I was once got in a firefight with a group of soldiers in the middle of the street. The fight seemed to be going my way but then their backup showed up, quickly overpowering my drone and turret. I immediately retreated into a nearby blown-out convenience store to try and buy time for my gadgets to recharge.  However, enemies quickly swarmed the front so I ran out of the store through a backdoor, into an alley, and then into a nearby office building with a stairwell that led up to a hallway with a broken window. From there, I fired on the soldiers as they flooded the alleyway and when my gadgets finished recharging, I just decimated every single one of them.

To be clear: this was not a mission in the game. This was a just a random battle that quickly escalated into something memorable because the playspace design here is capable of letting the player create natural, smooth transitions. It’s the video game equivalent of a tracking shot you might see in Goodfellas, Children of Men, or True Detective. Open-world games are exciting, after all, because they have a habit of making the player largely the director of the action that happens in the game. To have a playspace that players can mold to create exciting, memorable scenarios is paramount to good game design. That so many of the greatest open-world games of all time lack compelling spaces speaks to the growth the genre still has to do.

The Division 2’s playspace stands out not just because it has a lot of interiors you can duck into during battle, but because the game goes to great lengths to make the city truly feel like a city. The vast majority of missions in the game lead you to government buildings and monuments and museums that don’t just get lip service or are hastily assembled arenas with some nods to iconic architecture. No, they’re actual multi-level structures you have to navigate. And all of them feel like their own unique place in the world. No hallway ever looks like another. Every building has unique pieces of art related to whatever the structure is. Moreover, all the connectors between these locations help make the world feel natural. There’s an almost immersive sim-level of choice given to the player when it comes to navigation. Sure, you can run along the street to get from one place to another, but there are also alleyways and sewers you can sneak through, most of them filled with secret stashes of loot, if you so choose.

Of course, The Division 2 isn’t the first sort of game to do this structure.  Both Batman: Arkham City and Dying Light are also superb games at creating playspaces that marry huge open spaces to detailed interior levels in a way that creates a work that operates as strong singular world, one where the structure doesn’t create immersion-tampering divides or long lulls in dullness as you traverse open plains to get from point a to point b. However, that natural balance is still so shockingly rare that honestly feels like a revelation whenever I do play a game that manages to nail it.

So yes, The Division 2 is a fantastic multiplayer title (check out our review for more on that). However, it’d be a shame if this open-world didn’t get some praise for the subtle brilliance that even so many of the classic staples of the genre lack.

For more on The Division 2, check out our Funny To A Point column about the game here.

閱讀全文 →

Avalanche Studios’ latest title, Generation Zero, is out today and reviews are starting to hit. However, we need a little more time in this shooter that seeks to combine ’80s nostalgia with an open-world take on Sweden teeming with giant robots. I do have a few initial impressions I can impart thus far and none of them are glowing.

Generation Zero opens with you, a teenager, washing up ashore on an island off the coast of Sweden’s mainland. Your goal is to find out where all the adults have gone and why massive, deadly robots have invaded your country. This means trekking across a huge world in search of documents and recordings that reveal the mystery as well as some slice of salvation. Unfortunately, as intriguing as this setup is, the actual journey is anything but (so far). The enemies are too spongey and deadly to take on your own, the inventory interface and skill trees are cumbersome, and there’s so much barren real estate to trek across to get anywhere worthwhile. So far the only thing I’ve enjoyed is discovering the wild assortment of clothes for my character and the occasional beautiful vista.

Playing with random players hasn’t panned out either, as the players in my instance often refused to stick together as a group and would go to opposite ends of the world. The experience might become less sour as I get to play with a coordinated group of my fellow editors this week. But five hours in, Generation Zero isn’t coming close to living up to the potential of its promising concept.

Check back later in the week for our full review. For now, head here to see gameplay and our impressions of the beta.

閱讀全文 →