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This year’s EGX featured games of all genres and titles, and I was lucky enough to be assigned Hellblade. Presented by Ninja Theory’s Dominic Mathews, this developer session was as much about the process of creating a game as it was about the game itself. For their latest game release, Ninja Theory are taking the novel approach of allowing the audience to follow the production of Hellblade from concept to animation and story-building to completion. Whilst they realise this can leave the small team of 15 staff open to a lot of criticism, it also provides people outside of the games production industry a unique insight to how our beloved games come to be realised.
Another unique aim of the team who created ‘Devil May Cry’, is the type of title they want to release. Dominic detailed the main draw-backs of triple A titles being a set budget, spiralling costs and a loss of creative ownership in order to deliver a product expected from customers of triple A titles. Instead, the team are aiming for a title hallway between triple A and Indie, lovingly named “independent Triple A”. This will allow the developers to take creative risks and ensure an immersive storyline and gamer experience, without limited their production values.
The game Hellblade, follows the fantasy adventures of Celtic warrior “Senua”; a female protagonist plagued by psychosis and visual and auditory hallucinations. The thing that impressed me most about tackling such a controversial subject is the amount of research the team conducted to portraying the reality of mental illness in everyday life. Not only did the team interview people who deal with psychosis on a daily basis, but they worked with prominent psychiatrist Professor Paul Fletcher to create a truthful representation of psychosis. In this author’s opinion, mental illness is a subject that is only just receiving the attention it requires in wider media. The developers of Hellblade are striving to disband the usual stereotypes and to really help those with no experience, understand what sufferers all over the world have to cope with.
Continuing with the open development style, we were shown a ‘vertical slice’ of the game. This is a small cut scene created to demonstrate the sound, graphics and storyline standards the game will eventually be made to. To stay true to the Independent Triple A title, the team have created an in-house performance capture studio using materials obtained from Amazon and Ikea to keep costs down. Using Vicon 30 technology, not only have the actors portraying in-game characters been captured, but also rocks and trees in the real world have been scanned. The single environment artist on the team will be using these objects to create the background to Senua’s adventures, allowing a realistic environment for the player to experience.
The journey of Hellblade has already begun, and you can follow them at www.hellblade.com. Here you can catch up on developer’s diary videos, weekly blogging and Q and A sessions. All in all, Hellblade promises to be an immersive, creative experience, which I can’t wait to play.
To watch the entire developer session for yourself, click below:
This weekend has seen the open beta for Rainbow Six: Siege open to fans of the shooter, with the beta originally due to close after the long weekend. However Ubisoft have decided to extend the period of access til the end of the month.
The big reason for the extension is down to some technical issues with the beta which saw some players unable to connect to games for a long time, so extra time has been allowed so that everyone with access who wanted to play could have enough time to play.
Speaking on Reddit the developer said: “We’ve been getting good feedback on the content of the beta, and matchmaking and server stability have already been improved. There are still a few issues to work out, of course, and we will continue to do that over the course of the beta. Given the current situation, we’ve made the decision to extend the Closed Beta by 3 days. It will run through Thursday, October 1st.”
More beta keys are being sent out as well, so there’s still a chance to get in on the action if you’re lucky. Those who pre-ordered the game should have received keys as part of that pre-order, so check your e-mail if you did and haven’t checked your messages yet.
Today’s Homefront: The Revolution developer session was a bit of a surprise today here at geek towers. We all expected Homefront 2, as the Devs from Dambuster Studios also joked about at the start of the session.
What we got, was a more than pleasant surprise. We started seeing what we first thought was another open world dirge fest. What we saw, was a structured area game (including green, yellow and red zones where gameplay takes place as separate maps), that including stunning graphics and effects including weather effects, such as fog and rain that creates puddles that then dry out naturally as the tarmac warms up again and a real day/night cycle (an overly inflated one by the devs to show it off to better effect). To the near end of the presentation showing off the dynamic enemy spawn areas, meaning that no two people doing the same mission will see the same troubles.
It’s this dynamic enemy placement that Digmbot and I most found interesting. The idea that a snipe could be around any corner, or as you walk through a building, a full enemy patrol with an APC may be there to surprise you (or for you to surprise)
They ended the session with a bit of info about the map they were using at EGX this week, which also happened to be the Gamescom map aswell this year, and that they had been pulling player activity info the whole time. Including where people died in the map, how they died and which enemy killed them, including one sniper who accounted for the most players deaths (apart from self inflicted ones). The funniest statistic was how many players had set themselves on fire. Not been set on fire from an enemy as none in that zone had flamethrowers or similar, but had walked through flame (your clothes are flammable) and even those that had misused Molotov cocktails (including one guy who must have dropped one at his own feet at the very start of the zone, which they took great delight in laughing about, I hope that guy wasn’t watching)
This all culminated in a beautiful looking game that I went from not caring about to being determined to play it tomorrow when I’m back at EGX and may even get early next year when it’s out!
Great Job Dambuster Studios!
Homefront: The Revolution is slated for a Spring 2016 release on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and STEAM
Today Sony took to the stage at EGX 2015 to talk about the advancements they have made with their own Playstation VR system.
Like Valve’s similar panel yesterday they started off with a little history, tracing the roots of their Morpheus headset way back to the Sony Glasstron headset which was released to markets almost 20 years ago with little LCD screens and a limited frame of view. More recently we’ve had the Eyetoy and Playstation Move controller that laid framework for what Playstation VR is now.
With the Playstation 4, Sony feel they finally have enough computing power in a machine to push the high-grade experience of Playstation VR they want – teaming up the Morpheus headset with the Playstation Move controllers or the Dualshock 4 as well as the Playstation Camera to form an entire experience package to allow for placement in the world as well as being able to interact within it.
Sony felt that triggering natural responses to the situation simulated was the big aim of successful VR and to that effect showed off some of their pre-built experiences – one called The Deep that had participants in a diving cage viewing beautiful fish and an angry shark, as well as a series of them collectively entitled “The London Heist” in which character interaction, virtual object manipulation and then finally both at once in a high-octane situation were simulated for the player. They were adamant that The London Heist was not just a demo of VR or made as a ‘proof-of-concept’, they went through and made it as they would any other triple A game to make it as enjoyable as possible to sell people on the idea that VR could work and work well. Already they say third-party studios have had a “hugely positive” response to the package.
They have also said that right now they’re putting huge consideration onto the limited space people will have to play within their own homes and that they have been working with their designers to make sure that the headset will be comfortable for those players who wear glasses to use for longer periods of time. They also say that since playing a VR game is controlled in such a natural manner for us that VR could be the thing to remove the entry barrier for those people new to gaming.
Unfortunately though the panel didn’t bring any details about when we can expect to see the headset device released or what price we can be expecting; as well as our being told that because virtual reality gaming is such a different concept to the traditional gaming now in order to be backwards compatible games would need to essentially go through re-development.
In terms of the presentation as a whole though, Sony did make virtual reality seem like a fun, entertaining and over all very interesting new step in the world of gaming. Showing off the gameplay and how it worked did a lot more for me then just hearing someone talking about the specs of the hardware would have.
If you follow let’s players on Youtube or Twitch there’s a fair bet you’re familiar with the name of Elgato. Their capture devices are used by a lot of Youtubers with high subscriber counts because they perform well with a number of consoles. Now Elgato have just released their latest device – the HD60 Pro.
The main features of the HD60 Pro are that it is compatible with all the latest consoles, and is able to stream directly to Twitch or Youtube in 1080p at 60FPS with little latency. This on top of something called Flashback recording which allows you to go back in your latest gameplay and record something after the fact – brilliant for those times when you’re playing and something amazing or hilarious happens out of the blue. There’s also some very nice videos available on Elgato’s Youtube channel telling you how to install the device in case you need instructions; very useful.
Specs:
Interface – PCIe x1
Input – PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360 & Wii U (unencrypted HDMI)
