The next instalment of the long-running FIFA football simulator series was shown off today in a developers session at Eurogamer Expo.

EA talked about the new game, FIFA 14: Next-Gen, which is being released at the end of November for both the Xbox One and the Playstation 4, as well as a touchscreen controlled f2p version for mobile phones. The big thing EA seem to be aiming for with FIFA 14 is for their next gen game to be even more realistic in as many different ways as possible, with the tagline for the game shown in the trailer even being ‘it just got real’. Built upon the EA Sports Ignite engine and with ‘three pillars’ of how the game should feel in mind (human intelligence, true player motion and living worlds), the presentation talked a lot about the ‘massive gameplay changes’ to make the new FIFA game feel as ‘alive’ as possible, including smarter AI for more human-like reactions to situations, different playstyles (so faster players have more trouble keeping the ball close while dribbling compared to the slower players now for example) and what was described as ‘real biomechanics’. There have also been changes made to the ‘broadcast’ system of the game which replays shots and incidents from the virtual match from many different camera angles to give the illusion of a television-broadcast match. Even the crowd is now 3D and animated.

FIFA 14 is to contain 13 different play modes including skill games, co-op seasons, match day play, EA sports football club, career mode and ultimate team as well as containing many new leagues and teams. Each stadium within the game now also has an exterior rendered in 3D to resemble the real-life counterparts they are based on as well, again to add to the game’s real feel.

FIFA 14 is also able to take data from the previous FIFA game and transfer it over, allowing the player to bring over their teams, trophies and more from FIFA 13 and keep them (although it is a one-time transfer and possibly one-way too). Also discussed was the Xbox One exclusive content for the ultimate team part of the game: Legends. This additional part of gameplay allows players to put together a team of players from around 40 legendary players and play matches with them, choosing from players from many of the recent decades as well as modern champions.

FIFA 14 is out for the Xbox One on November 21st and for the Playstation 4 on November 29th.

When a Eurogamer Developer’s Conference starts with a member of Eurogamer staff addressing the floor prior to the presentation starting, and says we’re about to see a “sizeable chunk” of a game, you take an interest. When the speaker tells you the preview constitutes “the first ever live public presentation of the live gameplay”, even more so.

That’s just the opening of the presentation for Dying Light, an Action Survival Zombie Game by Polish game developer Techland – famous for the two Dead Island games. But this description isn’t enough to fully explain the game, says host Tymon Smektała. Asked to describe the game, Tymon starts with a high-impact 30-second trailer as the “short answer”. The long answer? “Dying Light is a First Person, Open World, Action Survival Horror Game. It’s a long description, but all of these words are important.”

What this means is Dying Light is not your everyday zombie survival game. Here, you’ll be interacting with a large game world in order to complete missions and escape being turned into a zombie yourself. Utilising a natural movement system, players will be jumping on crates and ledges, zip-lining down angled wires; and pulling themselves over gates to reach different areas, in a form of zombie apocalypse parkour; and there’s no need to look for doors if the wall is low enough to pull yourself over. When you have to come face to face with zombies, you can always kill them of course, but unlike many other zombie survival games, Tymon is quick to point out that isn’t the only option available here. You can run, you can escape, you can lay traps, you can use what you just built to defend yourself, or you can make use of the environment – it’s all about your approach to the situation. This is crucial, because not even higher ground makes you automatically safe. “Zombies can climb just as well as you can”, says Tymon.

To help you out, many missions will see you laying traps to kill zombies or provide distractions that will let you pass them safely. Some of these include car bombs and electrical boxes with exposed live wires. All traps will be triggered remotely, so until you make them live, you can run through at any time and wait for the zombies to follow – and sometimes you’ll come across traps set by other survivors, which you can trigger too. Another example of a trap is powerful lighting – useful at night, overhead lights can flood an area when triggered to not only make them more visible, but also disorient zombies by essentially blinding them with light.

Dying Light’s whole gameplay rests on a continuous day/night cycle mechanic. In the daytime, zombies are less active, giving you a chance to build up defences and prepare for the night ahead. Once night falls, the real challenge begins, as zombies spawn more frequently and become aggressive. For 95% of Story Missions and 100% of Side Missions, so claims Tymon, you can start a mission at any time of the day, giving you as much or as little time as you desire to complete tasks before the zombies get serious. Hints were dropped that night-time action will lead to greater rewards, leading to a serious risk/reward mechanic – do you start a mission in the day to stay safer for longer; or wait to later in the evening and potentially get more value out of difficult situations? Between one and four players can play at any time, dropping in or out at will. But even though co-op players will share a game world, there’s no requirement for them to perform the same missions – the choice is up to them.

Dying Light also makes use of a dynamic encounter system, making every playthrough different. You may never know when a survivor needing help; or a super-tough zombie that’s harder to defeat will appear. Helping others can lead to rewards as well, but at night-time saving others might be risking your own life. Additional help comes in the form of air drops sent from outside to provide survivors with extra resources, but do you take the time and risk to go pick them up? Your actions in the game will develop your character differently, letting you build yourself up the way you want to play and customise your character the way you like.

Dying Light hits PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows next year.

Fresh off the release of Heavy Rain, Paris-based studio Quantic Dream took to their own developers session at Eurogamer Expo today to show off their next big PS3 title.

Beyond: Two Souls tells the story of the life of a young girl/woman called Jodie, who from birth has been linked with a mysterious entity and doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know if it’s a ghost, an alien or any other entity, but they cannot be separated. This annoys Jodie, who wants to lead a normal life; however, she ends up living a life less normal, while the entity provides her with powers as well as causing her troubles from its own annoyance at being bound to her. The game sees you play as Jodie and her Entity, experiencing various moments of her life while also influencing events within them. Actors Ellen Page and Willem DaFoe star.

The story takes place over fifteen years, but in a chronological disorder, with scenes jumping between her older and younger life in a non-linear method. Players may interact with characters before the scenes where they first meet them, leading to a potentially confusing but ultimately deeply informative storytelling exercise, where the players will fill in the gaps as well as make the decisions for what happens, influencing events in your own way and making your own gameplay experience different from another player’s. Quantic Dream’s view for Beyond is to not just tell a story, but to get the player involved with it. “Some people say if you’re not involving your readers in the story, they won’t remember it. But Stephen Spielberg and [other major directors] say the second you give control to the players, the story is gone. It’s interesting how your perspective changes the better the storyteller you are. … This is what is unique about the Interactive Storytelling medium. It’s the only one that can put the player in the shoes of someone. … But when you separate the story from the gameplay, it doesn’t work. When you do [lots of killing] and then the story is cutscenes, it’s not working. So we try to find a different way to do things.”

To make this possible, Beyond: Two Souls eskews game over sequences except in the most unsalvageable situations, giving players as many opportunities as possible to change the outcome of any occurrence and leading to a non-linearised story. When asleep on a train as the police come to find you, for example, you can make the entity wake Jodie up so she can defend herself; but if you keep her asleep, it’s not game over – you’ll interact with the policemen and new options become available to escape or defend yourself. End up in a police car and it’s still not game over – there’ll be ways to get out. It’s all up to you. All action scenes are different every time.

Players will also have the ability to take control of the Entity instead of Jodie. The Entity is invisible and can fly through matter, going through walls or ceilings and into areas Jodie herself can’t easily reach. It can see people’s auras; and interact with matter like throwing cars and breaking stuff. As the Entity you can also choke people or possess and control characters. Meanwhile Jodie can interact with the real world. A new interaction system also exists in Beyond, to make knowing what you can do things with as least distracting as possible, but still show you your options. A white circle tells you when you can interact with something; if you want to try something, you move the right and left sticks towards what you interact with. With context-sensitive controls, every object has a different action – sometimes multiple actions – opening infinite possibilities.

An innovative part of Beyond is while either one or two players can play at the same time, neither need to have gaming experience and may never even have to touch a DualShock controller. As David Cage explains: “We discovered when talking with fans of Heavy Rain, that many people were playing with a second person. We found that interesting – someone who wasn’t playing was giving their opinions on what should happen. … So we asked ourselves, how can we allow the second person to interact with the game rather than just watch? We implemented a two-player mode where a second player could play the entity while the main stays as Jodie. But what about people who aren’t gamers? … So we developed an App called Beyond Touch, which connects to the console via Wi-Fi; and you can play the entire game via a touchscreen device – the app right now is on iPhone and Android – and you can play the entire game without ever touching a Dualshock controller.”

The other innovation in Beyond: Two Souls comes in the way every scene is animated. For the first time in videogame history, every animation in Beyond has been recorded using “performance capture” technology, with actors acting out each scene and computers digitally rendering the movements of their body AND their faces, leading to completely natural-looking scenes. “We just wanted the actors to act; nothing should be intuitive. … This is a real revolution as most games are done in two takes, with audio recorded in a sound booth; then another take where the audio is played and the actor acts out the motions. That worked for Heavy Rain; but when we tried Performance Capture for Beyond, we found it made a complete difference; we were getting emotions and subtle nuances you just don’t get otherwise.”

“Ellen Page really gave her heart and soul into a character, in a way I’ve never seen in a videogame before.”

When games try to be innovative and do never-before-seen things, there are only ever two likelihoods. Either they succeed and set new ground, taking videogame development to completely new territory; or they flop and it all goes to waste. Time will tell which way Beyond will go, but we at WPS Interactive cross our fingers. Beyond: Two Souls is set for release on 8 October 2013 in North America, 9 October 2013 in Australia, 11 October 2013 in Europe and 17 October 2013 in Japan.

Media Molecule, the studio that brought the world the popular Little Big Planet series today showed off their newest game in a developers session at Eurogamer Expo today.

Tearaway, a game being developed for the Playstation Vita, takes place within a world designed to look and act like paper. The character models are papercraft based and indeed as part of the game you are able to win the patterns for creatures such as the squirrels to download and make for real. Within the gameworld you control a character known as the Messenger (male version called Iota, female called Atoi), who only has one task: simply to deliver a message to you, the actual real-life player who is observing this papery world through the sun (and gets glimpsed at various parts of the game).

However while the gameplay takes part within the papercraft game world, the studio has utilised features of the Vita such as the rear touchpad and the tilt to allow the player (called a ‘You’ by the gameworld’s inhabitants) to interact with the world. Tilting the Vita makes the world tip slightly and the rear touchpad allows the player to stick fingers into the gameworld through a certain type of paper to allow you to knock out enemies (little creatures known as Scraps) or move objects such as blocks and cylinders to allow the player character to progress; all in order to give the feeling the player is ‘holding a small world in their hands’. In a way you are very much like a god within this world as you aid the Messenger past puzzles and obstacles and help him defeat Scraps.

There is also scope to customise the player character using a collectable resource scattered about the world called confetti to buy pieces to add to your character or replace existing features such as the eyes, in the form of what was described during the presentation as bits of paper you can stick onto the Messenger. Confetti can also be used to purchase lenses and filters for the camera item that is used in the game to take photos of the world (which can then be shared online) or solve puzzles (certain items in the gameworld are white for example and only regain colour when snapped). Present collectables can be found in the world that give a larger amount of confetti then the amounts scattered along the path.

Tearaway is scheduled for release on November 22nd 2013.

Indie developer studio Futurlab showed off the latest version of their game Velocity in a presentation today at Eurogamer: a sequel called Velocity 2X.

The game, which is being released on Sony’s latest console the Playstation 4, was talked about by members of the development team who discussed the journey that Velocity had gone through up until now from Playstation Minis onwards, and what had changed from the game’s last incarnation Velocity Ultra which was a game for the Playstation Vita. The major changes talked about were the improved graphical appeal of the game (with the game’s engine being rewritten for this purpose during production of the game) as well as the decision to include some on-foot platforming elements into a game that was up until now top-down style (although this type of gameplay is also present in 2X as shown in the pre-alpha footage played during the presentation).

The team also talked about having added a richer story to 2X as compared to previous Velocity games and even discussed a new enemy in the game, a species called the Vokh, as well as methods for fighting them. The creatures, described as ’15-foot monsters’ are fast and shielded and players need to find a way to disrupt the shield before they can dispatch the enemy.

2X makes use of the same ship movement features as past games, namely fast and fluid steering, teleportation and many other features but now each one has an equivalent action during the platformer parts. For example, teleport becomes teledash, a move that allows the player character to pass through walls and avoid enemies or obstacles. The levels have also been designed with making the player feel in control of what is happening, and to flow using the level design, ‘breadcrumb’ pick-ups and other things to give the game a sense of rhythm and keep the players engaged.

The original Velocity, a top-down shoot ’em-up game, was released on Playstation 3, Vita and Portable as a Mini in 2012 and was praised for the mechanics being fairly unique and the gameplay engaging although at times repetitive. Velocity Ultra, a Playstation Vita native version of Velocity, was announced in 2013.