IO Interactive show us the latest installment of their hit assassination’em up, Hitman!

The developer session kicked off showing us some pretty standard gameplay for a Hitman game, however there are options, lots and lots of options. It seems that as per the words of Travis and Sven, the two employees of IO Interactive who took us all through the Showstopper Level of Hitman,

“You will experience a rich and detailed sandbox, every person has a name”

It certainly looks like they’re correct at least on the rich sandbox part of that statement, the level is very densely populated, the crowds move, mill and mingle around as one would expect a large crowd of posh twats to and the level itself is pretty bloody expansive, including a large manor house with two floors, large garden grounds, numerous balconies (with vantage points of course) and plenty of staff members and civilians with nicely tailored clothes to steal.

Keeping with the whole options angle I mentioned earlier it doesn’t stop there. We’ve been given numerous types of poison, the ability to have weapons and equipment dropped into the level before the player begins and even ways to smuggle weapons and equipment past security checkpoints. Which is something I look forward to utilising, even Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have a feature like that and that’s pretty much the franchise that wrote the book on stealth. We’ll undoubtedly have the usual staples of the series however, I’d hate to see 47 without his Silverballers and Garrotte wire.

But there is a ton to see and do in this level, it isn’t just kill one target, in this Showstopper level we have two. One is the man behind the fashion show and the other is his accomplice who is holding a secret auction to sell off “deadly secrets” to some very unscrupulous people and of course all these options can come into play. Maybe you’ll drop one of your Silverballers that’ll get picked up by a security guard, taken past a checkpoint which you will then bypass and retrieve your gun afterwards which you will then utilise in a trigger pulling fashion to silently kill someone…maybe. There’s even more than one escape option, a chopper or a speedboat though you will have to find the keys. You may decide to get a Sniper Rifle smuggled in, camp out on a vantage point and shoot your way out afterwards or my personal favourite, attempt to bypass everything in a disguise and get discovered almost instantly. Almost mind you.

So allow me to summarise. Options. You need to take out the target, pick a path and get to it.

You can watch the full developer session below, Enjoy!

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.

One of the developer sessions on-stage on this last day of EGX was an interview/ Q and A session with Indie developer Mike Bithell, known for 2D puzzle platformer Thomas Was Alone and more recently stealth game Volume.

Bithell was very talkative about the indie game scene, saying that checking out the new games and new small studios exhibiting there was one of the things he most looked forward to about attending gaming events such as EGX and others. He spoke about his history and how Indie Game: The Movie filled with what he considered the “first generation” of Indie Devs had inspired him and others to create their own games and therefore become the “second generation” to inspire the next wave of developers and so on.

On changes to the scene he said that now it was a lot easier for Indies to get noticed than it had been 3 years ago when Thomas Was Alone was released, partially due to the fact that Indies were now taken more seriously by the gaming community, and thanks to bigger publishers being willing to take chances on small, quirky games that might not have cost a lot to make but target and resonate with their niche audience well. He also mentioned that while he had to call in a favour to get Thomas onto Steam, nowadays Indies found it a lot easier to get into the big digital distribution market of Valve’s. He did note though that work was still required to have a hit on your hands, and that developers still needed to promote their game and get it into as many hands as possible to hopefully build their audience.

When asked on future projects Bithell said that while he and some of the team who had worked on Volume had a number of ideas he wasn’t yet going to reveal any to the public although he did note that after two years of developing Volume he was thinking about doing something smaller again before the new big project.

The developers of Prison Architect today were on stage at EGX 2015 to talk to us about the new things we could expect from the game as it moves towards its final full release.

Prison Architect has currently been in alpha/early access for the last 3 years, slowly being developed on a monthly basis with several new feature being added over that time. In fact it was revealed to the audience that there had been a large spreadsheet of features that they had wanted to add to the game before they would release version 1.0. The full release will be October 6^th 2015, but the biggest pieces of news announced were that there would be two new game modes added to Prison Architect upon release.

The first is your standard Story Mode campaign, extending the brief story-driven introduction you get to the game and will also serve as a tutorial for the game, although you don’t have to play it first and the sandbox which the game has been up until now will be available right from the off.

The second was covered in a lot more detail and is called Escape Mode. There exists already in the game the possibility of being jailed yourself if you do a poor enough job managing your prison and so this mode is an extension on that, with the aim being to escape naturally. Any player-made map on the Steam Workshop will be playable in this mode and you can steal things from different areas of the prison and causing trouble will earn you ‘Reputation Points’ which you can then spend on things like upgrading your character, recruiting other prisoners to follow you, upgrading your followers and so on. The aim is to over time build yourself up so that you can escape the prison you find yourself in. There’s also a Skip Punishment button for when you find yourself sentence to solitary. Nice.

Other things of note were that while versions are coming to mobile platforms there aren’t any concrete plans for console versions… yet. We also had a hint at some future updates when talking about making the guards more realistic in that they could vary in how they handle the job and whether they would accept bribes or other things.

It was a very interesting look into a game that has done Early Access right in my eyes. They even said during the presentation that without the community feedback Prison Architect would not have been as good a game as they would have wanted to make, and that if you do Early Access that you need to respect your community. And they have. We all too often hear about Early Access games being left unfinished but here at least is proof that it is possible to get it correct and release a game through it.