Tell them please to put on some speed, follow our lead
They say great things come in small packages, and there’s been a fair bit of that in the Edge offices this month ( stop laughing at the back). In Knowledge this issue we introduce Analogue Pocket, a tiny handheld console capable of running games for a suite of beloved retro portables. We also recently took delivery of our Google Stadia Founder’s Edition, and the apparent future of interactive entertainment has never come in so small a box. And we catch up, too, with Lego’s modest new internal gamedevelopment team, and uncover its plans to build something big out of little virtual bricks.
In Hype, as is increasingly the case these days, games made by small teams (one by a husband and wife; another by two childhood friends) comfortably beat the big guns for page count, if not for profile. And while we’ve been swept up in the bracing autumnal rush of new big-budget releases like the rest of you, we ensure as always that games from the opposite end of the funding scale are properly represented in Play. When it comes to this month’s main story, however, things are different. For Blizzard, there is no such thing as small. It is one of a handful of companies whose new announcements feel like real events – and at BlizzCon in August, it made two of them at once, both of them sequels to two of Edge’s most-played games of the generation. We check in on Diablo IV in Hype, and in our features section go deep behind the scenes at Blizzard. We don’t just want to know about Overwatch 2, or the new Diablo; we wanted to get a sense of what it is that makes Blizzard tick. Its ability to hop between genres with each new release – from the Saturdaymorning vibes of Overwatch to the grimdark Diablo via the cheery fantasy of World Of Warcraft, and so on – while retaining a signature style and without compromising on quality is rivalled only by Nintendo. It’s had a rough few months talking politics, but we’re happy to return the spotlight to what Blizzard has always done best. The story begins on p56.