DISPATCHES JANUARY

Post script

So Kojima Productions demanded journalists complete its new game before a review could be placed, isn’t that somewhat abusive? Doesn’t this help the Metacritic score by demanding such dedication? Considering how seriously gamers take ‘ethics in journalism’, I thought there would be a huge backlash.

Anyhow, while I understand that Death Stranding might not get a review, I must admit I am disappointed there likely won’t be a Post Script analysis (love them!). See, I believe the game is on to something great.

Virtual worlds are giving players the chance to work on something larger than themselves. Nier: Automata did this amazingly with its Ending E, where players could choose to start all over to help an unknown online player beat the end boss. We know from real life that sacrificing oneself for another is a beautiful gesture. Games, however, are contained in a magic circle of safety, so there usually isn’t that much to lose. I applaud how Kojima has attempted to find new ways to touch this subject.

He does so by letting players help each other indirectly with structures and vehicles, slowly turning the wretched world into something more livable. The downside is that this world first needs to be miserable to begin with. There’s a thin line to tread here: make the game too much fun and nobody cares about help from others. Make the game too strenuous, and people won’t care about playing it at all.

I am reminded of a recent interview with Tony Hawk, who described what it was like to finally do the 900 after years of attempts. He said he was just relieved it was over with. A lot of Death Stranding’s players will likely feel the same while trudging through all those boring quests. It is by design, a tiring experience. And yet, I vividly remember the moment I saw that Hawk had accomplished his feat. It was a thing of beauty, an inspiration for us all to persevere. Maybe he didn’t do it for himself, but for his fans. If we could encapsulate that in a videogame, it’s worth occasionally slipping and falling along the way.

Robert August de Meijer

To be clear, while it’s not common to be asked to finish a game as part of an embargo agreement, developers are free to stipulate whatever they please. In Death Stranding’s case, however, we had no idea what we were agreeing to. Was it five hours long, or 50? Upon realising it was more like the latter, the urgency weighed heavy. Feeling pressured to rush our way through a game that’s clearly at its best when given room to breathe surely coloured our opinion of it. We’ll go back to it eventually, and once we’ve delivered all of Norman’s parcels, we’ll do likewise with our verdict.

The making of…

I joined the parent legion last year and now my former gaming life is unrecognisable. First to go were games that couldn’t be paused, so Destiny 2 and GTA Online were out. Then, pretty much everything else I wanted to play – Doom (2016) is quite toddler-unfriendly, it turns out.

Naturally, a Switch was bought and Super Mario Odyssey filled the 35-minute commute with delight. But once the credits rolled, no other game hit that sweet spot. Breath Of The Wild didn’t suit the truncated play periods quite so well. Oxenfree and The Gardens Between were decent but short. Into The Breach was great, but heavy on thinking and not conducive to the brain of a tired daddy whose baby isn’t sleeping well. Untitled Goose Game was unforgivingly boring and Telling Lies on iOS, although great, made me very self-conscious on the

“We know from real life that sacrificing oneself for another is a beatiful gesture”

train for reasons that, if you’ve played it, will be obvious.

So, a round of applause to my surprise game of the year: Bad North. It came to my attention in Hype and then Nintendo put it in their news feed with a big ‘30 per cent off’ sticker. With a game style reminiscent of Into The Breach, it has exactly the right combination of strategy and laid-back bloodbathery for my oddly specific gaming requirements. It’s the most relaxing version of mass murder I’ve ever engaged in (digitally or otherwise), with just enough cognitive requirements to keep me on my toes between levels. Well done Plausible Concept and Raw Fury for delivering this itinerant father’s gaming highlight of 2019. Chris Hemmens

Good for you. This feels like the start of something: ailing parents, which games have rescued you in your hour of sleep-deprived, nappy-addled, jam-smeared need?

Trigger happy

So, I looked at your games of the decade. And I don’t like Dark Souls. I’ve found it increasingly hard to understand the concept of punishing difficulty and the reward of progress. I’m now 35 years old, and I really do generally play on Easy mode these days.

Now this may mean that I miss out on important systems or the mechanics of how we play. And I do feel that I miss out on a lot of interesting concepts as a player. However as I have got older, I really have put a precedence on seeing a game through as, if I’m going to invest in it, as I want to know the end result – much like a Netflix show.

I’m not sure if this makes me a bad gamer or not. I really enjoyed playing through Catherine: Full Body to see the new plotlines, but this was done on Easy mode. I plan on working through Death Stranding in the same way, just to ensure I see the ending to the game. However, I worry I am losing muscle reflex, the ability to do six things at once, and general coordination.

I’m a huge fighting-game fan and keep myself up to date with these, but given my desire to remove challenge from narrative games, I wonder how this will impact on my ability to react in those environments. The long and short is: are the Edge team getting worse at everything and how do you cope with this?

Martin Hollis

How dare you. Sure, our knees hurt in cold weather, we keep pulling great clumps of hair out in the shower and we twisted the same ankle twice the other day, but our reflexes aren’t going anywhere. We’ll be dragonpunching all-comers in the care home.

Time extend

In the past I was always very excited for nextgeneration consoles: new hardware seemed to introduce plenty of headroom for innovation in games. This seems to have changed. I remember CD Projekt Red claiming they were pushing the current-gen consoles pretty much to their limits with The Witcher 3 – that was in 2015, just two years into this console generation. At the time I thought they were exaggerating, or that developers would learn to squeeze more from the hardware. Yet here we are four years later, at the end of the console generation, and The Witcher 3 remains one of its best-looking games.

I suppose we could blame the longevity of the 360/PS3 era: that generation lasted so long that by the time of PS4 and Xbox One the graphical jump wasn’t as pronounced. However, Sony estimated that the PS4 is roughly ten times more powerful than the PS3, so shouldn’t that actually make the headroom available to developers this generation more pronounced?

The PC ‘master race’ likes to blame middling console hardware for slowing down technological progress. While there is obviously some truth to that, I don’t think it’s the full story. The new ray-tracing cards far exceed what’s possible on consoles, but while Control maxed out and with full ray-tracing on is probably the most impressive technology I’ve ever seen, relatively speaking I was more impressed with the technical jumps made by

Half-Life (1998), Halo (2001), Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 (2004), and Gears Of War (2006).

It could be that I’m already the equivalent of a bitter old man pining after the good old days. But I also wonder if we’ve reached diminishing returns against our hardware, or perhaps the cost of making genuine graphical marvels outweighs the return. Whatever the case, I hope I’m forgiven for being much more excited about the decidedly old-school and technologically undemanding Disco Elysium than I am about the possibilities of next-gen hardware.

Leo Tarasov

All fair points, but assuming the next round of consoles won’t have Xbox One’s UI or PS4’s room-shaking fans, we’re very much ready.

The long game

With 339 issues lying around, I’ve probably become too accustomed to the way Edge smells to notice anything peculiar. But I still have a lot of fun flipping through back issues for these Edge mini-games: spotting the E on the inside back cover, guessing the topic for the next issue, spotting the usual letter writers (maybe I should become pen pals with Leo and Alex?), and of course, the secret monthly feature which must not be talked about. You do you, Edge! You make the best of your medium in so many ways. Robert August de Meijer

Right back at you, oh saviour of Dispatches. Twice in one month! We are truly spoiled.

Knowledge

The subscriber covers are terrific, but I do find myself wondering what the regular cover looks like. Any chance you could include a thumbnail of it on the intro page alongside the ‘exclusive subscriber edition’ image, to satisfy the curiosity of we subbers?

Christian McGregor

You can always view the newsstand cover on our subscription pages (see p78-9 this issue, for instance) but sure, let’s give it a go. Have a new 8BitDo controller by way of thanks.