Tea and biscuits, jellied eels and a couple little trinkets
At this time of year, the global game industry typically turns its attention to the United States: as we put the finishing touches to this issue, we’re also preparing to board our flight to E3. Despite that – or is it because of it? – there’s a distinctly UK flavour to this month’s Edge.
So much of the modern-day British identity, or at least the discussion around it, is about nostalgia. But there’s nothing of the sort to be found here. In Studio Profile we visit SIE London: while it has never enjoyed the profile (or investment) of the more renowned names in the PlayStation studio family, it’s always thrown itself with gusto at whatever mad new tech Sony cooks up. It made EyePet for the PlayStation Eye; Wonderbook for PS Move; and PSVR launch essential PlayStation VR Worlds. All three of those have fed into the creation of Blood & Truth, a grime-soundtracked gangland shootout set across modern-day London.
Meanwhile, in An Audience With… we speak to Siobhan Reddy, studio director of Media Molecule, that most British of developers. Dreams, currently in early access, takes the love of user-generated content that has become the Molecule calling card to dizzying new heights. It’s been a huge challenge for the studio to overcome, and all the while it’s quietly been setting new standards behind the scenes, becoming one of the most diverse game-development studios on the planet.
It’s been a while since we’ve put a Union Jack on the cover of Edge. The game that graces page one this month is being made 3,500 miles away in Toronto, yet Watch Dogs Legion is a very British game, and not just because of its setting. It explores, among other things, our collective ability to see the lighter side of even the darkest of situations. And what dark times they are: a near-future dystopia that’s made even more discomfiting by how plausible it all seems. If only its central mechanical hook – that you can take control of any character in the world – were real. We might stand a chance of sorting out this sorry mess. The story begins on p58.