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    • Star Wars: Battlefront, It’s back, looking more powerful than you could possibly imagine...

      Star Wars has returned. Spirits dampened by the prequels have been re-ignited by the new hope of a JJ Abrams-helmed, George Lucas-free trilogy, and Jar Jar Binks will soon be nothing more than a fading memory. What better way to celebrate than with a shiny reboot of classic multiplayer shooter series Battlefront? Created by Battlefield developer DICE, the game will allow you step into the shoes of either the freedom fighters of the Republic or the Stormtroopers of the Empire and fight it out in online scraps of up to 40 players. The focus is on the planets, vehicles, characters and spaceships of the original trilogy, and the team have entered into a partnership with LucasFilm to make sure things are as faithful to the movies as possible. Access to the hallowed LucasFilm vaults has allowed them to digitally scan the original props for the film into the game, and they’ve made trips to the locations where the iconic battles of Hoth, Endor and Tatooine were filmed. They’ve even had a rummage in the archives at Skywalker Sound and dug out every classic peeeeowww and vwwoooosh noise they could find. “Our vision is to deliver what we consider the most authentic and realistic Star Wars universe ever created for a videogame,” enthuses design director Niklas Fegraeus. ‘Realistic’ might be a bit of a stretch when you’ve got space wizards running around with laser swords, but we appreciate the attempt. The latest footage certainly seems to back up DICE’s claims. It’s in-engine rather than truly in-game, so we would suggest taking it with enough pinches of salt to fill a Rancor pit, but it really does look like the original films. Blaster fire hits with a shower of pyrotechnic sparks, explosions send up startlingly spot-on plumes of smoke, and the spindly scout walker has the perfect herky-jerky, stop motion-style walk. It all ties nicely into Abrams’ new back-to-basics approach to the franchise DICE is trying to get as close as it can get to recreating the various practical effects and other old-school movie magic in-game. You’ll be able to pilot that walker yourself, too, along with speeder bikes, snow speeders, and loads of other iconic Star Wars vehicles. There’s no space combat, but players will still be able to hop into an X-Wing or a TIE Fighter for in-atmosphere dogfights, and the developers have even confirmed a pilotable Millennium Falcon. The towering AT-AT walkers are, unfortunately, AI-controlled, as are the Y-Wing bombers, which can be called in for a handy explosive air strike. In Vader Gamers will even be able to get into the cockpit of… err… Darth Vader’s head. After meeting certain yet-to-be-revealed criteria in a match, one lucky player will be able to temporarily become one of the heroes or villains of the franchise, including everyone’s favourite bounty hunter Boba Fett, and Mr Tall, Dark & Wheezy himself. When one of these characters hits the field, the focus of the battle shifts with their super-powerful abilities (Vader, for example, can deflect blaster fire with ease, and use his favourite employee-management tool, the force choke) they’re effectively boss encounters, and the enemy team will have to pull together to defeat them. “Players Will be able to hop into an X-Wing or a tie fighter for in-atmosphere dogfights” At least if you do find yourself face-to-face with the dark lord of the Sith you’ll have a buddy to back you up. The game’s partner system allows you to designate a friend as your online other half, meaning you can respawn at each other’s locations. Partners also share XP and unlocks, so you’re always on equal footing, even if one of you clocks in more game time than the other. According to the developer, this will, for example, make it easier for parents to play the game with their kids. It’s a nice idea, but we’re not sure if we’re ready to introduce our mums to online voice chat just yet. Fett pack Those unlocks will be the key to customising your character, as this entry ditches the classes of the original games. Instead you’ll be able to pick the weapons and gadgets you want in your loadout, effectively building your own class and tailoring it to exactly how you want to play. There’ll be plenty of toys to choose from, including a jetpack, and a portable force field generator for keeping your squad-mates safe. Your character’s gender and overall style will be up to you too, and you’ll even be able to play alien races including Sullustans and Ishi Tibs (don’t recognise those off the top of your head? And you call yourself a fan?!). With the ability to switch between first- and third-person perspective at any time in-game, you’ll be able to admire your look even in the heat of battle though your team mates will probably prefer you concentrate on firing your blaster. And yes, it’s official, for the first time ever there will be female Stormtroopers, though whether we’ll be able to tell under those helmets is anyone’s guess. The game unfortunately won’t feature a single-player campaign, with its only solo content being a series of custom missions set on the multiplayer maps. These will also be playable in co-op, split-screen, or online. It’s understandable that the developer wouldn’t see any new stories to tell in this well-worn era of the franchise, but it seems a strange omission given that Battlefield’s single-player offerings have only grown in recent years. They’ll need to make sure there’s plenty of content in the multiplayer to make up for it. Colour us tentatively excited. DICE has the right attitude, but the studio’s got a lot to prove after the near-disaster that was Battlefield 4’s array of technical problems. We’re certainly ready for a great new Star Wars game to go with Abrams’ film. How likely is it to look as good as that amazing trailer? Hey, never tell us the odds… Galactic battlegrounds The four planets you’ll be fighting over Tatooine Thankfully there’s not a pod race or precocious child prodigy to be seen. We did spot a Jawa Sandcrawler in the distance those scavenging scamps have probably turned up to loot the bodies. Sullust This lava planet is where the Empire makes its weapons and vehicles, including the AT-ATs. It was mentioned in the films, but never seen, and DICE has been given permission to flesh it out to its own liking. Endor The Ewoks’ villages could provide good verticality to the maps; important with jetpacks on offer. You can even see some of the furry killers running around in the background in the announcement trailer. Hoth Here in the office we’re keen on the idea of riding a noble Tauntaun into battle. On chilly maps like these you may need one - in a pinch, those lovely, steaming guts are warmer than any winter coat.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Art Producer Stan Just : The Witcher 3 Biggest RPG Ever Made

How has working with the new consoles been for you?

I wouldn't say that it has been easy. It has certainly been a challenge. The Xbox One and PS4 are new for us as designers and new for our engine, so we’ve had to adjust our engine to accommodate the hardware and make sure everything works as we intend it to. Our engine is designed to be able to handle the next-gen systems, though.

So we manage okay [laughs].We used a lot of the multi-platform experience we gained from working on the 360 port of The Witcher 2, but many people that have joined the studio since we released The Witcher 2 have a lot of experience working on multi-platform games as well. We feel like we’re prepared for the new consoles, yeah.


You added a tutorial in the ‘Enhanced Edition’ of The Witcher 2; has that made you think more closely about how you teach players the mechanics of The Witcher 3 ?

Definitely it has, yes. Last month the studio was dedicated specifically to tutorials, so we know that’s something we need to include and it’s something we’ve developed heavily. From the very start, as far as I’m concerned, the way we teach players has been vastly improved. I was guilty of the opposite on The Witcher 2. I was too static when it came to talking about including a tutorial system.

Are there a lot of new things that returning players will need to learn?

I would say that the controls themselves have changed a little bit because the combat system has been revamped. Still, despite that, I think it will be rather easy for returning players to learn the new controls. I guess I would describe the combat as easy to learn and hard to master.

In the demo it was said that getting between the two places shown would take around 20 minutes on a sprinting horse…

Yeah, that’s right. Unfortunately, we haven't tasked anybody on the testing team to find out how long it would take to get across the entire world that we’ve built. For a start, you couldn’t get across all of it just using a horse at times you would have to climb a mountain and at other times you would have to sail a boat or dive through underwater passage ways. It’s huge, really. It's massive.

The mountain in the demo can be climbed in any number of ways. Do you need to handcraft environments to achieve this?

That’s right, yeah. This is an open-world game, but we've refrained from procedural generation of our environments and the places within them. Each environment, each hut, each point of interest, everything has been handcrafted by our level designers so that every little detail fi ts the quests and the general approach we want to take with the world.

It requires a lot of work. At the same time, though, it provides a level of intensity for the player. We want to preserve the story-driven gameplay that we had in previous games, but we’re in an open world and so it’s harder to do that. The only option is to handcraft everything.

Has it been more difficult to tell an engaging story in the open-world setting?

Yeah, it’s definitely difficult to do that. What’s also difficult is to fi ll out the world with enough quests to do, while also making sure that those quests feel related to one another in some way.

You have a lot of choices that you can make in the game, and they come in all shades of grey, so it’s difficult for us to work out all the intricacies and the relationships between those decisions. What you need to remember, though, is that the world in Wild Hunt is experiencing political turmoil there’s a war going on when you start the game. Even though you will stumble across a side quest at some point, it will be a side quest

that is grounded by that wider situation. A side quest about a force occupying a village might be a separate plot in itself and have a beginning and an end, but it’s also a plot that is grounded within the bigger storyline and the war.

Designing things that way allows us to make sure the story is always being driven forward and informed by things that you are doing. These things are optional to do but if you do them you will fi nd they are still part of the bigger picture.

 So you’re keeping away from what, in other games, can seem like distractions…

[Laughs] No, you won’t be doing things like searching for feathers.

Now that The Witcher games are well established, do you still look much to the books for inspiration?

I would say that Wild Hunt is a very specific part of the series in that we have included a lot of characters from the books and a lot of plot lines that have been mentioned in the books. Some of those plots are continued in the game, so if you’re a fan of the novels then you will hopefully be entertained when you explore that.

One plot might have ended in the books but in Wild Hunt we pick up from there and create a different plot from that point forward. So, even though this is a standalone story and a standalone game, the people that have read the novels and played the previous games will pick up on additional layers of depth here.

So you don’t need to have played previous games to grasp the plot?

The fi rst thing you need to know about this is: don’t worry about it. Even newcomers to The Witcher will understand everything that is going on in the world, it is carefully explained to you. The most important events from previous plots will be recapped, but there’s really no need to worry as this is a standalone game in its own right.

Underwater sequences/swimming are new to The Witcher 3. Are these a ‘big’ thing? Do you need to perform much of this?

It might be a big thing for you, if you enjoy those underwater parts and exploring them. There’s a lot of weird creatures living under the water and there are a lot of treasures and some quests that require you to spend time underwater. Some of the islands in the game force you to travel through water to get there and sometimes you will have to enter underwater areas to locate everything.

What are the key ingredients to making a fantasy world feel realistic?

Many developers of fantasy games do lose that element of believability to their worlds and characters. We try to be realistic in different ways and across different topics.

Sometimes you’ll see someone in other games wearing a piece of armour that is just ridiculous; no one could ever wear it in real life and they certainly couldn't move around or do anything in it. For us, when we discuss armour we talk about everything… from where the belt should be placed, whether the armour is practical and useful, and, perhaps most importantly, does it look and behave like something Geralt would actually use? That also applies to all the different items and weapons.
Many of our initial designs change because of those discussions. We might decide that something we have is stupid and just doesn't fi t into the world or relate to any kind of real life situation. There’s a lot of effort put into getting that right.


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Item Reviewed: Art Producer Stan Just : The Witcher 3 Biggest RPG Ever Made Description: Rating: 5 Reviewed By: Unknown