Well, here we have it. The defining moment in gaming. The pinnacle of the form. For the play it was Hamlet, for the novel Ulysses, and for film Citizen Kane. Each took its own medium and elevated it to unrepeatable heights. Now we have our own unrivalled masterpiece, a classic that will be remembered even when the last human on Earth hunches over the dying embers of the final flame. "I was there," this crooked old man, bent by time and torment, shall whisper to the ether. "I was there when Goat Simulator was released."
That's not a very good joke, I know. But neither is Goat Simulator. As comedy games go, it is the equivalent of daytime TV covering a popular YouTube video. What works perfectly well as thirty seconds of amusement is stretched into half an hour of awkwardly searching to spin it into something more, and ultimately falling back on repeatedly pointing out how funny the original joke was.Handing you control of one standard-issue Capra Aegagrus Hircus, Goat Simulator plonks you in a small open-world with the simple aim of causing as much destruction as possible. Now, even the most nihilistic of goats would usually struggle to do more than churn a farmer's field into mud before getting its horns hopelessly tangled in a wire-fence. Fortunately for your cloven-hoofed avatar, everything in Goat Simulator's world appears to be made out of papier-mâché and springs.
Head-butting a person in Goat Simulator will send them flying across the map like a comet, while doing the same to one of the many stationary vehicles dotted around the environment will cause an explosion that catapults anything nearby into a geostationary orbit, including the twisting, flopping ragdoll of your own goat-y self. In addition, your goat can lick things to attach them to his sticky tongue, things like basketballs, chunks of broken fence, other goats, and the wheels of a fast-moving articulated lorry.
Playing The Elder Scrolls Online is the most boring experience I've endured since I was seventeen years old, when a series of unfortunate events led to my family moving into my uncle's two-bedroom house. Because there wasn't an awful lot of room to do our own things, every night we'd end up playing Scrabble. Now, Scrabble isn't necessarily a bad game, but after six months it certainly starts to feel like one.The Elder Scrolls Online is like six months of Scrabble, only it manages to perfectly recreate that sensation of repetitive hopelessness within six hours. What Zenimax Online have attempted is to build a halfway house between the traditional The Elder Scrolls games and the familiar MMO mechanics of World of Warcraft. The result is a game that fails to satisfy in either category. Its formulaic quest structure is recycled over and over, unconvincingly disguised with a superficial smear of "story". Players are corralled down the same pathways in a world that initially appears free and open, but quickly reveals itself to be anything but. Your interaction with the environments are necessarily limited by the fact that ESO is an exhibit built for thousands of players to witness, rather than a malleable world crafted for the individual.
Your character's life begins in Coldharbour, a prison realm overseen by Molag Bal, the Daedric prince of domination (not that kind of domination). But Zounds! You escape! Thanks to the help of a blind old man thrillingly known as the Prophet. So begins a quest to reunite a band of ancient heroes and defend Tamriel against Bal's plans to enslave the population.At this point, the game drops you into Tamriel proper, the specific location depending on which of the three warring factions you've pledged allegiance to. Rather than retread my beta steps in Skyrim and Morrowind allied with the Ebonheart Pact, I joined forces with the Daggerfall covenant, an alliance between the Bretons, Orcs, and Redguard. Previously, the game introduced players using a series of starting islands, but this meant it took several hours before you even reached the mainland. Now though, your character begins his adventures on the central continent. Except, you still have to return to the starting islands and go through that before you can get very far. Instead of removing this tedious tumour, Zenimax have moved it from the leg into the brain.
Regardless of whether you take a direct or delayed route through the introductory areas, it soon becomes clear that nearly all the PvE content, meaning every area in the game save for Cyrodiil, is directed specifically toward you. You're special, you see. You're special because you, er, don't have a soul, which handily explains both why your character is so wilfully obliging when helping other people, and why in conversation you have all the personality of a Rich Tea biscuit. Every quest-giver you speak to, whether it's through the main story, the Fighters Guild, the Mages Guild, or just people you encounter while wandering the landscape, specifically want your help. And that's all well and good right up until you enter your first dungeon, where you and seventeen other unique world-saving heroes all run through the same corridors to kill the same goblin.
At this year's Rezzed Expo in Birmingham, a huge crowd clustered around a single television screen in a far corner of the expo floor. Together they cheered and whooped and laughed as four players at a time took their turns playing Gang Beasts, a multiplayer fighting game that uses physics in the same way Louis CK uses anecdotes about his children. We spoke to James Brown, one of the four-man development team Boneloaf, to see what all the fuss is about, and where they plan to take Gang Beasts on the long development road ahead. --How did the idea for Gang Beasts come about?James: Well it actually came out of a couple of other games that we were prototyping. The way we figured out how we might make games is by doing game jams basically. That's the thing that got us all in the same room together, and we found we were much more productive during those periods. We've done any game jam we can for the last couple of years, and during that we've evolved this physics system. It's probably too bold to call it a system. It's just something we made. But we were making a high fantasy with tentacle creatures, and giant turtles and things that light, that you could fight on the back of, and the way we did the magic system and swordplay and all these other systems.We had a space opera and that had low gravity physics and this thing we call SpaceBeef; these gelatinous, undulating forms. So we kinda thought "well actually as a new company, let's do something simpler", and we thought, if we could get a satisfying punch mechanic, we could build a game around it. We're from the arcades, we grew up on the North East coast. The three of us that are brothers. Jason obviously didn't. But we loved those old games, where there was a very simple premise, like, somebody's wronged you and you're out for revenge. So you just have that protagonist and antagonist, and then some kind of beef, feud, and you just beat people up to resolve it.And we thought we could build that. And we just started building a few things single player. Didn't have an AI at that time, so we just went local multiplayer. We are now looking at trying to support online multiplayer as well. The ultimate ambition for this game would be to customise your gang and go up against somebody else's gang. But at the moment we're just prototyping a whole bunch of different hazardous environments, that can facilitate your victory.
What development state are you in?James: It's actually still in pre-alpha. So quite early on.James: We've been developing it since mid-November, but only part time. So we've just gone full time. We took an office space two days ago. We haven't actually done any work in there yet because we came straight here. So we'll be going back on the train tonight, setting up in the office tomorrow and picking up work again then. It's all happened quite quickly for us. But the response has been pretty phenomenal. We didn't expect anything like this. So now we're just trying to set ourselves up and concentrate on making the game full time. But we're hoping to put out an early access in the next couple of months. We are speaking to publishers at the moment, so the only thing that might change that is if they give us advice contrary to doing that. I don't think that will be the case. We want to put it on Early Access. We want to put it out on Early Access, just so basically the people who played the Alpha can get a discount. Because it's normally the other way around where people get the discount on the sales. We want to give a discount to people who have played the game already, the people who have been behind us. That's as much of a plan as we have at the moment.
With the game in such an early state, what features are you planning to add next?James: There will be kicking and ducking coming. Ducking will facilitate uppercuts, but also avoiding blows, so we're quite exciting about adding that. There's also a climbing mechanic coming, which should allow you to recover from somebody trying to kill you. Because a big part of the fun is coming back after your opponent thinks he's been victorious, which is why we've put a taunt mechanic in. And we'll be doing more with that. But we're also trying to put some fun, nice, playful things in, like a hug mechanic, and hand-holding mechanic because there are times when people play this game in a non-violent way. And we want to support that so it's not just button spamming.
First person adventure games are a genre I am helplessly attracted to, like a moth to a flame, or an idiot to UKIP. And like both of these pitiful creatures, I often find myself burned by this attraction. It turns out there's a reason why first person games have relied on guns to provide compelling experiences for so long, and it isn't because gamers are all psychopaths. Guns enable the player to interact with the world in a variety of ways at a variety of distances, and removing them leaves a gap that is very difficult to fill.
In recent years games like Dear Esther, Gone Home and Amnesia have all tried to resolve this problem, and while each attempt has been admirable, none has proved definitive. Now we have Ether One, another first-person game that eschews traditional action and violence in favour of exploration and storytelling. Can it succeed where so many others have failed?
Not quite, but it sure isn't for lack of trying.
Ether One is set in the not-too-distant future, where a research initiative is on the verge of finding a cure for dementia. This is achieved through the work of "Restorers", who enter the minds of patients through telepathic means, explore their fragmented memories and attempt to piece their life stories together, thus returning coherency to the patient's mind and treating the ailment. Ether One's story casts you as one such restorer, treating a 69 year old patient named Jean on the day before the institute's research grant expires.
The story has multiple layers to it, and it's this which makes it so intriguing. On the one hand, there's the story of Jean herself, who has apparently been strongly influenced by an accident at a mine near her Cornish hometown of Pinwheel. Yet weaved within this is the institute's own struggle with its research into dementia, and the plight of your supervisor - who doubles as the narrator - between human compassion, scientific objectivity, and the need for funding.
Credit must also be given to the environmental design in terms of keeping Ether One engaging. The village of Pinwheel and its surrounding locales is an absolute delight to explore. The opening area, Pinwheel's harbour, has quickly ascended to very near the top of my list of "favourite gaming locations". I want to buy a pint in the Crow's Nest pub, sit outside and watch the sun set between the masts the moored fishing vessels, listening to the waves lap against the shore, and the herring gulls cry as they wheel in the air above.
Betrayer is a semi-open world FPS that is crammed with ideas. It ambitiously melds familiar gun-toting action with stealth, exploration, investigation and horror, while sporting a bold aesthetic and a pleasingly understated story that you must piece together yourself. Unfortunately, few of these ideas are executed as well as they could be, and while in theory Betrayer sounds excellent, in practice it feels lacklustre.Set during the colonisation of America, Betrayer begins with you awakening on the stony shore of a cove with nothing to your name. Come to think of it, even your name is withheld from you. Following a trail inland, it soon becomes clear that the land of milk and honey has gone sour and is covered in bees. Your first port of call, Fort Henry, is abandoned, with only twisted, Pompeii-like ashen figures remaining. Strange creatures prowl the landscape; shadows clothed in Conquistador uniforms. Even the colour has almost entirely drained from the world, with only enemies and a couple of key characters painted with violent splashes of red.
If there's one thing Betrayer nails, it's the atmosphere of this world. Those starkly distinctive black and white visuals are accompanied by an ambience that combines whispering winds with a haunting musical score. Like Amnesia and DayZ, it's one of those games that becomes more unsettling the longer you play it. Soon the sound of a British flag fluttering atop a colonial fort causes a great surge of relief, as you hurry inside for some brief respite from the wilds.But this is only half the story. By ringing a bell inside these fortifications, the harsh white light of the daytime is replaced by a bleak, misty night where the dead lurk in the shadows. Some of these, in the form of Lost Souls, you can speak to, and help put to rest. Others can only be returned to the grave through more forceful means.
The switching between day and night is one of Betrayer's more original systems, and it plays into the key focus of the game; unravelling the mystery of why the land of the free has become the land of the dead. Very little is explained to you through dialogue, because the few people you're able to converse with know about as much as you do. Thus the only way to put the puzzle together is to scour the land by both day and night, searching for clues dotted around the environment. Scraps of diary entries from an expedition heading inland, fragments of jewellery buried in the earth, the skeletal remains of former colonists. Each find provides a sprinkling of insight into what went wrong.
